Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties 9781400843558

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CIVIL DEFENSE BEGINS AT HOME

POLITICS AND SOCIETY IN TWENTIETH–CENTURY AMERICA SERIES EDITORS WILLIAM CHAFE, GARY GERSTLE, and LINDA GORDON

Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties by Laura McEnaney

CIVIL DEFENSE BEGINS AT HOME

M I L I TA R I Z AT I O N M E E T S E V E R Y D AY LIFE IN THE FIFTIES

Laura McEnaney

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2000 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McEnaney, Laura, 1960– Civil defense begins at home : militarization meets everyday life in the fifties / Laura McEnaney. p. cm. — (Politics and society in twentieth-century America) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-00138-3 (CI: alk.paper) 1. Civil defense—United States. 2. United States—Politics and government—1945–1989. I. Title. II. Series. UA927 .M33 2000 363.3'5'097309045—dc21 This book has been composed in Galliard The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper) www.pup.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For My Mother, Janet

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

3

Chapter One The Dilemmas of Planning and Propaganda

11

Chapter Two Living Underground: The Public Politics of Private Shelters

40

Chapter Three The Nuclear Family: Militarizing Domesticity, Domesticating War

68

Chapter Four Raising Women’s Bomb Consciousness

88

Chapter Five “Equal in Suffering”: Race, Class, and the Bomb

123

Conclusion

152

Notes

157

Bibliography

195

Index

209

Acknowledgments

ALTHOUGH so much of my time with this project was spent alone, I do feel as if my completion of it owes much to colleagues, friends, and family. I have been very fortunate to receive scholarly guidance, financial assistance, and emotional support from a variety of institutions and individuals. This book began as a dissertation at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and financial help during that phase came at some crucial stages. I would like to thank the UW-Madison Department of History, the American Association of University Women, Madison Chapter, and Rick Frye for financing several research trips. In 1994, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation provided the funds so that I could complete my research and begin writing. I am indebted to the UW-Madison Graduate School for a one-year writing fellowship, which proved absolutely crucial for the completion of the dissertation. As I changed the dissertation into a manuscript, I received a generous faculty research grant from my new institutional home, Whittier College, which enabled me to make another trip to the archives and purchase research materials. I extend my sincere thanks to all of the librarians who patiently and generously guided me through the entire research endeavor. John Taylor at the National Archives offered me encyclopedic knowledge of the collections and good hunting skills. Mercedes Emperado at the Federal Emergency Management Agency gave me access to crucial materials. Herbert Pankratz and the staff at the Eisenhower Library, along with Dennis Bilger and the staff at the Harry S. Truman Library, offered enthusiasm and found everything I needed. At the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, I received patient and delightfully caustic guidance from John Peters; Loraine Adkins also helped me wade through confusing government document collections. Tammy Galaviz at the Whittier College Library helped me tremendously with my unending interlibrary loan orders. Cindy Swanson at the General Federation of Women’s Clubs Resource Center and Elise Hagen at the Business and Professional Women’s Clubs both offered cheerful assistance. I must also thank the folks who gave me shelter (aboveground) during my research trips: the Criders in Kansas City, Lois at Abilene’s Diamond Motel during tornado season, Jon and Marianne Rees in Princeton, and my pal Ben Labaree in Washington, D.C. My intellectual debts are many. The U.S. and Women’s History Program at the UW-Madison provided a very stimulating environment in which to study history, and I feel lucky to have been a part of it. Linda Gordon has been a wonderful adviser, mentor, and friend. I am so thankful

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for all of her labor, criticism, advice, and support through this past decade. Jeanne Boydston, too, set high standards for me and shared her smarts and wit. Paul Boyer and Gayle Plummer offered insightful commentary and suggestions for revision at various stages of the project. Cynthia Enloe and Emily Rosenberg encouraged my interests in gender and national security; I have benefited from both their scholarship and collegiality. A big thanks also to Michael Sherry and Allan Winkler, who read this manuscript at a later stage and helped me rethink the larger arguments. My editor, Brigitta van Rheinberg, has made this whole process easier and has shared her intelligence and good humor with me. It has been a pleasure to work with her. Cindy Crumrine was a meticulous and amiable copy editor. Now in California, I am so fortunate to work in a community of smart and dedicated teachers. Whittier College has proven to be a wonderfully friendly and supportive environment in which to finish this project. I would like to sincerely thank my colleagues and friends in the History Department, Bob Marks, Dick Archer, Don Nuttall, and Jose´ Orozco, all of whom have mentored me in some way and have pushed me to keep writing. My work-study students, Nicole Burton and Callie Smith, did terrific research for me, and their talent with details enabled my sanity during busy semesters. My students, in general, help me to remember the “so what” questions, and I thank them for keeping me excited about teaching history. New friends at Whittier have given me a social life outside the book, as well as encouragement to finish, and I am most grateful to them. Finally, I must thank all of the friends and family who encouraged me to go to college in the first place, and then offered such generous support when I decided to stay for so long. Now exhausted, I hope I remember who they are. My warmest thanks to my dear friends in Chicago, Jill Hoff, Jerry and Darlene Redfield, Karen and Bob Stoeller, and Joan Levey. Good friends made in Madison have truly sustained me through all the twists and turns of the last ten years: Suzanne Desan, Erich Dietrich, Maureen Fitzgerald, Barbara Forrest, Dan Katz, Steve Kolman, Ben Labaree, Leisa Meyer, the late and dearly missed Beth Roughton, Bethel Saler, Susan Smith, Mariamne Whatley, and Nancy Worcester. My family deserves more than a book acknowledgment for all they have done for me. Still, I thank my father, Tom, for early inspiration, and my sisters Tracy and Patty, brother-in-law Don, Harrison, and Hazel for their unceasing support of my schooling. My wonderful partner, Tim, solves problems and makes work and play so much better. My deepest gratitude goes to my mother, Janet, who stayed with me all the way through, for which I am forever grateful.

CIVIL DEFENSE BEGINS AT HOME

Introduction

IN JANUARY 1951, a Santa Barbara resident penned a sober New Year’s greeting to President Truman: “What will happen if we should suddenly be attaked [sic] by another country?” she asked. “If something is not done . . . there will be such a panic . . . that the people would be in terrible danger.”1 In the wake of a Soviet explosion of an atomic bomb, hundreds of similar letters had recently arrived at the White House. A frustrated and perplexed Truman had no answer for any of them, save for a vague reassurance that the coming year would bring a solution. In fact, he had just created a new agency dedicated to shielding Americans from the physical and psychic ravages of nuclear war, so there was reason, indeed, for some optimism. The new Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) would fuse science, technology, and entrepreneurial spirit to come up with novel but viable measures to make people and property safe from attack. The FCDA dedicated all of its resources to finding a curative for the nation’s nuclear blues, calling on statesman and citizen alike to prepare for a new kind of war that showed no mercy to home front civilians. And yet, as each year passed, answers to the “what if” questions from citizens proved elusive, while new questions and quandaries piled on top of one another. The failure to devise solutions was not for a lack of trying. The FCDA’s planning for World War III proceeded along two tracks, one in the secretive and bureaucratic world of defense planners and policymakers, the other in the public sector of schools, civic clubs, and media. This latter arena is where ordinary people in the 1950s first came into contact with the theories and terminology of the vast nuclear defense bureaucracy, of which the FCDA was a crucial part. Here, congenial, clean-cut representatives of the U.S. government translated their “new language of atomic warfare” for citizens, coaching them in the methods and mindsets necessary to live with the bomb.2 One of these spokespeople was Katherine Graham Howard, a longtime Republican activist whose service to her local party eventually earned her a place on Dwight Eisenhower’s 1952 campaign team, and then an administrative position in the FCDA. From Howard’s perspective, the bomb was “completely terrifying”; she described how after viewing film of a hydrogen bomb explosion she was so overcome that she had to duck into a local church to kneel and pray. But rather than surrendering to fear, she believed the “public had to be educated . . . as to what the threat was and what could be done about it.” As she saw it, her job was to “prepare people to live through an atomic attack, not to die in one” (emphasis hers).3 Like her

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INTRODUCTION

FCDA colleagues, she came to believe in the nuclear family as the stalwart institution that could carry the burden of defense in “co-equal partnership” with the military. She formulated this family-defense schema while crouched in a trench in the Nevada desert, watching through her goggles the effects of a numbing nuclear blast on two single-family homes inhabited by plastic mannequins. For her, the blinding flash brought clarity about the necessity and possibility of a family-centered defense strategy. Weeks later, she donned a radiation-repellent jumpsuit and entered the homes herself, looking for surviving mementos that she could show to anxious civilians as proof that civil defense could really work. She found a dinner plate and a cookbook, which she then took on the road and used regularly as props—intact symbols of family survival, harbingers of a new era of warfare in which civil defense began at home. This book relates the story of how nuclear war literally and figuratively came home to America. It explores how policymakers and citizens alike tried to make peace with the bomb through civil defense, a security program that domesticated war and made military preparedness a family affair. Those of the generation who crawled underneath school desks to “duck and cover” will find in here a larger story that may help them make sense of their memories and experiences of the nuclear era. Those who came of age after the years of nuclear brinkmanship may find this a puzzling, appalling, or an even slightly farcical story of a nation gone temporarily mad. I was in the “sandwich generation,” a grade school veteran of thrilling but never explained “air raid drills,” which then (in the midwest) conveniently turned into “tornado drills” as the nuclear threat abated somewhat. Now when I relate the stories of our nuclear past, my students are simultaneously horrified and amused when they see footage of families huddled in basement shelters or of government officials advising people merely to dust fallout off their clothes. Today, few of them fear the bomb, and it is perplexing for them to square the still stubbornly nostalgic portrayals of a prosperous, pacific 1950s with a story of nuclear terror. Today we think of the 1950s as a postwar period, but shortly after World War II, policymakers and citizens had already chosen a different path. It was neither demobilization nor total militarization, but “national security,” a term and concept broad enough to accommodate both eager and reticent cold warriors. True, the use of the “winning weapon” in 1945 had spawned boastful nationalism and scientific prestige, but it had also generated palpable anxiety as American citizens pondered its potential to be turned against them. High-level civilian and military planners, too, felt confidence and fear, and an inability to resolve a new contradiction of the nuclear age: how to acclaim a postwar peace and at the same time prepare for another, certainly more destructive war?

INTRODUCTION

5

Civil defense emerged to reconcile the euphoria of peace with the urgency of war. As a domestic security program, it was many things at once: a national security agency, a military theory about survivability in a nuclear war, and a propaganda effort. The FCDA promoted “preparedness” as the link between the foreign policy elite’s dreams of internationalism and home front Americans’ domestic longings. Through participation in civil defense, citizens could defend several things: a newly aggressive Cold War diplomacy, nuclear weapons proliferation, a distinctly “American way of life,” and, allegedly, their own lives and property. FCDA planners asked ordinary citizens to become partners in the nation’s defense, prodding them to shoulder the responsibility for safeguarding their neighborhoods and homes from nuclear attack. Americans were told to turn their imaginings of doom into mental readiness, to transform their fear into action. According to military and civilian planners, national security was now a grass-roots proposition.4 The FCDA was, in many respects, a typical postwar security agency— bureaucratic, highly secretive, and staffed by civilian planners and military personnel from World War II. But it was also unique in some important ways. It was the only postwar national security agency to solicit mass citizen participation in its planning and implementation. This invitation to build national security “from the basement up,” so to speak, and citizens’ responses to these appeals offer an unusual opportunity to analyze civilian involvement in the creation of the national security state. Civil defense was also unique in the sense that it was not quite military, but not quite civilian either. It was a paramilitary program, situated between the priorities of the defense establishment and the cultural ideals of the postwar home front. Planners wanted civil defense to look to outsiders like a taut domestic defense system that mirrored the regular military, so they designed a program that mimicked some of the military’s regimentation. At the same time, however, they wanted citizens to see preparedness as benign, easy to practice, so they crafted an approach that made it look like a decidedly nonmilitary activity that was more about family togetherness than nuclear readiness. This dual personality of civil defense made it a peculiar fusion of Cold War military ethics and idealized domesticity. Civil defense had been a feature of the previous world wars, but its post– World War II iteration took shape during a period of heightened concern about national security, as leaders pursued containment strategies that yoked foreign policy to nuclear capacity. In such a context, I argue, civil defense arose as the domestic analogue of the militarization of U.S. foreign policy. Domestic “preparedness,” “readiness,” or “home defense,” whatever the term, represented the militarization of everyday life—especially family life. Through its home protection programs, the FCDA tried to establish a permanent military presence in the civilian domain by asking

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INTRODUCTION

Americans to adapt military hierarchies, training styles, and psychologies to their daily rituals. Indeed, Truman, Eisenhower, and FCDA officials all framed civil defense as a “way of life,” an unfortunate but manageable exigency of living in a nuclear age. This book seeks to understand how both policymakers and citizens envisioned a militarized society and how they, together, negotiated its terms and parameters. It is easier to count soldiers and weapons than it is to trace the rise of a paramilitary program, for civil defense evinced Cold War militarism in more subtle ways: preparedness encompassed a set of political views about the U.S.-Soviet contest, a pledge from private citizens as volunteers, not conscripts, and a particular mood—or as Howard put it, “an attitude [and] a posture.”5 Thus the most useful framework for studying civil defense is “militarization,” or the gradual encroachment of military ideas, values, and structures into the civilian domain.6 This is not merely the study of armed conflict, for a whole society participates in militarization, not just the formal military, making it a deeper and more complex phenomenon than war. It may be easier to think about militarization as “less a thing than a process,” in which traditional distinctions between civilian and military, war and peace become fuzzy and hard to discern.7 America’s Cold War militarization was, in fact, a broad and blurry process of institution building and policymaking, as well as an amorphous blend of war nostalgia, nuclear fears, and martial ethics that permeated political discourse, popular culture, even social reform. It was both state formation and cultural evolution. Civil defense, in particular, reflected the breadth of militarization, for it was state agency, war story, family lore, and people’s mobilization all at once. The aura of order and rationality usually associated with things military might suggest that militarization proceeded in a predictable and systematic way, but it was a historical process more improvisational, unstable, and contradictory than people might think. Even as national security agencies and interests consolidated into the 1950s, there remained unresolved dilemmas and new puzzles—especially related to the use of the superweapon. Civil defense’s creation reflected some of this incoherence, for its formation was an extraordinarily muddled and lurching process. There was never any agreement among congressmen, defense planners, scientists, and civic groups about how a regionally, racially, and economically diverse population could be protected from atomic annihilation. “Duck and cover,” probably the best-known remedy for nuclear woes, was but one of many plans contemplated in FCDA circles. Throughout the 1950s, planners considered a range of protection strategies, including publicly funded community shelters, evacuation from the cities into suburban and rural areas, and a system of basement or backyard family shelters.

INTRODUCTION

7

Changes in presidential administrations, congressional makeup, and FCDA staff meant only the pursuit of some variation on shelter or evacuation, not a reconsideration of the premises of preparedness. As a result, the FCDA’s proposals and policy decisions remained incoherent through most of the decade, and few of its programs were ever implemented. In part, this was due to the fact that planners could not conjure defense innovations to match “the most spectacular machine of destruction in human history,” as Edward Teller called the bomb.8 But it was also the result of political stalemate, for as this book reveals, building national security at the grass roots raised complex philosophical and political questions about the implications of militarizing civilian life. Among these was the issue of whether a paramilitary program should be administered by military or civilian managers. In fact, as I will show, the creation of a civilian defense program necessitated a more concrete definition of what national security actually meant for the home front: military rule of civilian life or the civilian control of a strong military. As diplomacy became more bellicose and military heroes were celebrated in politics and popular culture, there emerged a surprisingly energetic critique of the military’s power. Civilian policymakers worried that preparedness could gradually shade into military rule, a momentum that would be hard to reverse. This healthy suspicion of the military’s power, however, dovetailed deeper, more conservative impulses that were more about shrinking the postwar welfare state than warning citizens of the excesses of militarization. Congressmen and FCDA planners rejected federally financed plans to defend the citizenry, claiming such solutions too closely resembled Sovietstyle “big government.” Their protracted debate about how to shelter people from attack became a Cold War welfare debate in which public sheltering was criticized as “communistic” while private sheltering was valorized as a uniquely “American-style” militarization. Indeed, one of the central ironies of this story is that anticommunism actually worked against the funding of a paramilitary program designed, in part, to fight communism. These dilemmas of control and funding did not result in the abolition of home front militarization but rather, I argue, in its privatization. Elected officials and FCDA planners endorsed what they called “self-help defense” as the safeguard against military overreach and the potential surfeit of government programs and expenditures that would result from making the home front attack-ready. Self-help shifted the financial burden for readiness from the state to the individual, mandating that consumer-citizens purchase the tools of survival (such as shelter) rather than rely on atomic welfare. Significantly, this popularization and privatization of defense was mediated through the language and institutions of postwar do-

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INTRODUCTION

mesticity, making preparedness seem less militaristic than it actually was; civil defense called for the militarization of family relations and domestic space on an unprecedented level. “The family,” consecrated in the 1950s as private and apolitical, became the medium through which FCDA planners shifted the political discourse about nuclear defense from a question of national security to an issue of personal responsibility. Privatization, then, meant giving American families both the financial and psychological responsibility for meeting and beating the nuclear threat. If self-help defense solved the problems of control and funding, it also, unwittingly, created others. Deputizing citizens to carry out home front militarization meant that defense managers lost some control over its implementation. The government’s call for self-help popularized preparedness, but it also enabled various citizen groups to interpret and enact its precepts in ways that departed from official FCDA scripts. Club women, for example, saw home preparedness as an opportunity to expand their membership rolls and enhance their political influence. Through a peculiar fusion of militarism, maternalism, and feminism, they hoped to show that women’s full participation in the polity was still necessary even after World War II’s demand for their labor had disappeared. FCDA officials welcomed their volunteer energy but were discomfited by the fact that they injected a more social welfare and maternalist-feminist meaning into a quasi-military program. Civil rights organizations, too, most notably the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, molded civil defense to fit particular interests. The NAACP’s insistence that civil defense manifest a civil rights ethic (Jim Crow should be the only casualty of the nuclear age, they argued) gave preparedness a reformist meaning not anticipated or really welcomed by FCDA officials. Thus the demand that people share the burdens of militarization invited an unpredictable array of civilian players who freighted civil defense with meanings and agendas that sometimes broke with the government’s definitions of preparedness. This myriad collection of people, policies, and cultural currents that constituted civil defense requires us to look at both state and society—at the recorded, official politics of state and the less visible politics of everyday life and culture. I have culled a variety of sources and interpretive approaches to study the interplay between the security state and security culture.9 Civil defense was partly a bureaucratic enterprise, making its paper trail easy to follow through the agency records of the FCDA, the papers of its key administrators, the transcripts of congressional hearings, and the papers of Presidents Truman and Eisenhower and their national security managers. The FCDA spawned a variety of state, county, and city civil defense agencies, but I anchor my story at the national level where policymakers first confronted the bomb and originated the strategies for

INTRODUCTION

9

citizens to accommodate it. Local agencies enacted national policies; thus local histories of civil defense would likely reveal some variations but certainly similar themes. Along with a state-centered analysis, I have chosen to highlight the activities of nonstate actors because civil defense was not a top-down militarization effort. Yet the meanings and manifestations of preparedness beyond the beltway are harder to trace, for the evidence is more fragmentary and the analysis more psychologically oriented than the historian is normally comfortable with. Indeed, FCDA officials, deploying the most sophisticated survey techniques, griped constantly that they could not grasp the public’s perceptions and attitudes concerning preparedness; my scholarly attempt to explain how citizens adjusted to life with the bomb has made me strangely sympathetic to their complaints, even though my goal is to explain rather than to prescribe militarization. The interpretations of popular mood I advance here are based on a review of the papers of selected civic groups active in civil defense, hundreds of citizen letters to Truman and Eisenhower, polling data, radio and television shows, magazines, and newspaper editorials. These are similarly imprecise instruments for tracking the elusive “public mind,” as planners called it, but when combined with the official transcripts, there emerges at least a more inclusive and dynamic picture of preparedness as it was imagined and practiced. Indeed, what emerges most clearly from all the documents is a Cold War political culture generally supportive of fighting communism, but beyond that, a shaky coincidence of purposes, interests, and ideas about how exactly to enact that worldview. This book relates the history of civil defense through five topical (and roughly chronological) chapters. Chapter 1 begins the story with an analysis of the policy considerations and political controversies surrounding the creation of home front defense. I explain how particular ideological currents of the postwar years steered elected officials and FCDA planners toward the idea of a self-help defense. Chapter 2 traces the history of the bomb or fallout shelter as a way to illuminate the variables and constraints faced by federal planners as they puzzled over how to shelter an entire nation, and the eventual triumph of a family-centered, private solution versus a more collective, publicly funded one. Chapter 3 explores the family orientation of civil defense as a whole, scrutinizing the FCDA’s attempts to predict and manage the behavior of men, women, and children in ways that served civil defense. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the perils and possibilities of a “people’s defense” by examining how women’s clubs, workers, and African American groups both enlisted in civil defense and issued conditions for their participation. These chapters look critically at how various groups of citizens became invested in home front militarization and tried to democratize its structures, even as they supported an

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INTRODUCTION

anticommunist militarization. Chapter 5 also continues the story of the privatization of shelter by discussing the racial and class implications of the FCDA’s decision to make defense a family matter. Although this study illuminates particular aspects of Cold War militarization over roughly a decade, it is intended to shine the light on the whole of our nuclear history. I seek to broaden our understanding of how civilians came to be involved in the creation of the national security state— broadly conceived as a set of institutions, policies, representations, and attitudes to which all could contribute, even if outside the formal mechanisms of that state. I also hope that a close look at civil defense will encourage us to examine how the military values and ideas that became embedded in Cold War political culture still linger today. The most profound impact of civil defense was its ability to make the extraordinariness of nuclear war seem ordinary. Although relatively few citizens adhered faithfully to FCDA tenets, civil defense nevertheless engendered a kind of ambient militarism, a seemingly less perilous affair than either military rule or a garrison state, but still an ideology of war that has made it difficult at the end of this century to divest ourselves of military frameworks when imagining a new, post–Cold War order. This book offers no solutions for that predicament but rather some explanations for how we got to this point.

CHAPTER ONE

The Dilemmas of Planning and Propaganda

IN JANUARY 1951, the midwestern states had just survived a series of harsh winter storms, and the Federal Civil Defense Administration received official status as an independent agency. There was, of course, no obvious connection between these two events, but civil defense planner John Bradley saw one immediately. He penned a memo to his boss saying the snowstorms were more than merely bad weather—they were a harbinger for unprepared citizens of the nuclear age. The question raised by the storms, he said, was “how self-sufficient would the average urban home be following an atomic attack?” Bradley asked and answered his own query with an admonition that would soon become litany in civil defense planning circles: “We have, as yet, developed little bomb consciousness,” for postwar Americans had rebuilt their lives “on an assumption of peace” and in doing so had “lost ground” in the Cold War.1 Raising America’s “bomb consciousness,” however, required more than simple analogies between winter snowstorms and nuclear firestorms. The FCDA and its predecessor agency, the National Security Resources Board (NSRB), embraced Bradley’s view that Americans had too quickly assumed a peaceful future, but how to reorient public life around readiness remained a daunting question. As nuclear technology in the 1950s developed farther and faster than either defense planners or civilians could comprehend, a home front defense program seemed at least a partial answer. Yet the creation of a civil defense system became quickly entangled with a larger set of philosophical and political conflicts about the degree to which Cold War security priorities should structure and permeate civil institutions and relationships. Indeed, political debates about the relationship between civil society and national security proved just as vexing for FCDA planners as did scientific and logistical matters. As the militarization of foreign policy proceeded apace, the question of how civil institutions and civilians themselves would accommodate the national security mandate remained an open one. The most fundamental planning dilemmas centered on the management, funding, and implementation of civil defense—that is, who would run it, pay for it, and actually do it? Adapting civil defense to the nuclear age first necessitated a concrete definition of how national security would look on the home front: military rule or civilian control of a mighty military?

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In an era when U.S. military prowess was credited with saving the world, a military-controlled preparedness effort seemed logical. Yet many planners and politicians, including Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, worried that military supervision of civil defense might presage military governnance of civil society entirely. Most policymakers expressed a considerable liberal impulse to limit the powers of the military, but they still insisted on a kind of quasi-military character to the program. Funding, too, presented a complex problem. If civilian-run and ostensibly about self-protection, should civil defense be paid for by civilians directly or through government taxation and spending? Policymakers pondered the possibility that citizens might feel either entitled to government assistance or resentful of its absence, and thus funding issues became enmeshed with larger political controversies seemingly disconnected from the world of security planners: citizen entitlements, “big government,” and the New Deal state. Perhaps the variable human psyche itself presented the most difficult planning dilemma. The FCDA enlisted an army of psychiatric professionals to help predict and mold human responses to air attack, but despite planners’ faith in the scientific method, survey results never gave them what they really wanted—confidence, or maybe even a guarantee, that Americans would duck and cover when the sirens sounded. Nevertheless, FCDA planners mounted a sophisticated public relations campaign to “sell” civil defense. This campaign, too, presented its own subset of difficulties. How to exalt the military’s strength while conveying home front vulnerability? How to garner taxpayer support for nuclear weaponry while preaching self-help survival? How to invoke the bomb’s deadly peril while emphasizing survivability? What emerged from the early planning years, then, was less a specific civil defense plan than a prolonged national debate about the proper scope and character of Cold War militarization.

CREATING A DEFENSE BUREAUCRACY

The story of the FCDA’s emergence in the 1950s is inextricably linked to the development of a foreign policy increasingly dependent on nuclear weapons. Diplomatic historians have already shown how an uneasy U.S.Soviet wartime alliance, or “shotgun marriage,” as Walter LaFeber puts it, deteriorated into an economic and military standoff with far-reaching consequences for global and U.S. domestic politics. Between 1946 and 1948, Truman and Stalin, each with his own set of fears and aspirations about the shape of the postwar world, jockeyed for position to direct European and Asian recovery.2 As Melvyn Leffler has argued, the United States’ monopoly on atomic power until 1949 “constituted a shield be-

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hind which the nation could pursue its diplomatic goals.” Nuclear preponderance enabled American officials to rebuild Europe and Asia according to their own interests, to cooperate less and act with a kind of confidence “to do things they might otherwise have hesitated to do” if they had thought their actions would lead to war.3 But that monopoly ended in August 1949 with the successful Soviet test of an atomic bomb, and Truman and his advisers worried deeply about the symbolic and practical meaning of this development. In one sense, they feared less the Soviet Union’s immediate atomic capability than the “diplomatic shadows” cast by it; now their diplomatic latitude seemed more constricted. They worried about whether European allies would continue to cooperate with the American vision of postwar reconstruction, and whether the Soviets would expand their own postwar goals and act more aggressively to accomplish them. Furthermore, if the Soviets now had the technology to destroy, or at least cripple, the American industrial core—the basis of America’s power during and after World War II—the consequences could be dire. As Leffler sums it up: “The Soviet possession of the atomic bomb symbolized that U.S. strategic superiority might be at an end, that its warmaking capabilities would be at risk, and that the fundamental source of its superior power was no longer impregnable.”4 Truman and his advisers decided that more and bigger nuclear bombs would enable them to maintain military and thus diplomatic advantage, and Eisenhower remained faithful to this axiom. But this militarization of diplomacy, as Michael Sherry has argued, “proceeded in confusing fits and starts” and should not be mistaken for a coherent and well-defined process.5 There were deep divisions at all levels of the security bureaucracy about how best to pursue containment. Yet despite the interagency rivalries and jealousies and the constant tinkering with organization charts, a national security state emerged, spawning a whole range of agencies, including one dedicated to civil defense. The new national security state was a massive bureaucracy, or as Daniel Yergin puts it, “a state within a state.” It was also a cluster of ideas about foreign and domestic affairs. Because “national security” guided the spirit and purpose of civil defense, a brief detour is necessary to probe its meanings. First adopted by scholars and journalist Walter Lippmann in 1945, the term “national security” quickly gained currency among military and State Department officials who found it a more accurate descriptor than “national defense” to describe the close relationship between domestic politics, foreign policy, and military affairs. It explained all global developments as potential threats to U.S. interests, expressed hostility toward communism or nationalism, and exalted military readiness. The term’s appeal was its simplicity and flexibility; it was a “commanding idea” that could explain American diplomatic objectives and justify actions taken

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abroad and at home to achieve them. Its elasticity—and ambiguity—enabled its wide application in Cold War political culture, for its meaning shifted depending on who was deploying the term and in what context. In the 1950s alone, it was used in service of anticommunist purges in federal employment and to bolster reformist calls for expanded civil rights. And despite its official and quasi-military tone, national security was a term and ideology comfortably invoked well outside the formal political realm to discuss anything from hygiene to neighborliness. As Yergin aptly points out, national security in the postwar period was “not a given, not a fact, but a perception, a state of mind.”6 As the first postwar agency to coordinate civil defense, the National Security Resources Board was the first to define what national security would look like for nuclear-age citizens. Civil defense was only one part of the Board’s responsibilities, so it initially took a backseat to other concerns. In 1948, a small NSRB staff set its attention on the problem of defending life, property, and industry against a weapon the United States itself had created. Planners depended on a series of military studies to guide them, all of which had concluded that, with modest adaptations, World War II–style civil defense practices could provide protection from far more technologically sophisticated weapons. The studies further recommended that Truman establish a separate agency devoted solely to developing a civil defense program.7 With the somewhat shaky confidence of atomic monopoly and no immediate diplomatic threat, Truman supported only “peacetime planning and preparation” for civil defense, not full-scale mobilization; he wanted “to minimize the program without completely abandoning it.”8 In September 1949, however, Truman did an about-face when he learned that the Soviets had exploded an atomic bomb. Civil defense planning went from low-key to frenetic. Throughout the fall of 1949, politicians, scientists, and citizens from all points of the political spectrum began to pressure the administration for something more than mere studies. Anxious to display his anticommunist credentials and military toughness, a young Congressman John F. Kennedy warned that the slowness of civil defense planning made the United States vulnerable to an “atomic Pearl Harbor.”9 (Interestingly, this foreshadowed his later bellicose statements regarding a “missile gap.”) Joining Kennedy in his call for action was Senator Brien McMahon, chairman of the powerful Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, who announced a series of public hearings on civil defense. The pressure on Truman to take decisive action only increased in the summer of 1950, when Korea emerged as the next site for Cold War confrontation. Adding to the tensions surrounding Soviet nuclear capability and compounding apprehensions about the “loss of China,” the Ko-

