Fortress America Research Articles

Fortress America: gated communities in the United States

Gated communities are a new hot button in many North American cities. From Boston to Los Angeles and from Miami to Toronto citizens are taking sides in the debate over whether any neighborhood should be walled and gated, preventing intrusion or inspection by outsiders. This debate has intensified since the hard cover edition of this book was published in 1997. Since then the number of gated communities has risen dramatically. In fact, new homes in over 40 percent of planned developments are gated n the West, the South, and southeastern parts of the United States. Opposition to this phenomenon is growing too. In the small and relatively homogenous town of Worcester, Massachusetts, a band of college students from Brown University and the University of Chicago picketed the Wexford Village in November of 1998 waving placards that read Gates Divide. These students are symbolic of a much larger wave of citizens asking questions about the need for and the social values of gates that divide one portion of a community from another.

Queer Borders: Figures from the 1930s for U.S.-Canadian Relations

Queer Borders: Figures from the 1930s for U.S.-Canadian Relations Caren Irr (bio) “Canada as a separate but dominated country,” wrote Margaret Atwood during the free trade debates of the late 1980s, “has done about as well under the United States as women worldwide have done under men. About the only position they have ever adopted toward us, country to country, has been the missionary position, and we were not on top. I guess that is why the national wisdom vis-à-vis them has so often taken the form of lying still, keeping your mouth shut and pretending you like it.” 1 Like many opponents to the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (the predecessor to the North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA]), Atwood expressed her disapproval of the treaty by implicitly comparing its effects to rape. Above all, this depiction of international power relations involved figuring the United States as a man and Canada as a woman. Of course, in Atwood’s passage the metaphor suggests that Canada’s status as female victim will not be rectified until she acts up, opens her mouth, and tells the truth. The assumption is that Canadians, like women, have something to say as a group about efforts to subsume them under a larger, putatively generic category. Strangely, though, during the free trade debates, this gendered metaphor was also used by the treaty’s proponents; pro-free trade economists wrote pieces with titles such as Canada at the U.S.-Mexico Free-Trade Dance: Wallflower or Partner? and “The Draft Agreement: Cohabitation Worth A Try.” These pieces also figure a feminine Canada, but they suggest that courtship and marriage—or at least “fruitful and mutually invigorating intercourse”—are the most desirable outcomes of a relationship [End Page 504] between masculine and feminine entities. 2 The assumption for these writers is that having a voice is less important than having a home inside the walls of Fortress America. Despite their alternative goals, though, the economists share with Atwood and generations of Canadian intellectuals before her, the premise that Canada is a smaller, gentler, weaker body bound by contract and affection to an invasive, domineering, and often inconsiderate partner; for persons across the ideological spectrum, the gendered metaphor expresses an important power differential between the United States and Canada. Even while noting the expressiveness of this metaphor, though, we should recall a few situations in which it also operates as a limit. For instance, several pieces in the semiotext(e) collection canadas draw attention to the fractures and stresses that disrupt the association between gender and nation. Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood’s meditations on “quadrophenia”—the dissonance produced by hearing English, French, masculine and feminine voices simultaneously—show that the United States : Canada :: man : woman metaphor can also be retooled to describe conflicts within Canada, such as the long-standing dispute over the status of Francophone culture; for Lotbinière-Harwood, English Canada is to Québec as man is to woman. Similarly, Marie Ann Hart Baker’s piece “Gotta Be on Top: Why the Missionary Position Fails to Excite Me” recycles Atwood’s metaphor as a description of relations between white and Native writers; for Baker, white women’s efforts to appropriate Native stories can also be read as efforts to enforce the top-bottom hierarchy of the missionary position. 3 This chain, in which a “feminine” Canada becomes “masculine” when the points of reference shift, suggests that the gendered metaphor for national power differentials may have lost some of its descriptive power through proliferation. Because the male-female metaphor is so commonly used to describe relations of unequal power, it may well be that it does not describe any link on the chain precisely. If this is the case, it will be to our advantage to locate descriptive metaphors for U.S.-Canadian relations that not only articulate features of this relationship but also locate that relationship in an extensive and complex field of power and disempowerment. One suggestion offered in canadas is that we “see Canada not so much as effeminate, but as a kind of ‘queer’ country.” Especially in relation to a hegemonic U.S. popular culture, Canadians are...

