Editor’s Note: This is the second post to Part IV of the Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North series edited by Isabelle Gapp and guest edited by Jonathan Peyton.
A product of the Cold War era partnership between the recently established United States Air Force, telecommunications monopoly AT&T subsidiaries Western Electric and Bell Labs, and the US Army Corps of Engineers, the “White Alice” Communications system (WACS) was initially constructed between 1955 and 1958. Consisting of 70 tropospheric scatter and microwave stations, White Alice stations were most notable for their 60-foot tall, 100-ton antennas that its builders equated with “outdoor movie screens”—a comparison publicly promoted in “White Alice” educational materials.
Large as these structures were, their reach was even greater. White Alice stations stretched from Alaska’s northern Arctic coast to the Canadian border in the east, and to the end of the Alexander archipelago in the south and the Aleutian Islands in the west. As the Air Force would later boast in its January 1973 news release, the circuits between these stations were so long that cumulatively they would “circle the globe 57 times.”1
The stated aim of the system was to overcome “atmospheric disturbances,” long distances, intense polar climate, and geographic obstacles such as mountains to provide improved communication among the existing military infrastructure known the Aircraft Control and Warning Sites (AC&W), the Distant Early Warning Line (DEW), and the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS).
White Alice was said to enable critical defensive transmissions along the US’s remote northern flank while also allowing some of its bandwidth to be used for improved civilian telephone networks “free for the first time from atmosphere disturbances and interruptions” that had long plagued Arctic communications.2 If Alaska was the “air crossroads of the world,”3 as multiple territorial, federal, and state discourses had asserted for years, then White Alice appeared poised to facilitate military and civilian communication across that critical yet burdensome transit corridor. It promised to address longstanding challenges in connecting Alaskans to each other and the territory to its colonial overlords in the contiguous US. The reality was less audacious and more one-sided, as the civilian communication service only extended to those communities near the White Alice sites. In other words, it was unequivocally a military network with limited civilian applications.4
These limitations were absent from the promotional apparatus—and its attendant visual repertoire of Arctic-ness—that proved essential in both conveying the abstractions of long-distance communications technologies to lay audiences, and crucially in soliciting popular buy-in across the lower 48 American states for such massive and costly military-industrial projects. Like another 1960 sponsored film, Seconds for Survival, the Western Electric-produced film Land of White Alice and its accompanying booklet lay at the heart of these persuasive efforts.
With its presentations of city and village life, its bird’s eye perspectives on seemingly inaccessible terrain, and its glimpses into the military communications infrastructure said to represent a technological marvel within an extreme environment, Land of White Alice attempted to inform civilian audiences about America’s Arctic but also to frame the newly consecrated state through multiple visual logics of extraction. Such logics situated the visual as integral to communicating timely industrial (natural resource) and national (security) needs, and to rousing deep-seated ideological desires for settler colonial expansion and occupation. Alaska was thus situated as an exotic locale, the last “American” frontier for visitors to live out fantasies of exploration and discovery.
The film also aimed to generate consent and consensus regarding the allegedly urgent military-industrial need to envision much of Alaska as terra nullius, a largely empty—the film and booklet use the surrogate descriptor “silent”—Arctic space to be conquered in the name of military-industrial-civilian communication. “The purpose” of imposing this technology on the environment, White Alice‘s official literature rationalized to audiences, was “to let Alaska speak” for itself and to the rest of the US.
It is unclear how many schoolchildren, community and civic organization members set their eyes on these White Alice materials, but it is important to point out that these were in part continuations of a broader visual culture wedding “Alaska” aesthetics to an ascribed identity as a resource waiting to be mined. The 1934 “Alaska Line” map, for example, promoted the monopolistic Alaska Steamship Company owned by the Alaska Syndicate of banking titan J.P. Morgan and mining magnate Solomon Guggenheim.
It combined tourist destinations, natural resource designations, and transportation routes, entwining tourism and resource extraction decades before like-minded films such as Alaska: The 49th State (1949), Alaska: Reservoir of Resources (1946), Seconds for Survival, and Land of White Alice.
Land of White Alice and its ilk collectively appealed to what Rahul Mukherjee has called the “infrastructural imagination” wherein “aspirations of technological modernity” are employed to outline and cohere the nation state.5 The visual logics of extraction at work through White Alice framed the territory-turned-state as a kind of sandbox for testing new technologies, a landscape for experimentation that celebrated “American” (read white and male) know-how and problem solving that both tested the durability and functionality of such ingenuity and argued that the benefits of massive projects like White Alice extended to those far away in the contiguous US. Despite such hoopla, the system was quickly made obsolete by advances in satellite communication technology.
We can see another extractive logic here, one whose visuality is notably more elusive and mundane than a film or booklet or map. Instead, a series of government reports outline the long-term neglect of White Alice sites and the consequent risks to environmental integrity and the well-being of the largely Indigenous residents living nearby. Here, the visual logics of extraction are decidedly different, both more austere and far less invested in promoting an imagined “Alaska.” Romanticizing motion pictures and colorful maps are replaced by the sober aesthetic of bureaucratic letterhead, and unvarnished statements calling for the long overdue removal of White Alice facilities to head off these sites’ further extraction from local livelihoods and lives.
Notes
1 Military USAF News Release January 1973.
2 Project White Alice, Contract AF 33 (600) 29717, Special Report; Western Electric Company Part I: Inauguration – White Alice Communications System, Part II: White Alice Progress as of November 3, 1956, 1.
3 John Haile Cloe with Michael F. Monaghan, Top Cover For America: The Air Force in Alaska 1920-1983 (Missoula, MT, 1985), 1.
4 William R. Roche, “White Alice: The Blue Chip Policy,” Unpublished manuscript, 2-3.
5 Rahul Mukherjee, Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 200.
Feature Image: Abandoned White Alice communications antenna, covered in a light fog, on the Aleutian islands. Image: “Abandoned Aleutian White Alice Site” from Flickr account “hig314” https://www.flickr.com/photos/33862669@N00/3299940196/.
