861
Canada and the United States
searched book should interest western, urban, and
business historians.
GORDON MORRIS BAKKEN
California State University,
Fullerton
MICHAEL A. AMUNDSON. Yellowcake Towns: Uranium
Mining Communities in the American West. (Mining the
American West.) Boulder: University Press of Colorado. 2002. Pp. xxiv, 204. $24.96.
Many authors have explored the atomic age in American history and culture, but few have studied the
communities that mined and manufactured the key
elements of atomic power. Michael A. Amundson
compares the fates of four mining communitiesUravan, Colorado; Moab, Utah; Jeffrey City, Wyoming; and Grants, New Mexico-at the center of the
mid-twentieth-century uranium boom. As part of the
University Press of Colorado's new "Mining the American West" series, his book adds an important dimension to the familiar story of mining in the region.
Uranium towns shared much with other mining communities: isolation, unpredictable markets, cultural
identities joined to the industry, corporate consolidation, decline, and a toxic legacy. Yet they were unique
in their pursuit of ore steeped in secrecy and potential
danger and, Amundson argues, in their dependence on
federal policies.
Changing federal policies for the domestic industry
led to booms and bust for the uranium industry and its
communities. The author focuses on this "colonialist"
control rather than any human agency that might have
shaped work or community life. He uncritically outlines Cold War demands for atomic ores and shows
how, from World War II to the end of the federally
subsidized market in 1970, the government controlled
the uranium market for national security purposes.
Government contracts assured corporate profits, and
by 1958 production had expanded across eight western
states. When federal supports were curtailed to open
supplies to international markets, a short burst of
commercial demand in the 1970s came to a dramatic
end by the 1980s.
Amundson effectively outlines the external forces
that began to undermine 1950s optimism for endless
uranium production. Shifts in congressional and
Atomic Energy Commission purchasing programs, delays in anticipated nuclear power demand, oil company
takeovers, new environmental regulations, the politics
of enriching uranium, foreign competition, the Three
Mile Island accident, and heightened concerns about
nuclear power curtailed demand and contributed to
the demise of the uranium communities. Union Carbide closed its mill in 1984 and dismantled Uravan in
1988; Western Nuclear sold Jeffrey City, whose houses
were carted off. Communities that could diversify their
economies fared better. Moab capitalized on the tourism industry, and Grants benefited from the construction of three state prisons.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
The West's mining landscape is littered with tailings
and other contaminants and has become home to the
nation's largest Superfund sites. The uranium towns in
Amundson's study faced an additional problem: radioactive wastes. The federal government and mining
companies litigated over responsibility for cleanup,
and both spent tens of millions of dollars on remediation, which began in all four communities in the 1980s.
The author notes in his introduction that this work is
not "an in-depth social history" (p. xvii). The reflections and sentiments of residents are infrequently
invoked. Curiously little is said about workers at the
mines and mills, community life, or the human consequences of shutdowns, unemployment, and remediation. While full of details such as population and
school enrollment figures and the establishment of
churches and municipal services, the three chapters
comparing the towns provide few insights into residents' lives. In the descriptions of company towns
Uravan and Jeffrey City, for example, little analysis is
offered of company-community relations. The author
provides a more interesting comparison of Grants and
Moab: their transformation into "atom" towns and the
attendant problems from rapid growth.
Amundson charts the cultural markers that signified
the increasing acceptance of Cold War atomic power
in the electronic board game Uranium Rush, Hollywood films, literature, and television episodes that
embraced the potential for "yellowcake" or uranium
concentrate. Business names such as the Uranium
Cafe and town celebrations such as Uranium Days
Rodeo reflected support of the industry that fueled
community growth. Yet there was at least some ambivalence about this heritage, as symbolized by Moab's
ready adoption of "Heart of the Canyonlands" to
replace its former "Uranium Capital of the World"
slogan as tourism became central to its survival.
Communities seldom reflect on the products and
politics of their chief employer. Michael Moore showcases this irony in his recent film, Bowling for Columbine (2002), where he interviews a spokesperson from
Lockheed Martin, Columbine's largest employer.
Flanked by some of his company's missiles, the representative appears genuinely puzzled about youth violence in his Colorado town, failing to connect national
military policies to unsettling domestic issues. Because
it focuses on the economic impacts of the rise and fall
of uranium production, Amundson's book leaves untapped the community attitudes about the end use of
that production.
LAURIE MERCIER
Washington State University,
Vancouver
NICHOLAS DAGEN BLOoM. Suburban Alchemy: 1960s
New Towns and the Transformation of the American
Dream. (Urban Life and Urban Landscape Series.)
Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2001. Pp. x,
333. $27.95.
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862
Reviews of Books
Nicholas Dagen Bloom's book joins a growing and
important body of literature on the modern suburban
community and its place in the American landscape.