Fortress America

Fortress America Stephen Saunders Webb (bio) John Keegan. Fields of Battle: The Wars For North America. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1996. xiv + 348 pp. Maps, illustrations, and index. $30.00. Fields of Battle is more memoir than history. The accidents of the author’s American lecture tours determine his historical choices. The result is remarkably undisciplined: more about the author than his subject; more about space than time; more about apprehension than data; more about episodes than continuities. It is unanalytical, undocumented, and erroneous. When Keegan (p. 292) puts Thomas Jefferson at Bent’s Fort (Colorado) after 1834, the error indicts rather more than a lack of American copy-editing of this British reprint. Can we, like Rousseau, ignore such errors as not affecting Keegan’s conclusion (borrowed from George Steiner) that, militarily speaking, American history is a function of space, not time; that, in America, geography dictates strategy; that, therefore, forts were the foci for the conquest of a continent from the Indians, from the French, and from the British? Certainly, Keegan’s case would be stronger if he had not omitted the Spanish and the Spanish Americans, from whom half the territory of the United States was conquered. But the author’s lecture tours have not taken him to places in New Spain. Absent lectures and concomitant readings, Keegan does not find in the history of the South, Southwest, or far West, any military event that he can attack with the historical tactic which has made him famous, the battle-piece. In The Face of Battle (1976), Keegan defined battle as “something which happens between two armies leading to the moral and then physical disintegration of one or the other of them” (p. 302). Keegan understood (as has every intelligent commander since Alexander) that victory was as much moral as material. To this insight, Keegan added a more modern conclusion (that of S. L. A. Marshall in Men Against Fire, 1947, pp. 71–72) that the moral component of combat was determined by very small groups of men. Their band ethos, composed of interdependence, camaraderie, and self-esteem, resolved the contradictions of combat between obedience and self-preservation, between duty and fear, between honor and intelligence. In The Face of Battle, [End Page 31] Keegan’s forceful analyses of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme humanized military history. An American military, troubled by its all-too-human failures in Vietnam, invited Keegan to lecture on The Face of Battle. (Not to be left out of the intelligent analysis of war, in which they usually take the lead, the Marines also asked Keegan to speak, although the ethos of the Corps, which Keegan compares to that of the Brigade of Guards, had prevented its demoralization.) Under this military aegis, from 1977 onward, Keegan expanded on his only previous visit, a student tour of civil war sites twenty years earlier. To staff colleges and military academies he carried the message that men fight for their comrades, not for their countries. Then the study of “War and Society” emerged as an academic enterprise designed to replace the obloquy visited upon “drum and trumpet” history with the cachet now afforded to “bum and strumpet” studies. Keegan was called to American colleges and universities. They embodied everything he had been taught by his parents—Catholic, Irish, outsiders in England—to admire about America. There “the permanencies which set us apart—established religion, monarchy, empire, fixed division between one class and another, unequal opportunity in education—did not apply” (p. 20). American largesse liberated Keegan from twenty-five years of service in the classrooms of Sandhurst, just as American resources had “saved my world, the European world threatened by two pitiless dictatorships which overshadowed my childhood and growing up” (p. 17). Keegan is not ungrateful: “I love America” are the first and last words of this book. His gratitude and his affection have made this work welcome to American readers nettled by earlier English visitors’ contempt (of Syracuse, Charles Dickens said, “it would make an owl weep to fly over it”). 1 These amiable qualities infuse Keegan’s interest in the American military, and they color his perceptions of the country. Empathetic and extensive...