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rean War seemed to policymakers a possible prelude to a much larger military conflict.10 The triple threat of Soviet atomic power, Chinese communism, and Asian war generated enough momentum to create an entirely new agency dedicated to civil defense. NSRB chairman Stuart Symington, a former Democratic Missouri senator and Secretary of the Air Force, told Truman that the time had passed when a military and civilian mobilization could be organized “with relative leisure.”11 In July 1950, he expanded the NSRB’s civil defense planning staff and demanded yet another proposal be presented to Truman by September. The report, officially entitled “United States Civil Defense” (unofficially called the Blue Book), proposed three basic steps: the passage of civil defense legislation, the establishment of a civil defense administration outside the NSRB, and the appointment of an administrator to run it. Truman approved the plan, submitted it to Congress, and in the final months of 1950, conscious of escalating Chinese participation in Korea, Congress passed the civil defense legislation with relative haste. The resultant Federal Civil Defense Act transferred civil defense responsibilities from the NSRB to a newly created Federal Civil Defense Administration situated in the executive branch. It required the FCDA to be headed by a civilian—not military—administrator, and Truman selected Millard Caldwell, a former Democratic congressman and governor of Florida, for the job. Caldwell’s support of segregation while in political office briefly stalled his nomination, but Truman and the Senate defended him and he assumed his post in January 1951.12 The civil defense expansion from a small office space in the NSRB to its own agency closely mirrored the string of foreign policy crises of 1950. This would not be the first time that such flashpoints would invoke references to Pearl Harbor and cries to “do something” about U.S. vulnerability. Civil defense owed its existence to such moments, and it would be sustained over the long haul by policymakers’ decisions to pursue diplomacy through nuclear buildup. It now fell to the FCDA to translate highlevel atomic diplomacy into a populist language of national security that could motivate Americans to embrace readiness as a way of life.13

CIVILIAN VERSUS MILITARY CONTROL

Although it might have seemed logical to put a military man in charge of civil defense, particularly during a shooting war, the selection of a civilian in early 1951 to head the FCDA reflected a commitment to civilian control of a paramilitary program. The hesitance of politicians and policymakers to put the Department of Defense in charge of civil defense can be read in different ways. On one hand, it reflected an uneasiness about the extent

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of military control in a national security state, a sentiment first expressed in the battle between scientists, the military, and elected officials over the control of nuclear technology. It betrays, perhaps surprisingly, a genuine liberal tendency to impose limits on the military’s power even as the United States pursued total military readiness. On the other hand, it can be read as another case of policymakers minimizing the dangers of nuclear war by masking its military and paramilitary dimensions; with a civilian in charge, nuclear war (both the threat of and the actual event) looked more like a manageable civilian problem, something comparable to the survival of a natural disaster like a blizzard. Still, the sentiments against military control cannot be dismissed so easily; Truman, Eisenhower, elected officials, and NSRB and FCDA planners all embraced civilian leadership of civil defense. Critics of military rule—cold warriors, all of them—argued that a military-run civil defense program was antidemocratic and antithetical to the “American way of life.” The first round of debates regarding civilian versus military control emerged out of the internecine struggle to govern the uses of new atomic technologies. As early as 1944, the War Department had laid plans for “a permanent Manhattan Project with continued military control.”14 The May-Johnson Bill, introduced in the fall of 1945, proposed a commission that granted the military wide latitude in the management of atomic policy. This rankled scientists, who wanted the freedom to pursue research without security restrictions, as well as various Truman administration officials, who grew anxious about the subordination of executive power to a military-controlled body. Bipartisan political pressure, along with lobbying from notable scientists, ultimately persuaded Truman to endorse civilian control of a new Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Throughout the fifties, the military still enjoyed great influence on the AEC through its liaison committee, but an ideological commitment to civilian authority remained strong among both Democrats and Republicans as the civil defense program took shape.15 The concerns that emerged during the May-Johnson debate foreshadowed those that surrounded the creation of the FCDA. Part of the difficulty in defining the limits of military control stemmed from the paramilitary nature of civil defense itself. It was a hybrid program, a descendant of earlier wartime voluntarism and the product of the Cold War military imagination. Could it accommodate military management and popular participation at the same time? Further, would the U.S. military’s reputation be compromised by association with the kind of old-fashioned, home front patriotic pageantry that characterized previous civil defense efforts? Policymakers in and out of the military were well aware that placing civil defense within the Defense Department might be interpreted by citizens as “too great [a] concentration of power in one department.”16 Neverthe-

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less, they believed that the military should have at least some involvement in civil defense, since it was a program inextricably linked with larger questions of modern warfare and atomic diplomacy. Armed forces critics of military control did not speak in one voice, but many of their criticisms were less about respect for civilian supremacy and more about insuring that the primary mission of the military remained the armed defense of the nation. They identified the military’s chief task as “active,” not “passive,” defense. By “active” they meant training soldiers, protecting military installations and territories, and fighting the enemy— in other words, waging war. “Passive” defense, on the other hand, was responsive, not aggressive, and it did not involve the use of armaments. Critics of military rule argued that civil defense constituted a passive activity, thus inappropriate for military management. More importantly, they argued, U.S. Cold War interests created an ever-expanding list of responsibilities for the American military, which it could not handle if it had to coordinate two types of defense.17 Layered upon this active-passive distinction was another running debate about whether civil defense should involve highly physical and daring acts of rescue, identified as “protective” services done by men, or whether it should provide “nonprotective” social welfare services, reminiscent of those organized by women’s groups during previous wars. What leaks out of these deliberations over active and passive defense are some intriguing clues about the ways in which wartime gender ideologies were being reworked and adapted to a nuclear age.18 During World War II, Office of Civil Defense (OCD) director Fiorello LaGuardia assailed “nonprotective” activities, such as health programs, housing reform, and child care, as “sissy stuff.” He fantasized about heroic rescues and citizen armies meeting the enemy, and thus devoted most of the OCD’s resources to protective services, such as air raid warning and plane spotting. After OCD administrators and citizens pressured him to expand volunteer participation, LaGuardia reluctantly beefed up nonprotective programming (which he derisively called “community singing and basket weaving”). He appointed Eleanor Roosevelt in September 1941 in the hope that her name recognition would expand the OCD’s volunteer activities.19 As one might expect from her interests in social welfare, Mrs. Roosevelt believed that the “sissy stuff” was actually central to serving civilians’ wartime needs. She saw in civil defense an opportunity to reinvigorate the spirit of New Deal liberal reform; she hoped to implement a series of maternal-child nutrition programs, daycare services, consumer education, and youth fitness activities. Where LaGuardia saw opportunities to build neighborhood militias, Roosevelt envisioned community rejuvenation through the establishment of neighborhood support networks. Although she did not eschew entirely the need for protective measures, she believed

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that an activist warfare state should provide services for noncombatants who had to endure war’s economic and social stresses. And though she certainly shared her husband’s belief that civil defense should foster popular support for his planned intervention in the European war, she also saw civilian defense as a kind of civilian offense—a program that fulfilled people’s basic wartime needs and that also lobbied aggressively for a peacetime social welfare state. With her friend Florence Kerr, deputy administrator of the Works Progress Administration, Eleanor Roosevelt endorsed an “American Social Defense Administration,” a New Deal–style bureaucracy that defended citizens not only against Axis bombs but also against homelessness, hunger, and other travails of poverty.20 This vision, however, met with harsh criticism from conservative journalists and congressmen. Partisan critics of the New Deal called her ideas frivolous and focused on one incident, in particular: her hiring of a professional dancer to direct a children’s recreation program. They denounced her for involving what they called “fan dancers” and “strip-tease artists” in what should have been a serious defense program. Indeed, they purposefully associated her youth recreation activities with sexual depravity, preying on nascent popular fears that the war would erode family and moral restraints on teen behavior. Their use of sexual innuendo here is significant, for the association of dishonored female sexuality with what was supposed to be a masculine or “protective” defense endeavor implied not so subtly that civil defense was a liberal front for New Dealers to experiment with scandalous reform. 21 Beneath these obvious partisan attacks and the titillating talk of strippers, however, was actually a meaningful debate about the core identity and purpose of civil defense. Without knowing it, LaGuardia and Roosevelt had framed the central question for their nuclear-age successors: should civil defense be essentially a reform program, attentive to the welfare needs of civilians, or should it be a military program, featuring a militia, small arms, and military rule? LaGuardia had tried to masculinize— and therefore militarize—civil defense by calling its nonprotective dimensions “sissy stuff,” urging an association of home defense with the regular military that would surely bolster the program’s toughness quotient. But Eleanor Roosevelt’s emphasis on the welfare aspects of civil defense was also compelling, as it became clear that survival of a nuclear attack would require an array of social services to help the injured, homeless, and hungry. The fallout from the LaGuardia-Roosevelt battle hovered over postwar civil defense planners as they pondered how to pitch their new program. In 1950, fully eight years after the controversy, an NSRB official reminded his colleagues: “ ‘Civilian defense’ is still associated in the minds of many people with the morale building, community-organization type of activities of the OCD during World War II—not a happy association.”22 Postwar

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planners hoped to project a much more sober meaning for so-called passive defense; in fact, FCDA officials liked to call civil defense a “co-equal partner” with the military, hoping that the association with trained soldiers and armaments would garner respect. The advantage in claiming a managing partnership with the nation’s military was the opportunity for the NSRB and FCDA to cleanse themselves of any association with Rooseveltian reform—now gendered as feminine weakness and sexual depravity. But riding the coattails of the Defense Department was also a tricky and potentially perilous strategy: the FCDA wanted the advantages of an association with the military but without the appearance or suggestion of military rule. The military’s own reluctance to take on the burden of home front preparedness certainly steered civil defense away from military governance, but a robust suspicion of military power also insured civilian supremacy over preparedness efforts. The choice to appoint a civilian (although a veteran) to head the FCDA reflected elected officials’ deep uncertainty about the potential governance rearrangements of war and the widespread belief that even a national security state required some built-in controls. What emerges from the documents just as loudly as the calls to “do something” are declarations of civilian sovereignty—national security emergency or not. Even before the FCDA was created, a 1949 NSRB report warned against military management of a civilian enterprise: “No such military control over civilians is desirable—even potentially.”23 Appearing a year later before the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron expressed the popular mood as he saw it when he cautioned that a military-controlled civil defense would lead to a “gradual infiltration and integration of military authority into the civil life of the country.”24 And the venerable Project East River, a long-range and comprehensive government study on preparedness, argued that since the functions of civil defense were so connected with the regular day-to-day functions of civil government, “the extension of military direction and control . . . should be avoided.”25 The potency of the civilian supremacy argument is reflected in the fact that wariness about military rule of civil defense lingered into the mid1950s, well after the matter had been resolved. Although voted into office as a genial military hero, Eisenhower was actually quite anxious about the degree to which the United States should organize itself around military readiness. As Michael Sherry notes, he “was perilously alone in that anxiety.”26 Eisenhower worried not only about the financial consequences of attaining nuclear supremacy but also about the social implications of total mobilization—which included the gradual encroachment of military rule. At his first White House Conference of Mayors in 1953, he stressed the importance of distinguishing between reasonable preparedness and total militarization: “We can’t be an armed camp. We are not going to transfer

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ourselves into militarists. We are not going to be in uniform, going around yelling ‘Heil’ anything.”27 His new FCDA chief, Val Peterson, seemed surprisingly less troubled by the issue, however. Soon after taking office, he acknowledged on “Meet the Press” that citizens refused to be governed by the military, but privately, at a National Security Council meeting, he argued that civil authority would collapse during a real attack, and that “dictatorship is the answer you have to come to, even if you couldn’t talk about it.”28 Peterson’s view represented a minority opinion, but in the early years of the atomic age, no one actually knew if civilian-military distinctions adhered to in peacetime might collapse in the chaos of war. There were enough rumblings about the military’s unique ability to “restore order” immediately after a nuclear attack to suggest a limited but potentially useful role for the armed forces on the home front. Still, even the most fervent civilian cold warriors saw military control of civil defense as tempting a permanent state of martial law. In short, they believed the most effective civil defense system would borrow the military’s technical data and disciplinary ethic but reject its formal hierarchies and jurisdiction. Ultimately, they were not so much critical of the military itself as they were wary of the implications of militarization.

CONTAINING THE GARRISON STATE

The issue of military rule was inextricably linked to another policy question: Would preparedness give rise to a highly bureaucratized “garrison state” that subordinated civilian autonomy to the state’s quest for total security? Nascent fears that civil defense would enlarge the federal government’s budgets and controls and reach into the lives of postwar citizens emerged in the early planning years, 1950–51, as policymakers struggled to define national security more precisely. Citizen groups, elected officials, and even civil defense policymakers pondered publicly whether a society thoroughly readied for attack would bring them the sense of security they desired. At what level of readiness, they asked, would people have to surrender personal freedoms to state control?29 Concerns about “control,” whether by the military or civilian government, evinced tangible worries about the rise of the centralized state and its seemingly endless demands. Hostile to any further post–New Deal aggrandizement of federal power, civilian control advocates in Congress thus blended their criticisms of military rule with anti-statist critiques of big government. Civil defense, they warned, should not metamorphose into a garrison state in the service of national security. Doing so would undermine its purpose—to protect the system of individual rights and mini-

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malist government that was the hallmark of the American system. Testifying before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in March 1950, NSRB civil defense director Paul Larsen reassured skeptical congressmen of both political parties that “one hundred percent security obviously is not possible . . . unless we are willing to become a garrison state. If too much of our national effort is expended for military and civil defense purposes, the very liberties we are trying to make secure will themselves be endangered.”30 Various commentators and newspaper columnists echoed Larsen’s admonition. Washington Post columnist Marquis Childs expressed a view shared by many in and out of policy circles: “Anything like a complete defense would mean such revolutionary changes as to alter entirely the nature of our free society. It would have to be made over into a pattern of total control exercised by the central government.”31 These views expressed larger cultural and intellectual anxieties already in circulation at the time about a “mass society,” a state in which citizens’ daily lives were regimented and controlled by a huge central government and large corporations. Social critics from diverse ideological perspectives identified a postwar military-corporate alliance, ruled by technocrats and “experts,” that fostered homogenization, standardization, and conformity in both work and family life.32 Although the Nazi state was the quintessential example of this militarized mass society, Soviet communism was fast becoming the new exemplar, and NSRB and FCDA planners found themselves bedeviled by analogies between U.S. and “Soviet-style” preparedness. They and citizen advocates of civil defense—whatever their partisan or ideological differences—shared the conviction that a U.S. civil defense program should reflect and reinforce “the American way of life,” defined as voluntarist and self-reliant. As Democratic congressman Chet Holifield argued, American civil defense was based on “cooperation rather than coercion.”33 Even the complaints about citizen apathy that would surface regularly throughout the decade would be eclipsed by cautionary tales about the alternative “communistic” (state-run, coercive) preparedness system. Building a national security state without establishing a garrison state, however, was a dilemma created by the national security establishment itself. Cold War policymakers’ decisions to make global and domestic commitments to contain the Soviets contributed to the enlargement of the postwar state. Yet, both Truman and Eisenhower believed that these decisions obviated the rise of the garrison state; that is, a military buildup would prevent Soviet domination of Europe and Asia, which would, in turn, preclude the U.S. from imposing centralization and regimentation domestically.34 Still, both presidents felt challenged by the task of building a security state without, as Eisenhower said, “imposing ever-greater

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controls on our economy and on the freedom of our people.” Indeed, he confessed, “the whole thing . . . was a paradox.”35 The decision early on to assign primary responsibility for civil defense to state and local governments was intended partly as a safeguard against the garrison state. “We are not planning to make civil defense a federal bureaucracy,” Larsen reassured a California citizens’ group in 1950. As long as states and local governments and citizens did their share, he told Congress, civil defense would reflect the core values it was designed to safeguard.36 Congress had vested responsibility for civil defense within states and their political subdivisions—counties, cities, and townships. Nothing in its 1951 Federal Civil Defense Act gave the federal government the power to tax citizens or mandate their participation. To be sure, the FCDA had big responsibilities: It was expected to formulate a coherent strategy for rehabilitating the economy, the labor force, and key civil and military installations; and it was supposed to provide states and cities with guidance on legal and personnel training matters, supplies and equipment, and technical advice. Practically speaking, however, states and cities were responsible for organizing and funding their own operations. Given these arrangements, a garrison state was not even a remote possibility. That this minimal level of federal responsibility could strike a national nerve about the rise of the garrison state, generate congressional concern about a resurgent New Deal statism, and tap into postwar anxieties about mass society indicates just how strong these ideological undercurrents were in the postwar period. The controversies over military control and mass society soon found their way into deliberations about what to label a quasi-military home defense effort. NSRB planners contemplated this question more than might seem necessary because they understood that their terminology would reflect the public character and authority of the program. Some staff members supported “civilian” over “civil” defense in order to stress citizen responsibility, but others argued that “civilian” did not strike the right tone. As one official said, “The federal administrator of the program, the governors of the states and the mayors of the cities . . . are not merely ‘civilians’ as opposed to the military, but constitute the full civil authority of the home front.”37 In other words, although the NSRB wanted to dissociate civil defense from military rule and big government, it still wanted to emphasize that civil servants (mainly elected officials), not private citizens, would have jurisdiction during wartime. It was, indeed, tricky business for officials to find just the right words to convey the difference between civilian control and mob rule. The remaining concern about the use of “civilian” was that its connotations had become less than respectable during the LaGuardia-Roosevelt conflict. When a House subcommittee in December 1950 began to hear testimony on the Federal Civil Defense Act,

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two congressmen asked future FCDA officials if their plans included “entertainment.” Representative Paul Kilday from Texas praised the serious tenor of the hearings and told new FCDA administrator Millard Caldwell: “I know we all take a great deal of satisfaction and confidence in the fact that you are not going to let this thing degenerate into a haven for dancers, artists, actors, and that sort of foolishness that we had before, when we wasted millions of dollars and did nothing.”38

THE GOSPEL OF “SELF-HELP”

That the atomic bomb had transformed every citizen into a potential combatant or casualty was unmistakable by 1950, but less manifest were delicate political questions about the government’s obligation to its citizens, its security priorities (that is, who or what to save first), and the American people’s willingness to fight a nuclear war. Working from blueprints from previous world wars, defense officials decided early on that the federal government would play a limited role in protecting civilians from atomic attack. Tepid support and outright resistance from Congress to pay for a comprehensive preparedness program, accompanied by mounting concerns that citizens would feel dependent on or, worse, entitled to government protection and postattack welfare assistance, led civil defense planners to embrace the doctrine of “self-help.” This meant that citizens would have to take primary responsibility for safeguarding their families, private property, and neighborhoods. The Federal Civil Defense Act stipulated that state and local governments would provide limited pre- and postattack assistance when citizens could not cope themselves, and that the federal government would step in only when local authorities became overwhelmed. Self-help thus became the defining doctrine of postwar preparedness programs throughout the fifties. As Millard Caldwell put it: “Civil defense, like charity, is something that begins at home.”39 Civil defense planners embraced self-help for several reasons. First, civil defense had been a grass-roots activity from its inception during World War I, and this precedent guided its nuclear-age application. With no danger of air attack, state and local (meaning city, county, or town) governments fought the First World War through volunteer-run defense programs designed to build morale. Approximately 180,000 civil defense councils directed volunteer activities nationwide, making home front defense a federally mandated but locally controlled and implemented program. Under LaGuardia’s guidance, World War II civil defense was patterned on this local control model. Some state governors and senators argued that this disorganized, decentralized system duplicated efforts, but self-help remained the basis of wartime defense.

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After World War II, planners breathed new life into the idea of a decentralized, locally controlled volunteer civil defense program, even though new technologies had drastically changed the nature of warfare. They advocated self-help not only due to precedent, but because all of the studies that had been done on cities that survived aerial bombing had shown that trained local defense teams saved the most lives. U.S. officials were particularly impressed with British civil defense, a system of local self-help supported by central government aid in planning, equipment, and training.40 The effectiveness of the British model only confirmed for American planners that the optimal program minimized federal obligation and highlighted local responsibility. As a 1947 War Department study recommended: “The fundamental principle of civil defense is self help. . . . It is incumbent upon each individual to protect himself, his home and family to the maximum before calling for aid. To implement the self-help principle, the populace should be organized into small groups under leaders and trained. . . . Calls for aid should not be made until the situation is beyond the control of the group.”41 Yet civil defense planners also embraced self-help because they wanted to discourage people from thinking that the government could protect and rehabilitate everyone after an attack. These dangerous expectations might create two problems. First, given the destructive power of the bomb (growing more fearsome each year), planners knew it was foolish to promise all would survive; instead, they said self-help civil defense could minimize risk for many. Second, if citizens believed that the government would protect them, they would think civil defense unnecessary and therefore not practice it. The FCDA anticipated that such complacency would breed apathy, which would doom a program predicated on citizen enthusiasm and participation. The doctrine of self-help, then, was advantageous because it released the government from complete responsibility for citizen protection while giving people a tangible role to play in the defense of their country. Undeniably, the policy of self-help also grew out of certain Cold War financial realities. One of the key reasons for the local control “pay as you go” schema was that Congress did not support the idea of a federally funded civil defense program. Congress may have passed the Federal Civil Defense Act with little debate, but it also did so with little enthusiasm. Part of its hostility to funding preparedness stemmed from the fact that civil defense planning accelerated only when the Cold War heated up, so plans such as the Blue Book were prepared hastily and without much detail about implementation. NSRB and FCDA staff offered vague designs regarding shelter, evacuation, and other protection strategies, and consequently, Democrats and Republicans alike refused to fund such hazy proposals.

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At its core, however, the decision to make self-help the basis of civil defense must be understood as a political compromise, the outcome of ideological struggles over the size, power, and priorities of a militarizing postwar state. The various political viewpoints in play cannot be mapped out neatly, because fears of military control and anti-statism crossed party lines and traversed ideological positions within the parties. Congressional politics in the late 1940s and early 1950s evinced a conservative mood— even as Congress wavered between Republican and Democratic control. The outbreak of war in 1950 accelerated domestic anticommunism, and an array of corporate and partisan political forces targeted New Deal fiscal policies and social programs for extinction. Conservatives wanted sovereignty for states, lower taxes, balanced budgets (through spending reductions), and the elimination of competition between government and private enterprise. In short, they sought a small state. To be sure, there were significant differences among these conservatives (they included Republicans and Democrats, northerners and southerners, to name a few), and anticommunism and national security politics did not always harmonize with their other interests. Shrill cries to do something about the communists through costly arms buildup competed with equally loud demands to shrink taxes and spending. Nevertheless, congressional conservatives shared a commitment to “arresting the disorderly momentum of New Deal liberalism” and building a postwar order that eschewed the aggrandizement of the state.42 In this context, self-help emerged as the basis of civil defense because it satisfied an array of divergent interests without the attendant risk of appearing “soft” on defense or communism. Republicans and Democrats could agree that money was better spent on active versus passive defense and still trumpet civilian preparedness, since self-help threatened no arms budgets. Do-it-yourself defense was also a practical and ideological bulwark against the garrison state, for voluntarism certified American values symbolically and demanded no expansion of the state practically. And finally, self-help insured that the civilian would remain sovereign as the state accommodated national security priorities. Thus, both liberal concerns about military control and conservative hostilities toward a militarized New Deal reprise coalesced to trump civil defense—at least on budgetary matters. Budget figures reveal the potency of these political currents. Throughout the 1950s, even with the advent of the hydrogen bomb, the revelations about radioactive fallout, and the expectation that by 1954 the Soviets could launch an attack, Congress provided only minimal funds to keep the FCDA operational. For example, from 1951 to 1953, Truman requested $1.5 billion for civil defense operations, but Congress appropriated only $153 million, a reduction of 90 percent. Eisenhower’s FCDA

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fared somewhat better. Between 1954 and 1958, Eisenhower asked for $564 million, but Congress authorized $296 million, a reduction of about 48 percent, but only a nominal per annum increase after the Truman years. In its eight years of existence then (from 1951 to 1958), the FCDA operated with a total budget of approximately $450 million—about 20 percent of its requested budget. (In contrast, Department of Defense expenditures reached $19 billion in 1951 alone.)43 The FCDA spent about half of this sum on stockpiling medical, food, and other emergency supplies, and about a $120 million helping local governments purchase civil defense rescue equipment and training materials. The remaining funds went to administrative costs and salaries (the agency had an average staff size of 880), research, and training and public relations activities. Feeling only sporadic popular pressure to take action, elected officials felt confident that shrinking the civil defense budget on the one hand and vigorously supporting self-help on the other would not wound them politically.44 The result was a system based on the unfunded mandate, in which the federal government assigned the states the major responsibility for preparedness without giving them the operating revenue. With both paid and volunteer staffs, states were expected to educate citizens on the front end—that is, to provide them with information on how to best minimize their risk—but also to aid survivors on the tail end, the days and weeks after a strike. Although most states allocated some funds for this, state legislatures, mindful of other budget priorities and skeptical of the effectiveness of civil defense, allocated meager subsidies for home defense programs. State and city civil defense officials wanted the federal government to provide more, and they regularly (and very publicly) lamented their low budgets.45 By 1952, almost every state had appointed a director of emergency welfare services, but this was usually the public welfare officer moonlighting as a civil defense official. The doctrine of self-help, then, applied not only to individuals and families but to states as well. On a shoestring budget, FCDA planners worried greatly about the postattack phase, as they feared millions of homeless, hungry, and jobless Americans would be unable, indeed unwilling, to support a war unless they had a strong welfare safety net in place. Welfare proposals, therefore, reflected military priorities; the safety net would be as strong as war morale and military production needed it to be. As stated by the FCDA’s Emergency Welfare Division, “temporary substitute arrangements . . . will assure that no one goes without at least the minimum of food, clothing, shelter and other services necessary to maintain life and the strength and will to continue producing and supporting the Nation’s defense effort” (emphasis mine).46 Some of the early welfare schemes were quite ambitious: government-assisted family relocation and housing, care for orphaned children, and hospitalization for the injured.47 Planners even debated an

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“income maintenance” plan in which each family would qualify for a (federal) government stipend in the first week or so after attack until the breadwinner (assumed to be male) could return to productive work.48 Caldwell moved swiftly to institutionalize welfare planning in the FCDA, creating in 1951 two new social-medical service divisions and a welfare advisory committee.49 He and all subsequent FCDA directors worked with government agencies such as the Federal Housing Administration and the Departments of Agriculture and Health, Education, and Welfare, hoping that peacetime welfare could shift easily into wartime relief. Still, the FCDA’s welfare vision was a limited one, dependent on some combination of public funding and private charity, resulting in uneven postattack welfare services from state to state. With constrained budgets at both the state and federal levels, FCDA officials recommended this publicprivate combination platter as the only course. They envisaged a series of cooperative arrangements or “compacts” among federal, state, and local governments, private enterprise, and citizen volunteers. For example, when evacuation from cities was touted in the mid 1950s as the best survival option, the FCDA worked with the Housing and Home Finance Agency on a plan whereby suburban and rural officials would survey neighborhoods to identify private homes that could double as shelters.50 Planners expected rural people to prepare their homes as “reception areas” and to supply bedding, food, linens, and medical care to their so-called guests.51 The FCDA’s pledge that all victims would receive free health care was just as dependent on private initiative. In coordination with the Red Cross, the American Medical Association, various nurses’ associations, and public health organizations, the FCDA’s Health Services Division assembled technical manuals and conducted training courses for doctors and nurses to learn how to care for blast victims. The FCDA estimated optimistically in 1952 that only 4 million people would die from an all-out attack, and that emergency treatment could be provided at the state and local level for the 7.3 million injured survivors. Volunteer health workers could staff 8,000 first-aid stations, providing the initial care for victims until they could be transferred to one of the 6,000 state-funded “improvised hospitals” designed for patients likely to make a short-term recovery.52 It must be understood, however, that FCDA planners never intended to provide a long-term safety net for anyone. They considered welfare services to be short term, lasting no longer than ten days to two weeks. After that, citizens were on their own. As one FCDA manual put it: “Individuals and families decrease the welfare load by taking steps for their own survival, maintenance and other welfare needs.”53 Some officials did worry that they were underestimating the recovery time, but they were also daunted by the expense and logistics of rehabilitating the legions who

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would need help. “When those ten days are up,” one official said, “there may still be 5,000 children with no parents, families with no homes, savings gone, clothes gone, and jobs gone. The organization for handling that kind of job is a stupendous one.”54 Even so, FCDA officials reasoned that self-help was the only politically and economically viable solution. In the end, despite its myriad potential glitches, self-help provided both defense planners and elected officials with an ideal formula for the political and technical obstacles they faced in adapting civil defense to a nuclear age. Self-help could provide the volunteer labor and community protection that meager congressional appropriations could not. Its emphasis on personal responsibility and local civilian initiative would insure that civil defense did not become a concentration of either government or military power. It would discourage citizen expectations of government protection during and after an attack, which might lead to indifference toward civil defense or, worse, a sense of entitlement to long-term government aid. It assigned citizens a concrete patriotic task and fostered a sense of belonging in the quest for national security. And, finally, self-help could be useful in convincing people that they could really survive and rebuild after an attack, which was critical in garnering popular support for atomic diplomacy.

