Podcast: 3
Siberia U.S.A.
“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.”
–Marjorie Shearon, Challenge to Socialism, April 22, 1956. Edith Green Collection. Oregon Historical Society, MSS 1424, Box 57, Folder 1.
Questions to Explore in this Podcast:
- How do citizen concerns about the Alaska Mental Health Act speak to Cold War fears of the period?
- What can we learn from these citizen letters and the public misinformation surrounding the AMHA about conspiracy theories impacting U.S. politics today?
- What do citizen letters show us about how US residents viewed Alaska?
- What do the views of these (predominately white) US citizens and politicians tell us more generally about the ways the expansion of US nationstate boundaries was tied to colonialist and extractionist ideas about Alaska Natives and about land and environmental resources?
- How does the Siberia, USA controversy reveal deeper tensions in the US over mental health and illness, psychiatric care, and state power?
Episode Overview:
This episode examines a historically-interesting fact about Morningside Hospital: debates over the hospital’s operation or pending closure became tied up in Cold War hysteria of the period. Here, we show how the closure of Morningside was connected to the much-debated Alaska Mental Health Act (AMHA), a piece of Congressional legislation that would have closed Morningside and established a funding mechanism for the mental health care of Alaskans within the then-Territory of Alaska. The AMHA, which passed Congress in 1956 after much debate and revision, stipulated that the revenues from a huge tract of land in Alaska would be used to construct a psychiatric hospital in a more populated region of the Territory and to fund mental healthcare for Alaskan residents into the future. Strangely, public response to the bill in the “lower 48” states quickly snowballed into a nationwide panic that the million-acre tract in Alaska would become “Siberia, USA.” Drawing from citizen letters held in the Edith Green collection at the Oregon Historical Society, this episode examines the controversies over the AMHA and over fears it would create a “Siberia, USA.”
The “Siberia, USA” controversy shows how psychiatry and public mental health care provided touchstones in the debates of ordinary citizens over state power and its limits in 1950s America, foreshadowing both left-leaning challenges to psychiatry in the 1960s and the right-led deinstitutionalization of mental health care initiated by then-California-Governor Ronald Reagan in 1967.
Podcast music: “Varied Thrush” by Stephan Nance
