Chapter: 4

The Alaska Mental Health Bill, which passed Congress in 1956 after much debate and revision, was intended to remedy the fact that Alaskans were being sent for mental health care to Oregon’s Morningside Hospital, a private facility in Portland that contracted with the federal government to provide patient care. The bill stipulated that the revenues from a huge tract of land in Alaska Territory would be used to construct a mental hospital in Anchorage or another urban center in the Territory and to otherwise build up infrastructure for treating mental illness more locally.  Strangely, public response to the bill snowballed quickly into a nationwide panic that the million-acre tract in Alaska would become “Siberia, USA.” In line with Cold War fears of the period, the theory ran that “global socialists” would take over the world and immediately begin sending right-leaning American political dissidents off to this remote prison.

House Bill 6376, the American Mental Health Act, was drafted by Oregon Representative Edith Green and Alaska Territory Delegate R. L. Bartlett. The bill, which went through many revisions and iterations before being passed in 1956, proposed setting aside a million acres of Alaska land for the funding of mental health facilities so that mental health care for Alaskans could be relocated from the distant state of Oregon (specifically Morningside Hospital) to local communities. Conservative letter writers flooded their representatives with correspondence decrying the dangers of the bill, convinced that it was part of a plot hatched by an international network of communists, conspirators, and psychiatrists. These letters reveal that powerful right-wing conspiracy narratives had a profound effect on mental health care policy across the U.S. during this period; stories about psychiatry with little basis in reality came close to directly affecting the lives of individuals and families struggling to attain mental health services in their local communities.

In May of 1955, Congresswoman Edith Green, representing the state of Oregon, first introduced HR Bill 6376 into Congress. Green intended the bill to right what she considered a grievous wrong—the failure of the Federal government to support treatment of mental illness in the Territory of Alaska itself, opting instead to send most of those diagnosed with severe mental illness (which included what today would be labeled as developmental disability) thousands of miles from home, family, and community to Morningside Hospital in the state of Oregon. Green learned that from 1904 to about 1960, the family who owned the hospital, the Coe family, contracted with the U.S. Department of the Interior to transport, house, and treat mental patients from the Territory of Alaska. Green became distraught by the news she was receiving from both worried insiders at Morningside and residents of Alaska concerned with public mental health.

Writing on the back of the July 6, 1955, issue of the Congressional Record (No. 114), Green expressed in short phrases her sense of urgency about the situation; she noted that Morningside was “the only institution of its kind,” a private, for-profit mental hospital that received a federal government contract to treat patients sent from another state. She lamented the “barbaric procedures” many of these patients were subjected to, supposedly referring to electro-shock treatments, which were popular in the 1950s as treatment for depression and psychosis. She also noted that Morningside received from the federal government $800,000 to $900,000 a year and maintained that “profit was one of the primary considerations” for Morningside’s continued involvement with treating patients sent from Alaska Territory. She decried Alaska’s commitment procedures, which were done in criminal courts in a jury trial setting. In particular, she remarked that to her knowledge 20 children had been sent from Alaska Territory to Portland, Oregon, including, shockingly, a “17-day-old child.”

It must have seemed fairly straightforward from Green’s point of view that the contract between Morningside and the federal government should be terminated. As she and “Bob” Bartlett, the Alaska Territory Representative to Congress, conceived of HR Bill 6376, it would make all the sense in the world to set aside a mineral-rich tract of land in the Alaska Territory as a source of funds to build a mental hospital in Anchorage or another more densely populated area in Alaska. It’s important to note that this effort was part of a larger colonialist push to exploit and gain control of profitable resource-laden land in the Territory, and we’ll discuss the complexities of this public-mental-health-related land grab, its violation of Indigenous land rights, and its relationship to the drive for statehood elsewhere in this research project. For now, we want to focus on the reaction in the U.S. to HR Bill 6376 and the connection of that reaction to Cold War politics of the 1950s.

As various right-wing groups around the U.S., some involved in health care and some not, heard about the bill, a red flag went up for them about the “actual” purposes of the million acres set aside in Alaska wilderness. In this case the flag was red not just because these groups thought they sensed danger but because that danger was connected to their fears of communism and what they saw as an international conspiracy to destroy American democracy, taking political prisoners in the process and shipping them to a gulag-type psychiatric facility in the wilds of Alaska Territory.

The right-wing American Public Relations Forum wrote in their newletter in 1956,

 “Bill HR 6376 has the effect of preserving a vast tract of arctic wilderness to which any citizen of the United States may be sent. Once in Alaska, the ‘patient’ may be detained incommunicado, indefinitely. Soviet Russia, as we understand, has vast areas in Siberia to which, on the whim of the right bureaucrat, any person may be sent. The machinery for this brand of exile is contained in Mrs. Green’s bill.”

If we unpack these words, we can see that powerful narratives and iconographies are at work that pre-date and surround the Alaska Mental Health Act.  First there is the image of “arctic wilderness,” which implicitly contrasts with settled and populated land. Implicit here too is that populated land is somehow more knowable, reliable, and safe if it is inhabited by white settlers. Historically in the U.S., white settlement of land was put forth as the opposite of “wilderness” in the settler imaginary. If the bill is “preserving” the wilderness, it maintains this opposition in a way that supposedly poses a threat to American citizens. In reality, the bill did not seek to preserve the land so much as to exploit it for profit that could be used to build a psychiatric facility in Anchorage or another city in Alaska. This contrast between the imaginary and the reality of the bill’s language shows to what extent the settler narrative establishing contrast between settled lands and wilderness was at play in the newsletter’s language.