His study of three communities from the New Towns
movement-Reston, Virginia; Columbia, Maryland;
and Irvine, California-moves beyond the older suburban analysis, which pitted the suburbs against the
traditional urban forms, and examines its subjects on
their own terms. Bloom considers both the built environment and the reform ideals that shaped the New
Towns. He follows their development over time and
grades them not pass/fail but individually, against their
own criteria, producing a balanced study of the three
towns, which were a response to the critique of the GI
Bill suburbs of the 1950s.
After a review of the received wisdom on the
American suburb, Bloom explores the planning and
design of each of his subject communities. His analysis
of the roles of time and class gives a depth to his
subject that is lacking in many of the older environmental-determinist studies, which often emphasize the
built environment and minimize the impact of class,
culture, and time period. This model attributed pathologies, problems, or changes to the suburban environment: conditions that were far more widespread, and
that had deeper roots in the culture. Focusing narrowly
on the geography and form of the built environment as
the source of the civic, cultural, and social lives of the
inhabitants, such critiques often failed to distinguish
between the suburbs and their time-specific, socioeconomic, and national contexts.
Bloom's detailed study of the plans and execution of
the new towns includes a careful evaluation of their
successes and failures at achieving their intended
goals: civic involvement, social reform, cultural activities, and independence from the personal automobile.
In the belief that the communities of the past can be
created instantly through design, urban planners have
been forming and reforming, critiquing and promoting
our buillt environment for almost two centuries. Beginning with Horace Bushnell, Andrew Jackson Downing,
and the Shakers, reformers have tried to construct on
a physical level the promise of the metaphorical "City
on a Hilll." Thus the underlying goal of most of modern
America's planned suburbs has been to return to, and
improve on, the community life of the traditional-and
largely mythic-neighborhoods of nineteenth-century
America. A longing for a half-remembered past-the
village, the neighborhood, the small town, the city, the
golden form-nurtured the best in the American social
culture.
Periodically reform developers try to recreate the
physical form of traditional places in the belief that the
form created the community rather than responding to
it. They attempt to ward off the sterility and sprawl of
the mass-produced suburbs of the postwar era, creating instant utopias in what are essentially more contemporary subdivisions. In so doing, they overlook the
fact that community is a process rather than a product.
The goals of the reformers-mixed land use, high
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
culture and education, social equity and communityevolve in traditional ways. Small groups form and
pursue special interests in the arts. A house is razed to
be replaced by a shop, which, basic or quaint, gravitates to the market. Young people mature; the aged
move in with their offspring. Although they may
flourish more readily in one environment than another, traditional communities develop over time.
Nevertheless, the idea that the physical environment
can create an instant utopia that will counteract the
effects of fearsome social and cultural changes has
been with us since the rural reform movement of the
1830s. Bloom's study provides a compelling argument
for a composite, longitudinal study comparing and
contrasting the development of three model communities from different eras, examining them at different
points in their history in order to evaluate the effect of
the built environment over time. This book is well
written and accessible to students-both undergraduates and graduates-as well as to a more general
readership. A solid bibliography and copious notes add
to its value, although the studious reader would benefit
from a more extensive index.
BARBARA M. KELLy
Hofstra University
DoNALD E. DAVIS and EuGENE P. TRANI. The First Cold
War: The Legacy of Woodrow Wilson in U.S.-Soviet
Relations. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
2002. Pp. xxiii, 329. $42.50.
In this careful study of U.S. policy making toward the
Russian Revolution, Donald E. Davis and Eugene P.
Trani argue that "President Woodrow Wilson's administration initiated a 'cold war' that lasted from 1917 to
1933" (p. xxi). Wilson's legacy in U.S.-Soviet relations,
they further contend, provided the precedent for the
Cold War from 1946 to 1991, thereby making the
Wilsonians "the first cold warriors" (p. 206). The
authors develop this thesis by focusing on the U.S.
government's search for a policy to deal with revolutionary Russia from 1917 to 1920, but not on what was
happening in Russia. They seek to explain U.S. policy
making toward "the Russian problem" rather than to
examine the problem itself. Although they give some
attention to how European governments reacted to
revolutionary Russia in the midst of World War I and
at the Paris Peace Conference, the authors keep their
focus on the United States.
Davis and Trani criticize Wilson for his failure to
define a constructive policy. After the March 1917
Russian Revolution, the president sent the Republican
elder statesman Elihu Root on a diplomatic mission to
Russia, and the engineer John F. Stevens on a technical mission to assist with the operation of the TransSiberian railway. These missions and some credits,
relief, and propaganda, the authors conclude, were the
only "efforts that constituted Wilson's foreign policy
toward Russia during the months of the Provisional
Government. The Wilson administration was increas-
JUNE 2003