THE ELUSIVE “PUBLIC MIND”

In the 1950s there was no shortage of governmental and nongovernmental organizations dedicated to explaining the nature of the Soviet threat and how to contain it. The FCDA was one of these—its specialty, explaining the particulars of life with the bomb. Though it sat on the margins of diplomatic and nuclear policymaking, the FCDA stood at the center of the government’s campaign to “make up the national mind” about the bomb and the Cold War.55 As foreign policymakers formulated their domino theory of geopolitics, FCDA planners formulated their own domino theory of public opinion. Negative feelings about civil defense, they feared, might lead to rejection of the whole Cold War project. As one policy memo put it: “There is a danger that revulsion at the thought of nuclear warfare will jeopardize public support of the government’s activities in the international field, as well as of both military and non-military defense programs.”56 The association of civil defense with death and destruction was inescapable, however, making home preparedness a tough sell even for the most ardent armchair cold warrior. How to persuade and cajole, but not coerce, people into militarizing their daily lives? Without an American experience of a real atomic attack, planners needed to create a vivid but not horrific snapshot of what one would look like in order to create a psychological

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climate that facilitated self-help. Complicating this task was the fact that most Americans experienced the Cold War as a noncombat war. Except for Korea, the Cold War played out for the majority of U.S. residents as a more psychological than physical confrontation. Thus citizens had to be persuaded, in the words of NSC-68, “that the cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake.”57 Without a “real” war, planners anticipated resistance: a Defense Department official predicted in 1948 that any civil defense plan, even if approved by Congress, would “meet with considerable [citizen] opposition since it, inevitably, must be associated with the principle of anticipated enemy attack.”58 This unpleasant image of bombs dropping from the sky was precisely what the FCDA had to conjure up in order to activate citizens, but such scenarios had to be matched with equally gripping scenes of survival and triumph. The FCDA’s campaign to simultaneously scare and reassure people about the bomb evolved at the same time that the Truman and Eisenhower administrations fortified their nuclear arsenals, learned more about the dangers of radiation, and worked to conceal those dangers from the public. Before examining the FCDA’s exhaustive propaganda effort, it is important to consider the extent of its knowledge about the bomb’s perils.59 There is no easy answer to the question of “who knew what and when?” Nuclear weaponry developed rapidly throughout the decade, changing estimates of its dangers along with it. The FCDA’s research and demonstration tests rendered little useful information because they were almost always done with smaller bombs than would have been used in an actual war. More importantly, the AEC guarded closely the most damning crucial data, not only from those at the very top of the FCDA hierarchy, but also from scientists, journalists, and even members of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, all of whom complained regularly about the AEC’s tight control on information.60 Furthermore, within the FCDA, there were different degrees of awareness and access to classified information; radio spot copy editors, for example, knew less about radiation’s dangers than did the FCDA’s shelter research staff. The FCDA’s partial ignorance about the specifics of the bomb’s peril reflected the fact that it was out of the loop anyway; it was not directly involved in making nuclear or foreign policy, and thus it was dependent upon the informational largesse of other security branches. Yet at the same time, the FCDA stalwartly defended the nuclear secrets it did and did not know. Decisions about what was leaked to the American public regarding fallout, bomb target areas, and related nuclear security matters were made by the president and his top aides, and the FCDA’s chief administrator was sometimes included in that decision making. In the early fifties, civil defense planners and White House staff set up elaborate protocols for the release of information during and after an attack,

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reviewed regularly by Truman and then Eisenhower’s national security staff. Cold War policymakers wanted to “insure a continuity of information to the public” in order to maintain national unity for their decisions, even if that included starting a nuclear war.61 Like all other national security agencies, the FCDA disseminated only a small fraction of what it could have, and reserved the right to withhold information from the American public if it felt its release might jeopardize the “national interest.” A 1955 internal policy history of the FCDA’s public relations activities illustrates the wide latitude Cold War agencies had in determining what citizens would or would not know about nuclear war. The document acknowledged that “people are entitled to an accounting by their government,” but it stipulated that when the release of information would endanger U.S. security, “the national interest should take precedence over the right of the people to know.”62 This presented less of a dilemma for FCDA administrators than one might think. In fact, they did not wrestle very much with the philosophical questions of full disclosure. Government prerogative to control information was simply an accepted doctrine of the national security state and did not generate controversy within civil defense circles. The FCDA released information on nuclear dangers selectively, using the cover of “national interest” to shield itself from potential criticism. Its propaganda provided little information to citizens about the consequences of blast and fallout, offering instead optimistic projections that the prepared could survive. Even when it had relevant data documenting the futility of survival schemes, the FCDA preached the gospel of preparedness. Its media productions and spokespersons did not completely dodge the fact that millions of people would die from a nuclear attack, but declarations about the simplicity and efficacy of self-help closely followed those infrequent admissions.63 In a sense, the FCDA functioned as an ad agency whose client was the bomb. It had to sell the bomb as the centerpiece of a strong foreign policy, as well as persuade people to prepare for the day when the weapon that supposedly protected them was launched to destroy them. This effort involved defense planners in an ongoing, and ultimately futile, attempt to gauge people’s receptiveness to their client. The FCDA was one of many government agencies chasing “public opinion,” the elusive mass public that could allegedly swing policy directions and change outcomes. Though often frustrated by its unpredictability, FCDA strategists did not feel hemmed in by it. As one historian argues, postwar presidents and policymakers found public opinion “permissive, not restrictive.” Most often, they paid attention to it when it was time to present and build support for an issue that had already been decided.64 Such was the case with civil defense. The decisions to pursue Soviet containment through

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atomic diplomacy had already been made; Congress and the FCDA had already endorsed self-help. The concern about public opinion, then, centered on how to get citizens to accept the atomic-age responsibilities that came with buying into the bomb. The FCDA’s calculated pursuit of Americans’ moods and attitudes reflected the growing belief in the postwar era that “the human personality and its diverse and unpredictable mental states were of utmost importance” in the prosecution of war. By the end of World War II, as Ellen Herman has argued, war “had been reconfigured into a profoundly psychological format.” The belief that “morale” was as much a part of victory as weapons had a deep impact on Cold War defense planning. “Psychological warfare,” a new designation in the 1940s, became a centerpiece of Cold War military strategy in the 1950s and 1960s. The FCDA’s conviction that emotional states could win or lose the Cold War nurtured a longterm collaboration with psychological professionals (called “sykewarriors” during World War II) who considered themselves rigorous scientific practitioners whose data could advance knowledge about the human psyche, their own professional authority, and the patriotic cause of containment. These sykewarriors believed that studying the “civilian mind” was just as important as understanding the “enemy mind.” Indeed, as Herman points out, policymakers “perceived their job as more than keeping tabs on what Americans were thinking and feeling; they had to skillfully engineer the appropriate U.S. outlook.”65 This was the aim of the FCDA—to both track and mold public opinion on nuclear matters. But planners confronted several problems as they tried to map out a public relations strategy. Chief among them, ironically, was the formidable strength and reputation of the U.S. military. How could the FCDA promulgate its hyperbolic rhetoric of nuclear vulnerability without implicitly suggesting that the military was incapable of defending the nation? FCDA staff needed the vulnerability emphasis, for civil defense was premised on it. On the other hand, as a close relative of the Defense Department and itself a booster of American military might, the FCDA could not suggest the military’s incompetence. In late 1951 and early 1952, Millard Caldwell presented this dilemma to Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett. Citing a recent FCDA survey, which showed that 68 percent of urban dwellers believed the military could deflect an attack, Caldwell warned Lovett of an “alarming trend” of public confidence in the armed forces. Indeed, he suspected that American military might was actually undermining his program: “This type of blind faith in military protection is perhaps the most serious road-block to public action and participation in civil defense,” he said. Overconfidence in American military capability, he forewarned, “could wipe out the sense of urgency which is essential not only in civil defense preparedness, but in our entire security

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program.”66 This was, indeed, a peculiar development, and it caught the FCDA by surprise: the desired public faith in military technology, certainly a propaganda triumph of the national security establishment, was apparently undermining home preparedness. The FCDA’s attempt to resolve this potential public relations quagmire only generated more nuclear-age doublespeak about U.S. military prowess and dangerous vulnerability to attack. That public confidence in the military could unexpectedly work at crosspurposes with civil defense recruitment underscored for FCDA planners the surprises and difficulties involved in trying to predict and mold not only “the civilian mind” but also civilian behavior. They worried that images of nuclear war would incite “mass panic,” making it impossible at crucial moments for citizens to behave in constructive ways—that is, helping themselves and their neighbors. Panic might also lead to apathy or resistance. People might feel so overwhelmed by the scope of atomic war that they would do nothing, or, worse, frightened citizens could channel their fear into a protest of the nuclear state and withdraw their support for U.S. policies. Cold War sykewarriors believed their data offered solutions for these attitudinal and behavioral obstacles. Basing their studies on positivist assumptions that scientific methods could accurately diagnose and predict human behavior, they claimed that a “nation has a living personality,” which could be dissected to produce data useful for defense strategists.67 FCDA planners (many of them veteran psychological strategists) shared this conviction, so they hired the charter members of the vast “psychology-industrial complex” of Pentagon-funded research institutes and university departments to perform this vivisection on the nation’s personality.68 In 1951, and almost annually thereafter, the FCDA commissioned the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center to study people’s perceptions of the likelihood of atomic war, their chances of survival, and their willingness to participate in civil defense.69 Also in 1951, both the FCDA and the Department of Defense hired Associated Universities, an Ivy League Cold War consortium, to develop comprehensive plans for national civil defense. That effort became Project East River, a thick government report that identified panic prevention and control as a key component of a successful program.70 The following year, the FCDA asked the Stanford Research Institute to compile a summary analysis of the data on British, German, and Japanese populations under aerial attack, hoping for insights applicable to atomic-age defense planning.71 Human behavior studies remained a staple of Eisenhower’s FCDA as well. Worried about citizens’ commitment to nuclear deterrence, the president commissioned yet another panel to study “human attitudes and behavior affecting national strength and . . . support of national objectives.”72

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The data collected from these ongoing research projects offer a view of a postattack society through the eyes of civil defense planners and sykewarriors, so it is useful to briefly characterize some of the findings. Collectively, the studies concluded that human reactions to conventional and atomic bombing differed very little. Populations subjected to both kinds of attack exhibited low morale, meaning a decreased acceptance of and confidence in the war, a marked hostility toward home authorities (as opposed to just “the enemy”), severe and prolonged fear, and apathy.73 Most of these findings were based on a 1950 Rand Corporation report by Irving Janis, a prominent Yale psychologist who studied human behavior under the stress of aerial attack.74 Janis published widely on the topic, and FCDA planners relied extensively on his work to formulate their public education programs. He predicted that survivors of atomic attack would be in “an extremely aroused emotional state,” which greatly increased “the likelihood of excited, impulsive, and maladaptive behavior,” meaning uninjured survivors might be unwilling to help others or even to take the necessary precautions to protect themselves. Everyone would suffer from “acute anxiety,” at least initially. Most would recover, he predicted, but a sizable percentage would not, and this would have a “demoralizing effect upon others in the community.”75 On the issue of panic, specifically, FCDA planners worried especially about the days and weeks after attack, for that was the most critical time in terms of restoring industrial production (the key to victory during World War II) and reestablishing “normalcy” for citizens (the key to maintaining high morale). A 1953 FCDA report warned: “Mass panic, if not quickly quelled, can in itself be a lethal weapon. Beyond the additional deaths that mass panic could cause, we face the prospect of domestic civil strife; emotional instability among the population affected . . . and apathy which may manifest itself in a prolonged mass paralysis and disorganization of civil defense operations.”76 Project East River similarly suggested that panic could lead to “disorganized flight” or even rioting, and that once an individual began to feel panicked, the “return . . . to rationality is not easy.” Mass hysteria in the postattack phase would make a person “oblivious to external guidance” and thus undermine the authority of local officials and recovery protocols.77 Eisenhower’s 1956 “Human Effects of Nuclear Weapons” study echoed these findings: the panel of military planners, medical doctors, anthropologists, and psychiatrists predicted that after an initial panic or shock reaction, Americans would experience severe anxiety, grief, survivor’s guilt, and that “extensive negative behavior” could handicap recovery.78 Most of the studies presumed citizens would panic in the same way, despite sex, racial, class, and other differences. Given postwar cultural preoccupations with gender difference and deviance, for instance, it is a bit

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surprising that behavioral scientists rarely measured sex as a panic variable. As the Stanford Institute’s review of the literature showed, there was “relatively little evidence” about how certain “predispositional factors,” such as age, socioeconomic status, or sex, affected a person’s reaction to aerial bombing.79 Nevertheless, panic was opprobrious to defense planners partly because it was understood as a “female trait.” FCDA chief Val Peterson wrote a widely circulated article in Collier’s in which he claimed not only that women would panic more than men, but that only 55 percent of women (versus 83 percent of men) could learn to be “reasonably panicresistant.”80 The presumptions underlying Peterson’s unsubstantiated “scientific” claims resembled those held by other cold warriors. The national mood Dean Acheson identified as essential to the “long, long job” of dealing with the Russians required self-discipline, rational calculation of risk, and level-headed judgment, traits associated with masculinity in the postwar period. In contrast, qualities understood and valued as feminine (such as emotionalism or dependence) had no place in the serious, high-stakes war of nerves. These gendered understandings of emotional makeup infused the psychiatric culture of civil defense; they were powerful precisely because they remained implicit, unremarkable, and needed no scientific bases.81 On the whole, civil defense planners viewed all of this data with ambivalence. They cited the studies often and depended heavily on the pieces that seemed most helpful in formulating propaganda oriented around selfhelp. At the same time, however, they found “public opinion” inchoate and ethereal, not well suited to the calculus of Cold War defense strategy. In sum, the FCDA was both reverential and skeptical about behavioral science data, pleased to have at least some indication of how the public felt, but still unsure that the human psyche was as malleable as the experts suggested. As they began to plot out a public relations strategy, planners would soon learn—as World War II social scientists had before them— that the “virtues of public opinion . . . were a lot clearer in theory than they were in practice.”82

PEDDLING PREPAREDNESS

Political scientist Clinton Rossiter astutely observed in 1949 that “the bomb, like the middle class, is a state of mind.”83 FCDA strategists openly admitted their mission to market civil defense as a mental state—a psychological orientation toward military readiness. They were taken by Irving Janis’s argument that a sound public education campaign was an “emotional inoculation” against “untoward mass reactions” to the bomb.84 Indeed, they hoped that people would eventually come to accept pre-

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paredness as “a way of life.” There was nothing deeply conspiratorial about this effort, for planners viewed civil defense as a commodity that required the same kind of psychological research and marketing pitch necessary to sell colas or cars. They hoped the right mixture of research data and marketing strategies would yield an effective serum against panic, apathy, and outright resistance. For assistance in this area, civil defense officials turned to a new set of experts: Madison Avenue advertising executives. The FCDA entered a partnership with the Advertising Council in March 1951, a consortium of ad agencies and corporate advertisers formed during World War II to provide free consulting and advertising copy to the government. The New York agency of Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn (BBD&O), with support from an advertising executive from the Johnson and Johnson Corporation, led the FCDA–Ad Council partnership. A sometimes stormy relationship, the partnership nevertheless experimented with a variety of different propaganda plans, ranging from basic informational pamphlets to elaborately staged mock drills.85 Although the policy of self-help dictated that each locale had to make civil defense operable, the FCDA dictated the content and tone of all propaganda programs. Beginning in 1951, the FCDA saturated the newsstands and airwaves with the gospel of civil defense. It published booklets as well as newspaper and magazine articles and produced radio and television programs and motion pictures. Print editors happily collaborated with the FCDA. In 1951, for example, 2,168 newspapers ran a twelve-part series on civil defense written by the FCDA. Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report both published special civil defense issues and donated fifty thousand copies each to the FCDA, free of charge.86 In 1952, the FCDA set up a liaison program with national magazines, such as Collier’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Newsweek, offering ads and ready-made editorial statements for easy publication.87 Television and motion pictures enabled more graphic presentation of both the mushroom cloud and the ease of self-help, so the FCDA exploited these media to the fullest. All of the major television networks, no doubt eager to identify themselves with a patriotic cause amidst the chilling effects of McCarthyism on their industry, featured thousands of hours of civil defense programming.88 In July and August 1951, for example, NBC broadcast a seven-part FCDA series entitled “Survival.” In 1952, CBS aired a special, “Defense of the Nation,” featuring Arthur Godfrey as the emcee.89 By 1955, major networks were broadcasting live test shots of hydrogen bombs, with an estimated audience of 100 million. 90 As a result of the media’s cooperation with FCDA campaigns, the lines between government-sponsored propaganda and a free press grew disturbingly blurry. The FCDA’s public information bombardment was so

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effective and the press cooperation so thorough that it was virtually impossible for citizens to discern the difference between FCDA spin and independent journalism. The mainstream news media was both victim and perpetrator of this process. The government’s shroud of secrecy made thorough investigative reporting essentially impossible, but the media nevertheless acted as more partner than adversary to the civil defense establishment. In planning a show on civil defense, for example, an ABC representative told the FCDA: “We hope this program will help your cause . . . our cause.”91 Of course, FCDA planners were unconcerned with this symbiosis between government and press objectives, because their job was to make it appear as if press coverage was the same as full disclosure.92 The media’s accommodation freed FCDA strategists to focus on other public relations conundrums. Every new campaign had to straddle the paradoxes of nuclear readiness: pamphlets had to guard atomic secrets but reveal enough news to motivate participation, frightening images had to be balanced with reassuring ones. The “Duck and Cover” productions, appearing in late 1951, typified the FCDA’s efforts to overcome such contradictions. The well-known “Bert the Turtle” cartoon told children that they should learn the dangers of the bomb, but that survival was as easy as a turtle’s protective maneuver. Even though most propaganda was aimed at adults, it was no more sophisticated conceptually than the cartoon; it hammered home the same messages about fear and personal responsibility. Project East River had advised that fear was “a normal response to any danger” and should “be channeled into behavior actually useful in combating the danger.”93 FCDA publications thus did not try to extinguish emotion altogether (a tactic dismissed as unrealistic), but rather offered people a set of appropriate responses to attack. Sometimes pamphlet literature read like a pop psychology manual. A handbook for neighborhood wardens advised: “Accept the casualty’s right to feel as he does. Let him know that you want to understand how he feels. Do not . . . criticize his feelings, nor tell him how he should feel.”94 Val Peterson’s Collier’s article similarly reassured Americans: “Don’t be ashamed of being scared,” he said. “Fear can be healthy if you know how to use it.”95 Another public relations dilemma reflected a tension inherent in the paramilitary nature of preparedness itself: how to get people involved in civil defense without ordering them around like military grunts. Already keenly aware of the distaste for military rule, planners did not want to use a frowning, finger-wagging army general as the poster boy of civil defense. Instead, they wanted influential and reliable civilian spokespeople. This led the FCDA to investigate “what means are available for increasing the symbolic potency of civilian leaders.”96 Planners turned to popularly known scientific authorities, such as Ralph Lapp and Richard Gerstell, and to so-called glamour figures, movie or media stars who could supplement

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dry, authoritative military endorsements with personality and appeal. Edward R. Murrow, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Groucho Marx, and Bing Crosby all lent the FCDA a hand, and even photographer Ansel Adams volunteered his services. He advised the FCDA: “Pictures of schools, churches, individuals . . . will stir the emotions, amplify morale and encourage greater service to civil defense.”97 Adams’s suggested themes of morale and service would appear regularly in all FCDA propaganda throughout the 1950s, subtly transforming civil defense from a list of tasks into a set of desirable personality traits. In other words, preparedness became a character issue. The FCDA’s valorization of self-help strongly implied that dependence on the government for protection was somehow a personality defect. If a family was caught by surprise and unable to cope, it was a reflection of their moral laxity or their inability (weakness) to confront unpleasantness. One could still depend upon neighbors and other members of a community because, according to the FCDA, this was merely a variation on family self-help; neighbors were fictive kin who could share burdens and pool resources so that the business of recovery remained a matter of local responsibility, not government largesse. Media productions reinforced these principles with a vigorous antidependency rhetoric. Statements such as “be self-reliant” or “the individual must be capable of caring for himself” effectively implied a moral condemnation of those citizens who expected the kind of postattack welfare necessary to return them to fully functioning workers and home dwellers. Indeed, the FCDA’s self-help discourse stigmatized “dependency,” a term whose perjorative meanings had already solildified in the thirties and forties and reached new intensity in the 1950s with the rising influence of psychiatry and the New Deal backlash. Civil defense planners sounded alternately like welfare experts of the 1930s, who worried that recipients of relief would form stubborn “habits of dependence,” and social workers of the 1950s, who diagnosed dependency as a sign of emotional immaturity. As they toured the country making speeches and observing mock attacks, FCDA officials touted self-help using the language of both welfare bureaucrats and psychologists. Hoping to inspire participation through negative reinforcement, they stigmatized dependency as both an undesirable economic state and a character flaw. Thus the civil defense establishment’s homage to self-help grafted military meanings onto an already loaded political-therapeutic term.98 Ironically, as nuclear bombs became more powerful and lethal throughout the decade, the rhetoric became more benign and reassuring. Although there was essentially no difference between the Truman and Eisenhower administrations in terms of the content of their “informational” literature, there was a difference in tone. In the earliest years of weapons development, the Truman administration had admonished people to

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accept the “terrifying facts” of the “horrors of modern warfare.” Eisenhower’s FCDA took a different tack, with the president himself urging civil defense officials to “talk calmly” with citizens and project “a feeling of safety and not of hysteria.”99 Planners launched “Operation Candor,” part of Eisenhower’s “atoms for peace” campaign, which embraced “balanced reporting” and rejected the emotional sensationalism of the Truman years.100 As one official explained the long-term objective: “While the threat is serious, goodness knows, there has been a great deal of hysterical talk about it. . . . We’re trying to get national thinking on this subject back on an even keel.101 In the end, however, the propaganda under Ike’s watch was no less obfuscatory about the dangers of atomic attack: pamphlets and films featured nuclear wars in which average American citizens prepared, sacrificed, fought, and won decisive victories over the Soviet Union, saving Europe, indeed the world, from communism.

————— Although its literature trumpeted the simplicity of survival, the FCDA struggled to maintain its own political life within the national security bureaucracy, as well as to imbue citizens with a survivalist mentality. Its problems were rooted ultimately in its own paradoxical planning assumption—that peace came through preparation for war. This central premise of civil defense was too big of a philosophical, rhetorical, and practical contradiction to overcome. The FCDA’s myriad public relations programs pleaded with postwar Americans to reprioritize their concerns from domestic to international, from peace to war, from security to insecurity. But this platform was a tough sell, beset with internal tensions and contradictions, logistical problems, political resistance of various kinds, and the eccentricities of the human psyche. Civil defense foundered on its own inconsistencies: military guidance, but not military rule; faith in the military, but skepticism of its protective power; promotion of fear, but containment of panic; and so on. The protracted ideological and bureaucratic tussles over who would control and implement civil defense and how it would be sold to citizens belie a simple analysis of government-imposed militarization. Administrators’ and congressional representatives’ fears about military control were genuine expressions of concern about how much power a democracy should rest in its military as it builds a national security state. The skepticism and resistance to civil defense as either the precursor to or result of a mass society illustrates the palpable anxieties that accompanied Cold War militarization. Home front preparedness did not emerge as a foregone conclusion after the Soviet explosion of an atomic bomb; internal debate

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and popular input animated early efforts to create a civil defense program that could bolster U.S. foreign policies without undermining the cherished core values that underlay them. However, despite the protestations about the militarist excesses of a government-led preparedness effort, the FCDA’s campaigns nevertheless promoted a mood and mechanism for home front militarization. Self-help insured that militarizing everyday life seemed homespun, a grass-roots effort disconnected from larger policy imperatives. Ultimately, this kind of ambient militarism altered the nation’s bomb consciousness in a profound way. The FCDA’s policies and propaganda shifted a share of the responsibility for survival from the bureaucratic state to the individual’s emotional state. Self-help—as both policy and political discourse—transformed Cold War militarization into a personal responsibility. Thus the state’s own practice of nuclear secrecy and its role in creating the threat of attack in the first place were not defined as problems growing out of Cold War political agendas; rather, FCDA literature identified people’s negative emotional reactions as the main culprit. As Val Peterson put it: “If there is an ultimate weapon, it may well be mass panic—not the Abomb.”102 As the next chapter will show, although the dilemma of military control had been largely resolved by 1951, funding problems remained, along with even trickier matters of getting citizens to enact militarization in their own homes. A tour of the family bomb shelter will enable a closer look at the ways in which policymakers tried to resolve the remaining quandaries of home front readiness and at how the public both shaped and responded to those efforts.

CHAPTER TWO

Living Underground: The Public Politics of Private Shelters

FALLOUT SHELTERS are the stuff of Cold War folklore. For over three decades after the last of the government’s programs, people have remembered shelters as a curious icon of a bygone era, offering anecdotes about neighbors who built them or squirreled away rations. In 1995, a building manager’s surprise discovery of one hundred nuclear survival kits in the basement of a Bronx apartment complex prompted a “human interest” story in the New York Times. Tourists can now inspect a fallout shelter in the Smithsonian or visit “Doom Town” and “Survival City,” the fictional suburbs in the Nevada desert built by the government to test the effects of atomic blast on homes. As the United States continues to mark its anniversaries of various atomic-age firsts, shelters remain potent symbols of an era consumed with paranoia and fear about communism, Soviet military might, and an invisible radioactive contagion. Even the Bronx superintendent pledged to stash away a few of the survival kits, remarking, “Who knows what happens?”1 Shelters deserve a serious historical treatment, too, for what they can tell us about the politics of postwar militarization. The persistence of the family shelter as the definitive visual image of the atomic age (a status it shares with the mushroom cloud) implies a deceptively simple historical narrative of consensus around home shelter as the solution for the nation’s nuclear peril. But the story of the family shelter’s rise to policy and symbolic preeminence is more accurately understood as a case study of the incoherence, contradictions, and limitations of Cold War militarization. Civil defense planners during the Truman and Eisenhower years proposed a variety of protective schemes, ranging from government-funded communal shelters, to evacuation, to family-centered private sheltering. After years of scientific study, special investigations, and congressional hearings, policymakers finally settled on the nuclear family as the most ideologically and politically palatable solution for shielding citizens from nuclear harm. There were myriad variables and constraints that led policymakers— first National Security Resources Board and then Federal Civil Defense Administration staff, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, Congress, and, to some degree, citizen groups—to offer up the nuclear family as a nuclear

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shield. One important variable was the ever-changing nuclear technology that created the need for civil defense in the first place. Planners scrambled to come up with shelter innovations that could match the awesome power of the new hydrogen bomb, but they simply could not keep pace with the advances in nuclear weaponry. As a result, their shelter proposals seem today to be ludicrously speculative, even surreal. A major constraint was the difficulty in forging the political alliances necessary to endorse a national shelter program that met the needs of a regionally diverse population. Although Cold War anticommunism had the power to knit diverse constituencies together, divergent federal, state, and local interests unraveled anticommunist coalitions that came together in the name of home front preparedness. Federal planners, civil defense officials, and big city mayors, for example, often stalemated on issues of cost, logistics, and oversight. Indeed, one of the ironies of this story is that the logic of anticommunism often undermined home front militarization: it inflamed hysteria about the Soviet threat, fostering a public mood supportive of preparedness, but it also prevented an all-out militarization effort, labeling any federally funded public shelter system as a subversion of the very American ideals civil defense was set up to defend. This anticommunist position accommodated both harsh invective against those perceived as “soft” on preparedness and an equally trenchant criticism of the garrison state. A federally funded national shelter program, critics argued, would turn the United States into a Soviet-style state dedicated to military preparedness at the cost of individual economic and political freedom. Privately funded family shelters, on the other hand, expressed a distinctly American-style of militarization, based on voluntary effort, family autonomy, home ownership, and public-private collaboration. Thus the history of the shelter reveals that militarization could be pushed only so far until it confronted other Cold War political ideologies that would curb its appetites and limit its home front application. Policymakers hoped that the privatization of shelter could resolve or, at the very least, submerge some of the political contradictions that were the unexpected by-products of militarization. A family-centered shelter policy would neither overburden the state nor divert resources from active defense, but it would still ensure that citizens would permanently share the burdens of militarization. This could appease those who were hostile to military rule and the garrison state but who also believed that the absence of civil defense would invite Kennedy’s scenario of an “atomic Pearl Harbor.” The private home shelter could also perform the cultural work of the Cold War: it symbolized the superiority of a society of autonomous, property-owning individuals and strong families who had the capability and the choice to shelter themselves. In sum, the main ideological and political benefit of privatizing shelter was that “the militarized state did

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not look militaristic.”2 Still, militarizing the American way spawned yet another troubling question: Would citizens accept militarization’s burdens and transform their living spaces into bunkers?