Discourse that is closer to silence than to talk: The politics and possibilities of reporting on victims of war1

This essay weighs the possibility of a postmodern political knowledge that “refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable”; as suggested by Jean‐Francois Lyotard, as opposed to the prospect for a new and oppressive metanarrative of “'Fortress America’ in a hostile world”; as suggested by Daniel Hallin. In particular, this essay examines news accounts of lives caught in the midst of violent political conflict—accounts of suffering and death that, as Peter Bruck wrote, record a discourse “closer to silence than to talk. “ The essay concludes that we can read such journalism as a flight from chaos and a demand for order but that we may choose, instead, to read it as an appeal for human solidarity in the midst of history's cruelest contingencies. Richard Rorty provides the framework for this alternative reading.

Fortress Europe, fortress America

Fortress Europa, meet the new fortress America. If the Clinton administration continues on its present course, a bill will soon be under way in the Congress to restrict the rights of asylum seekers coming to the United States. It is tentatively titled the “Expedited Exclusion and Asylum Reform Act of 1993.” The plan, supported by both Democrats and Republicans, calls for on‐the‐spot hearings for asylum seekers at the point of entry, such as at airports. There will be speedy deportation of those who do not meet the criteria for refugee status. This new initiative comes in the wake of the “Haitian Wall”—this past year's virtual blockade of Haiti by U.S. ships to prevent Haitians from reaching the United States by boat—and, most recently, the interception of three ships filled with Chinese immigrants off the Mexican coast.

Review: Fortress America: The Corps of Engineers, Hampton Roads, and United States Coastal Defense, by David A. Clary

Review: <i>Fortress America: The Corps of Engineers, Hampton Roads, and United States Coastal Defense</i>, by David A. Clary

Fortress America: The Corps of Engineers, Hampton Roads, and United States Coastal Defense by David A. Clary

150 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE trestles, and iron rails faced. Inconsistency, occasionally incompe­ tence, were the watchwords of the general’s railroad policy. Lash is clear about the ways in which railroads could have been used, and the complexities of finance and transport, and misses nothing. That is why this book will please the researcher into the Civil War more than it will the general reader. Often the story is told in such minute detail that the larger picture vanishes from view; many a Civil War buff’s head will droop as he presses through the off-again, on-again competence of Johnston during the 1861—62 campaign. There is no liveliness of style to beguile, and the distaste for Johnston is unconcealed. Yet, in the end, the weaknesses only underline the strengths. It will be hard for anyone, coming to the end of Lash’s book, to disagree with his conclusion that Johnston’s modest reputa­ tion was one well earned, or not to wish that Lash would take the other generals and apply the same scrutiny to them. Mark Wahlgren Summers Dr. Summers is professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. He is the author of Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel ofProsperity: Aid under the Radical Republicans, 1865—1877 (Princeton, N.J., 1984). Fortress America: The Corps ofEngineers, Hampton Roads, and United States Coastal Defense. By David A. Clary. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990. Pp. xiii + 222; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00. From the formation of the nation until the end of World War II, protection of the U.S. coasts from seaborne attack depended on fixed cannon in carefully prepared defenses. The Corps of Engineers was responsible for the design and construction of defensive works large and small, and many remains of those structures still survive. The study of coast defense is often neglected by scholars, and David Clary has done much to bring attention to it. He sets for himself a large task: his volume is at once an overview of the involvement of the corps in planning coast defenses, the development of coast defense as a national policy, and the growth of the Hampton Roads defenses as a national paradigm of that policy. This is a rich area for those interested in the development of military technology because the period Clary covers includes the dramatic expansion of the defenses in the years following 1885. During that time, progress in civil engineering combined with advances in such fields as metallurgy, communications, and optics to produce a remarkable array of forti­ fications in the United States and its possessions. One of the difficulties with Clary’s work is that he gives little credit to the introduction of new technology. For Clary, the importance of the corps’s work is best exemplified by Fort Monroe, the rambling TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 151 masonry construction that took shape at the entrance to Norfolk Harbor in the years before the Civil War. The building of such defenses Clary calls the “Golden Age of Coastal Fortifications,” although the more challenging task of designing and building a more elaborate and technically enhanced fortification system at the close of the 19th century is covered in a chapter titled “The Decline of Military Engineering.” Clary could have elaborated more on his interpretation of these disparate construction episodes. That problem underlies a fundamental difficulty with the work as a whole. Clary’s topic is too large to be handled successfully in so small a volume; the actual text is only 175 pages. The topic is also too complex to employ Hampton Roads as a national paradigm. Although historically the area may be the oldest position continuously served by defenses, larger harbors in the United States—Boston, New York, and San Francisco are examples—offer much more instruction in the prob­ lems and successes of fortification designers in defending U.S. ports. Clary does not deal substantively with innovations in defense, usually staying with larger generalizations. Perhaps as a result, some ofthe detail he employs is flawed. For example, he presumes that mortar batteries and dynamite guns were to be used in the same fashion (they were not) and that the...

