The Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act of 1956 (Public Law 84-830) was an Act of Congress passed to improve mental health care in the United States territory of Alaska. Initially bipartisan and uncontroversial, it became the focus of a major political dispute"One of the most controversial pieces of legislation tackled by Congress in 1956" – Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1957; quoted in Felicetti, Daniel A., Mental health and retardation politics: the mind lobbies in Congress, p. 27. Praeger, 1975. . after radical anti-communist activists nicknamed it the "Siberia Bill" and denounced it as being part of a communist plot to hospitalize and brainwash Americans. Campaigners asserted that it was part of an international Jewish, Roman Catholic or psychiatric conspiracy intended to establish United Nations-run concentration camps in the United States.
The legislation in its original form was sponsored by the Democratic Party, but after it ran into opposition, it was rescued by the conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater. Under Goldwater's sponsorship, a version of the legislation without the commitment provisions that were the target of intense opposition from a variety of far-right, anti-Communist and fringe religious groups was passed by the United States Senate.Nickerson, Michelle M. "The Lunatic Fringe Strikes Back: Conservative Opposition to the Alaska Mental Health Bill of 1956", in The Politics of Healing: histories of alternative medicine in twentieth-century North America, ed. Robert D. Johnston, pp. 117–152. Routledge, 2004. . The controversy still plays a prominent role in the Church of Scientology's account of its campaign against psychiatry.
The Act succeeded in its initial aim of establishing a mental health care system for Alaska, funded by income from lands allocated to a mental health trust. However, during the 1970s and early 1980s, Alaskan politicians systematically stripped the trust of its lands, transferring the most valuable land to private individuals and state agencies. The asset stripping was eventually ruled to be illegal following several years of litigation, and a reconstituted mental health trust was established in the mid-1980s.
Background to the act
Alaska possessed no mental health treatment facilities prior to the passage of the 1956 Act. At the time of the Act's passage, Alaska was not a U.S. state, being constituted instead as a territory of the United States. The treatment of the mentally ill was governed by an agreement with the state of Oregon dating back to the turn of the 20th century. On June 6, 1900, the United States Congress enacted a law permitting the government of the then District of Alaska to provide mental health care for Alaskans. In 1904, a contract was signed with Morningside Hospital, privately owned and operated by Henry Waldo Coe in Portland, Oregon, under which Alaskan mental patients would be sent to the hospital for treatment.Boyvey, Roger. "Mental Health and the Ultra-Concerned", Social Service Review, 38:3 (1964:Sept.) p. 281-293. A commitment regime was established under which a person said to be mentally ill was to be brought before a jury of six people for a ruling on insanity. The patient was routinely sent to prison until his release or transfer to Portland; at no point in this ruling was a medical or psychiatric examination required.Kominsky, Morris. The hoaxers: plain liars, fancy liars, and damned liars, p. 111-116. Branden Press, 1970. .
By the 1940s, it was recognized that this arrangement was unsatisfactory. The American Medical Association conducted a series of studies in 1948, followed by a Department of the Interior study in 1950. They highlighted the deficiencies of the program: commitment procedures in Alaska were archaic, and the long trip to Portland had a negative effect on patients and their families. In addition, an audit of the hospital contract found that the Sanatorium Company, which owned the hospital, had been padding its expenses. This had enabled it to make an excess profit of $69,000 per year (equivalent to over $588,000 per year at 2007 prices).
The studies recommended a comprehensive overhaul of the system, with the development of an in-territory mental health program for Alaska. This proposal was widely supported by the public and politicians. At the start of 1956, in the second session of the 84th Congress, Representative Edith Green (D-Oregon) introduced the Alaska Mental Health Bill (H.R. 6376) in the House of Representatives. The bill had been written by Bob Bartlett, the Congressional Delegate from the Alaska Territory who later became a U.S. Senator. Senator Richard L. Neuberger (D-Oregon) sponsored an equivalent bill, S. 2518, in the Senate.
Details of the bill The Alaska Mental Health Bill's stated purpose was to "transfer from the Federal Government to the Territory of Alaska basic responsibility for the hospitalization, care and treatment of the mentally ill of Alaska." In connection with this goal, it aimed:
to modernize procedures for such hospitalization (including commitment), care, and treatment and to authorize the Territory to modify or supersede such procedures; to assist in providing for the Territory necessary facilities for a comprehensive mental-health program in Alaska, including inpatient and outpatient facilities; to provide for a land grant to the Territory to assist in placing the program on a firm long-term basis; and to provide for a ten-year program, of grants-in-aid to the Territory to enable the Territory gradually to assume the full operating costs of the program.Alaska Mental Health Bill, H.R. 6376, January 16, 1958.