EARLY SHELTER POLITICS

The newness and astounding firepower of atomic weaponry made it difficult in the early 1950s for planners, politicians, and civilians to imagine the degree of destruction that might result from an attack. Even before radioactive fallout became the primary concern in 1955, civil defense planners understood that survival from blast would require more than World War II–style blackouts.3 As Democratic congressman Chet Holifield said, “The tin hats and sand buckets of the last war would seem rather pathetic in the awful glare of an atomic blast.”4 Between 1950 and 1953, the NSRB and FCDA proposed shelter plans that they hoped could spare a few million from death, while giving millions more at least a fighting chance to recover. Given its emphasis on self-help, the civil defense establishment endorsed shelter plans with a surprisingly significant financial role for the federal government. To be sure, none of these plans exempted states, cities, and private citizens from sharing the burden, but neither did they excuse the federal government from offering political leadership, funding, and oversight responsibilities. Even with this degree of shared responsibility, however, Congress defeated the early proposals, setting the stage for the triumph of a family-centered policy. Much of the shelter policy drama unfolded in congressional hearings, where the public received its first glimpse of the attack scenarios, casualty projections, and protective schemes under consideration. Typically, such hearings were convened during periods of acute anxiety about the bomb, so they were more show and less substance. This was the case with the first series, the March 1950 Joint Committee on Atomic Energy hearings, organized in response to the announcement that the Soviets had tested their own atomic weapon. Democratic chairman Brien McMahon identified a national “worry psychosis,” which he intended to minimize with informed testimony and calm recitation of the facts. But little information in this first set of hearings would have soothed popular fears. NSRB administrators laid out a confusing and tentative shelter plan, based on underdeveloped scientific data, in a weak attempt to show citizens and the world that U.S. officials were in control of the situation.5 By September 1950, armed with a bit more data, the Resources Board made public a more definitive plan for blast shelters, this time out of the limelight of a congressional hearing. Its Blue Book outlined a complex three-tier program, which combined public and private initiative and

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offered the first inkling that some citizens and regions would get more protection than others based on their military usefulness. The first tier involved the government-funded adaptation of existing buildings in socalled target areas—urban industrial centers that were deemed most vulnerable to Soviet strikes; the second tier encompassed the governmentfunded construction of either “maximum-” or “moderate-strength” new shelters that would shield particular groups deemed militarily essential, such as military and civil defense personnel and factory workers in strategic industries. Families or small neighborhood groups represented the third tier; in keeping with the doctrine of self-help, they would be expected to supplement federal and state efforts by building their own basement shelters.6 The Blue Book’s plan, although still reliant on private citizen initiative, expressed considerable financial and conceptual support for a public shelter program. It recommended a federal contribution of over 1 billion dollars (implemented over a three-year period) to be matched by the states, bringing the total projected budget to $3.1 billion. Still, this was nowhere near what would have been needed to protect everyone, an amount that experts wildly guessed might range from $16 to $300 billion. But the Blue Book plan did not pretend to promise democracy in sheltering; its focus was on target cities and key personnel, not “nonessential” citizens.7 In December 1950, as the war deepened in Korea, NSRB officials were no closer to a national shelter plan than they had been at the March Joint Committee hearings. When the House and Senate Armed Services Committees convened to write the legislation of the new Federal Civil Defense Act, there emerged the first signs of congressional frustration and skepticism about the Blue Book’s blueprints. These hearings occurred just as Truman was transferring the NSRB’s civil defense functions to the newly created FCDA, so Congress’s mood can be explained partly as a response to the incomplete and confusing data presented by an outgoing NSRB and incoming FCDA staff. However, the hearings revealed not only the disarray of a civil defense establishment in transition, but also the degree of bureaucratic infighting and inertia that characterized shelter policymaking in its early years. FCDA planners fought with congressmen over budget appropriations, while state and municipal authorities fought with the federal government for policy direction and funding. Even among those who agreed on the advantages of a national shelter system, there was disagreement about its implementation.8 This confusion, however, provided unexpected opportunities for municipal authorities and advocates of urban redevelopment to stretch the definition of civil defense to include civic improvements. Many municipal officials latched onto an early FCDA proposal that large underground parking garages could serve also as emergency public shelters; they hoped

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to extract federal money for pet projects that would improve local traffic and parking bottlenecks. Boston Mayor John Hynes, for example, tried to secure a loan from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to build an underground garage/shelter in downtown Boston, an area beset with parking problems. New York Mayor Vincent Impellitteri suggested that federal dollars for improvements in the city’s subway system could both fulfill shelter needs and improve public transportation. Others interested in urban policy saw the development possibilities of shelter funds. Harry Prince, president of the American Institute of Architecture’s New York chapter, argued that fireproof public housing could provide essential protection for city dwellers. Slums should be cleared, he argued, and public money made available to construct modern low-income housing that could provide air-raid cover. “Private enterprise alone,” he maintained, “has not built and cannot afford to build low-rental fireproof housing.”9 This enthusiasm for the urban renewal possibilities of public shelters caught the FCDA by surprise, and even made it a bit nervous about rising expectations for federal aid. Big-city mayors hoped to recoup 50 percent of their costs if they built dual-purpose garages, but they grew quickly annoyed with the FCDA’s reticence to commit federal aid to urban target areas. As slum clearance became a pet project among mayors facing urban housing crises, city leaders saw the shelter debate as an opportune time to advance housing development agendas—even if clumsily inserted into national shelter designs. When the FCDA failed repeatedly to offer concrete plans for such federal-city collaboration, municipal officials became impatient and frustrated. Mayor Albert Cobo of Detroit expressed confusion in simply trying to understand the shelter policy. Speaking for many other city officials, he asked the FCDA: “I mean, what is the program and how far are we going? Will you just tell us?”10 Where the FCDA was headed was probably not even clear to most planners at the time, but political realities began to move shelter plans swiftly toward privatization as early as 1951. Congress passed the Federal Civil Defense Act in January of that year with overwhelming bipartisan support, but it tightly circumscribed the conditions under which states and cities could qualify for public shelter funds, vastly scaling down the threetier proposal originally advanced in the Blue Book. In essence, Congress declared that no federal money would be available to build public shelters. At the most, the federal government could contribute to special shelter projects, such as building prototypes in various cities, but even here local governments had to come up with seed money. This was “self-help” philosophy applied to states and cities, who, not surprisingly, had no money set aside for national defense.11

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On the surface, of course, these were fights about money. But congressional moneys always ebb or flow in connection with particular interests, and the interests expressed here were about the advantages of active over passive defense and the containment of the postwar state. These ideological positions, endorsed by both military and civilian planners, were not the only interests in play, but they proved decisive in undermining a federal shelter program. On the issue of active versus passive defense, when the two competed with each other for funding, as chapter 1 illustrated, passive defense always lost. But, paradoxically, the escalation of the Korean War made elected officials both more inclined to endorse the idea of civil defense (they had nothing to lose by supporting a national security program) and more skeptical of funding it (given the more immediate wartime active defense needs). Thus the Blue Book’s public shelter plan became simultaneously an outgrowth of fears about Cold War bombs and a casualty of a hot war.12 Yet this alone does not explain the evisceration of the FCDA shelter program from 1951 through 1953. Congress’s repeated funding denials stemmed from a growing suspicion that civil defense—especially its shelter system—was fast becoming a militarized version of a New Deal–style public works program. Legislators envisioned massive federal spending on shelters and the creation of another bureaucracy to develop and manage them. To congressional conservatives, this seemed like additional girth for an already bloated state, and some used the shelter hearings as an opportunity to rail against a seeming New Deal revival. Older New Dealers who may have defended a public shelter system did not emerge to do so because, thanks to the FCDA’s sketchy plans, there was no tangible “it” to defend. And even if there had been a clear proposal, New Deal torchbearers were themselves divided by anticommunism and its various permutations in Cold War domestic politics.13 Ironically, then, the FCDA’s shelter policy fell victim to the very congressional anti-communism that spawned domestic preparedness agencies in the first place. Caught between anti-statist political impulses and a civilian-military rhetoric to maximize readiness, the FCDA’s shelter program foundered. FCDA planners worked to resolve matters by drastically cutting shelter costs. In 1951, chief administrator Millard Caldwell proposed a skeletal $250 million program that would locate shelter space in existing buildings “rather than digging holes in the ground.”14 FCDA planners knew it was a paltry sum, but they saw it as necessary “earnest money” to encourage state legislators to follow suit.15 The FCDA also tried to persuade Congress that it shared its conservative fiscal outlook. Planners promised no tax increases and highlighted their proposal’s combination of federal and state spending, business cooperation, and voluntarism. Senior

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official James Wadsworth acknowledged that “if we try to construct shelters for all the people . . . the economy would not stand for it, the materials would not be there, the manpower would not be there, and the taxpayers could not stand for it.”16 But Congress’s stubborn impression that the shelter proposal was a gambit for a big-government program made it difficult for planners to get legislators to seriously entertain and investigate the possibilities of a national shelter system. That Congress flatly rejected even the stingiest of plans indicates the depth of its political hostility toward statist solutions for preparedness. Perhaps the early shelter proposals would have survived congressional scrutiny if the FCDA had better anticipated how anti-statist attitudes would affect its plans. Millard Caldwell himself had served previously on the House Appropriations Committee, but this apparently did not make for a more savvy presentation of his shelter ideas. The frequent discussion among planners and in the press of civil defense as a “welfare problem” that involved housing, feeding, and clothing millions of citizens did little to aid the FCDA’s lobbying effort. Even as the FCDA entreated citizens to practice self-help, its welfare contingency planning continued apace under Caldwell’s watch. And FCDA staff used every opportunity to tout their collaboration with the American Red Cross, welfare experts, and housing officials for postattack planning. This suggested to Congress that despite the FCDA’s commitment to self-help—and its recent pledge to cut shelter construction costs—its shelter system was a type of welfare program after all. Had congressional officials looked more closely at the FCDA’s welfare planning, they would have seen a very meager safety net, as chapter 1 has already shown. What the shelter debates reveal, then, is the intensity and scope of antidependency rhetoric in postwar political culture, which made congressional deliberations about shelter defense into a kind of proxy war about the breadth of the welfare state.17 Furthermore, big-city mayors’ interests in civil defense as urban renewal only exacerbated the suspicions that civil defense was a return to big government under the guise of home preparedness. Though the FCDA had never even endorsed the notion of civil defense as urban development, Congress (already stingy with funds for public housing and other city redevelopment projects) was loath to consider even the FCDA’s very modest parking garage–public shelter proposal. Missouri Republican Dewey Short’s remark that a shelter program could open the door “to a lot of vicious boondoggling and waste” typified the views of many of his colleagues, Republican and Democrat alike. Certainly, the sketchiness of the FCDA’s proposals did little to reign in such anxieties or even to convince pro–civil defense shelter skeptics that a national shelter system could really work. Thus, Congress’s treatment of shelter funding proposals

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as a referendum on the New Deal became a template for all future debates on the shelter program.18 President Truman remained on the margins of these policy deliberations, undoubtedly more concerned with other fiscal matters, labor unrest, and the Korean War. Yet he still pondered the implications of Cold War militarization, especially its financial demands. This motivated his sporadic participation in the national discussions about the role civil defense played in military readiness and the extent to which civilian society should be remade to achieve total security. Truman denounced the first round of budget cuts to gut the shelter program, although he was in the enviable position of being able to call for shelter preparedness without actually having to craft a spending bill to support it. He issued strongly worded statements about the necessity of civil defense, arguing that Congress had been “reckless” in its evasion of federal responsibilities for citizen protection. “There are no bargain basements where we can pick up America’s security at cut-rate prices,” he exclaimed.19 But without federal shelter funds, that is precisely where civil defense was heading—to the basements of America’s single-family homes.

ESCAPE TO THE SUBURBS

Before the shelter debate hit home, so to speak, it took a brief detour back out beyond the perimeter of American cities. The Eisenhower era ushered in a renewed interest in evacuation, which marked a significant departure from the public-shelter focus of the Truman era. Having failed to extract congressional appropriations for a federal program, the FCDA under Eisenhower shifted its strategy from underground retreat to abandonment of the target site altogether. In 1953, Eisenhower appointed former Nebraska Republican governor Val Peterson to head the FCDA and move civil defense in a new direction—outward. Truman’s FCDA had previously dismissed evacuation as unworkable and a surrender, of sorts, of the “front line.” At a speech before the American Welfare Association, for example, James Wadsworth said there could be no “mass exodus” from the cities “because there can be no surrender of our production centers.” He cynically suggested that evacuation might provide an opportunity “for a sort of group vacation on the part of thousands of city dwellers.” If an attack occurred, he warned, there should be “no voluntary surrender of a single machine, or a single home, that might help our armed forces to wage war.”20 Eisenhower’s FCDA, however, saw evacuation not as retreat but as the cheapest and safest way to beat the bomb over the long haul. Val Peterson criticized the idea of a public shelter program as economically and

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strategically unsound; a truly effective underground system of mass shelters, he told Congress, would cost billions, destabilizing the economy, thus compromising national security. Evacuation promised a more economical approach to nuclear preparedness, leaving more money available for either active defense measures or taxpayer savings. Peterson never completely ruled out the need for shelters as supplemental, but he became evacuation’s most ardent supporter from 1953 through 1955.21 The larger context for this shift from underground to outward bound was Eisenhower’s “New Look” and the changes in nuclear bomb technology. Evacuation was more compatible with Eisenhower’s desire to reconcile “security with solvency.” During his 1952 campaign, Eisenhower promised to cut government spending, including defense, without compromising national security. Believing a strong economy and nuclear preponderance were equally important in meeting the Soviet threat, Eisenhower deemphasized the importance of conventional land and naval forces and prioritized nuclear weapons and air power. Ideally a less expensive approach to containment, the New Look made sense for Eisenhower: he could project an image of a frugal but firm military leader who would curb inflation, balance the budget, and lower taxes, all while building a leaner and meaner nuclear arsenal capable of swift retaliation.22 Meanwhile, disturbing scientific discoveries about the bomb’s peril provided a new context and stimulus for the FCDA’s stance on evacuation. Already by the fall of 1952, the Atomic Energy Commission had successfully detonated the first hydrogen bomb. Scientists reported that it released the equivalent of ten million tons of TNT—a weapon five hundred times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. In fact, the test completely destroyed a small island. In March 1954, further tests in the Pacific released record levels of radiation that contaminated U.S. observation troops, the native peoples on the nearby islands, and a Japanese fishing boat floating some 85 miles from ground zero. Though scientists had long known about the harmful effects of radiation, these tests enabled them to comprehend more fully the staggering power of the H-bomb’s blast and the potency of its radioactive cloud. Caldwell’s vision of blast shelters now seemed ridiculously obsolete.23 But Peterson’s FCDA, too, found it difficult to answer the explosive technology with a protection plan that reflected scientific realities. Indeed, Peterson’s usual glib response to people’s anxious queries about how to survive an H-bomb attack was “not to be there.”24 Like the FCDA’s early shelter plans, its evacuation plans lacked specifics, but a 1954 report offers a composite view. In this year, forty-two cities constituted “critical target areas,” which meant that almost 62 million people would require evacuation before an attack. Essentially, evacuation entailed moving immediately from where one stood when the sirens rang to some form of transporta-

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tion—usually one’s car—and then driving out to the “reception area,” defined as a suburban or rural location some fifteen to twenty miles away from the city. Workers (assumed to be men in the FCDA literature) were not allowed to return home to retrieve family members; families would be reunited at reception areas with the assistance of trained volunteers. Citizens living in reception areas were expected to help state and local officials provide welfare support for their “guests,” such as temporary housing, food, and medical care. According to the FCDA, people could return to their homes within a few days to a week, depending upon wind patterns, radiation levels, and their residences’ proximity to ground zero.25 To convince the American people that this new plan was now their best option, the FCDA had to portray evacuation as a calm, orderly drill, not a frantic escape. Planners preferred “directed evacuations,” that is, migrations that they authorized and managed, but they also anticipated “spontaneous evacuations” that would have to “be made subject to discipline and control.”26 Planners from the federal to the local level anticipated much popular resistance. Milwaukee’s Mayor Frank Zeidler, a staunch advocate of evacuation, warned his colleagues to prepare for a variety of negative reactions to directed evacuation: he foretold “many mental conditions,” such as apathy, resignation, or even pacifist sentiments, that would undermine a massive outmigration from a city. He asked his fellow mayors to ponder: “How much of this program will your people buy?” Considered one of the better organized cities from a civil defense standpoint, Milwaukee was a model for urban evacuation planning. City officials had drawn up intricate evacuation plans, replete with traffic studies and reviews of emergency services. Yet even with these hospitable conditions for citizen participation, Zeidler reported “we have already encountered certain psychological difficulties with our people.”27 Starting in the summer of 1953, FCDA and Ad Council officials met to design promotional campaigns that would transform the psychological resistance Zeidler described into consent and participation. This involved first developing an “educational” program that deemphasized fallout’s dangers. In the spirit of Eisenhower’s emphasis on “atoms for peace” and his insistence on “talking calmly” about the bomb, the resultant campaigns sought to present information on fallout “in balance with other threats of enemy attack.” Even for seasoned advertising professionals, this was a tricky proposition. As FCDA Public Affairs Director Ed Lyman remarked, “No more serious challenge in the field of mass public education has ever confronted us.” FCDA and Ad Council planners agreed that, along with a campaign to neutralize people’s fear of fallout, evacuation “needed to be sold up and down the country.”28 To this end, the Ad Council proposed the distribution of an evacuation kit (a flashlight, medical supplies, and nonperishable food), with the obvious hope that it would

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inculcate urbanites with the skills of disciplined evacuation. As a 1954 Ad Council report stated: “The public must be conditioned in the intervening months to accept the need and discipline of . . . evacuation exercises. . . . It must practice evacuation until people become conditioned to doing the right thing automatically in an emergency even under the physical and emotional shock of an enemy attack.”29 Between 1954 and 1961, the FCDA staged annual nationwide mock air raid drills, providing citizens with an opportunity to put the evacuation kits to practical use. Dubbed “Operation Alert,” these yearly exercises tested the FCDA’s operational capabilities, identified deficiencies, and provided thousands of civil defense volunteers and paid staff with practice for the real thing. Citizens living in the average sixty-plus participating cities were typically required to take cover for fifteen minutes while civil defense staff and volunteers tested their readiness. States, counties, and cities reenacted the national Operation Alert on a smaller scale throughout the 1950s. FCDA statistical reports describe thousands of these dress rehearsals taking place all over the country: in March 1955, 37,000 school children in Mobile, Alabama, evacuated to reception areas ten miles outside of town with the help of 6,000 parent chauffeurs; in June 1955, 1,200 federal employees in Kansas City participated in a “sidewalk evacuation” of an office building; in July 1955, thirty carloads of evacuees left the Tacoma, Washington area for a reception area where they remained overnight to cope with rudimentary living conditions.30 Sociologist Guy Oakes has aptly described Operation Alert as “an elaborate national sociodrama that combined elements of mobilization for war, disaster relief, the church social, summer camp, and the county fair.”31 With the help of a genial media, Operation Alert officials turned a reenactment of nuclear holocaust into an occasion for upbeat, triumphal predictions about survival. The 1955 drill, for example, featured the participation of President Eisenhower, his cabinet, and 15,000 government employees relocating to secret locations outside the capital. From a cozy encampment in rural Virginia, Eisenhower addressed the country in a live broadcast, appearing sober, confident, and reassuring. He outlined the fictitious casualties: 8 million dead, 6.5 million injured, and 25 million homeless. His final assessment of the simulated armageddon was solemn and religious: “This is my deepest impression of this exercise: the most devout daily prayers that any of us has should be uttered . . . [so] that this kind of disaster never comes to the United States.”32 Although press coverage of these annual rehearsals for war was never entirely positive, FCDA-media cooperation blunted the most pointed criticisms.33 Newsweek reported that thousands had evacuated Rockefeller Center, but also that thousands had ignored the drill completely, including some civil defense officials! Still, the article concluded by parroting the

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FCDA’s favorable passive voice interpretation that “many positive results were apparent.”34 Ad Council representatives found these drills invaluable as public relations vehicles; Ed Lyman called the media coverage of the 1956 Alert “a pretty good show.”35 Even those highly critical of the Eisenhower administration’s secrecy about fallout saw these drills as a useful advertisement for preparedness. Ralph Lapp, for example, told “Face the Nation” reporters that although Operation Alert revealed great deficiencies, it generated a “good psychological reaction” among citizens.36 It is hard to fathom the FCDA’s promotion of evacuation—and Eisenhower’s endorsement of it—given that each Operation Alert confirmed the impossibility of protecting civilians from nuclear attack. FCDA planners repeatedly received data that predicted unsolvable problems in warning time, transportation, reception area welfare support, and public cooperation. When Milwaukee and FCDA officials commissioned a traffic study of the city’s 870,000 inhabitants, planners found that even under perfect conditions (including seven hours of warning), effective evacuation was hopeless. Zeidler conceded to his fellow mayors that the results “were not nearly as optimistic as we hoped.”37 Nevertheless, planners continued to maintain the fiction that evacuation was as simple as a suburban commute during evening rush hour. Speaking at a Washington civil defense conference, Peterson told his audience that New Yorkers and Chicagoans were already seasoned evacuees by virtue of their daily retreat from city to suburb.38 In fact, it is difficult to take seriously most of the evacuation ideas presented to Congress, since they now seem to the modern reader hopelessly naive. During 1955 Senate Armed Services Committee hearings, highlevel AEC and FCDA officials essentially reprised “duck and cover” methods as a way to cope with the vaporizing power of the hydrogen bomb. AEC Commissioner Willard Libby told presiding chairman Estes Kefauver that if a person was caught outdoors with no evacuation options, “he could merely dig a hole and crawl in it and stay there for the first few hours.”39 Peterson proposed digging trenches or burying pipe, four feet in diameter, along newly built interstate highways, in which evacuating commuters could hide. He even suggested that bridges could offer some cover.40 Perhaps sensing the futility of such ideas, Peterson challenged others to come up with alternatives using scare tactics, an approach Eisenhower’s FCDA had supposedly rejected in favor of “balanced reporting”: “People are going to leave town, regardless,” he warned. “They will leave as a bitter, angry, destructive, violent mob, or in some semblance of order.”41 The fact remained that while the FCDA was promoting evacuation, it had no idea how much time people would need to scurry. Nor did the country have an adequate siren warning system in place, despite the FCDA’s statements to the contrary. Planners hailed the new national highway

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system and advancements in radar detection as the cornerstones of safe evacuation, and Peterson predicted that technology would soon give people two to four hours for a running start. But this was mere speculation, and even though many cities had built siren systems by the mid-1950s, these were useless without an integrated nationwide warning system.42 In the end, Operation Alert confirmed what the FCDA already knew: that a directed evacuation of U.S. target cities defied rational calculation and planning. Like all other civil defense measures, evacuation’s success was primarily dependent on human behavior, and the FCDA’s own studies confirmed the unlikelihood of favorable participation; its 1954 University of Michigan survey noted that only 8 percent of both metropolitan and suburban respondents would evacuate if attacked.43 Few in Congress questioned the premises of evacuation, partly because it favored local initiative and local control and partly because its fiscal requirements seemed so minimal—especially relative to the previous “boondoggling” and “wasteful” billion-dollar shelter proposals.

PRIVATIZING PREPAREDNESS

The civil defense establishment had considered family-centered shelter proposals from the beginning, but not until the mid-to-late 1950s did the family shelter assume center stage in national preparedness. It served both a practical and symbolic purpose: it offered a self-help solution for those opposed to a publicly financed communal shelter system, and its simplicity seemed a remedy for the logistical headaches of evacuation. Private familyfinanced shelters also presented an opportunity for Cold War propagandists to tell a story of American postwar triumph—of free-market capitalism, individualism, consumerism, voluntarism, and nuclear family togetherness. The ascendance of the family shelter coincided with the emergence of a postwar ideal that defined “the family” narrowly as husband-breadwinner, wife-homemaker, and several children. The powerful economic, cultural, and psychological reinforcements that sustained this fifties ideal made it appear that the suburban middle-class family represented the normative experience for postwar Americans. Although this ideal was neither attainable nor desirable for all, as this and following chapters will show, it nevertheless saturated civil defense culture as thoroughly as it did the larger culture. People living in nonfamily situations were largely absent from FCDA shelter literature, betraying either an ignorance or laziness on the part of planners to imagine protection scenarios outside the nuclear family framework. In the FCDA’s lexicon, “private” was a synonym for “family,” and “family” was imagined as a harmonious, middle-class, suburban, home-owning entity. “Family” also served as a shorthand description for

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other elements of the shelter program: geographic (located in a singlefamily home), economic (citizen financed), and emotional (emphasizing family togetherness). These assumptions were rarely articulated or challenged by anyone within the FCDA or Congress, for they represented a conventional wisdom about the way people lived that grew out of the social positions and outlooks of the policymakers themselves. 44 However large the nuclear family loomed in planners’ nuclear imaginations, in the early planning years at least, civil defense staff viewed the family shelter as merely a companion piece to a public shelter system. Public and private would coexist, compensating for the inevitable gaps in both state funding and citizen initiative. In fact, the Defense Department’s civil defense liaison, Colonel Barnett Beers, testified before a House committee that private shelters would be an absolute necessity given the likelihood of overcrowding in the public ones.45 Yet Truman’s FCDA sought federal funding only for public or “community-type shelters,” announcing that the cost of private shelters “will rest with each individual family” and that there would be no accompanying tax breaks or mortgage insurance as incentive.46 This laissez-faire attitude toward family shelters stunted early research into their feasibility, resulting in a very rudimentary family “howto” literature premised on flimsy scientific evidence (and the notion that everyone lived in structures with basements). Early home preparedness brochures were nevertheless distributed in large quantities, apparently as a result of popular demand. According to the FCDA, the first of this genre, Survival under Atomic Attack, sold over a million copies in its first year of publication.47 This dual shelter approach generated a rather confusing set of political platitudes about the Cold War obligations of state and citizen. On the one hand FCDA officials lobbied for federal funding by chiding Congress for its callous regard for the lives of constituents, while on the other they grandstanded about the virtues of self-help sheltering. In response to a typical citizen request for home shelter blueprints, an FCDA official wrote: “Your typically ‘American’ attitude of accepting the responsibility for thinking about the protection of your own family . . . and not asking for financial assistance from your government to do your job for you is most encouraging. I am sure that most of our citizens will act and think just as you are doing. This attitude makes our democratic way of life in the U.S. worth fighting for.”48 In fact, the “typical American attitude” at midcentury was to both preach self-reliance and ask for government assistance. Although antiwelfare sentiments were certainly palpable, continued support for core New Deal welfare programs and the popularity of a G.I. “Bill of Rights” illustrate a paradoxical discourse of citizen sacrifice and government subsidy. The fact that this contradiction was so deeply embedded in postwar American political culture made it unremarkable that

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FCDA officials invoked the rhetoric of state obligation and citizen selfhelp in the same breath. Yet this also meant that in Truman’s FCDA there was no discernable ideological center from which shelter policies sprang, resulting in a confused presentation to both Congress and the public about what, if any, protective options should be available for the average citizen. The Eisenhower administration’s mantra of “security with solvency” gave its shelter planning slightly more ideological coherence, but its FCDA, too, pursued readiness along two tracks: evacuation and family shelter. Thus even as planners staged the disastrous ritual evacuation drills, they also began to seriously research home shelters as an apparently simpler and more economical way to family safety. A series of dramatic above ground experiments in the Nevada desert, some sixty-five miles from Las Vegas, enabled the FCDA (and other defense-related agencies) to test the effects of blast and fallout on “average” homes. The 1953 “Operation Doorstep” (so named by the 250 reporters selected to view the shot) and the 1955 “Operation Cue” gave many Americans their first glimpse of what an attack might look like. Researchers subjected the amenities of postwar family life to blast and fallout: included were “typical American homes,” equipped with basement shelters, outdoor “home-type” backyard shelters, “typical passenger cars,” and “representative” fruits, vegetables, meats, frozen and canned goods, and baby foods. Government-surplus furniture and household items, such as appliances and dishes, adorned the inside of the two houses. To give the experiment extra visual persuasiveness, the FCDA placed what it called a “mannequin family” in each home. Dressed in J. C. Penney–donated clothing and positioned in basement shelters, autos, and living and dining rooms, mannequin families confronted the nuclear age head-on (or head-off, as the tests would later show). In glossy detail, an FCDA report depicted the family’s plight in Doorstep: two “before” pictures feature the family relaxing and entertaining dinner guests, but in the “after” photos, furniture is overturned, dishes are broken, and family members and guests are twisted, chipped, and mangled. Mannequin families fared better in the shelters and automobiles, leading FCDA officials to determine that “home-type” shelters and family cars could be effective atomic shields.49 These tests were as much public relations morality plays about the dangers of family apathy as they were scientific experiments. Viewed on television by millions of Americans, Doorstep and Cue defined who and what was endangered by the atomic age: families, homes, consumer commodities. The mannequin family, with its frame house, new car, and household appliances, was a stand-in for all atomic-age families. The peril it endured was intended as both a warning and a reassurance: Americans had to fight apathy in order to spare the structural, material, and emotional enjoyments

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of postwar life from nuclear destruction. The FCDA created films and reports for popular consumption to circulate just this message. As a propaganda film of Doorstep asked its viewers, “Will you, like a mannequin, just sit and wait?”50 Remarkably, in the report to the public on Cue, a surviving television set is pictured amidst the rubble of a demolished home, an unintended but fitting emblem of the FCDA’s sitcom-style survival experiments that always showcased danger but featured a happy ending.51 The spinoff of these experiments on mannequin families was a familycentered self-help literature to augment Eisenhower’s evacuation program. This likely added to the confusion surrounding evacuation policy, but just as Colonel Beers had earlier argued that family shelters were needed to handle the overflow from public shelters, Val Peterson maintained that evacuation’s protective gaps (he never said failures) still made voluntary sheltering a necessity. Indeed, the first family shelter brochure (released only months after Operation Doorstep) was a self-help manual, replete with consumer information on cost and easy construction tips. The booklet spoke directly to the male head of household: “In preparing this manual, [the] assumption has been made that the householder will have to provide shelter for his family at his own expense.”52 Distributed to millions of home owners, this manual was revised annually to incorporate information about new perils such as fallout. Hundreds of instructional guides in this genre followed, including the Home Protection Exercises, a workbook of drills and exercises families could practice in their own homes, and Four Wheels to Survival, a small pamphlet describing the protective value of the family car as both an evacuation aid and a shelter. Citing the Nevada tests as proof for its claim, Four Wheels declared: “Shelter is an unexpected bonus you get from your car. More importantly, the car provides a small movable house. You can get away in it—then live, eat, and sleep in it.”53 Not everyone was taken in by the family drama in the desert. Reporters noted that the bombs dropped on these family scenes were about as strong as those dropped on Japan, which rendered the findings all but meaningless. Life declared Operation Doorstep misleading, and a Washington Post editorial said that such small-scale tests on fake homes and plastic families added “an air of gross unreality” to the proceedings.54 In a way, the FCDA had fallen victim to the very attention it had invited. It staged the experiments as a national media event to teach citizens a lesson about preparedness, but by so closely replicating the bomb’s effects on “Main Street,” it may have generated further skepticism about the chant of self-help survival. To be sure, the FCDA’s political viability and public acceptance depended on such scary reenactments, but the reportage could be only so vivid until it had the potential to backfire.55