Destroyer of the Iron Horse: General Joseph E. Johnston and Confederate Rail Transport, 1861–1865 by Jeffrey N. Lash

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 149 of our military skill, in managing our arms, after the European mode. Now we are glad to learn the skulking way of war.” Wilcomb E. Washburn Dr. Washburn is director of the Smithsonian Institution’s American Studies Program and author of several books on Indian-white relations. Destroyer ofthe Iron Horse: GeneralJoseph E. Johnston and Confederate Rail Transport, 1861—1865. By Jeffrey N. Lash. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991. Pp. viii + 228; illustrations, notes, bibliogra­ phy, index. $28.00. Reacting against the carnage that Robert E. Lee’s boldness inflicted on the Confederate soldier, some historians have cast wistful eyes on Joseph E. Johnston. If only so cautious a master of the strategic retreat had remained in command, the Lost Cause might have been won! Jeffrey Lash’s Destroyer ofthe Iron Horse comes as a welcome antidote, for where the use of railroads was concerned, Johnston showed himself a man of limited vision, a slow learner and a quick forgetter. Just as the rifle and minié ball were transforming the face of battle, the railroad should have altered the nature of war itself. Some commanders applied the technology to the logistics of moving men and supplies, but not Johnston or his subordinates in the west. As Lash makes painfully clear, the general understood very little, cared even less, and cooperated in efforts to coordinate movements hardly at all. Instead of choosing experts to handle transportation, he threw the task on staff quartermasters; rather than innovate in railroad policy, even so far as to tender aid to private companies repairing track essential to the war effort, he stuck to the traditional protocol of laissez-faire. The War Department was more flexible than he, more tender toward company property, but Johnston misinterpreted some directives, ignored and flouted others. Unimaginative, insubordinate, arrogant, and uncommunicative, he always knew what to do. Some­ times it paid off. Nearly as often, it proved a hindrance in saving supplies when the army pulled back or carrying men when it moved forward. Well aware of how valuable railroad communications were to the advancing Union army, he somehow overlooked the possibility that they might be just as valuable to the Confederacy. Increasingly perceptive about the strategic use of Virginia’s railroads, increasingly capable in handling troop movements after taking command in the west, he never learned enough or for long. Retreating from Missis­ sippi in 1863, he abandoned or destroyed over six hundred engines and cars, a loss that would have been unnecessary with a little imagination or even obedience to orders from Richmond. Until late in the war when necessity forced him to change his practices, Johnston remained the worst nemesis that southern engines, rolling stock, 150 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE trestles, and iron rails faced. Inconsistency, occasionally incompe­ tence, were the watchwords of the general’s railroad policy. Lash is clear about the ways in which railroads could have been used, and the complexities of finance and transport, and misses nothing. That is why this book will please the researcher into the Civil War more than it will the general reader. Often the story is told in such minute detail that the larger picture vanishes from view; many a Civil War buff’s head will droop as he presses through the off-again, on-again competence of Johnston during the 1861—62 campaign. There is no liveliness of style to beguile, and the distaste for Johnston is unconcealed. Yet, in the end, the weaknesses only underline the strengths. It will be hard for anyone, coming to the end of Lash’s book, to disagree with his conclusion that Johnston’s modest reputa­ tion was one well earned, or not to wish that Lash would take the other generals and apply the same scrutiny to them. Mark Wahlgren Summers Dr. Summers is professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. He is the author of Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel ofProsperity: Aid under the Radical Republicans, 1865—1877 (Princeton, N.J., 1984). Fortress America: The Corps ofEngineers, Hampton Roads, and United States Coastal Defense. By David A. Clary. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990. Pp. xiii + 222; illustrations, notes...