Also at play in the words and scare quotes above is the insinuation that while the land would supposedly be set aside for mental patients (itself a false claim, since patients would not be sent to the land grant area but to an urban or suburban facility), in reality “any citizen” could be seized, declared insane (a “patient”), and sent to this wilderness tract. It is this claim that reveals the newsletter writer connects the AMHA to a larger, pre-existing Cold War narrative in which a global communist conspiracy seeks to create yet another Soviet Siberia, this one designed exclusively for upstanding American citizens seeking to protect democracy.

Right-wing groups such as the American Public Relations Forum took the Siberia U.S.A. conspiracy theory even further. Many of those writing letters to Congressional Representatives insisted that there were other dangerous elements in the AMHA, aside from the land grant proposal, that would lead to the commitment of perfectly sane people fighting against communism. Congresswoman Green and other legislators started getting letters from all over the U.S. urging them to vote down the bill. She received a letter from a man named Will Foster Rogers, of Gainesville, Florida, who informs her that he had already written to Senator Pat McNamara to denounce “the Alaska Mental Health Bill as a project for a U.S. Siberia.” Rogers tells Green a cautionary tale about Lucille Miller of Bethel, Vermont, who was arrested for protesting the draft:

“The Federal Judge halted her public trial when she started to make her defense. She was “railroaded” off to St. Elizabeths Federal Mental Hospital in Washington, D.C. on May 3, 1955. The judge had her examined by psychiatrists of HIS OWN choosing. Dr. Overholser held her in this hospital—most of the time in the violent ward—from May 3 to June 22… Only mounting public sentiment forced the Justice Department to release her. This is a glaring case of UNWARRANTED HOSPITALIZATION through conspiracy of public officials…If the government can transfer a political prisoner from Vermont to Washington, D.C. as Lucille Miller was transferred, without her consent or the consent of her family then why not to Alaska?”

A letter such as the one above can be confusing to read today because we tend to think of those who resist psychiatric control to be aligned more with the left-wing anti-psychiatry movement that arose in the 1960s and grew throughout the 1970s. At the time this letter was written, though, the Siberia U.S.A. conspiracy theorists were in line with McCarthy and other right-wing anti-Communist players. They were afraid that there was an international Communist conspiracy working in league with psychiatry and other mental health professions to take over the U.S. and that Siberia U.S.A. would be an American gulag where anti-Communist defenders of the American Way would be sent, never to be heard from again.

It was actually a member of the right-wing American Public Relations Forum in Van Nuys, California, who coined the phrase “Siberia U.S.A.,” and it was soon being widely used by groups across the U.S. and in debates before Congress.

However, the AMHA supporters didn’t allow the conspiracy theorists to rule the day. They fought back, with their own letters and articles and also on the floor of Congress. For example, Dr. Milo Fritz of the Alaska Territorial Medical Association responded vehemently from Anchorage when the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a Chicago group that spouted the conspiracy theory in numerousbulletins, media releases, and letters to politicians, published an anti-AMHA diatribe in their bulletin. Fritz writes,

“Gentlemen: Your fantastic ‘Emergency Bulletin No. 4-56’ of February 25, 1956, is without question the most shocking piece of mail we have ever received. The shock is all the more severe when we consider that you have doubtless air mailed this bulletin to every medical society in the country plus countless other influential organizations and persons…It is one of the most unbelievable irresponsible actions every to come from your organization, or from any other. Your bulletin literally throbs with a palpable ignorance on the subject of the care of the mentally in in Alaska and the proposed legislation.

      You might have contacted the Alaska Department of Health, the Alaska Mental Health Association, or practicing psychiatrists in the Territory, but you did not. The content of your bulletin indicates that you made no attempt to get any facts on the situation. 

      In your bulletin, you state that the proposed legislation, among other things, “means the creation of a potential ‘American Siberia,’ “ to which people could be sent. Had you bothered to investigate, you would have discovered that for more than fifty years, all Alaskans committed for mental illness have been sent to an  “American Siberia” in the form of Morningside Hospital in Portland, Oregon.”

Even Wayne Coe, one of the owners of Morningside Hospital, complained about the “small, noisy group” who raised “objections that a million-acre land grant made under the bill to aid Alaska in financing the program actually would be fenced for use as a ‘political Siberia.’” Interestingly, one of the most vociferous opponents of the Siberia U.S.A. theory was conservative, anti-Communist columnist and editor Marjorie Shearon. In her newsletter CHALLENGE TO SOCIALISM (April 22, 1956), she wrote,

“There has here been presented a bizarre situation regarding a small Territorial bill which, at the most, would not affect as many as 225,000 persons. A wild, frantic series of newspaper articles, bulletins, and scare sheets has been flooding the country. It all started with one ill-informed woman in Van Nuys, California, who coined (or used) the slogan SIBERIA U.S.A. This was picked up by patriotic groups, DAN SMOOT [her caps here and throughout], AAPS [Association of American Physicians and Surgeons], and other organizations and individuals. AAPS appears to have been the largest professional group to be sucked in. Neither the AMA nor any State or county medical society fell for the SIBERIA line. The AMERICAN ACADEMY of GENERAL PRACTICE, second largest medical society in the country, did not get on the SIBERIA bandwagon. AAPS was wholly irresponsible in misleading the public. It refused to retract when the Alaska Territorial Medical Association asked them to do so. “

The voices of Fritz, Shearon, Green, Bartlett, and many other supporters of the bill finally won out, and it passed the Senate on July 10^th, 1956, with a few revisions. Before that day, however, it had elicited more correspondence than any bill of the prior twenty-five years.

Source for above quoted archival documents:

Edith Green Collection. Oregon Historical Society, MSS 1424, Box 57, Folder 1.