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The cumulative effect of the folly of Operation Alert, the simultaneous “gross unreality” and gruesome reality of battered mannequin families, and the continuing bad news about fallout’s toxicity strained the FCDA’s already thin credibility and, remarkably, sparked a renewed effort to build a public shelter system. This new impetus for policy reform came neither from the American public nor from the executive branch but, surprisingly, from Congress. California congressman Chet Holifield coordinated a bipartisan effort to enlarge the federal government’s oversight and funding of civil defense—only several years after Congress had rejected any such proposal. A liberal Democrat known as “Mr. Atomic Energy,” Holifield decided to become an “informed layman” on atomic energy matters in the years following Hiroshima, especially after witnessing atomic tests in the Bikini Islands in 1946. He was soon appointed to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and his tenure there, as well as on the House Committee on Government Operations, earned him a respected position in the forefront of national debates on nuclear issues. Holifield had been generally supportive of civil defense since 1950, but when the 1954 Pacific tests revealed the hydrogen bomb’s destructive capabilities, he called on Eisenhower for an explanation of the nuclear threat “in plain, understandable words,” as well as for “a revolutionary change in our concepts of military offense and defense.” In the glaring flash of the hydrogen blast, he claimed, Operation Alert now looked like “a confession of failure and desperation.”56 In the first six months of 1956, Holifield led his House Subcommittee on Military Operations through yet another thorough investigation of preparedness policies, which culminated in a lengthy report and a legislative draft that would fundamentally alter civil defense as it was currently practiced. Holifield’s legislation envisioned an organization chart very different from previous ones, whereby states and cities now had merely supporting roles to play and the federal government had primary responsibility for implementation and oversight. Most dramatically, Holifield’s bill called for a nationwide public shelter system, reprising but going well beyond Millard Caldwell’s early proposals. Holifield was sensitive to the cries of big government, especially since he had been a defender of the New Deal, but he determined that a $20 billion expenditure could provide shelter from either blast or fallout for all citizens without unduly burdening the state. Anticipating criticism from his congressional peers, he pointed out that public shelter did not obviate the need for citizen selfhelp; even with an expanded federal role in preparedness, he argued, citizens could not abdicate their own responsibilities. In the end, Holifield claimed, imagining and implementing a public shelter system was a matter of sacrifice and determination on the part of both the government and

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the citizenry. As he put it: “A shelter program is the acid test of a national will to build an effective civil defense.”57 This proposal represented a startling reversal, especially given the potency of postwar congressional anti-statism. One reason Holifield’s legislation even saw the light of day was that his stature as a ranking member of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy vested his bill with more credibility than previous ones had had. He knew Eisenhower would have to at least listen to him, even if only to say that he had consulted with “Mr. Atomic Energy” before rejecting the legislative proposal. Another was that new technology had yet again shifted the terms of the policy debate; the new ICBMs would reduce the warning time for evacuation, necessitating a revision of the FCDA’s “not to be there” approach. Finally, Holifield’s committee had successfully generated a policymaking momentum that was hard to slow; by shining the light on poorly conceived evacuation plans, Holifield revived popular discourse (and anxiety) about the bomb, which forced a Republican-controlled FCDA to reconsider its own plans so as to avoid the appearance that the Democrats were the only ones interested in citizens’ safety. Stymied by evacuation’s intractable problems but feeling a kind of amorphous popular and political pressure to act, Eisenhower’s FCDA also did an about-face and presented the president with a massive public shelter proposal costing $32 billion. Presented four days before Christmas in 1956, this was hardly a holiday gift, for it rejected evacuation and put forth a plan that duplicated Holifield’s. Aware of civil defense’s deficiencies but taken aback by his own FCDA’s reverse in course, Eisenhower created yet another special committee to study the matter and make a recommendation. The new Gaither Committee grew into a legion of veteran scientists, military planners, and defense intellectuals who considered preparedness in the largest sense—as a matter of budgets, national resources, armaments, civilian opinion, and labor power. As the Gaither Committee convened, the official policy deliberations about the Holifield plan unfolded in predictable ways. In Congress, there was bipartisan support for preparedness in theory and bipartisan opposition for shelters in practice. The military disliked the price tag; as General Curtis LeMay argued, it was better to spend money “on offensive weapons to deter the war in the first place.”58 The FCDA’s internal debates turned on more practical and psychological issues. Proponents of a national shelter system argued that “running like hell,” as some characterized evacuation, was no longer workable, leaving shelters as the sole option. Some even suggested that a long-term shelter project could stimulate the economy as a public works program. Yet at the same time, planners admitted that the system’s enormous cost might divert financial and human resources away from active defense and permanently toward shelter

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construction and ongoing maintenance. Most important, they worried that public shelters might generate “adverse psychological effects” among citizens, due to the fact that shelters represented “ever-present evidence of personal danger.”59 The Gaither Committee wrestled with similar issues, but its overall conclusions charted a course of incremental militarization that did not sit well with Eisenhower. It recommended a $25 billion shelter program, a plan that mimicked the very proposals Eisenhower had convened it to scrutinize. The Committee argued that public shelters would convey “our will to survive, and our understanding of our responsibilities in a nuclear age” (emphasis theirs).60 Eisenhower was not persuaded by such grandiose prose. At one of the largest National Security Council meetings ever held, Eisenhower, Secretary of State Dulles, the Cabinet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other relevant policymakers gathered to debate the merits of the Gaither Report, including its civil defense plans. Speaking for his president, Dulles argued that the struggle against the Soviet Union “was not just a military struggle,” but an economic one. Draining economic resources for public shelter, he charged, meant there would be less available for offensive methods.61 Remaining faithful to the tenets of the New Look, Eisenhower finally rejected the shelter proposals of Congressman Holifield and his own FCDA and Gaither Committee. This decision was no minor matter, for it was tied to the emergent politics of the missile gap. Indeed, Eisenhower knew that his decision, coming as it did on the heels of Sputnik, might incur partisan wrath. Democrats and some Republican opponents would claim that his parsimonious defense policies had weakened U.S. preparedness (though most of these same politicians would have never passed shelter legislation anyway).62 Further, Eisenhower was aware that his view contradicted the views of important policy groups: the Rockefeller Fund and the Rand Corporation had suggested that a public shelter system was “more promising than has been generally realized.”63 Finally, he also had to contend with a palpable popular hysteria over Sputnik; as he rejected a national shelter program, he also had to work diligently to contain Sputnik-related panics about readiness and accompanying calls to hasten militarization. He warned Gaither supporters in the NSC meeting: “We have before us a big job of molding public opinion as well as of avoiding extremes.”64 Determined to maintain the political upper hand, Eisenhower made several faint concessions to public opinion and Holifield’s increasingly influential attacks on his civil defense program. He issued a National Shelter Policy in 1958, a reorganization of civil defense that finally codified the family shelter as the centerpiece of preparedness.65 As stated in an NSC paper: “The national fallout shelter policy is based firmly on the philosophy

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of the obligation of each property-owner to provide protection on his own premises” (emphasis theirs).66 Although the new policy allowed continued research into the shelter utility of subways, mines, and large public buildings, Eisenhower viewed such efforts as “stimulation” for families, particularly male heads of households, to build their own shelter: “The policy is based upon action by individuals, primarily individuals who are heads of families.”67 Thus, the privatization that had begun during Truman’s tenure reached its apex in the aftermath of Gaither and Sputnik. There would be no more discussion of public shelters, or even public-private collaboration, just talk of self-help and private retreat. And in this policy environment, the language of personal responsibility grew even more extreme: the new National Shelter Policy now recommended “rescuing yourself from entrapment in private structures and shelters.”68 Civil defense planners were not entirely unsympathetic to the charge that privatization disadvantaged those without the financial means to build their own shelter. They admitted that while “individuals may desire to undertake the construction of home shelters, they are often unable to do so due to lack of available finances.” Several ideas were proffered, but the vision was narrow, fixed on single-family home owners exclusively. One plan proposed tax deductions for expenses incurred from home shelter construction. Another posed $2,500 of mortgage insurance from the Federal Housing Administration to encourage new home buyers to build shelters. Officials hoped that by 1963, these incentives would inspire about 25 percent of home owners to install shelters, offering protection for over 44 million people (assuming an average family size of 3.5!). The loss in tax revenue would be significant, they acknowledged, but well below the price tags for shelter first presented to Eisenhower, thus insulating the proposals from charges of welfarism.69 The advantage of these incentives was that they were a kind of federally subsidized self-help, politically palatable to all groups. Although a scanty financial stimulus for privatization, they represented a smart political compromise between the anticommunist, anti-statist crowd, who branded public shelters as Soviet-style big government, and the anticommunist, activist-state camp, who believed the United States became ever more vulnerable without at least some federal investment in preparedness. Planners scarcely entertained more ambitious incentives, for no one really wanted to confront the fact that even privatization (if available to all) would siphon off substantial amounts of federal tax dollars. Whatever the level of government assistance, however, the fact remained that citizens saw their nuclear-age responsibilities expanded, even though they had barely participated in the debate. By 1958 collective shelter solutions had moved fully to the margins of preparedness planning. Eisenhower’s officials liked to put an optimistic, self-empowerment spin on this fact, calling self-help

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sheltering civil defense “from the ground up” or “from the inside out.” But in reality, families would have to fend for themselves when the bombs began to drop.70

THE SYMBOLIC POLITICS OF SHELTER PREPAREDNESS

The privatization of shelter occurred in the arena of formal politics, but it unfolded as well within a complex cultural milieu that made the shelter debates a kind of Cold War culture war that expressed the anxieties and aspirations about the course of postwar militarization. Understanding this assertion requires analysis of how policymakers interpreted and deployed shelters as symbols of American political principles and values. At the symbolic level, the debate over shelters in the United States was a Cold War contest between two societies: one, an American society of autonomous families who voluntarily sheltered and helped themselves during attack, and the other, a Soviet mass society of communally sheltered citizens coerced into civilian defense service. The defense establishment was keenly aware of the shelter’s symbolic utility and used it to their advantage. By focusing on what family shelters represented, civil defense officials could avoid talking about their true function. While so many fought over the actual cost of shelters—public or private—the economic symbolism of the family shelter proved invaluable to cold warriors. The private shelter stood for a system of free markets and unfettered consumption. In the midst of a highly charged ideological battle about the advantages of consumer capitalism over a state-controlled economy, the family shelter performed the cultural work that public shelters could not. A family-centered system enabled householders to select their own type of shelter from the government catalogue, tailor the shelter to their own needs, and then purchase the desired foods, supplies, and recreational activities. As many historians have illustrated, the consumer culture of the 1950s was family oriented, structured around home ownership, automobiles, acquisition, and leisure. Shelter privatization amalgamated all of those interests. Indeed, the family shelter was the one consumer purchase that could figuratively and literally reinforce family and home.71 Family shelters also symbolized core values of free labor and voluntarism in contrast to Soviet “slavery.” The realities of the Soviet shelter program almost did not matter, for FCDA officials interpreted Soviet preparedness through the lens of anticommunism. Hence, reports of Soviet civil defense followed familiar outlines: the FCDA’s 1954 Annual Report explained that while U.S. preparedness was built from “the ground up,” the Soviet system was organized “from [the] top to bottom of the Soviet state,”

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requiring “all the population [to] be trained” (emphasis theirs).72 This was partly true, based on what is currently known about Soviet civil defense. The Soviet government required all of its citizens to learn the basics and to serve the state in some capacity during an emergency. Interestingly, Soviet officials used the same propaganda as the FCDA did (newspapers, films, lectures, etc.) to inspire popular participation. It is also noteworthy that Sweden and Switzerland, routinely praised by the United States as models of preparedness, also required their citizens to perform civil defense service.73 Still, accuracy and nuance were not the hallmarks of Cold War propagandists, so requirements praised in European allies were excoriated in Soviet Russia. Rhetoric contrasting freedom and slavery, of course, made for excellent speeches, such as this one from Peterson’s deputy director, Katherine Howard: “We know of at least one nation’s home defense program that is heavily manned by men and women who have no choice as to whether or not they wish to participate. . . . Their duties are thrust upon them . . . by the same iron-fisted bureaucracy that regulates every other activity in their daily lives.”74 The diplomatic symbolism of the shelter was more ambivalent than the dramatic contest between free and slave labor. Defense elites worried that a massive public shelter system could symbolize to the rest of the world either war readiness or retreat, both of which might alienate America’s allies. John Foster Dulles argued that a shelter program would encourage western European leaders to view the United States as “Fortress America,” a country abandoning its economic obligations to Europe while spending lavishly to make itself attack-ready. The director of the United States Information Agency concurred, adding that Europeans already thought the United States had a “war psychosis.”75 This was hardly the diplomatic symbolism Eisenhower wanted as he tried to shrewdly manage East-West tensions abroad and calm people’s fears about the bomb at home. Yet, even as Ike wanted to avoid the image of overzealous American militarism, he also wanted to project toughness. A national shelter system, he argued, conjured up images of people burrowing underground, which suggested cowardly escape. As early as 1954, Eisenhower pointed out the “adverse psychological impact” of political leaders fleeing to their public shelters; citizens might see this as an official retreat and then panic, or worse, the Soviets might see retreat and then attack. He told his NSC colleagues that he would prefer “the Soviets know he was at Camp David rather than . . . five miles under Pike’s Peak.”76 While the various policy positions surrounding the creation of real shelters grew ever more rigid in the fifties, policy conversations about shelters’ symbolic usefulness became more elastic. The family shelter, in particular, could be either an emblem of peace or of military toughness, depending on which version was needed more at that political moment. If a federally

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financed public shelter system was, alternately, too militaristic or too defensive, family shelters projected peace (but not weakness) and strength (but not militarism). Katherine Howard’s speeches regularly invoked these twin themes. Home shelters were “a chain reaction for peace” but also “a direct answer to the sword rattling of Mr. Khrushchev.” 77 The family shelter was thus an extremely functional, capacious Cold War symbol. It held multiple political and cultural meanings, enabling policymakers to straddle contradictory interpretations and explain away inconsistencies in their policies. In the highly ideological business of Cold War, it became a trope for a complex set of attitudes and values that extended well beyond its putative protective function.

SHELTERS IN PRACTICE

The family shelter played well as Cold War symbol and media copy, but the practice of private sheltering never took root in the United States. Selfhelp defense may have resolved some of the policy headaches of home front militarization, but it also created problems more unwieldy and intractable in the long run. The FCDA’s expectation that citizens would shoulder the domestic burdens of militarization made the success of their effort entirely dependent on the very factors that their own studies had shown were impossible to manage: human attitudes and behaviors. In fact, it is difficult for historians to grasp the human dimensions of the civil defense story for similar reasons; the public’s moods and views about preparedness are as ill-defined today as they were then for those who struggled to track them. Evidence suggests that it was not difficult to get people to pay attention to civil defense when the Cold War heated up, but sustaining popular interest and getting people to move from “bomb consciousness” to a change in behavior ultimately proved impossible. Before examining the infrequent practice of self-help sheltering, it is important to get an overall sense of the public’s attitudes toward civil defense. The FCDA’s exhaustive opinion studies offer a few clues. The second annual University of Michigan study (taken in 1951) showed that over half of those sampled had a generally accurate idea of what civil defense was, and that it ranked high among a list of community problems that people felt needed attention. Seventy-six percent said they would be willing to volunteer a few hours a week for at least six months.78 If the FCDA’s numbers are to be believed, by 1953, 4.5 million people had enlisted in the United States Civil Defense Corps (the name for local and state civil defense volunteers), over double the 1.8 million civil defense workers reported in 1951. Further, as early as 1952, the Warden

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Service, the anchor of neighborhood civil defense efforts, grew to 550,000, and then to 800,000 by 1956.79 Upon closer inspection, however, these statistics do not add up to the kind of grass-roots defense effort hailed by FCDA officials. Despite the FCDA’s media saturation, the 1952 Michigan survey identified a significant problem of public awareness about local activities. Civil defense programs existed in all of the cities where surveys were taken, but only half of the respondents said they were aware of them.80 Again in 1954, survey data showed that only 17 percent of the respondents knew of civil defense activities in their own neighborhoods, and that only 2 percent had participated in civil defense since World War II.81 Moreover, it is unclear who comprised the 4.5 million Civil Defense Corps. States reported participant numbers to the FCDA, but their statistics included civil service workers who had been “trained” (also an ambiguous term) in civil defense as a secondary part of their paid jobs. Thus it is impossible to tell how many of those 4.5 million constituted what would be commonly understood as volunteers—unpaid workers, either unaffiliated or members of civic organizations, who offered free labor to local programs. Finally, it is unclear what the FCDA meant by “participation”: it could have included anything from building a shelter to posting a civil defense poster in one’s window. Even more troubling for FCDA planners was the fact that its own survey data cumulatively showed a tendency among people to believe that the government should take responsibility for civil defense, even if they also believed that they should contribute something to the effort.82 The FCDA reported that by the end of 1952, only one-fifth of those sampled had done anything to make their homes safer in the event of attack.83 Apparently oblivious to the confusion and contradiction in their own propaganda, FCDA planners groused about “the tendency for certain people to hold [incongruous] combinations of attitudes.” They feared that even ardent supporters of civil defense might be unwilling to personally take up the mantle of preparedness. It was one thing, after all, to endorse anticommunism and military readiness, and quite another to build household monuments to such ideologies.84 The imperfection of the public opinion studies and the data on shelter construction make it impossible to say precisely how people viewed shelters and how many of them actually built one in their own home. Aside from anecdotal reminiscences from people who lived through the period, much of the evidence is contained in the civil defense establishment’s own studies. These limitations make the analysis of what was said and what was done a bit fuzzy around the edges. Nevertheless, a cautious evaluation of the extant data indicates a mixture of moods and attitudes about nuclear war and citizen responsibility. The first University of Michigan survey (done in 1950) found that well over half of those queried believed their

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city would be bombed in the event of war, but found little enthusiasm for either public or private shelter construction. When researchers asked what ought to be done to prepare for attack, only 18 percent of the respondents endorsed shelters.85 Investigators found similar trends even after the revelations about fallout. The 1956 Michigan survey found that a majority of citizens felt that they “should do more” but that only 39 percent were willing to volunteer. On the issue of shelter, there was overwhelming support for it (90 percent) as a more practical alternative to evacuation. Yet, what kind of shelter—public or private? The study did not pose this question but noted that “support for civil defense is shallow,” a likely indication that if few were willing to volunteer, a similarly small number would be willing to build home shelters.86 Other evidence suggests that shelters had piqued people’s curiosity, but not enough to spur their actual construction. As early as 1950 and 1951, hundreds of citizens wrote to the NSRB and President Truman requesting information about shelters. Typically, they asked for blueprints and advice on how to build them, often speaking to the president as if he were a friendly neighbor. Male and female homeowners alike asked the president whether he would build a backyard or basement shelter, what he would stock in it, and where one could find the best materials to construct it. A 1951 article in Time confirmed this increasing level of public interest in shelters, reporting that city switchboards were swamped with requests for information on backyard models and that hundreds of Californians had already built them.87 The New York Times, however, reported the closing of a shelter business, arguing that “Americans are not sufficiently warconscious to make the air-raid shelter business profitable.”88 Similarly, the sampling of citizen letters to the government suggests that although there was steady interest in home shelters, there was no groundswell movement or citizen lobby demanding a public shelter system. Among the many voluntary organizations that clamored for federal action on civil defense, calls for a national shelter system were conspicuously absent from their agendas.89 Without such popular outcry, it is no wonder elected leaders felt confident that their repeated rejections of public shelter proposals would harm them little at election time. In the end, as policymakers clumsily escorted shelter policy toward the single-family home, American families did not follow. No reliable figures exist on the number of family shelters built in the fifties, for self-help discouraged the kind of record keeping that would enable a reliable statistical profile. The reported figures vary widely. The House Military Operations Subcommittee’s 1960 survey of state and local civil defense directors offers a shockingly low statistic: 35 states and sixty-six cities reported a total of only 1,565 home shelters, roughly one shelter for every 100,000 Ameri-

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cans.90 That same year, civil defense officials estimated that over a million families had built shelters, still fewer than 1 percent of the population.91 One explanation might be that only 62 percent of American homes were owner occupied, and just over 50 percent of them had a basement available to transform. But even accounting for the large segments of the population that were not in the position to build a home shelter, the figures show that a minuscule number of people purchased and built their own nuclear shields.92 These statistics suggest that the family shelter program was more a phenomenon of policymaker hand-wringing, popular curiosity, and media hype than an actual construction boom. The failure of family-centered privatization is not explained easily, nor is it the result of any one factor, such as budgets or apathy—an oft-used term by planners that requires scrutiny. Rather, the explanations are embedded in the realm of both formal politics and postwar culture, where defense planners and citizens contemplated the meanings of militarization. First, Eisenhower, the military man who wanted to restrain militarization’s excesses, may have dissuaded citizens from building shelters because he inspired popular confidence in the presidency and the military. Although beset by problems of periodic recession, racial conflict, and diplomacy, Eisenhower generally enjoyed high approval ratings; citizens found his “peace and prosperity” message, along with his military and grandfatherly persona, a reassuring buffer against their diffuse atomic anxieties.93 On preparedness issues, his approach was to “get the American public to understand that we are confronting a tough problem but one that we can lick.”94 His New Look reliance on nuclear retaliation raised public confidence in the military to deflect an attack, a confidence that had previously dogged Caldwell and that he had tried, ironically, to erode. In essence, Eisenhower’s endorsements of active defense spoke louder than his advocacy of self-help. Perhaps family shelters could not have become a citizen priority in such a climate. The failure of privatization also reflects people’s resistance to militarism and its contradictions. The need to combine alarm and confidence in every preparedness policy was inherently contradictory, and thus made shelters a very hard sell. Dozens of national security planners in and out of civil defense circles remarked on this. John Foster Dulles, for example, told his NSC colleagues that it was almost impossible “to sustain simultaneously an offensive and defensive mood in a population.”95 Perhaps preparedness demanded too much anxiety for a nation that had recently fought two wars. Val Peterson observed that “constant readiness requires constant apprehension, which Americans refuse to have.” Eisenhower pondered the problem in a way that diagnosed either popular war weariness or nascent

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pacifism. The trouble with getting people to participate, he said, was that they “hated war so much that they could not stir themselves to do the necessary protective activity.”96 These statements are more plausible explanations for the failure of shelter privatization than “apathy,” which implies that citizens made no decisions to reject FCDA admonitions. This is not to suggest that the refusal to build home shelters expressed an organized resistance to Cold War militarism. This was hardly the case. Americans generally stood behind the anticommunism, military expenditures, and foreign interventions of the Cold War. But they repudiated a level of militarization that required them to finance their own security, and they rejected the idea of living with a physical reminder of nuclear war inside or immediately outside of their homes. As Michael Sherry aptly points out, “Americans often celebrated what war gained them, but rarely war’s institutions and burdens.”97 While citizens watched politicians and scientists fail to come up with viable solutions for an unprecedented scientific challenge, they, too, felt overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the problem. Ultimately, they ended up doing what the civil defense establishment did: they conventionalized the bomb, treating it as a more familiar weapon of the pre-atomic age and avoiding the reality of its immense destructive capacity. Where citizens and defense bureaucrats parted ways, however, was in their view of how best to accommodate nuclear weaponry into their daily lives. The FCDA used conventionalization to promote family shelters; citizens used it to avoid building them altogether.98

————— The fact that home bomb shelters are now treated as museum curiosities and Cold War trivia does not mean the historical debates about their feasibility should be treated similarly. The policy struggles over public and private sheltering are perhaps the best window through which to view the tensions of Cold War militarization as they played out in defense, partisan, symbolic and popular arenas. The family shelter merged the disparate worlds of security planners and suburban home dwellers; it fused the security culture of the postwar defense bureaucracy with the family and consumer culture of suburbia. As one of the most significant icons of the nuclear age, the family shelter must be understood as both policy and political discourse, the outcome of an assortment of political-cultural contests and moods. Although the figures reveal a failed privatization policy, the larger impact of the FCDA’s family shelter program cannot be measured statistically. In fact, the program can be judged a success for what it disguised

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about the deeper processes of militarization. Family shelters deflected attention from more fundamental questions about whether protection from such powerful weapons was even possible in the first place, whether there was actually a “bomber gap” or later a “missile gap,” and whether the government’s far-reaching domestic anticommunist initiatives were really necessary. Rather than raising questions, the family shelter implied answers: that Soviet aggression could be countered through private initiative and family fortitude. Here was a militarization that could be purchased, handcrafted, even tastefully decorated! The family shelter may have promised restraint against the military-welfare state, but it abetted continued investment in active defense and encouraged what Ike called the “insidious penetration” of militarism into civilian political culture.99

In one of the first tests of Operation Doorstep, a sophisticated mannequin family entertains in the Nevada desert, sitting only 7,500 feet from ground zero, oblivious to looming nuclear dangers. (Operation Doorstep, 1953, National Archives.)

Moments later . . . dinner’s surprise ending. Operation Doorstep’s glossy brochure warned, “This party group was caught unprepared . . .” (Operation Doorstep, 1953, National Archives)

Another test featured a nuclear family of mannequins enjoying togetherness in their suburban living room 7,500 feet from ground zero. (Operation Doorstep, 1953, National Archives)

Now a family torn apart, due to their unwillingness to practice home protection together. (Operation Doorstep, 1953, National Archives)

The house not in the middle, littered with debris, an “eyesore” according to the narrator of the FDCA film The House in the Middle. This mockup in the Nevada desert would be momentarily subjected to blast to show housewives that dirty homes deserved what they got. (Operation Doorstep, 1953, National Archives)

Real workers stock the larder for fake families. The food test program subjected thousands of commercial products to numbing blasts in an effort to identify durable and nutritious family menus that housewives could prepare underground. (Operation Cue, 1955, National Archives)

The FDCA’s Home Protection Exercises recommended that families score their progress in learning self-help techniques on this handy chart. (FCDA, Home Protection Exercises, 1956)

A typical government recruitment poster promoting shelters as the only defense against fallout. (National Archives, 1959)

Lessons learned. This model family drilled itself in self-help techniques, built its shelter, and is now safely tucked away waiting for the worst. (Operation Doorstep, 1953 National Archives)

CHAPTER THREE

The Nuclear Family: Militarizing Domesticity, Domesticating War

SHORTLY after the National Shelter Policy became official, a Princeton University psychology professor escorted a married couple and their three small children into a fallout shelter (in the basement of Princeton’s psychology building), where they resided for fourteen days to test the feasibility of shelter occupancy. For their participation in “Project Hideaway,” the Powner family received five hundred dollars “to repay the normal wages lost to the breadwinner” and a little extra for their heroic feat. It was the first experiment to test shelter inhabitance for a period as long as two weeks, so the Powners’ emotional and physical states were studied closely before, during, and after their stay. Prior to confinement, each family member received a thorough physical and psychiatric review. During their waking and sleeping hours, the Powners were monitored, unknowingly, by a microphone. When the experiment ended, they again endured a battery of tests to see if shelter living rendered any ill effects. But the Princeton professor who ran the study reported only good news to his federal government sponsors. The middle child had suffered a bit, as evidenced by his moody withdrawal from family activities, but the three year old “was quickly brought out of this attitude by one administration of a tranquilizer” (the adults had whiskey), and follow-up exams showed that he was “perfectly all right.” The final report concluded that aside from this glitch, the Powners emerged “with a very positive attitude toward shelter life.”1 Project Hideaway was kept secret before it was underway, but when the Powners finally climbed out of the shelter, the media swarmed, giving them a chance to speak directly to their peers about the lessons and policy implications of the experiment. Mr. Powner spoke for the entire family, saying, “It really wasn’t as bad as I thought. . . . shelters are practical and I think everyone should build one in his own home.” His glowing account suggested that shelters offered some valuable intangibles beyond fallout protection—most importantly, according to the report, the “integration of the family.” Indeed, the Princeton researcher noted improved relationships among the children and the father’s “opportunity to get to know his children better,” resulting happily in Mr. Powner’s “new-found respect for the entire family.” It seemed that “shelter life had produced a positive attitude toward the family,” just as the Powners’ togetherness had fostered

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a positive attitude toward the shelter. This was the symbiosis civil defense planners were looking for: a civil defense system that nurtured and valorized ideal families as it shielded and secured real ones.2 Project Hideaway confirmed what civil defense planners had gradually come to believe—that militarization and privatization could be synergistic when the family functioned as the instrument of privatization. As opposition to statist solutions coalesced in the early fifties and peaked with Eisenhower’s 1958 shelter policy, civil defense planners fashioned self-help policies around one of the most powerful postwar images besides the mushroom cloud: the nuclear family, with its male-breadwinner father, a nonemployed mother, and, of course, children. Symbolically, this ideal represented an organic unity, a model of commitment and cohesion for a diverse citizenry fighting a common enemy. Practically, family-based civil defense offered a private solution for a public-military problem; the costs of nuclear attack would be borne by family units, a family-style self-help. Further, family preparedness buttressed the national security establishment’s ongoing effort to “domesticate” the bomb; FCDA planners made the bomb familiar by making it familial. To be sure, postwar family ideology did not determine privatization policies, but to the extent that “the family” was a familiar invocation of wartime and a profoundly resonant ideal in the fifties, it was a familiar discourse that meshed comfortably with the language of privatization. The centrality of ideal and real families to the privatization of defense proved both a blessing and a curse for civil defense planners. The blessing was that family-centered preparedness looked benign, clearly off the continuum of Cold War militarization. Families like the Powners, not military generals, were the mouthpieces of militarization, banishing the specter of formal militarism while neatly cloaking ambient militarism. The curse, however, was that a militarization this amorphous was too malleable to serve only FCDA interests. By asking citizens to share the burdens of militarization, civil defense planners were asking citizens to share the fear, which, as planners knew, was not a human emotion easily shaped and controlled. During and after an attack, individualism could easily undermine familialism, shattering the assumption that family members’ interests were always unitary. Further, persuading families, hailed as private entities, to perform a quasi-military public function meant that the sentimental and the regimental would have to commingle. Could families adopt the right blend of military discipline and stoicism and fulfill their paramilitary duties without losing their affective qualities? FCDA planners hoped that the nuclear family—both the ideal and the real—could absorb the various contradictions of militarization in such a way that American preparedness would seem more domestic than militaristic.3

