"Barbed Wire: A Political History" by Olivier Razac

Here's how a simple twist of spiked metal ravaged the American West, crucified a generation of young men and terrorized millions of Europeans.

By Damien Cave

Aug 6, 2002 | In a world jampacked with stuff for the body, house, car, government or corporation, one can only survive through selective awareness. Paying full and serious intellectual attention to everything from the microwave to the beer-can cozy simply isn't possible. Just imagine how hard it would be to get anything done at work if you couldn't type without ruminating on the letter arrangement of the modern keyboard. Why is the "P," a relatively popular letter, so hard to reach? Who decided that the "I" didn't belong between "H" and "J"? Was it always this way? (As a matter of fact it was. Early keyboards were designed to slow down typists, whose fingers moved so fast they jammed the mechanisms of the old manual typewriters.)

These are just a few of the questions that would get you fired if you couldn't survive without having them answered. And yet, to completely forget how we have shaped and been affected by the various things that surround us amounts to ignorance. Many of the modern products we regularly overlook -- plastic trash bags, to take a more trivial example -- have dramatically altered the nature of our society. They are parts of the honeycomb we've built to make life easier, cleaner or better-looking. Because they envelop and reflect us, they deserve to be analyzed and discussed.

Seinfeld's writers understood this. Authors and book publishers have also made a habit of identifying significant items and holding them up to the light of intelligent study. In the past few years alone, air conditioning, wristwatches, guns, steel and even the color mauve have all been subjected to literary scrutiny.

Now, barbed wire can be added to the list. Olivier Razac, a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Paris, has written a short history of the metal fencing and how it's been used through three periods: the settling of the American prairie at the turn of the 19th century, World War I and World War II, specifically in concentration camps. The result -- "Barbed Wire: A Political History" -- may fall short of a complete and thorough exegesis on all things wiry and barbed. In fact, Razac's slim, often repetitive book will leave the curious hungry for more. But with its pictures, quotes from primary sources and expansive prose, "Barbed Wire" offers more than enough insight to be worthy of a focused read.

Razac's primary goal is to prove that barbed wire has been used repeatedly for "the political management of space." He points out that barbed wire began in the world of agriculture. J.F. Glidden, an Illinois farmer, patented the design -- a pair of metal wires twisted to hold a barb in place -- in 1874 as a means of keeping wild animals from private land. But barbed wire was also far cheaper than other forms of fence and it hit the market just as American settlers fanned out across the great plains.

Thus, it became the boundary enforcer of choice, the fence that appeared in places that had otherwise been left unmarked. Steel makers benefited substantially: About 270 tons of barbed wire were produced in 1875; by 1901, that number had shot up to 135,000 tons. The problem, of course, was that the newly cordoned-off lands were not unoccupied. Native American tribes had been roaming the plains for generations -- and they had no reverence for the private ownership that barbed wire protected. To them, the spiked metal barrier was not a new fancy fence but rather a tool of subjugation. It was a cultural weapon that single-handedly altered their daily existence. The buffalo and bison that they hunted no longer had the same freedom to roam; the tribes no longer had the same freedom to hunt.

Most Native Americans decided to flee barbed wire rather than fight its spread, but eventually they had nowhere to go. Barbed wire dominated the once-open landscape, surrounded tribal areas and eventually destroyed the communal nature of their society. "In short," Razac argues, "it created the conditions for the physical and cultural disappearance of the Indian."

Historians might want to point out that other factors did far more damage to Native American life than barbed wire. Guns, greedy settlers and the ignorant Manifest Destiny belief that white Europeans deserved the land from coast to coast -- these all significantly contributed to the Native American "disappearance," though you wouldn't know it from reading "Barbed Wire." Still, Razac is correct to point out that barbed wire severely affected Native American life.

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