Stagecraft / Statecraft: The Military “Mock Village” and the Fabrication of American Empire, 1941-1945

Abstract

Focused on the period between the United States’ entry into the Second World War and the surrender of the Axis Powers (1941-1945), this dissertation investigates the entanglement of US wartime governance and global geopolitics, racial tensions, and design expertise that led to the invention and proliferation of military “mock villages.” As so-called “laboratories of war,” mock villages were (and continue to be) replicas of foreign and domestic cities, constructed on US soil, where the US military simulated urban warfare operations. The first examples were overseen by the US Army and the US Office of Civilian Defense in collaboration with architects and staging experts from the Broadway theater industry, the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and Hollywood film studios like Walt Disney and Twentieth Century Fox. Together, they produced hundreds of cityscapes representative of Germany, Japan, China, the Pacific Islands, and even the US itself. Each chapter investigates one example of what I have identified as four distinct ways that the US military used these initial mock villages: as instruments of visual deception; as public propaganda; as military-scientific objects; and as mechanisms for psychologically conditioning troops. As I show, with mock villages, the US military manipulated the built environment to perform less like buildings and cities and more like immersive forms of propagandic media. These implements not only empowered the development of illicit chemical weapons like napalm, for example, but they were also armaments themselves: architectures made to disorient, disinform, and control both soldiers and civilians, foreign and domestic. But while mock villages arose during the Second World War to stop the spread of fascism, they have since become the very tools of imperialism and empire, mirroring US-occupied territories from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. That is, from World War II to today, these imitations have been continuously altered and aestheticized to represent new adversaries. What has remained the same, I contend, is the production of a visual field in which foreign nations are parodied as inferior and inherently hostile environments worthy of US military intervention and control. At the heart of this dissertation, then, are two overlapping lines of inquiry that weave American military, political, and urban history with global studies of media, conflict, and empire. I show how, as products of the American entertainment industry and the military gaze, mock villages figured centrally in the visual and material culture of the mid-twentieth century United States and the nation’s rise as a global superpower. At the same time, I show how the invention of these military tools demanded novel ways of envisioning, constructing, and instrumentalizing the built environment that coincided with the production of new and persistent forms of state-sanctioned disinformation, oppression, and violence.