Jeffrey C. Sanders. Razing Kids

An impressive piece of twentieth-century regional history, Razing Kids: Youth, Environment, and the Postwar American West explores how youth experience and environmental challenges worked together in the urban and rural West from the 1940s through to the 1980s. Across a series of five case studies, author Jeffrey C. Sanders relates a diverse set of stories that includes child runaways, farm laborers, and leukemia victims. He paints a picture of growing interest in the postwar period in child health and youth culture that happens very much alongside and often connected to growing problems of pollution and development. Primarily focused on how policymakers, corporations, and activists shaped events, the book is less about how kids saw their world and more about how they were seen, controlled, and sometimes even liberated by adults. The case studies commence with a look at the shipbuilding cities of Richmond, California, and Vanport, Oregon in the 1940s, and how progressive industrialist and entrepreneur Henry J. Kaiser tackled unhealthy environments with, at times, a truly inspired approach to community building. Sanders capably tracks the contrast between older romantic “frontier” visions of the open West and twentieth-century realities of industry, overcrowding, and poor health. Early shipbuilding camps on the West Coast offered living conditions reminiscent of those documented by Jacob Riis in New York City fifty years prior, with one privy shared by “100 men and boys” (29). Kaiser responded with a progressive approach that prototyped not only postwar suburbia but fully integrated health care and schooling into new communities. Looking particularly at Kaiser’s innovative Child Service Centers, Sanders highlights attempts to build strong ships and strong kids alike, with the Oregon Shipyard as “a profound experiment in wartime production and housing, a model of a new American society in the making” (39).

Political science · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies