Razing Kids: Youth, Environment, and the Postwar American West

Abstract

In Razing Kids, Jeffrey C. Sanders aptly demonstrates how adults used rhetoric about children and the environment to express concerns about America's future. Using specific case studies centered in the West, Sanders cleverly organizes the book chronologically by events that follow both the growth of environmental problems and baby boom kids from birth to adulthood.Focusing first on concerns about young children, Sanders examines the development of World War II–era housing by industrialist Henry Kaiser in Richmond, Virginia, and Vanport, Oregon. Adults expressed concern about keeping children healthy and safely contained, ideas inherent in the architecture of the spaces they designed. Moving into the 1950s and 1960s, Sanders shifts his analysis to Arizona and New Mexico, where he probes growing fears about radiation from nuclear testing and its impact on children's health. This case study moves from the local level with rural, poor, often Indigenous “downwinders” attempting to force information from the government to the national level as activists, particularly women, worked on milk boycotts to avoid radioactive fallout. As western children grew into teenagers, Sanders follows them into urban areas. He examines greater youth autonomy in Los Angeles, leading to increasing attempts to control “juvenile delinquency” through labor on Youth Conservation Camps. For the later 1960s, Sanders turns to the People's Park in San Francisco, where politicians and reformers struggled to deal with the huge influx of runaway teenagers. The final case study deals with baby boomers as parents expressing concern over food safety for children in the wake of ubiquitous pesticide use. Like the concerns over radiation testing, concerns about pesticides shifted from local to national, but they also shifted away from concerns over children-as-farm-laborers toward children-as-consumers.Sanders deftly weaves multiple themes through the narrative, including children, race, and the rural-urban divide. He notes that adults often frame concerns about the present or future with rhetoric centered around children. In addition, these concerns often say more about the policy-makers than children, with adults pressing for policies that control young people's behavior under the guise of their “protection.” Sanders's case studies in the early chapters detail adults using policy—industrial, urban, or regulatory—to control children. By the later chapters, the police state becomes more visible, cracking down on youth on the streets and in poor neighborhoods in more aggressive ways. As Sanders notes, these environmentally centered policies also reflect the rise of the carceral state during the 1960s.Two case studies by Sanders focus on the rural-urban divide. In chapter 3, he details the strong anti-urban bias that led adults to develop Youth Conservation Camps, modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps. Seeing nature as a “cure” for troubled urban youth, reformers placed young Black men in isolated, primitive camps, where they worked on conservation projects. Far from being “cured” of the ills of the city, young workers faced severe dislocation, health problems, and racial conflicts with neighboring towns. In the last chapter, Sanders confronts health concerns over pesticides during the late twentieth century. Sanders surveys early food and anti-pesticide activism, focusing on farm labor activists in the Pacific Northwest, who expressed considerable concern about the effects of chemicals on children working in the fields with their families. While these activists enjoyed some success through the 1960s and 1970s grape boycott, the conversation soon shifted focus. Rather than working toward the safety of children-as-laborers, middle-class whites chose to focus on the dangers of pesticides on children-as-consumers, which marginalized the Latinx population in the area.To his credit, Sanders has crafted a story rich in diversity. His case studies illuminate the effects of racism in environmental policies on African Americans, Latinx, and Indigenous populations. He also clearly delineates changes in ideas about gender (sticking to cis women and men) from the case studies. Importantly, although the focus is on adults, children's voices appear as well, discussing their own experiences and views during the time period.Overall, Razing Kids is a meticulous, compelling work on environmental policies about children in postwar western America that should become a pivotal work in the field. Sanders employs highly readable prose and ample context, making it accessible to students of all levels. Scholars of post–World War II America, the environment, childhood, rural/urban relations, food history, race, and the police state should find it useful. His work also demonstrates a compelling need for more scholars to add to the ongoing efforts to combine the history of childhood with environmental history.