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THE FRONT LAWN AS THE FRONT LINE

Civil defense strategists sought to construct a modern family for a modern war. They hoped the family could perform two basic functions: physical protection (either shelter or evacuation) and the inculcation of values and behaviors that promoted self-help. NSRB planners had originally envisioned civil defense as a web of relationships with the family squarely at the center. The Blue Book first depicted this concept as four concentric circles. In the smallest circle, at the very center, stood the individual, “calm and well trained,” along with the family, labeled as “the base of organized self-protection.” Farther from the center in the second circle stood the city, and the peripheral third and fourth circles encompassed the state and federal governments, all delineated as supplemental supports for the family’s physical and psychological self-maintenance. This pattern implied that the Cold War was best interpreted and experienced as a family affair. The family would act as filter, mediator, and educator for citizens trying to understand the complexities and exigencies of the nuclear age.4 Civil defense administrators laid the groundwork for this schema in the early fifties by assembling the theoretical frameworks through which families could assimilate the changes of modern warfare. The confluence of anticommunism, U.S. diplomatic ambition, and new technology, they argued, created a military mobilization with new rules and protocols. As NSRB planner Martha Sharp described it: “The U.S. is at war today—a cold war—a new kind of war—a war of nerves . . . waged by new techniques that we have never known and whose danger we do not appreciate.”5 The seemingly clear distinctions between soldier and civilian, protector and protected had faded, and national security, therefore, could no longer be the exclusive preoccupation of paid defense intellectuals. The front lawn was now the front line. Atomic age vulnerability translated into new responsibility; citizens had to think of themselves as an integral part of a military mobilization even more than they had during World War II, for they were now vulnerable as never before. This new situation demanded a rewriting of old war scripts. Civil defense planners refashioned the World War II notion of fighting for the American family into a new ideal that positioned the family not as the object-prize of military struggle but as the engine and soldier of the battle itself.6 President Eisenhower himself acknowledged the Cold War family as “a new element . . . in the total strength of the nation.”7 FCDA strategists wanted families to think of themselves not merely as havens for returning soldiers or propaganda vehicles but as combatants with military commitments comparable to those of enlistees: “For the first time,” remarked the FCDA’s Katherine Howard, “the personal defense of our

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homes is . . . being rated as co-equal in importance with our military defense” (emphasis hers).8 Much as in the military, family warriors would not act as self-interested soldiers but as part of a corporate whole, unified in interests and purpose. This paramilitary family may have looked familiar to many postwar Americans even though it was more ideal than real. Historians have detailed the political and cultural cachet of the nuclear family in 1950s. Popular media, political, and social scientific discourses extolled nuclear family formation and stigmatized anything else. Diverse groups of opinion leaders, especially politicians, psychologists, and advertisers, defined the family as a defense against political subversion, gender and sexual deviance, and myriad social problems. In the context of McCarthyism and the Cold War, home and family represented national security—broadly defined. As Elaine Tyler May has argued, the home became an instrument of containment, and “within its walls, potentially dangerous social forces of the new age might be tamed.”9 Statistical trends show only a superficial match between the FCDA’s domestic imagery and postwar family life. True, marriage rates reached an all-time high in the years after World War II, and both men and women married at younger ages. And although the divorce rate did not dramatically decrease, it stabilized considerably. Further, reversing a century-long decline in birthrates, women of childbearing age in this period had more children at younger ages and spaced their births closer together than their mothers had. Other evidence, however, shows a less homogeneous family history than suggested by the FCDA’s prescriptive literature. For example, women’s labor force participation rates climbed in the 1950s, and married women with children comprised the majority of that growth. Not all families enjoyed the postwar consumer boom either. Twenty-five percent of Americans were poor in the mid-fifties, many of them without access to housing supports or food stamps. And though home ownership soared relative to the rates during the Depression and war, 38 percent of families still did not own their residences.10 The irony of the FCDA’s family discourse was not so much that it obscured the realities of family life (so did many other family discourses of the time) but that it portrayed the suburbanized postwar family as eternal and self-made when, in fact, government supports had facilitated its growth and abetted its endurance. As Stephanie Coontz has shown, the traditional 1950s family was not only “a new invention; it was also a historical fluke, based on a unique and temporary conjuncture of economic, social, and political factors.”11 The family boom of the postwar period was underwritten by a host of government subsidies, without which millions of working people would have had to forestall or abandon

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altogether their dreams of education, home ownership, and a family life that presumed a certain level of consumption and economic stability. And yet, civil defense planners called the postwar family a “self-contained, independent unit,” neither dependent upon nor encumbered by the government’s intervention. All of the external supports that made this family form possible were rendered invisible in civil defense literature; FCDA families were proudly autonomous and self-sufficient. Here, indeed, was the perfect vehicle for selling self-help over the long haul of Cold War.12 So, the family that was bred, in large part, by the state’s patronage would have to survive nuclear attack without it. From the FCDA’s perspective, this was intellectually defensible. Families had historically served both a regulatory and protective function, and despite the formidable displacements of depression and war, they had remained for all racial and economic groups one of the most basic organizational units of a modernizing society. The demographic indicators seemed to imply a permanence to the postwar family boom—and certainly, social observers confidently predicted the nuclear family’s endurance. But despite the FCDA’s confidence in the postwar family’s resiliency, it was already in flux. That family preparedness campaigns, especially shelter policies, largely ignored this fact was perhaps unremarkable to strategists because of their extraordinarily family-centered context. Planners conceivably generalized from their own experiences, or perhaps they were loath to take on the project of incorporating nonfamily individuals into already complex defense schemas. In fact, self-help could have been imagined in ways that incorporated more thoroughly the fictive kin of friends, neighbors, coworkers, teachers—the people who inhabited the various communities of which each family member was a part. Survival scenarios could have been less insistent that blood relatives face the blast huddled together. Perhaps planners knew implicitly that people would practice civil defense this way by default, for their most popular attack scenarios occurred during the day, when family members were scattered about and forced to rely on nonfamily affiliates at work or school. Still, the biological nuclear family stood stubbornly at the center of every civil defense policy and public relations effort. The advantage of this, of course, was that wishful thinking about the simplicity of family life would simplify the task of devising protection for some 160 million people.

DOMESTICATING THE BOMB

“The new stronghold of national security is in our homes,” FCDA administrator Katherine Howard proclaimed to a gathering of eager civil defense volunteers.13 Howard was not speaking metaphorically; she and her FCDA

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cohort hoped that millions of Americans would really make the necessary modifications to make their homes attack-ready. As women’s affairs director for the FCDA, Howard was a chief purveyor of home protection literature, but the entire FCDA dedicated itself to getting the word out about family preparedness. Through this effort, civil defense planners sought to change fundamentally the meanings of family, home, and modern warfare, all while making home defense seem like a modest alteration. The government assigned the family unprecedented military meaning and function, and this, in turn, nourished the ongoing reconfiguration of warfare into a psychological format, since family self-help was as much about mental preparation as it was about physical protection. It should be noted, too, that the extent of this reorientation of family life was considerable for a generation who had already accommodated varying degrees of militarization during previous wars. Yet the open-ended commitments of the Cold War suggested that home protection represented not another temporary state of emergency but a permanent realignment of family priorities. The identification of nuclear war with home and family domesticated the bomb, even war itself, enabling the FCDA to vest families with some of the burdens of militarization without seeming to do so. “Domestication” as it was practiced by the FCDA was a rhetorical gambit to make the bomb and its attendant dangers more familiar, less threatening, thoroughly disassociated from war and militarism through an association with family—broadly defined. It was akin to but not identical to “conventionalization,” a characterization of nuclear bombs as no more harmful than conventional weapons. Civil defense planners were by no means the only ones to domesticate or conventionalize nuclear matters, but they supplied the central motifs for others to use. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has identified domestication as one aspect of “nuclear numbing,” a process in which people suppress, minimize, or deny the horrors of nuclear war. Yet because Americans were not survivors but anticipators of atomic attack, civil defense planners pursued a domestication strategy that not so much numbed people to nuclear war, but detoxified their imaginings of it. Instead of macabre scenarios of death, domestication showcased people’s ability to live in a state of constant readiness.14 Domestication took many forms, but at its most basic, it involved breaking down global problems into local ones with familiar solutions. Katherine Howard argued that citizens should avoid the doomsday statistics of nuclear scientists, with their grim prognostications about the effects of even bigger bombs: “We are taking in too much territory in our global worrying,” she said. Although the dangers of nuclear war seemed to be growing more unwieldy and incomprehensible, she recommended: “The important thing is to get away from those overwhelming figures, and down to home facts.”15

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Transported from global concerns to “home facts,” families could now confront the bomb more readily in the privacy and familiarity of their living rooms. Inside the home, domestication involved the presentation of nuclear danger as one of many household hazards—dangerous but not unmanageable and, of course, ultimately the family’s responsibility. One of the first booklets to promulgate this notion was Survival under Atomic Attack, released by the NSRB in fall 1950, and updated and distributed to millions of people throughout the decade. Survival’s most literal domestication of nuclear war was the exhortation to practice “fireproof housekeeping.” This recommendation was rooted in the belief that fire from the blast, not radiation, posed the greatest danger to people and property. Dirty, cluttered homes were firetraps, so good housecleaning could mean the difference between life and death. Even the dangerous lingering radioactivity could also be eradicated through rudimentary housekeeping techniques. Survival claimed that “radioactive particles act much the same as ordinary, everyday dust,” some of which could be simply wiped away with a rag. In the kitchen, wiping the top of cans before opening them would “remove most of the pollution that may have gotten on them.” Utensils could also be decontaminated by washing them in soap and water. “Take these precautions,” Survival recommended, “but don’t worry. There isn’t much chance really dangerous amounts will pile up in the house.”16 Domestication literally cleaned up the language of nuclear warfare; it sanitized the images and rhetoric in a desperate attempt to prevent the panic, fatalism, and resistance that the FCDA’s social scientists had predicted. Nothing was as it seemed in civil defense literature: fallout was dust, family fire drills were “games,” and blast or fallout shelters were “family,” “family-type,” or “home” shelters. Survival’s authors even admitted an ulterior motive in distributing an educational pamphlet that had so little scientific foundation, noting that its dissemination was useful “if for no other reasons than its psychological value.”17 Yet domestication was more than psychological wordplay; it created a political environment in which arguments favoring privatization could thrive. Scholars and antinuclear activists have discussed domestication’s psychic dimensions, but no one has yet analyzed it as a legitimating premise for civil defense’s privatization. In fact, it is difficult to describe how this occurred, because domestication so effectively foreclosed other kinds of discussions that it seemed preparedness inevitably belonged in the home as a private burden. In a sense, domestication functioned as a kind of background music that set just the right mood for policymakers to debate public versus private solutions.18 It is essential to think of the domestication of the bomb and the privatization of preparedness as mutual processes, each dependent upon the other for persuasive power and effective-

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ness. There was no domestication without an available and widely recognizable family ideology, nor was there any way to imagine privatization without that family discourse. Indeed, domesticated images of nuclear war bolstered the case for privatization by making self-help sheltering seem a feasible defense and reasonable government policy. Militarization (with its martial values and military orientation) and domestication (with its family values and homeward orientation) did not work at cross-purposes; rather, they converged to create a fairly well articulated privatization policy which held that the “responsibility for the civil defense of the nation lay squarely in the laps of the people themselves.”19 In sum, domestication’s impact was more than merely psychic: it was political, for it created a policy framework in which planners and citizens could reasonably entertain the notion of a family-centered militarization dependent largely on private initiative. It is worth going into greater detail here about family militarization in order to grasp its behavioral and psychological dimensions, as well as to understand how average families might have perceived it. The family could demonstrate its full acceptance of its nuclear-age responsibilities by adapting certain military-style behaviors as well as a worldview that understood readiness as infinite. The Blue Book had decreed that the “family unit . . . attacks its own problems,” but, again, how to translate platitudes into strategy remained the more daunting question.20 FCDA planners placed their faith in simple, even old-fashioned methods to teach people about the complexities of modern warfare. They hoped that through exposure to training materials (brochures, films, workbooks), adapted to the needs of a particular community and distributed and taught by volunteers, “the family itself will act . . . and enter into the Civil Defense mechanism.”21 Families could encounter these materials in a wide variety of venues: at the grocery store, where local volunteers typically put together special displays on what supplies every family shelter should contain; at the public library, where one could find a literature table or a bulletin board featuring family preparedness ideas; or at a neighborhood meeting organized by a volunteer block warden armed with FCDA films and pamphlets. Parents were often exposed to FCDA literature through their children, who were taught at school to duck and cover or who might have been affiliated with youth organizations (such as scouting) that tended to be deeply involved in civil defense. Any adult active in the PTA, social clubs, or local civic groups would likely encounter home protection literature through such affiliations, as the FCDA sent targeted mailings to such groups. Even reclusive people would be unable to ignore the parade of radio and television public service announcements trumpeting the importance of family preparedness.

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Although Truman’s FCDA had worked reasonably hard to develop a family-centered training program, starting in 1953, “public education was aimed more and more at family indoctrination, training, and participation,” according to one FCDA report.22 In fact, the family bent of civil defense appears to have grown more pronounced in the Eisenhower years, partly because Eisenhower’s staff benefited from their predecessors’ work, and perhaps partly because family discourses in the larger culture continued to multiply as the decade proceeded. Drawing on this momentum, Ike’s FCDA officials dedicated themselves to “implementing family action at the local level,” hoping to make family self-help “the thing to do,” just as saving tin or planting victory gardens had been during World War II.23 Anchoring this “family indoctrination” effort was a new manual called the Home Protection Exercises, a “family action program” designed to train parents and children in the basics of preparedness. First released in 1953 and revised annually thereafter, the Home Protection Exercises represented the FCDA’s most ambitious effort to codify the gospel of family self-help. The booklet’s aim was nothing less than to transform families into welltrained paramilitary units that required little or no government assistance. The FCDA condensed the concept of preparedness into eight basic “family action exercises”: warning siren recognition, home shelter preparation, home firefighting and prevention, rescue techniques, food and water storage, and first aid. These were broken down even further into smaller, discrete tasks that both children and adults could perform. The Home Protection Exercises featured spaces for the names of the persons responsible for each task, as well as the name of an alternate or helper. Families were supposed to drill themselves and then record their progress in a grid provided at conclusion of the booklet. After each rehearsal, family members were supposed to assess their own performance. “In addition to deciding how to do the whole job better,” the booklet instructed, “try next to find ways to do it faster.” If some members were not performing according to the standards, the Home Protection Exercises advised: “Drill the lagging members of the family again.” The booklet further recommended: “Keep practicing until you can conscientiously score the family performance as ‘excellent.’ Then review and refresh your preparations and practice at least once every 3 months.” The implication of the Exercises’ repeated pleas about rehearsing the drill was that families would have only themselves to blame if their skills grew rusty and they were caught unprepared.24 The campaign to redefine families as paramilitary units also implied a significant reworking of the internal relations of the family itself. Spousal and parental relationships would now have to accommodate the task orientation, regulation and assessment called for by the Exercises. Timed drills, regular evaluation, and supervision of “lagging family members” would now be the bases upon which family members would decide how

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much they could depend on and trust one another. Indeed, as Guy Oakes has argued, the practice and timing of discrete skills, as well as their close monitoring and regular evaluation, approximated a kind of military Taylorism, whereby the family became the site of the rationalized production of nuclear preparedness.25 FCDA planners, of course, avoided presenting home protection methods in ways that suggested the drills were more than extensions of family chores. They declared the family a demilitarized zone even as they tried to militarize it. Although this level of household militarization certainly implied changes in the relationships between family members, it required no modification of gender or generational scripts. Family preparedness borrowed from and reinforced the traditional social arrangements of the period. In fact, home protection was a militarized elaboration of postwar domesticity, in which the husband assumed the role of sergeant and the wife acted as second in command.26 FCDA literature assigned men tasks that required physical strength or were more dangerous, while women were obligated to care for children or the elderly, stock the shelter with food, perform “light rescue,” and nurse the wounded. In general, family preparedness campaigns depicted women as concerned mothers, preoccupied with fulfilling the physical and emotional needs of others. Men, too, appeared as concerned fathers; indeed, Project Hideaway had demonstrated that shelter life could enrich a father’s bond with his children, as Mr. Powner himself had reported. But men’s paternal responsibilities as depicted in FCDA literature were less about supplying hands-on care for family members and more about providing the dynamic leadership that would pull the family through attack and recovery. As Katherine Howard described evacuation, the “father as head of the family” leads the members to another location, while the mother, “helping in the planning,” protects the children “through making preparations . . . interesting and even fun.”27 Yet despite the centrality of the father’s managerial role, he was less of a presence in the literature than one might think, given the paramilitary tenor of civil defense. As we shall see later, the FCDA’s decision to make preparedness a family affair brought women to the center of the militarizing project. Fathers were important, but the increasing family orientation of civil defense gradually pushed paternal rhetoric to the background as it accentuated women’s maternal protective role.28 Still, the overall emphasis on family traditionalism in FCDA literature suggested that the anxieties about family and gender role rearrangements that had loomed large during World War II would not materialize again in this Cold War mobilization. In fact, there was a hint of anxious reassurance in most FCDA propaganda about the fact that postwar militarization would bring families closer (as it had the Powners), not tear them apart as they had been in wartime. The lingering worries about wartime gender

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and family realignments, however temporary they had actually been in the forties, forced civil defense officials to navigate a narrow course. They had to convey the sense that the world situation was urgent enough to warrant the kind of family adjustments advised by the Home Protection Exercises but not pressing enough to warrant the gender role rearrangements of World War II. This resulted in a family action propaganda that defined home defense as an act of family preservation and an extension of conventional gender roles. As Katherine Howard liked to point out, civil defense was created to enable people to “keep their homes, not to lose them; to protect and preserve their families, not to scatter and dissolve them” (emphasis hers). In fact, when Howard was hired at the FCDA, she represented herself as a mother-housewife whose new duties would not interfere with her family responsibilities. As one newspaper announced her hiring: “Mrs. Howard Will Stick to Knitting along with Her New Official Duties.”29 Whether or how the home protection campaigns contributed to the hardening of gender ideologies in the larger culture is nearly impossible to assess. Setting aside for a moment references to “fireproof housekeeping,” the FCDA’s home protection literature was virtually indistinguishable from the family advice literature so popular in the 1950s. To the extent that the FCDA’s prescriptions mimicked these widely circulating family discourses, it seems plausible that they reinforced other professional and popular preachments about the importance of family and gender traditionalism. Similarly, tracing the ways in which family preparedness bolstered militarization is difficult, for myriad factors fostered militarization and it was manifest in different ways. It can be argued, however, that programs like the Home Protection Exercises stand out as one of the government’s most comprehensive attempts to realign family life around national security priorities, and given this marriage of family and martial values, it is safe to say that home protection campaigns, at the very least, certified the rhetoric and ambitions of cold warriors. Indeed, FCDA administrators hoped family self-help would personalize the Cold War and give citizens a stake in fighting it from their living rooms. In this sense, home protection was a booster shot for the diverse and diffuse efforts to achieve total security. Family preparedness fed ambient militarism by making families—not the state—the messengers and practitioners of Cold War militarization.

FAMILY FEUDS

Family preparedness was predicated on the idea that families would remain intact during and after attack, not break apart into a group of individuals concerned only for their own well-being. Without this unit

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cohesion, there was no civil defense. Of course, the ideal families of FCDA literature were no indicator of what real families might do under stress, and although planners only grudgingly acknowledged this, they were savvy enough to try to anticipate barriers to family militarization. Their faith in home protection was tempered by the understanding that family militarization could be as complex as the family itself, subject to the whims of emotion, competing loyalties, and conflicting interests. The possible obstacles to family unity ranged from the hollowness and ambiguity of the FCDA’s own family-security rhetoric to unforeseen conflicts between family and national loyalties, to policy negotiations over definitions of public and private. Mindful of the potential potholes of granting the nuclear family so much responsibility—and, in a way, control—over home front militarization, civil defense planners thus labored to craft a mobilization strategy that both exalted family unity and anticipated its breakdown. Working against an effective family action strategy was first the malleability of the terms “family” and “national security,” concepts used so synonymously by the FCDA that they seemed indistinguishable. “The family” echoed throughout postwar political culture, making it a convenient invocation for FCDA planners but also creating difficulties for them in harnessing a particular set of behaviors. Similarly, “national security’s” myriad meanings gave the term an expansive political and social power, but its murkiness, too, worked against the FCDA because it prescribed no specific set of protective tasks. In fact, it could be argued that postwar Americans understood national security primarily in negative terms—that is, practicing national security meant not engaging in certain kinds of behaviors that could be judged suspicious or subversive. The ambiguity of these terms was sometimes made worse by defense planners themselves, who tended to get caught up in lofty rhetoric about family and nation at the expense of clarity about survival. Many of their speeches left the details of evacuation or shelter living to the imagination of the listener. FCDA officials tried to mix abstract Cold War boosterism with specific instruction, but it was not easy to stir audiences to action with details about such things as shelter sanitation practices. Even President Eisenhower was guilty of obfuscation. For example, several days after his “Atoms for Peace” address before the United Nations, FCDA Public Affairs Director John DeChant complained to a presidential aide that although Eisenhower had done an adequate job explaining the nuclear threat, he gave citizens nothing concrete to do about it. “By the nature and content of the speech,” DeChant lamented, “the American people were not called upon for any direct personal effort or cooperation.”30 Although they groused about their presidents, planners, too, found it difficult to both cheerlead family militarization and give specific marching orders about how it should be done.

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The imperfect translation of global affairs into family action, however, was not the principal obstacle to home front readiness. Rather, the liabilities of family militarization were rooted in the planning assumptions themselves. The FCDA’s family ideal implied a false unity, a convergence of interests and psyches that did not exist either within or among families during peacetime, much less under duress. Moreover, it assumed a unity of interest and purpose between family and nation—specifically, that family preparedness and national security were not nor could ever be in conflict. In fact, planners hoped that the family could absorb and mediate most of the social, political, and economic disruptions that would result from attack. Citing the conflict-resolution experiences that came with family life, as well as the built-in control mechanisms of parental supervision, the FCDA posited the family as the best bet for brokering attack-related conflicts in the larger society. In Cold War parlance, the family was the first domino, and if it fell, so would the rest of society. As one official testified to the Senate, “attacks could produce . . . the breakup of families, the demoralization of whole communities, and the failure or inability of survivors to return promptly to duty.”31 The home shelter stood as a testament to these theories about the family’s positive social value in the age of vulnerability. Inside the shelter, according to FCDA literature, parents and children could enjoy leisure time together, playing games, reading aloud, listening to music. Mrs. Powner, for example, played with and tutored her children, and had even learned to paint during her confinement. More importantly, the enforced togetherness of shelter refuge could strengthen family relationships, particularly between fathers (presumed to be absentee white-collar breadwinners) and children, as evidenced by Mr. Powner’s positive experiences with his own toddlers. As Project Hideaway’s final report recommended, “Parents should not view shelter life with children apprehensively,” for children’s needs could draw family members closer together. And when not in use, the shelter itself could foster family cohesion by functioning as a recreation room, a place for families to go to practice home protection tasks or enjoy some quality time together. As Project Hideaway suggested, the occasional overnight stay in the family shelter could generate “positive associations with the shelter” as well as “the excitement of camping out.”32 Outside the shelter, however, it was far from certain if families would prove just as cohesive and contributive to the defense effort. FCDA planners pored over their piles of human behavior studies, looking for clues to help them construct predictive models. An oft-cited 1952 Johns Hopkins study of human behavior during an industrial explosion in Texas seemed to offer promising information. In general, social scientific observers noted no mass hysteria or panic. Strangers helped one another out of the rubble, and with the exception of some looters, citizens generally came

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to one another’s aid and comfort. Loyalty to family, as opposed to loyalty to coworkers, proved to be the “strongest tie” exhibited by survivors of the emergency, and the family acted as “the basic social unit” of recovery.33 Yet this same study also raised doubts that family and national interests were synonymous. It reported that “frantic parents rushing about looking for children . . . caused great confusion” and ultimately hampered recovery efforts.34 Sociologist Lewis Killian, who had also studied the explosion, found that the men working at the blast site felt the “greatest inner conflict” from being forced to choose between saving their workplace or going home to family. “Much of the initial confusion, disorder, and seemingly complete disorganization,” he noted, “was the result of the rush of individuals to find and rejoin their families.” He found this same set of conflicting loyalties among the rescue workers as well. Most people resolved this conflict by “favoring the family.”35 “Favoring the family” was, of course, the de facto slogan of postwar civil defense, but the scenario Killian described actually disturbed strategists. In their view, staffing the factories was the most important postattack activity, for industrial production was surely the basis of any victory and recovery in the next war. A strong impulse toward family protection, planners worried, might triumph over a military-industrial imperative to staff the production lines. Skepticism about the ability of citizens to negotiate these competing interests surfaced quietly at first and then circulated widely among policymakers and interested observers. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Eugene Rabinowitch, for example, wrote that a sense of obligation to the workplace or government would evaporate as quickly as the target site: “In America individualism dominates the psychology of the average man, and the natural response of everybody to sudden disaster will be to save himself and his family.”36 Nowhere was this contest between family loyalty and national interest more conspicuous than in the FCDA’s evacuation policies. Evacuation blueprints for a daytime attack dictated that people had to evacuate from where they stood as soon as sirens sounded. This meant that fathers evacuated with coworkers, children with teachers and schoolmates, and that mothers (presumed to be nonemployed) left their homes alone or with neighbors (other housewives). No one was allowed to search for family members first. Assuming everyone survived, family members could reunite at a designated evacuation center after registering their names with authorities. FCDA officials were well aware that these protocols put people in a position of choosing between what was safest for their community and country versus what they wanted for their families and themselves, but they feared that family reunification might make already disorganized evacuation processes even more chaotic. As Val Peterson cautioned,

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if people scrambled to find family first, “we will just be running around like ants in a big hill, and we will be bombed, all of us.”37 Requiring people to suppress strong familial emotions for the sake of orderly evacuation might have looked, paradoxically, like an antifamily measure, a consideration not lost on FCDA planners. Indeed, they worried openly that the prohibition on instant family unification would engender popular resistance. Katherine Howard warned her colleagues that preventing the retrieval of children was “contrary to any mother’s or father’s feeling.” As the FCDA’s women’s affairs director, Howard was particularly concerned about the difficulty of convincing housewives that an evacuation policy that forestalled parental protection of children was actually pro-family. In fact, she pointed to a potentially malignant side to family loyalty, arguing that without proper evacuation training, a woman’s “concern for her family may become a bad thing, not a good thing. The motivation of family life is a force not lightly to be interfered with. . . . Many things can divert it into destructive channels.”38 Despite their worries about overzealous family members flouting evacuation orders and hampering recovery, FCDA officials held fast to the dream of a well-trained paramilitary family. They considered a number of possible solutions that could help parents and children reconcile conflicting interests under stress of attack. Social science consultants, not surprisingly, recommended more studies. Lewis Killian recommended additional public opinion research to “make possible the prediction of the choices that will be made by individuals” so that planners could devise the appropriate training programs. But this was, of course, a path already being followed, largely unsuccessfully, via the University of Michigan opinion studies.39 FCDA planners thought that a taut and speedy family reunification procedure—publicized widely—might reassure potential evacuees and thus promise better results. Under the auspices of its welfare planning office, the FCDA designed a system whereby separated family members could reunite through a registration system. A “welfare inquiry” card could launch a search on family members feared missing, injured, hospitalized, or dead, and surviving evacuees could send a “safety notification card” to relatives, friends, employers, and anyone else concerned about their whereabouts. The card would read: “I am safe and can be reached at this address,” and the federal government would pay the postage (a benefit duly noted on the sample card!).40 Still, even this system presumed an order and discipline among civilians akin to that of the military, and evinced a seemingly unswerving faith in the power of rational planning to compel ordinary people to behave in extraordinary ways. Indeed, it is striking how the FCDA, an agency that declared its opposition to military rule, increasingly borrowed training tactics from the military as it grew more desperate to impose rational planning on the chaos

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of war. Just as the regular military depended upon repeated drilling to instill in soldiers particular habits and relations to authority, so, too, did the paramilitary FCDA premise its training programs on repetitions, hierarchies, and psychological reorientation. Project East River’s authors had advised early on that the advantage of using military-style training for civil defense stemmed “from the psychological fact that well-trained habits resist disruption by emotion.”41 The Home Protection Exercises emerged as the home-front application of these psychological warfare theories. Other home defense pamphlets similarly recommended military-type exercises so that family members would not contemplate their options but act reflexively when the sirens sounded. One brochure advised: “Hold drills frequently so that responses to emergency situations become automatic.”42 But, as was the case in the regular military, self-discipline was only one part of a successful defense. Family preparedness also required respect for the imposed discipline of others. Planners argued that family drills had to be supplemented with some kind of socialization process that enabled people to readily accept direction from leaders. In 1953, an FCDA staff member suggested that future publicity campaigns “build community respect” for the trained auxiliary policeman and the neighborhood warden so that citizens would “respect them and their authority in an emergency.” Planners believed these local authorities could truly control panic “if people . . . learned instinctively to obey them” (emphasis theirs).43 This infusion of military outlooks and values into postwar family ideology steered planners toward yet another troubling question about the degree to which families could be militarized until they ceased to be the celebrated havens of emotional self-fulfillment and autonomy. Prevailing cultural norms prescribed that the individual turn inward, looking to family to provide an antidote to the economic and emotional hardships endured during the Great Depression and World War II. As Elaine Tyler May has argued, the “family seemed to be the one place where people could control their destinies and perhaps even shape the future. . . . The home represented a source of meaning and security in a world run amok.”44 Was there a point at which the FCDA’s quest for national security could become so excessive that it could undermine “the family”? Indeed, in a postwar society that venerated private home ownership and decried “mass society,” the FCDA’s family preparedness campaigns represented a somewhat remarkable attempt to shape the private behaviors of the nuclear family to fit the public needs of the national security bureaucracy. The attempted militarization of domestic space necessitated the FCDA’s redefinition of the concepts “public” and “private” as they related to the family, as well as a renegotiation of the meanings of wartime sacrifice. Of course, Cold War notions of public and private were (most immediately) inventions and improvisations left over from wartime adapted to the

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politics and culture of the postwar years. Despite all the talk of turning homeward as the antidote to war’s privations and communism’s subversions, families were not private entities in the 1950s. As Stephanie Coontz argues, “The private, autonomous family of mythical tradition was, paradoxically, largely a creation of judicial activism in the nineteenth century and state regulation in the twentieth.”45 All postwar American families, to one degree or another, were reliant upon an array of federal and state welfare and social security programs, including federal highway funding, expanded federal home loan programs, and the subsidies of the G.I. Bill. However unreal, the ideal of family privacy and independence was a strong one in this period, even as families increasingly depended upon government programs and “experts” of all kinds to help them attain the good life.46 Further complicating the FCDA’s task of family militarization was that the prevailing social mood of the postwar United States appeared to be more about personal satisfaction—through leisure, consumption, and family togetherness—than about public sacrifice. World War II had exacted a toll on all families, albeit unevenly, whether it was the loss of a family member, job migration, rationing, or housing difficulties. And even amidst the patriotic fervor of wartime, citizens challenged government and industry policies that seemed to extract sacrifices from some more than others. By the 1950s, many were war weary and ambivalent about government interventions that required them to reconfigure family life. People wanted to harvest what they had labored for during the war. The giddy rush to release long pent-up consumer demands, to be free of wartime restrictions, to attain the economic and political rights and privileges for which officials said people were fighting, all indicated a public mood unreceptive to public sacrifice and more attuned to reward.47 In this context, civil defense officials anticipated that citizens would view home protection campaigns as reconstituted World War II–style intrusions into the family. The degree to which FCDA planners bent over backward to reassure citizens that preparedness was not a wartime imposition is curious because no group of citizen volunteers and none of the citizen letters to the presidents voiced such a criticism. It seemed, at times, that FCDA planners were talking more to congressmen than citizens when they energetically denied that civil defense would warrant any government-decreed change in lifestyle. It is likely that the ongoing debates about the size and reach of the federal government made the FCDA extrasensitive to issues of autonomy and local control when conveying defense protocols to families. Still, planners rightly sensed an inertia, a popular lethargy in response to calls for yet another all-out mobilization, and they surmised that people’s reticence about adopting civil defense routines might be an indication that families were not prepared to get prepared.