Fortress America: The Corps of Engineers, Hampton Roads, and United States Coastal Defense

Fortress America: The Corps of Engineers, Hampton Roads, and United States Coastal Defense

Another Look at the Downfall of “Fortress America”

In the reams of commentary that marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, no theme was more common than that it ended American isolationism. According toTimemagazine, “this was the moment that changed Americans from a nation of provincial innocents, not only ignorant of the great world but proud of their ignorance, into a nation that would often have to bear the burdens of rescuing the world.” “The United States was shaken to the bottom of its soul, its geopolitical innocence in ruins,”Newsweekrecalled. “No longer could it cultivate the old American illusion of withdrawing safely behind the Atlantic and Pacific while the rest of a corrupt world went about its dirty business.”

Fortress America: The Corps of Engineers, Hampton Roads, and United States Coastal Defense.

Fortress America: The Corps of Engineers, Hampton Roads, and United States Coastal Defense.

Fortress America: The Corps of Engineers, Hampton Roads, and United States Coastal Defense.

Fortress America: The Corps of Engineers, Hampton Roads, and United States Coastal Defense.

Fortress America: The Corps of Engineers, Hampton Roads, and United States Coastal Defense.

Fortress America: The Corps of Engineers, Hampton Roads, and United States Coastal Defense.

Fortress America: the Corps of Engineers, Hampton Roads, and United States coastal defense

Fortress America: the Corps of Engineers, Hampton Roads, and United States coastal defense

Lying down Together: Law, Metaphor, and Theology

Law is understood, interpreted, and practiced by metaphor. The presently dominant, conceptual metaphor for law is that law is the bulwark of freedom. Milner S. Ball, in this experimental statement, invites the reader to consider an alternate metaphor: law is a medium of human solidarity. A more humane metaphor for law, Ball s alternative connotes an open-ended conductor allowing for exchange and flow rather than the defensive wall or barrier associated with bulwark. To discover how this alternate metaphor may take concrete form, Ball explores the law of the sea and coast while basing his discussion in broad theological terms. This provocative analysis of jurisprudence will interest academic and practicing lawyers, theologians, philosophers, and political scientists concerned with legal studies. Law as bulwark suggests a static, defensive posture that is all divisions and boundaries a contradiction to the meaning and purpose of law as well as destructive of human community. Law as medium, illuminated by Ball s analysis of international, federal, and state marine law, releases these barriers and promotes a flow of dialogue. When viewed in this way, law serves the dynamics of a transfigured society. The metaphorical context of law as bulwark, depicted by Ball, is Fortress America; the metaphorical context of law as medium is the Peaceable Kingdom. Ball examines the possibilities and practice of law as the medium of the Peaceable Kingdom through a theological perspective based on a nonreligious, political theology of the natural. The author also draws imaginatively upon ecology, physics, art, literature, ethics, and rhetoric to persuade the reader to join him in his hope for a jurisprudence more authentically human and less inherently victimizing than that of the legal system today.

Early Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism

When the Abstract Expressionists began to paint in the early 1940s, World War II had cut off Europe from the rest of the world and the United States was becoming involved with the war first in an effort known as Fortress America, and then as an actual combatant. Thus, during their formative years the Abstract Expressionists were floundering through a number of half-understood truths about modern art and attempting to find a way to communicate their feelings about the apocalyptic state of the world.