The bill provided for a cash grant of $12.5 million (about $94 million at 2007 prices) to be disbursed to the Alaskan government in a number of phases, to fund the construction of mental health facilities in the territory. To meet the ongoing costs of the program, the bill transferred one million acres (4,000 km2) of federally owned land in Alaska to the ownership of the proposed new Alaska Mental Health Trust as a grant-in-aid—the federal government owned about 99% of the land of Alaska at the time. The trust would then be able to use the assets of the transferred land (principally mineral and forestry rights) to obtain an ongoing revenue stream to fund the Alaskan mental health program. Similar provisions had applied in other US territories to support the provision of public facilities prior to the achievement of statehood.
In addition, the bill granted the Governor of Alaska authority to enter into reciprocal mental health treatment agreements with the governors of other states. Alaskans who became mentally ill in the lower 48 states would be properly treated locally until they could be returned to Alaska; likewise, citizens of the lower 48 who fell mentally ill in Alaska would receive care there, before being returned to their home states.
The bill was seen as entirely innocuous when it was introduced on January 16, 1956. It enjoyed bipartisan support, and on January 18 it was passed unanimously by the House of Representatives. It then fell to the Senate to consider the equivalent bill in the upper chamber, S. 2518, which was expected to have an equally untroubled passage following hearings scheduled to begin on February 20.
Controversy
Initial opposition
In December 1955, a small anti-communist women's group in Southern California, the American Public Relations Forum (APRF), issued an urgent call to arms in its monthly bulletin. It highlighted the proposed text of the Alaska Mental Health Bill, calling it "one that tops all of them". The bulletin writers commented: "We could not help remembering that Siberia is very near Alaska and since it is obvious no one needs such a large land grant, we were wondering if it could be an American Siberia." They said that the bill "takes away all of the rights of the American citizen to ask for a jury trial and protect him[self] from being railroaded to an asylum by a greedy relative or 'friend' or, as the Alaska bill states, 'an interested party'."
The APRF had a history of opposing mental health legislation; earlier in 1955, it had played a key role in stalling the passage of three mental health bills in the California Assembly. It was part of a wider network of far-right organizations which opposed psychiatry and psychology as being pro-communist, anti-American, anti-Christian and pro-Jewish. The Keep America Committee, another Californian "superpatriot" group, summed up the anti-mental-health mood on the far right in a pamphlet issued in May 1955. Calling "mental hygiene" part of the "unholy three" of the "Communistic World Government", it declared: "Mental Hygiene is a subtle and diabolical plan of the enemy to transform a free and intelligent people into a cringing horde of zombies".Marmor, Judd. "Psychodynamics of Group Opposition to Mental Health Programs", in Psychiatry in Transition. Butterworth, 1974.
The APRF's membership overlapped with that of the much larger Minute Women of the U.S.A., a nationwide organization of militant anti-communist housewives which claimed up to 50,000 members across the United States. In mid-January 1956, Minute Woman Leigh F. Burkeland of Van Nuys, California issued a bulletin protesting against the bill. It was mimeographed by the California State Chapter of the Minute Women and mailed across the nation. On January 24, 1956, the strongly anti-statist Santa Ana Register newspaper reprinted Burkeland's statement under the headline, "Now — Siberia, U.S.A." Burkeland issued a lurid warning of what the future might hold if the Alaska Mental Health Bill was passed by the Senate:
Further opposition After the Santa Ana Register published its article, a nationwide network of activists began a vociferous campaign to torpedo the Alaska Mental Health Bill. The campaigners included, among other groups and individuals, the white supremacist Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith; Women for God and Country; the For America League; the Minute Women of the U.S.A.; the right-wing agitator Dan Smoot; the anti-Catholic former US Army Brigadier General Herbert C. Holdridge; and L. Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology, which had been founded only two years earlier.
Increasingly strong statements were made by the bill's opponents through the course of the spring and summer of 1956. In his February 17 bulletin, Dan Smoot told his subscribers: "I do not doubt that the Alaska Mental Health Act was written by sincere, well-intentioned men. Nonetheless, it fits into a sinister pattern which has been forming ever since the United Nations was organized." Dr. George A. Snyder of Hollywood sent a letter to all members of Congress in which he demanded an investigation of the Alaska Mental Health Bill's proponents for "elements of treason against the American people behind the front of the mental health program". The Keep America Committee of Los Angeles similarly called the proponents of the bill a "conspiratorial gang" that ought to be "investigated, impeached, or at least removed from office" for treason. Retired brigadier general Herbert C. Holdridge sent a public letter to President Dwight Eisenhower on March 12, in which he called the bill "a dastardly attempt to establish a concentration camp in the Alaskan wastes". He went on:
For their part, America's professional health associations (notably the American Medical Association and American Psychiatric Association) came out in favor of the bill. There was some initial opposition from the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a small and extremely conservative body which opposed socialized medicine; Dr. L. S. Sprague of Tucson, Arizona said in its March 1956 newsletter that the bill widened the definition of mental health to cover "everything from falling hair to ingrown toenails". However, the association modified its position after it became clear that the AMA took the opposite view.