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The delicate task of compelling private sacrifice without appearing to impose any public demands or controls on the family proved a difficult one for FCDA public relations strategists. For starters, they were not at all sure what the sacrifices and burdens of nuclear survival actually looked like, save for the evidence from blasted homes and mannequin families. All they could do was merely prepare people vaguely for some kind of change in lifestyle. Millard Caldwell often told his audiences that civil defense “would bear heavily on our private lives,” even though he could never quite describe what the requisite level of personal forbearance and adjustment would be.48 The most specific description came from FCDA Public Affairs Director John DeChant, who said that “each person must be prepared to give freely of his time and energy” to family preparedness. “One of the prized byproducts of our way of life is our leisure time,” he said. “Acceptance of civil defense means that we must give up some or much of it.”49 DeChant’s emphasis on “acceptance” reflected the FCDA’s emergent tendency to fuse the familiar drone of wartime sacrifice with a newer therapeutic discourse. An unwillingness to sacrifice was now cast as a state of psychological denial or avoidance. “Acceptance” in FCDA-speak meant that one had come to terms psychologically with the need to think and act according to the advice of the Home Protection Exercises. As DeChant framed it, “each psychological and emotional road block must be broken down” so that families could fully accept personal privations for the sake of national security.50 FCDA planners like DeChant rested their hopes on the neighborhood civil defense warden to enable families to accept these psychological and lifestyle readjustments. The warden was ideally a well-known neighbor on the block, a recognized leader who could provide “the face-to-face contact we need to get family action going.”51 Wardens were responsible for coordinating all local rescue and recovery efforts, which included “conditioning the neighborhood,” house by house, to think about readiness.52 Thus they were the perfect candidates to forge a “link between the civil defense organizations and the people at the neighborhood and family level.”53 The FCDA’s 1956 “Putting Civil Defense Awareness to Work” campaign was premised upon an ambitious “Warden STEP (Survival Through Emergency Preparedness) Program,” which involved drumming up support for civil defense by having a warden walk the beat, like a party precinct captain, talking with neighbors about home protection. According to one report, the STEP Program was a primary “mechanism for reaching into the home on a personal basis.”54 Yet this outreach had to be done delicately, for it involved making queries about the geography of the home, its residents’ routines, the special needs or disabilities of any dwellers, and a family’s willingness to make the necessary changes to become attack-ready. FCDA administrator Jean Fuller coached volunteer

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wardens to conduct their inquiries gingerly: “Remember that the questions are almost an intrusion on the privacy of the home, and it must be done with great care not to offend or set up any resistance to the work of civil defense.”55 The FCDA worked diligently to package home protection as voluntary militarism, to strike the right balance between stern admonishments and family boosterism. As one pamphlet reassured, “We do not feel that the Federal Government should impose requirements on the personal affairs of any family.”56 Strategists wanted to give people enough room to accommodate preparedness in their own way, for without that modicum of autonomy, they suspected, families would not adopt civil defense as “a way of life.” Shelter model choices, food selections for the predicted two-week stay underground, the frequency of family meetings on civil defense— these were all determinations to be made by each individual family. As one pamphlet stated, “There is one thing the Federal Government should not be asked to do—and that is to make a decision for you” (emphasis theirs).57 Yet despite the deliberately hands-off tone of much of the FCDA literature, it was hard for planners to simultaneously celebrate voluntary militarization as the hallmark of an American-style civil defense and not complain about its lackluster results. Sometimes FCDA officials engaged in a comic doublespeak that revealed the unresolvable tensions inherent in a voluntary militarization. Katherine Howard, for example, explained the nature of the recruiting task to a group of female volunteers this way: “We must induce [the housewife] to adopt civil defense housekeeping methods of her own free will,” and, “We must make her want to choose her own block warden” (emphasis mine).58 The attempt to resolve these contradictory strains in family defense campaigns resulted in a sort of schizophrenic quality to the preparedness literature; it was both friendly and reprimanding, gently coaxing and prohibitive. A Parade article on evacuation, written by Val Peterson, offers another example. It featured a photo of a woman evacuating the neighborhood in her car, with the caption “Mother Does as She’s Told,” a tacit reference to the dark side of family loyalty (as described by Howard) and the importance of disciplining those maternal whims. Yet the caption also explained that the mother’s obeisance to authority represented “her first lesson in . . . cooperation.”59 In essence, the problem was not the confused oratory of FCDA officials, but rather the underlying contradictions of the entire family preparedness project. As the disappointing results of self-help sheltering made apparent, it was nearly impossible to make the regimental impulses of militarization fit alongside the sentimental ideals of postwar domesticity.

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————— Family militarization merged the seemingly disparate worlds of the Powner family and the defense planners who sponsored their two-week stay in the basement of Princeton’s psychology building. The civil defense establishment labored to make the inhabitants of these two worlds, previously strangers to one another, partners in the militarization of the home front. As anti-statist discourses within the defense establishment helped to dismiss more communal, publicly funded solutions, family discourses outside of the defense establishment legitimized a family-style self-help defense program. And the FCDA’s domestication of the bomb, paradoxically, mystified it to the point of recognition; nuclear war was now a family affair, unworthy of drastic protective measures, familiar enough to fight with ordinary household remedies. Ideal family types—embodied by the Powners—emerged in FCDA literature to mask the underlying political and economic realties that led planners to embrace family self-help with such gusto, as well as to assure citizens that militarization’s demands for discipline and authority would not corrupt the sentiment and autonomy of the family. Both real and imagined families ultimately became the twin pillars of the privatization of preparedness. Yet real families proved less malleable than ideal ones. The concern that home front militarization might actually disrupt families or corrupt family ideals underscored the trials of orchestrating a defense program entirely dependent on civilians. FCDA officials found they could not compel but could only cajole families into compliance. In the end, however, none of the calibrations in sales approach appears to have made a noticeable dent in the number of American families remodeling their homes with security priorities in mind. As the last chapter revealed, few families chose to transform domestic space into militarized space. There was likely a wide range of family participation in more low-key or “second-tier” preparedness activities, from stocking a few supplies to posting a “family alert” card in a kitchen cupboard. Ironically, however, the FCDA’s emphasis on autonomy and self-sufficiency meant that families did not have to account for or report their defense activities to anyone, including the block warden. Thus, FCDA officials could only guess at the levels of family participation based on their own public opinion studies and anecdotal evidence from local sources. Remarkably, at no point did their overall diagnosis of “family apathy” lead them to rethink the utility of a family-based defense strategy. In fact, the call for family responsibility grew stronger as the strategy’s weaknesses became more apparent. As we shall see in the next chapter, the FCDA staked their hopes on women—mainly housewives—to raise the bomb consciousness of American families so that they would behave more like the ideal families pictured in the propaganda.

CHAPTER FOUR

Raising Women’s Bomb Consciousness

IMAGINE a fifties housewife pondering world affairs and deciding to write one of the highest military men in the land to discuss her ideas. In August 1950, almost a year after the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb and while American troops fought in Korea, a Houston housewife wrote Secretary of Defense George Marshall to discuss the lack of civil defense efforts in her neighborhood. Speaking for other housewives on her block, she told him: “Now we are ready to find the housewifes’ [sic] place in the atomic bomb defense plan. . . . Can you give us any help?”1 The letter was routed to the National Security Resources Board’s civil defense office and never received Marshall’s attention. But letters about “the housewife’s place” in nuclear defense kept coming—from individuals, neighborhood social clubs, and women’s voluntary organizations. By 1953, the Federal Civil Defense Administration had a fully developed women’s division and an elaborate family preparedness program with housewives at its core. As Katherine Howard said, the arms race “cannot help but add to the household responsibilities of the average wife and mother. She must now assume a further and more serious awareness of her public duties as a citizen.”2 Howard was one of a series of female administrators hired first by the NSRB and then by the FCDA to do some consciousness-raising about women’s atomic-age obligations, which were one part maternal and one part military. This convergence of defense and domesticity happened gradually and at times almost unintentionally, the culmination of internal defense establishment debates about the character of civil defense and of outside political pressure from women’s groups to expand their role in government. Together, the FCDA and a network of female activists cultivated women’s interests in preparedness, each finding that they could pursue policy agendas through lobbying for a family-style civil defense dependent on women’s domestic skills. FCDA planners welcomed club women’s early enthusiasm for self-help preparedness, but it meant that they had to relinquish some official control over the meanings and applications of home front militarization. Female volunteer groups took on the mantle of civil defense so eagerly that they sometimes took it in directions planners had not anticipated. Some clubs broadened the definition of Cold War civil defense in ways eerily reminiscent of Eleanor Roosevelt’s vision during World War II. In addition, female activists, including women administrators within the FCDA, saw in

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home protection an opportunity to articulate essentially feminist aspirations. They called for equal representation on planning boards at the highest levels, arguing that World War II had proven them fit partners for Cold War security campaigns. One of the unintended consequences of a family-centered, popularly implemented militarization was the feminization of preparedness itself. Privatization brought civil defense to homes and neighborhoods, places where women supposedly presided full-time over the welfare of families and community members. Home protection made preparedness immediately a “woman’s concern,” for the skills and services required to prepare for and survive an attack were virtually the same as a housewife’s domestic chores and community service. As planners began to understand that recovery would require a vast array of social services at levels beyond what state and local governments could provide, they turned to female volunteers as the solution to this “welfare problem.” This definition of civil defense as home protection and welfare provision feminized preparedness, making it one of the only Cold War defense programs hospitable to women’s participation. Club women abetted this feminization, hoping to carve a space for women in civil defense by shaping its core identity in a way that made women indispensable to it. Their demands for inclusion received a hospitable hearing in large part because they were compatible with the swiftly changing needs of the FCDA. As congressional stinginess hardened throughout the decade, women’s value expanded as a natural resource for a family-centered defense effort. What emerged from this feminization of civil defense was no less than a militarist-maternalist women’s movement that worked both collaboratively with and independently of government planners to spread the gospel of home protection, anticommunism, and “woman power.” This militarized maternalism was a strange hybrid of Cold War militarism, domesticity, and female reform traditions. Indeed it represented an ironic twist on female pacifism, in that it argued that women’s “special” traits could be harnessed for war; as well, militarized mothers were a unique female presence in “an all man outfit” (as Howard called the FCDA), a bureaucracy of World War II veterans-turned–cold warriors who prized masculine swagger above maternalist insight. The development of this female civil defense network represents an interesting turn in the story of not only Cold War civil defense but also the postwar women’s movement.

A WOMEN’S NETWORK EMERGES

Civil defense officials understood that preparations for nuclear war could not be made by targeting men exclusively, yet they gave little thought to mobilizing women until the summer of 1950. At that time, the Resources

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Board’s more immediate question was whether a separate civil defense bureaucracy was even necessary. However, the outbreak of war in Korea in June 1950—inextricably linked in Cold War logic with the Soviet situation—turned planners’ attention to issues of civilian mobilization, which then included consideration of how to use women in the first real “hot war” of the Cold War. World War II had taught government planners the value of women’s participation in a military mobilization, and women themselves had accrued some tangible benefits during this conflict. Wartime labor shortages yielded for many women higher-paying jobs, union representation, and even some daycare. Military demands also created unprecedented opportunities for them, both professional and personally, in the armed services. But the military was a workplace, too, where women learned new skills but also fought the same patterns of gender and racially based discrimination as their civilian counterparts. Ultimately, most of these wartime reforms, as Susan Hartmann and others have argued, “had an extremely brief life-span, shorter than the war itself,” yielding only superficial changes in women’s secondary economic and political status.3 Yet despite the rhetoric of national sacrifice, many women used their wartime leverage to push the door of opportunity open for good. A generation of postsuffrage activists emerged during and immediately after the war, hoping “to capitalize on the feelings of gratitude” for women’s contributions to victory.4 They pursued differing paths toward equality, with some favoring protective legislation and others supporting the Equal Rights Amendment. They were the heirs of an incredible wave of suffrage activism in the early twentieth century, a vibrant Progressive Era reform tradition, and a surge of women’s activism within government and party politics during the New Deal. Throughout the 1940s they battled inside and outside of political parties for such things as increased representation in business and civil service, seniority rights in workplaces and unions, and the end to racial discrimination in the armed forces. These wartime and immediate postwar struggles for women’s rights inspired continued agitation in the 1950s, even amidst a backlash against working women and a chilling political environment. In fact, the reason planners even considered the role of women so early in the Korean mobilization was that female activists had pushed them to do so. Throughout the summer and fall of 1950, letters and telegrams streamed into the offices of the NSRB and President Truman, claiming that women’s wartime service had earned them the right to participate in the current emergency. As one woman wrote: “American women not only have won a place shoulder to shoulder with their men in supporting the big affairs of their country; they also have proved their ability to hold it.”5 Queries came mainly from the largest national women’s groups, such as the General Federation of

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Women’s Clubs, the National Association of Business and Professional Women, the American Association of University Women, and the ladies’ auxiliaries of veterans groups. These and other organizations formed the nucleus of a burgeoning network of female civil defense volunteers, a web of personal and professional affiliations within the postwar club women’s movement that coalesced in the 1950s around civil defense and related security issues. It is useful to pause here and sketch a composite of the kinds of organizations that comprised this network. The biggest clubs were by no means the only ones to become involved in civil defense; there is evidence that smaller, less elite neighborhood women’s groups, like the Houston housewives, also united in the name of national security. Dozens of other unnamed associations of self-identified wives and mothers similarly wrote to the president and other officials to ask for information, announce their availability as volunteers, and describe their own plans for civil defense.6 For example, a New York State woman asked the FCDA for literature to share with other mothers in her local PTA and announced her plans to transform her house into the neighborhood shelter.7 A Maryland woman requested information for “the ladies in our block” who wanted to learn about civil defense at their regular “coffee parties.”8 A woman from a small town in Pennsylvania offered plane spotting services from “a small group of women doing good in our community,” advising Truman, “You need all the help you can get in this awful trouble.”9 It was the larger, national women’s organizations, however, that had the longevity, resources, and political power to gain access to federal officials; thus their voices speak the loudest in the historical records. One source of their political muscle flexing was their growing membership. By 1950, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) had 5.5 million members organized in almost 17,000 local clubs.10 The American Association of University Women (AAUW), the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs (BPW), and veterans groups’ auxiliaries were relatively smaller, but they enjoyed healthy membership numbers in the fifties as well. In 1950, the AAUW had 115,00 members.11 By 1955, the BPW’s membership climbed to an all-time high of 165,000 members organized in over 3,000 clubs.12 Although they represented different constituencies, none of the clubs in the network was truly a single-issue organization; all had diverse platforms that ranged from the ERA to veterans aid to “good fellowship.” Nor were the network’s members singularly focused; women often held multiple memberships in a variety of organizations, local and national, partisan and nonpartisan, Republican or Democrat. Situated squarely in the mainstream of party politics and the club women’s movement, the leadership of the burgeoning network was quite homogeneous. It was largely prosperous, professional, white urban women

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who led the lobbying and organizational campaigns, with the national officers of the GFWC, the BPW, and the AAUW contributing much of the energy and direction. But the network membership was far more diverse than its leadership. It included rural women from the National Home Demonstration Agents’ Association, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant women from their national councils, blue-collar women from the auxiliaries of the AFL and CIO, and African American women from their thriving national club movement. Both Republican and Democratic Party women were an integral part of this network, for the women’s club movement and the women’s divisions of the two major political parties enjoyed a generally harmonious, collaborative relationship in this period. In fact, partisan politics neither united nor divided women in the network in any particular way, a testament to the way potent maternalist and anticommunist ideologies could transcend often rancorous party divisions. On the whole, the network’s member groups, as well as its leadership, worked both independently and collaboratively, with some dropping in and out of civil defense work as Cold War tensions ebbed and flowed.13 Even with this diversity, the network’s composition still reflected longstanding fissures in women’s movement organizing. By the mid-twentieth century, the women’s movement was still split along the axes of race and class. During and immediately after World War II, professional women clashed with blue-collar women on issues of unionization and protective legislation, which evolved into a bitter struggle over the ERA in the fifties. Differing priorities and visions about the kind of political work that best aided their cause led union women to participate only sporadically in civil defense activities. Similarly, racism in and out of the women’s club movement led black and white clubs to prioritize war-related issues differently. During World War II, for example, the AAUW and BPW refused to help the National Council of Negro Women fight racial discrimination in the armed forces and instead pushed for more service opportunities for professional (meaning white) women.14 Despite a growing awareness of racism within mainstream women’s rights and club movements (thanks to continued civil rights agitation), postwar anticommunism promoted clannishness and suspicion and discouraged reform and political risk-taking. Black women’s club leader Mary Church Terrell learned this as early as 1946, when she applied for membership to the AAUW’s Washington, D.C., branch, only to be turned down under the guise of keeping “subversives” out of the organization.15 By 1951, as McCarthyist hysteria reached a fever pitch, the women’s civil defense network (including the AAUW) proved slightly more hospitable to African American women than did other mainstream women’s organizations. But the network became more tolerant only after black women pointed out that initial organizing meetings had excluded them. Aside from the intermittent involvement of the largest black women’s

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clubs, the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women was the sole black women’s organization to become an integral part of the network.16 While its presence made the network technically interracial, it did not influence club women to frame preparedness as an issue of racial justice, as would later be the case when civil rights groups participated in civil defense.17 What unified this constituency of female civil defense volunteers was a quirky blend of postwar political ideologies: anticommunism, maternalism, and feminism. Despite fluctuations in presidential administrations, congressional politics, and global tensions throughout the decade, women activists remained remarkably loyal to this trio of views. They were ardent cold warriors, hostile to communism and dedicated to its containment abroad and at home. Like most Americans, they endorsed diplomatic policies buttressed by an expanding nuclear arsenal. Their anticommunism meshed well with their brand of maternalism, a more conservative, militarized derivative of the maternalist ideologies of the Progressive Era. Like their reformer predecessors, female civil defense activists viewed family obligations and maternal identities as essential for the majority of women and fundamental to the social order; they believed that the experience and work of motherhood gave them particular insights and skills that qualified them to spearhead certain reforms; and they fancied themselves as caregivers for other citizens, especially more vulnerable populations. In an atomic-age context, this translated into a belief that women, because of their maternal experience and capacity, were most qualified to fight communists, defend the family from Soviet attack, and if the unimaginable did happen, to rehabilitate a wounded citizenry.18 At the same time, however, these female activists held beliefs characteristic of postsuffrage feminism. Many of them, after all, were members of organizations that had formed originally to gain legal and economic equality in business, education, and government.19 Although most would not have called themselves feminists, they nevertheless shared the conviction that discrimination against women was wrong, and that part of their collective mission was to stamp it out. Like their New Deal predecessors, many in the civil defense network believed that increasing women’s representation in government would improve governance itself and benefit not only professionally oriented club women but all women. In civil defense, they saw a new arena in which to fight for some old ideas.

WORKING IN AN “ALL MAN OUTFIT”

The energy with which female activists pursued their place in national preparedness initially took NSRB officials by surprise. At first, they could only reassure women that they had “a vital part to play in our national

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security” and tell them that planners were already giving the issue “very careful study.”20 But groups like the GFWC and the BPW were too large and powerful to dodge, and unlike smaller assemblages of women, their leadership had the resources (including a Washington, D.C., home base) to persist in their inquires. NSRB administrator William Gill recognized that their pointed questions would soon require clear answers, for club women with easy access to the press (in fact, some were the press) might criticize government inertia, making the NSRB seem incompetent and disinterested in women’s contributions. Gill alerted the NSRB’s director of civil defense Paul Larsen that “pressure has been brought upon us to give greater recognition to the role of women in civil defense. Editorial writers and commentators have picked up the subject.”21 Indeed, Gill was referring to the Washington Post’s columnist Malvina Lindsay, a club movement supporter who had already editorialized that women had been left out of the planning discussions and passed over for high-level appointments on the Resources Board. She objected to any proposed “substitution approach,” a World War II policy, she argued, that had treated women only as stand-ins for men’s jobs. This foreclosed the opportunity to compete with men for the same positions, she said, and also prevented women from contributing their peculiarly feminine talents. Speaking for all female activists, Lindsay announced it was time for the NSRB to let women assume “the partnership with men that atomic defense demands.”22 Although at this stage women’s groups had lobbied for such a partnership independently of one another, their cumulative efforts yielded a surprisingly quick response from the NSRB. Fearful of more unfavorable press and ever solicitous of popular support, NSRB officials agreed to hire “an outstanding woman” to work in its Civil Defense Office. Gill proposed that she advise the NSRB on women’s role in preparedness and serve as a government liaison for women’s organizations. It was especially important, he argued, that women’s groups be consulted about the appointee. Although they did not say so explicitly, club women expected the appointee to be plucked from their ranks, and Gill wisely sensed this. He told Larsen that the appointee had to be “a person who properly represents the women of the nation, not only in our view but also in the view of women and women’s organizations generally.”23 In August 1950, the NSRB appointed Martha Dickie Sharp to coordinate women’s involvement in the overall civilian mobilization, which included not only civil defense but labor as well. Although she was not a leader in the club movement, women’s groups found her a fitting representative. She was a white, middle-aged, upper-class woman educated at Ivy League colleges. She had married a Harvard-trained lawyer and Unitarian minister and had two children. At the start of World War II, she

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had immersed herself in the cause of international child welfare and refugee relief, working for the American Unitarian Association and the American Friends Service Committee. Immediately after the war, she ran for Congress as a Democrat, but lost the election, and so continued with her relief work. Sharp was a liberal Democrat, an anticommunist, and a feminist (though she eschewed the latter label). She endorsed civil rights and liberal reform with the zeal of Eleanor Roosevelt, and she espoused military preparedness and anticommunism with the vigor of Harry Truman. She was proud of the fact that she had secured a policy job in defense, and not in a human services agency, where female appointments were more common. She told an acquaintance: “My husband said that usually Johnny goes off to war but this time Martha has gone instead.”24 Although pleased with the creation of a “women’s affairs” coordinator, club women saw Sharp’s appointment as the beginning of a long-term official relationship with the Resources Board, not a resolution of their demands. As NSRB staff hurried to assemble the national civil defense policy—the Blue Book—club women tried to influence internal debates through their liaison with Sharp. They wanted clarity about women’s role, not patriotic bluster. Yet the Blue Book scarcely mentioned women at all. It paid homage to their World War II service and said that women should similarly “be used to the utmost” in atomic-age defense, but it did not give activists the nod they were looking for.25 To be fair, no other interested groups received a nod either, for the NSRB was reluctant to form any official liaison with private citizens, even though hundreds of organizations of all kinds, including veterans, youth, engineers, comic book artists, insurance agents, meteorologists, beauticians and barbers, and even the American Cemetery Association sought such a relationship.26 As one official anxiously noted, in Washington, D.C., alone, there were “hundreds of national organizations listed in the . . . telephone book and all of them are interested in civil defense and all would like a stake in it.”27 Yet although such groups represented one of the few areas of enthusiastic and well-organized public support for civil defense, officials were reluctant to forge a link with any of them for fear that it would appear as government favoritism. Of even more concern, however, was the fact that when such groups did jump on the civil defense bandwagon, they tried to steer it in ways that officials could not always control—one of the drawbacks of popularizing preparedness. The American Legion, for example, wanted to run the auxiliary police program, while the Veterans of Foreign Wars wanted a consulting seat on the NSRB.28 Aware that LaGuardia’s failure to cooperate with volunteer organizations had discredited his Office of Civil Defense, NSRB and later FCDA planners worked diligently to garner popular support but carefully manage it at the same time. During the first series of

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congressional hearings, for example, NSRB staff prevented the American Legion and others from testifying that the government had been derelict in its duties. Officials arranged a meeting to brief these groups before they testified (accurately) that the government’s civil defense plans were lagging. The meeting “toned down their public testimony in a number of instances,” according to relieved NSRB planners, and “the general tenor of the hearing . . . [was] not overly critical of NSRB activities.”29 Still, officials nervously acknowledged that citizen groups continued to complain about a lack of training materials and that they could not meet with every one of them to keep them quiet. “I don’t know how long we are going to be able to hold off really serious criticism,” warned James Wadsworth.30 Ironically, then, civil defense managers found themselves trying to restrain the very participation they had invited. The grievances of the women’s network, then, were only one part of a chorus of voices pressuring the NSRB for a partnership. Civil defense planners lumped these women’s groups into this larger pool of potential volunteers from whom they wanted support but not formal affiliation. Club women, however, viewed their participation much differently. Their inclusion, unlike that of other groups, was necessary to offset the preponderance of male planners; their representation would yield a “different” (and in their eyes better) end product. Moreover, they believed their involvement would serve an even larger and perhaps more important goal: the expansion of women’s participation in public life. Sharp understood this and she tried provide a voice for club women from the inside. Her strong contacts with women leaders in government and social welfare circles, as well as her own beliefs in women’s equality, created a hospitable environment for female activism. But because of the incompleteness of her own agency’s preparedness plans, she found herself in the difficult position of brokering a relationship between agitated and overeager volunteers and only partially sympathetic male planners who were still scrambling to secure funding for an independent agency, the FCDA. Sometimes, club women saw indifference where there was really incoherence. In an attempt to resolve the tensions, Sharp called women’s clubs to Washington, D.C., in October 1950 for the first national “Women and Civil Defense” conference. She organized the event “in answer to those letters,” which club women rightly chalked up as another success of their lobbying.31 She hoped the conference would mollify women activists by offering them firsthand information, a forum to air their grievances, and the motivation to write their own “blue book” that grafted the new science of nuclear war onto what they already knew about emergency service from World War II. The sixty-one women in attendance represented the major national women’s organizations, the women’s branches of the

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armed forces, various federal agencies, and the Democratic and Republican Parties. The class and racial composition of the conference reflected the mainly white, middle-class composition of those interested in civil defense, but Sharp made a special effort to include African American and labor union women. The National Council of Negro Women and the National Federation of Colored Women were both in attendance, and female delegates from the AFL and CIO were invited but could not attend. Conference participants ranked among the most prominent women in the club movement and government service: Frances Perkins of the United States Civil Service Commission, Dorothy Ferebee of the National Council of Negro Women, Bertha Adkins and India Edwards of the Republican and Democratic Parties respectively, and Frieda Miller of the Department of Labor. The full-day meeting featured presentations by NSRB administrators on topics ranging from the role of the Defense Department to civil defense in England. The proceedings reveal how government planners initially envisioned women’s contributions to the militarizing state. These early discussions are significant because they framed the policy discourse on women’s involvement in civil defense for the rest of the decade. Resources Board planners were most taken with the idea that women could function as public relations representatives for the entire defense mobilization—not just for the duration of the Korean War. A highly ideological enterprise, civil defense seemed a natural outlet for women’s supposedly innate talent of moral suasion. Women could be a “valuable influence” in the “development of constructive attitudes toward the defense program,” said NSRB chairman Stuart Symington. No one else, he said, could “make a greater contribution to developing informed public opinion and high morale in all segments of our national life.”32 Sharp echoed these sentiments in her keynote speech, noting that she had invited “representative American women” because they could sell home protection to the average housewife far better than could a defense bureaucracy. Referring to British women’s wartime defense service, she declared: “Women’s tongues were considered as more effective weapons of national defense than their hands.”33 There were some indications at the conference that the gender classification of civil defense jobs would actually prove more elastic than the increasingly rigid gender categories of the larger culture. Sharp said, “The fact that civil defense is a grass roots proposition automatically means that women can take positions of authority right along with the men.”34 Although NSRB speakers stereotyped morale building as a feminine skill, they also suggested that women would be “able to do any job as well as men if they [were] properly trained.”35 Planners did not rule out the possibility for women to be auxiliary police officers, emergency vehicle drivers, chemical decontamination workers, bomb reconnaissance