United States Foreign Policy: The Legacy and the Challenge

Henry Kissinger, who has turned out a better negotiator than prophet, said in 1960: The United States cannot afford another decline like that which has characterized the past decade and a half. Fifteen years more of a deterioration in our position such as we have experienced since World War II would find us reduced to Fortress America in a world in which we had become largely irrelevant.Despite the accelerated decline of America's position in the world in the intervening years, the United States remains the world's most powerful and influential nation. (Even those who measure power in terms of military strength appear more concerned about an upward trend in-Soviet military strength and a relative decline in America's strength and its willingness to use it than about current U.S. inferiority.) The position of the United States has eroded because of its own follies and the growing strength of other countries; the latter development would have occurred irrespective of U.S. actions.

Is Containment Moral?

The Dulles idea that nonalignment in the Cold War is immoral voiced the view that all the world must choose between the pure white of our cold-war crusade and the total evil of Soviet communism. This absolutist doctrine failed to convince any nonaligned people and had to be abandoned. Even our allies condemned its rigidity. However, its propa gation and failure inevitably raised the issue of the morality of our containment policy. Was it moral to go to the other side of the earth to build many-sided hostile walls around the two largest peoples in the world; to deplete our own economy and society dangerously by nearly a trillion dollars of cold-war military expenditures, while verging upon international finan cial bankruptcy; to proscribe all revolutions in the world, lest they turn Communist, and ally ourselves with socially oppres sive and obsolete groups everywhere; to ignore the mounting evidence of social evolution and achievement in Communist lands; to maneuver the Congress into giving four blank checks for world war; and to violate both the United Nations and Or ganization of American States (OAS) charters as well as the oldest rules of international law? Is it moral, also, to force corrupt governments on the people of South Vietnam and to inch toward a nuclear war on China, in order to maintain our selves in the trap of deep involvement around China's frontiers? Will the acute dangers created by our encirclement rings, to those living in the rings and to those outside, boomerang upon us? Will President Johnson's proclamation of Pax Americana end in an involuntary Fortress America?

Can Pax Americana Succeed?

With the election of President Johnson, the American people had every right to expect the lessening of cold-war tensions and defense expenditures and increased government attention to the serious and long-standing domestic problems of the nation. However, the decision to use force in Vietnam has done irreparable harm to the American image in Asia and is forcing the Soviet Union and China together in spite of their ideological differences. Coupled with the growing hostility toward American economic outthrusts in West Europe—which are encouraging economic co-operation between West and East Europe—the danger of an involuntary "Fortress America" looms large. Also the Administration's decision to send large numbers of troops to Santo Domingo to protect and evacuate American citizens and to prevent "another Cuba" has aroused Latin-American anger and fear of us. If the United States continues to intervene in every small revolution which seems capable of turning Communist, it will find itself encircled by a hostile world. The Fortress America which would perforce result would lower our living standards, endanger nuclear war, and usher in a new era of McCarthyism, none of which would be conducive to individual freedom. As in 1954, when a few powerful officials were pushing us into preventive war with China, conservatives and liberals should join in effective protest against government policies before it is too late.—Ed.

Is Western Europe the Pivot of American Foreign Policy?

The basic issue in world affairs is whether, in the world social and political reorganization now in process, Western (or European) civilization will maintain its ascendancy or will be destroyed. Since Western civilization as a whole is now under attack, the parochial conflicts within Western civilization fall to secondary importance. The United States is organically a part of Western civilization. The correct and most effective United States foreign policy, there fore, must be a "European policy," conceived in the perspective of the civiliza tion as a whole. So viewed, the primary present objective, a required premise to any wider world objectives, is seen to be the reconstitution of the Western base itself through the recovery of the captive regions—namely, Eastern Europe. Until this is accomplished, other foreign policy moves will continue to be as they have been for the past decade: negative, defensive, transitional—merely holding operations. Within the next decade, either Eastern Europe will rejoin the West, or the United States will be compelled to fall back on Fortress America.