Islands in the Sun

PETER: hosts, that story of James Strang and the Mormon diasporamoving to this island, Beaver Island, was a fascinating story. And it evokes for me– well, fantasies and memories that go back to early childhood. Islands were the most exciting and romantic place that I could imagine. Of course, we read books like Treasure Island. But the idea of a space that was delimited and could be your own. ED: Yeah. I remember seeing Swiss Family Robinson, the Disney movie, in the theater, and fighting off the pirates with the rolling logs and all that. BRIAN: Yeah. I remember that scene.

ED: I don’t think I’d ever felt so vicariously invested in a movie. And there’s something about being able to defend the boundaries of who you were, and, of course, the family.

PETER: Yeah. [INAUDIBLE].

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

ED: So, yeah. Apparently Disney knows how to tap the psyche.

[LAUGHTER]

PETER: That’s right. And that point you make, Ed, about defense I think is really crucial in the story of James Strang. Mormons had, as you know, suffered tremendous persecution and abuse in New York and Ohio and ultimately in Illinois and Missouri, and trying to find a safe place so that they could practice their religion. And of course it was not just going to church on Sunday for Mormons. It was a whole way of life. They desperately needed an island. And you could say that, in some ways, the successful Mormon experiment in Salt Lake was a virtual island in the midst of the Great American Desert.

ED: Yeah. They use land as the ocean, right? PETER: Yeah, exactly.

ED: You go so far away that nobody, unless they were really determined to persecute you, could get there. PETER: Yeah. Yeah.

ED: But it sounds like Strang wasn’t quite so fortunate– that, in a time when an island’s basically vulnerable to anybody with a boat. PETER: But I think that’s the point, because islands are simultaneously these defensible points. But I think more important than that is that islands in the early modern period into the present day are nodes, or points of connection, with the larger world. This is, I think, the paradox. On the one hand, an island is a place you get away to an island. And in fact, that’s the lure in tourism. BRIAN: On the other hand, you’re saying, Peter, islands used to be kind of way stations– crucial ones, right– and in international trade. PETER: That’s absolutely right. So the advantage of an island is its openness, is the fact that it can connect many places. It’s a way of linking to the world and exploiting the world– and that is through commerce and trade. ED: Yeah. And the interesting thing– if you think about the way that you would control the seas, it’s basically making man-made islands in the forms of ships. A ship is a portable island– self-contained, isolated, defensible, but the point here is that you can actuallytake it from one place to another with all the guns and food that you need. PETER: Yeah.

ED: And you think about Herman Melville and the great whaling voyages.I think they actually saw the ship as islands. So in a watery world– which the world was until the middle of the 19th century– PETER: Yes it was, indeed. ED: –I think islands had a role that we can’t really quite imagine today in which now they just same places that you can fly to to get away in a very transitory, kind of shallow, so to speak, sort of way.

BRIAN: And Ed, don’t stop with the 19th century, because as America became a global military power in the 20th century, islands were crucial.They were called fueling stations. PETER: Right. Yeah.

BRIAN: And then after World War II, they became bases for aircrafts. So the American presence, well into the 20th century, on Guam and the Philippines and all of these islands is very much a linked to the kind of interconnectedness that Peter was talking about– in this case, a flat-out military interconnectedness. PETER: Yeah.

ED: Yeah. As much as the United States enjoyed its status as a citadel isolated from any other real power, it needed to expose itself by establishing the coaling station there in Hawaii. And it both gave it an enormous advantage in participating in the Pacific trade, but at the same time, that makes it vulnerable.

BRIAN: And you mentioned vulnerable, Ed, and we’re talking about independence, autonomy, and interdependence. And think about how America entered World War II. It was the bombing of Pearl Harbor, whichwas intended to make America militarily strong, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back in terms of entry into a World War– the ultimate independence. PETER: Yeah. I think what all this suggests, guys, is that islands are part of the whole world of everywhere, yet islands remain in kind of our deep memories, in our psyches, as places of escape, of where you can fulfill your own individual destiny, where you won’t be subject to the influence of others. I think that’s beautifully epitomized by Thomas More’s Utopia, published in Latin in 1516, in which he imagines an ideal society– utopia means no place. And, in fact, he’s reimagining the worldby projecting this ideal society onto an island which is a world unto itself.

BRIAN: It’s time for another break, but stay with us. When we get back, we’ll hear the stories of East Asian migrants yearning to breathe free, but stuck on an island in San Francisco Bay.

ED: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.