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assistants, and supply officers. Even the Blue Book had suggested that housewives could be wardens, the backbone managerial position of neighborhood defense. As it turned out, however, it was the feminization of preparedness itself and not a feminist gender taxonomy of civil defense that ultimately paved the way for women’s participation. NSRB staff did not set out consciously to feminize civil defense as a way to include women. Rather, they gradually realized that preparation and recovery from nuclear war was partly a welfare issue, which then led them to consider women’s involvement more seriously than they might have. Military and civilian planners estimated that an adequate civil defense required a long list of social services, well beyond what federal, state, and local governments would or could provide. Temporary housing, soup kitchens, medical care (including psychological rehabilitation), short-term economic aid, care for orphaned children and the elderly, public health and sanitation services, and more were all necessary to ensure survival and restore order. Planners, therefore, began to understand civil defense as a “welfare problem,” not just a military one. At the same time, “self-help” was fast becoming the primary policy discourse in 1950. Given these realities, NSRB strategists began to grasp that their defense welfare operation would depend primarily on private charity and not state subsidy. The confluence of postwar gender ideals and historical precedent led planners to conclude that if welfare was the problem, then women were the solution. They thought that women could voluntarily coordinate a respectable emergency program as an outgrowth of their peculiar interests in community welfare. This idea took shape in the context of a marked fluctuation in gender ideologies as the nation demobilized from the war and then mobilized again. Rosie the Riveter was nudged aside by a new female icon, a slightly altered version of a nineteenth-century “true woman,” whose embrace of marriage and motherhood was presumably more compatible with citizens’ desires for a return to “normalcy.” The emergence of a “feminine mystique” in the early Cold War years tied femininity to domesticity much more tightly than it had been during the war. Although a less unified and coherent ideology than historians have presumed, it was nevertheless a powerful gender code that enjoyed wide circulation in postwar culture.36 Influenced by their gender environment, NSRB planners saw a synchronicity of interests between female domesticity and nuclear-age welfare preparedness. Planners were influenced, too, by a longer-term phenomenon. Women’s role in reform or “social housekeeping” had linked femininity to welfare provision since the nineteenth century. This identification of welfare as a historically feminine enterprise further encouraged defense officials to draw women into their preparedness blueprints. In sum, the definition of civil defense as a welfare

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problem, welfare’s association with female activism, and the feminine mystique’s renewed emphasis on women’s domestic proclivities all contributed to a feminization of the whole concept of civil defense. At the time of the conference, however, the idea of civil defense as primarily a welfare (and family) matter was still gestating, so the NSRB’s intentions for women’s participation were indeterminate. Though frustrated with incomplete NSRB plans, club women happily seized the opportunity to steer the policy discussions in a direction that reflected their interests. So, only two days after Sharp’s meeting, club women met independently to plot a “bold new approach to full mobilization” and “to find out how women may be fully mobilized for civil defense and for economic and military mobilization.”37 This was not a counterdemonstration to the NSRB conference, for the BPW had hatched the idea before Sharp had even been hired, and they invited virtually the same assortment of club leaders, government and military officials, and members of the press. Still, the independent conference’s scope was broader and its discussions more free-flowing. Without government officials presiding, club women seemed more able to ask questions of the speakers and debate one another. They discussed not only civil defense but also the economic aspects of national security, women’s military service, and Cold War propaganda. Just as the NSRB conference unveiled the government’s thinking on women and militarization, so, too, did this gathering reveal what women activists themselves saw in and expected from militarization. Club women readily endorsed the NSRB’s idea that women could serve the “war of ideas” by talking up the mobilization and spreading the word “that our American ideals of democracy have more to offer than any other form of government.”38 They understood that militarizing the home front was partly a task of attitude adjustment, and they were eager to serve as community ambassadors for the Cold War. As one keynote speaker told club women, “Because of your influence with your groups, and because of your position in your communities, you have accepted the challenge for mobilizing wise and constructive and useful action.”39 Club women also shared the NSRB’s emergent view that civil defense was a welfare issue that could benefit from female expertise. But while government planners had been slow to realize this, club women saw immediately the benefits of feminizing a paramilitary program. Indeed, they had pressed for a definition of civil defense as a welfare matter even before the NSRB had defined it as such, knowing that their culturally defined roles as homemakers and record of social housekeeping would credential their involvement in an otherwise male-dominated effort. Almost two months before the NSRB’s conference, for example, veteran activist Loula Dunn of the American Public Welfare Association told Symington that welfare professionals had to be involved in civil defense

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planning: “Many of the problems which will confront your Board,” she insisted, “are essentially welfare problems.”40 As Dunn and her colleagues saw it, framing civil defense as a welfare matter not only invited their participation, it mandated it. Female activists carved out their niche in civil defense in ways that are hard to untangle because they drew on differing and even contradictory historical traditions of women’s organizing. As maternalists, they (even the childless among them) celebrated motherhood as a force for political change, and they sometimes invoked a diluted version of nineteenth-century reform arguments about women’s moral superiority to men.41 As a result, they eagerly accommodated the NSRB’s invitation to implement militarization in the roles of welfare providers and morale builders. At the same time, however, they did not want themselves or their contributions marginalized. Recalling the experiences of the last war, club women echoed Lindsay’s complaints about a “substitution approach,” which they agreed had given women only a tenuous hold on their wartime gains. This time around club women were not interested in joining a mobilization at the end of which they would be asked to leave. As conference participant Dorothy Stratton told fellow activists, “Our primary function is . . . to open the doors.”42 Only a month before the NSRB’s conference, however, President Truman had proposed an idea that would have forced women to enter the defense establishment through a separate entrance. He instructed Symington to form a women’s advisory committee to represent “the feminine viewpoint” on all defense issues.43 Sharp disagreed with his proposal, arguing that women “should be in on [the] ground floor” of civil defense planning, not relegated to a special committee that could quickly become peripheral. “When you start segregating women,” she wrote, “you are in trouble.”44 Her peers in the club movement agreed. At the second women’s conference, keynote speaker Margaret Hickey, past president of the BPW and now public affairs editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, criticized the idea of a separate women’s committee as a barrier to full partnership. “I am thoroughly acquainted with the limitations of advisory groups,” she told her peers, “and whenever I hear about another advisory group, my heart sinks just a little bit.”45 Hickey was herself a member of many such committees, and she endorsed the idea of a “citizen specialist” who could advise government planners on matters outside their expertise. Still, her experiences led her to share Sharp’s wariness. As she told the audience, “I always look and . . . ask . . . ‘Where is your [women’s] advisory group on the [organization] chart?’ ”46 In response to Truman’s idea, the GFWC called for “100% partnership” in paid and volunteer positions, a platform endorsed by all at both conferences. Yet this view actually expressed a declaration of female difference.47

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Paradoxically, network members wanted to be treated the same as men in order to contribute what they saw as their peculiarly feminine, maternal talents. Traversing familiar philosophical ground about whether women were essentially the same as or different from men, club leaders argued that barring women from equal access to policymaking would, as Malvina Lindsay put it, “deprive the Nation of what special contributions they might make.”48 Sharp, too, argued that women had “special aptitudes and concerns” that would have to be considered if civil defense would succeed at the grass roots.49 And Hickey called for women’s inclusion on legislative and administrative policy bodies “because of the special contribution they can make.”50 This atomic-age maternalism reprised women’s political theorizing from earlier reform epochs and suggested no resolution of the tensions between sameness and difference, maternalism and feminism. As Nancy Cott has shown, suffrage activists similarly expressed “an equal rights goal that . . . sought to give women the same capacity as men so they could express their differences.” Though already enfranchised, postwar club women articulated their political demands in ways reminiscent of the suffrage movement and other reform mobilizations. In an era of nuclear brinkmanship, they argued, their experiences as givers of life gave them special insight into its preservation. They further claimed that maternal status, the reason for women’s exclusion from affairs of state, should now be the source of their inclusion. As GFWC president Dorothy Houghton put it, “The most constructive work is not always accomplished by statesmen. . . . Building a strong America . . . is a special field for women.”51 Neither club women nor Sharp (nor any of her successors) saw anything irreconcilable about the expectation to be simultaneously treated as men’s equals and appreciated for uniquely feminine contributions. As Cott points out, women activists have historically been able to “voice these two arguments almost in the same breath” without being tripped up by their potentially contradictory meanings.52 The NSRB had hoped that the October 1950 conference would mute women’s very public demands and redirect their organizing from the federal to the local level. Sharp had been careful to emphasize that the Board functioned “as a catalyst rather than as a director,” reflecting the evolving sentiment among defense planners that citizens would have to carry a larger share of militarization’s home front burdens.53 But the conference had the opposite effect, for its success, along with the excitement generated at the second meeting, raised club women’s expectations that they could form a long-term partnership with federal planners. Changes in personnel and infrastructure temporarily slowed that momentum. During the January 1951 transition, in which the NSRB’s Civil Defense Office became the newly created Federal Civil Defense Administration, Sharp

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left her post to pursue other opportunities within the NSRB. Before leaving she warned Millard Caldwell that he had to “stem the mounting tide of criticism by women’s organizations that they are being given no positive information on ways they can be useful in civil defense.” Another conference would be “good public relations,” she advised, for it would enable women’s groups to “learn that the Federal Civil Defense Administration is doing something.”54 Caldwell wasted no time finding a replacement for Sharp, for he knew that club women represented one of the most promising sources of popular support for the new agency. In January 1951, Sara Whitehurst became an assistant administrator and assumed Sharp’s duties as women’s affairs coordinator. Like Sharp, her political lineage was in the Democratic Party. As was the case with all women’s affairs appointments, her hire was a partisan decision, a reward for party-building activities at the state level. Whitehurst was less of a Rooseveltian (Eleanor) Democrat than Sharp, but she was more rooted in the club movement than her predecessor had been. In the 1930s she had held several elected posts in her home state of Maryland’s Federation of Women’s Clubs, and during the war she assumed the national presidency of the GFWC. Despite club women’s protestations about a women’s advisory committee, a segregated structure for women’s participation emerged nevertheless under Whitehurst’s watch. Although she increased women’s membership to about 10 percent on the FCDA’s thirty or so citizen advisory committees, Whitehurst devoted most of her energy to the creation of an Advisory Committee for Women’s Participation.55 Comprised of twentyeight representatives of the country’s largest women’s organizations, this body represented the primary vehicle for women’s official liaison with the FCDA.56 In a sense, it gave activists the institutional recognition they sought by offering them a semi-official status as policy advisers. Yet its creation also reinforced the notion that women were most qualified to determine policy on so-called women’s issues like welfare and less able to advise on matters such as shelter provision taken up by other committees. Interestingly, in tandem with Whitehurst, club women organized themselves independently along similar lines, in spite of their worries about sex segregation. They formed a nongovernmental equivalent of the FCDA’s Advisory Committee for Women’s Participation called the Assembly of Women’s Organizations for National Security. Established in February of 1951, the Assembly was the outgrowth of the independent women’s meeting. Its creation reflected another success of club women’s organizing: by 1951 leaders found themselves in such demand to provide the “woman’s viewpoint” for federal agencies that they hoped the creation of a central organization would reduce their time and their costs of attending myriad meetings (which clubs and individuals bore themselves). The Assembly

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originated therefore as a representative body that could advise federal officials more efficiently on the utilization of the 30 million women it claimed to represent, as well as a more structured way for clubs to exchange information with one another. It ambitiously envisioned a political life for itself as long as the Cold War itself: its mission statement said “national security [was] a long-range problem” that would require an equally long-range commitment from all “organized women.”57 Ironically then, both FCDA female staff and club women fashioned committee structures exactly like the one President Truman had called for but that they had earlier rejected. If segregation was “trouble,” as Sharp had noted, then why did club women facilitate its creation only months later? The answer lies in the network’s understanding that even though civil defense was the underfed stepchild of the military, it was still related closely enough to nuclear security to warrant control by military veterans and defense experts—a male world of Cold War strategizing in which women were foreigners. Though their rhetoric was often heavy with sentimental maternalism, club women were deeply political creatures who spoke a tactical language as well. They wanted the political status that entry into government policymaking circles afforded, but they also understood that the limitations of their context required them to broker deals to get what they wanted. The advisory group was not their end goal, but it was a strategic compromise that brought them significantly closer to policymaking than they would have been had they decided to pursue integration. Such an insurgency would have directly confronted deeper institutional patterns of sex discrimination in the military-defense establishment. As one of Eisenhower’s female administrators described her sense of realpolitik: “We knew there were certain things we could not do and we didn’t try to.”58 As club women had predicted, then, the creation of special women’s committees did effectively exile them to a corner of the civil defense establishment. Yet, they did not view this as an entirely negative development. Again, their lofty claim to special maternal insight was partly responsible for putting them there, so they were not surprised about or completely displeased with an outcome partially of their own making. Whitehurst, for example, had encouraged Caldwell to fully integrate women, but she, too, claimed the mantle of difference to push for that integration. Furthermore, many network activists were veterans of the advisory committee circuit, so they had faith in its capacity to “open the doors,” to provide a platform for more talk about women in government and a stepping-stone to full partnership. They were legatees of successful Progressive Era campaigns in which women had served in similar advisory capacities, and some had even been New Dealers responsible for providing “the feminine viewpoint.” Lucy Howorth, chair of the Assembly from 1951 through 1952,

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for instance, was a charter member of the cadre of female civil servants that served in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies.59 Similarly, during World War II, many activists had served on local, state, and federal advisory boards. Margaret Hickey enjoyed a stint as chair of the Women’s Advisory Committee to the War Manpower Commission, and Whitehurst served on the women’s committee of Maryland’s Council of Civil Defense. Still more of the network’s rank and file had served in the women’s divisions of their local and state political parties, on the “ladies’ auxiliaries” of hospital boards, and on the women’s committees of countless civic organizations. Clearly, network members knew that the women’s advisory mechanism was flawed, but it allowed them to do their work while fighting for “100 percent partnership.”

PARAMILITARY SISTERHOOD

Even within the parameters of “women’s affairs,” club women managed to create an impressively collaborative network of federal, state, and local preparedness programs. At the very top of the flowchart stood the FCDA’s female administrator: Sharp and Whitehurst served under Truman, and Katherine Howard and Jean Wood Fuller served under Eisenhower. Below them were regional women’s affairs administrators (also paid positions), who oversaw programming in the FCDA’s nine (later seven) defense regions. At the state level, women’s participation was more uneven because not every state had a fully developed preparedness program. One report noted that already by 1952, twenty-eight states had either women’s advisory committees or female representation on their statewide advisory boards.60 Below the state level, generally the largest cities (or sometimes counties) had a women’s program in place. But at this level, women’s clubs (usually chapters of national organizations) often supervised local efforts. In concert with the FCDA (but outside of its direct supervision), the Assembly of Women’s Organizations for National Security guided its member groups’ state and local activities. The Assembly’s organizational structure, however, was much more fluid and less hierarchical than the FCDA’s, enabling its members to more quickly and easily implement programs that matched their local needs and resources. The Assembly’s clearinghouse and advisory functions provided members with the latest news on women and defense from Washington, as well as an outlet for club women to communicate their ideas back to the FCDA. Relations between the FCDA’s women’s affairs directors and the Assembly’s successive chairwomen remained friendly, even through changes in presidential administrations, fluctuations in FCDA evacuation and shelter policies, and the shifting agendas of women’s organizations. Leaders of the Assembly

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moved on and off of the FCDA’s Advisory Committee for Women’s Participation, and as a whole, the Assembly served as a kind of nongovernmental lobby group for the FCDA. Within the Assembly, however, it became immediately apparent that fissures in the larger women’s movement prevented any realization of a paramilitary sisterhood. Indeed, at the independent women’s conference, the first discussion about the composition of the then future Assembly’s steering committee became a conflict about which organizations could and should represent American women on security issues. Women from the AFL and CIO, representing an essentially white working-class constituency, insisted that blue-collar women had to have a strong presence in the Assembly to offset the preponderance of prosperous club women. Labor’s ascendance to the Assembly’s steering committee, however, occurred with less protest than did black women’s.61 Jeanetta Brown of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) criticized organizers for inviting black women’s clubs as an afterthought: she told fellow participants that black women did “not want to be called in to have these things said to us. . . . Let us help in the planning.” Only after prodding from a representative of the United Council of Church Women did the mainly white Assembly members grant the NCNW a seat on the steering committee. Still, some African American women found themselves excluded in another, less direct way. The National Association of Colored Women, although supportive of the Assembly’s formation, could not join due to the $100 membership fee. This was likely a financial obstacle for many smaller, less organized women’s organizations as well.62 The Assembly’s racial and class composition changed only slightly as a result of these accommodations of union and black club women. Leaders of the GFWC, the BPW, and the AAUW dominated despite the Assembly’s rotating chair and committee elections, resulting in a more homogeneous leadership than general membership. Geneva Valentine of the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women was elected treasurer for several years, but despite her experience as her organization’s national president, Assembly members never elected her to lead them. The homogeneity of the network’s leadership meant that activists maintained close and easy personal relationships with one another, which, in turn, enabled them to pursue their political work from a shared set of perspectives and organizing styles. Leaders were in frequent contact with one another, in ways reminiscent of suffrage and Progressive women activists, yet with the added modern luxuries of the telephone and air travel. They shared personal news through letters as well, relating what they knew about goings-on in Washington and the successes and failures of their own endeavors. Their most important social and political event was the annual National Women’s Advisory Committee Conference, where the leaders of

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national women’s organizations, regional and state women’s affairs directors, and FCDA officials convened to discuss the latest developments in shelter or evacuation policy, set volunteer recruitment goals for the next year, and formulate new plans for expanding women’s programming on matters of education, welfare, and medical care. Here, they networked around not only civil defense issues, but around professional interests, club politics, and women in government concerns as well. Well into the 1950s, these annual meetings regularly drew about 150 representatives of women’s clubs, an impressive number considering the quixotic character of other volunteer groups and the inconsistent interest in civil defense of the population generally. Far from being marginal to the inner workings of the civil defense establishment, “women’s affairs were constantly in the forefront” as a result of these kinds of events, Katherine Howard later recalled.63 The excitement and fellowship of being part of a national network provided female volunteers with the energy necessary to maintain their interest in civil defense even in years when the Cold War cooled. Assembly chair Lucy Howorth noted in her 1952 report that maintaining women’s activism over the long term would be difficult: “When the Assembly was formed a year ago, the period was aptly described by General Marshall as one of ‘tension.’ Today, there is the prospect of a truce in Korea [and] the arms program is being leveled off. . . . While these developments are welcomed, they will make more difficult the promotion of activities necessary to defense.”64 As discussed, the entire defense establishment shared this concern, but because club women were actually working on civil defense at the grass roots, they probably knew better than FCDA planners how hard it would be to sustain popular interest in a macabre topic. Local activists whose affiliation never brought them near the excitement of a national conference in Washington depended dearly on their national leadership to bring back inspiration from the hub. Women’s clubs, large and small, had varying resources, skills, and memberships to provide this inspiration, but they all deployed the same general themes: patriotism, volunteer service, and “the use of womanpower in national security.”65 A few examples from the most active clubs illuminate these principles in action. The GFWC had set up a National Defense Department in June 1941, so its state, district, and local chapter members felt well prepared to take on civil defense work by 1950. Less than one year after the first women’s conferences, the GFWC set up a separate Civil Defense Division in order to make it a top priority. “Women were never so important as in the year 1951, the sixth year of the Atomic Age,” said President Houghton, “and we bear a greater responsibility than ever before for the preservation of life.”66 The GFWC aimed for the “active participation of every club member in some volunteer civil defense service.”

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This meant that a typical member was expected not only to participate in her chapter’s activities but also to register her services at her local (county or city) civil defense office. The GFWC was typical among women’s clubs in its fanatical faith in education, so its programming revolved around setting up FCDA-approved training classes and publishing materials to rouse American women out of what Houghton called their “shocking apathy.”67 Another active group in the network, the BPW, also devoted a sizable chunk of its resources and labor power to civil defense. It first formed a special National Security Committee to coordinate national efforts, which in 1953 became a standing committee based on the premise that “national security should be a matter of daily consideration.”68 Committee chair Clara Longstreth declared that “the central fact of our national existence today is that we are not safe.”69 Following on these assumptions, local BPW clubs coordinated an impressive number of activities, including special conferences, training sessions, speaking tours, and public relations campaigns. Chapters solicited publications from the FCDA, duplicated and disseminated them, and then designed neighborhood training sessions for women. They also cooperated with municipal civil defense officials when additional volunteers were needed for blood drives, mock training exercises, or recruiting campaigns. In some instances, local BPW organizers even spearheaded efforts to pass state or county legislation and secure funding where there was no official program. BPW chapters reported significant interest in civil defense activities among their local members, with 1,158 clubs (39 percent) reporting active National Security Committee programs by 1954.70 Smaller clubs with even smaller chapters could not take on the broad defense agendas of the GFWC and the BPW, so they concentrated on particular aspects of preparedness, such as first aid or blood donation. The National Negro BPW, for example, focused its efforts on plane spotting in the Ground Observer Corps, while the National Home Demonstration Council organized rural women into a disaster corps that could handle mass feeding of evacuees. When the FCDA issued the Home Protection Exercises in 1953, chapters of smaller organizations often designed training programs around its recommendations. Local clubs always received a boost when the FCDA women’s affairs coordinator came to speak about home protection. In 1953 alone, Katherine Howard traveled almost 100,000 miles to deliver sixty-three speeches in thirty-two cities, many of them to smaller organizations that did not have the resources or reach of the GFWC and BPW.71 Whatever their size, resources, or access to FCDA insiders, female activists apparently had no difficulty in adapting the civil defense techniques of conventional wars to a nuclear age. Despite their thousands of hours of meeting, talking, training, and proselytizing in the “new language” of

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atomic warfare, none of them questioned the premises of that language or frankly confronted the new demands of nuclear warfare. Of course, activists’ main source of information, the FCDA, did nothing to encourage open discussion of what was new about nuclear war. Thus women’s groups remained enthralled with the oft-told successes of the British female civil defenders in World War II, and looked backward to the “good war” instead of staring ahead to confront their nuclear future.

ATOMIC HOUSEWIFERY

As female FCDA staff and activists feminized civil defense, they militarized women’s housework. Routine chores, such as housecleaning, cooking, and consumption, became a matter of life and death. Both male and female FCDA planners promulgated the concept of atomic housewifery, but Eisenhower’s women’s affairs directors, Katherine Howard and Jean Wood Fuller, disseminated the concept the most vociferously. Club activists, who had been the innovators in terms of identifying civil defense’s welfare dimensions, proved very receptive to the notion of atomic housewifery, for like welfare work, it promised inclusion in a paramilitary mobilization. This militarization of housework, however, was part of a deeper process than women’s efforts to get in on home defense. Most immediately, it was an outgrowth of the FCDA’s militarization of family life; as the trend toward family preparedness intensified over the course of the decade, so did the focus on women. It was also a by-product of the militarization of the larger postwar culture, an indicator of just how large the bomb loomed in the popular imagination. That housework was now an integral part of paramilitary defense reveals how far Cold War diplomatic and military concepts had seeped into the everyday life of civilians.72 Housewives seemed the most logical target for the FCDA’s atomic makeover since the responsibility for civil defense shifted increasingly to families, which everyone viewed as women’s business. The principles of atomic housewifery were rooted firmly in the feminine mystique. The Blue Book, for example, saw women as a potential volunteer pool because presumably they were “generally present in residential neighborhoods at all hours.”73 The average housewife could therefore, in their words, be “on duty” twenty-four hours a day. Planners also assumed that women could easily take on family protection responsibilities because preparedness required nothing more than the adaptation of domestic skills to an attack situation. FCDA staff had assumed the same thing for welfare services. As Sharp told listeners at the first women’s conference: “I believe that because of their experience in the home . . . women can be counted on for emergency welfare services with little or no training.”74 So, too, then, the job

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of “bomb-proofing” the home would require nothing more complicated than women were already doing for their families. As Katherine Howard liked to say, civil defense was “merely a prudent extension of existing protective services” already provided by women.75 Preparedness meant for women not just the militarization of family relations along the lines of the Home Protection Exercises, but the militarization of maternal and wifely functions in particular. The paramilitary housewife had to learn essentially four critical tasks. First, she had to learn the basic rules of modern warfare, including not only the use of atomic bombs but of biological and chemical weaponry and domestic sabotage. She also had to learn to recognize air-raid alert signals. Once aware, she could perform her second duty, training other family members in disaster preparedness. “Every member of her family can learn through her,” Howard said. Third, she was responsible for the containment of panic and fear; she had to “prepare the family mentally and psychologically” for warfare with “matter-of-fact discussion” about the necessity of family readiness. As Symington and Sharp had declared early on, housewives’ own gossip could prevent rumors and mass hysteria and fortify the psyches of an entire neighborhood. The final and perhaps most important duty of the nuclearage housewife was to prepare the home itself for both attack and recovery. This involved gathering at least a three-day supply of food and water for the family car, preparing a survival-tool and first-aid kit, assembling supplies for safe sanitation practices, and stocking the family bomb shelter with food and amusements for the children.76 Home protection campaigns were a kind of nuclear-age version of the early-twentieth-century domestic science movement. In ways similar to home economics experts in the Progressive Era, FCDA staff sought to inculcate in housewives rational, efficient, routinized housekeeping skills. Fire prevention campaigns, for example, recommended the establishment of housecleaning protocols. Officials claimed that fire from the blast was more dangerous than the explosion itself, so dirty homes were potential kindling for nuclear firestorms. Establishing routines that kept the house clean, therefore, was the most important thing a woman could do to protect her family. The FCDA’s Women in Civil Defense pamphlet told housewives to practice “fire-proof housekeeping” as “the first line of defense against fire.” The pamphlet recommended a careful inventory of areas in the home that tended to accumulate junk: “Attic a junk pile? Stairs or halls cluttered?” the pamphlet asked. The solution was to train family members to stay alert and keep those places debris free—or even to hold family clean-up drills to maintain cleanliness.77 In a sense, this home defense literature was indistinguishable from the litany of “expert” advice in the postwar era that counseled women to perform their domestic chores with care and precision.78 But ordinary civilian

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experts could never pack the authoritative power of the military: “The highest military authorities in our country,” Howard often said, “stressed the fact that good housekeeping is one of the best protections against fire in an atomic blast.”79 Along with fireproof housekeeping, FCDA literature stressed the importance of scientific food storage and preparation. The FCDA produced dozens of pamphlets to instruct housewives how to stockpile food before a strike and prepare it for consumption afterward. The most famous in this series was Grandma’s Pantry, prepared in 1955 by Jean Fuller. Using an old-fashioned cook stove and a stocked larder as its central iconography, the Grandma’s Pantry campaign avoided scare tactics and used a softer, domestic imagery. As Elaine Tyler May has argued, this campaign invoked a nostalgia for a simpler, more self-sufficient time in American history. Yet it also updated the domestic imagery by fusing female domesticity with the paramilitary. “It may seem a little difficult to equate hot stoves with the cold war,” Howard acknowledged, “but . . . hot stoves are part of Civil Defense.”80 Other pamphlets offered more alarmist recommendations on food preparation and biological warfare. This literature, in particular, betrayed an obsession with dirt that replicated 1950s commercials for kitchen cleansers and bath soaps. “Keep yourself and your home clean,” recommended one pamphlet. “Keep the house spic and span. Germs don’t like clean houses,” admonished another. According to officials, biological warfare was not merely a personal concern but a public health matter as well: “You must strive to keep your personal health at a peak at all times,” one booklet warned, for unhealthy citizens could spread disease and weaken national resistance. Civil defense housekeeping also required women to educate their families about the risks of unclean living. The Home Protection Exercises told women: “Gather your family together and discuss the dangers of dirt and disease.”81 A housewife’s defense against fire and dirt depended primarily upon the preparedness strategies of her family. In the evacuation years, the FCDA advised women to stock enough food and water for an extended trip in an automobile. For families who had built home shelters, the FCDA recommended that women stock a one to two weeks’ supply of food and water that would “fit the needs and preferences of family members.” The FCDA’s training film, Shelter on a Quiet Street, depicted housewife Betsy Warren in her kitchen poring over menu ideas, selecting “as many family favorites as possible.”82 FCDA experts offered detailed suggestions on food management in order to “ensure having a reserve supply of food that is good tasting.”83 Although FCDA literature stressed that women should follow federal guidelines in their choice of foods, it also advised that each woman had the creativity to invent menus that would work best for her

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under adverse conditions. As a woman reporter predicted, shelter preparation was “where a homemaker’s ingenuity . . . [would] be tested.”84 It is worth pointing out that defense planners paid so much attention to women’s meal preparation because they believed that food had a psychological value beyond its obvious nutritional benefits. Food could allay panic and reassure a frightened citizenry that shelter life was not unbearable—and could even be comfortable. The FCDA’s literature on mass feeding maintained that food was “a powerful social symbol as well as a symbol of security. There is something about eating that eases tensions and calms anxieties.”85 One of Howard’s speeches addressed the potential military uses of mass feeding in ways that equated the distribution of food with the parenting of dependent children: “Whenever a people feels that its food supply is in the hands of an authority, it tends to regard that authority as to some degree paternal.” Thus, she concluded, “feeding people adequately . . . is an efficient way of establishing the existing authority as a good parent toward whom the people [will] assume an attitude of dependency in times of severe stress.” Of course planners did not design mass feeding programs as crude social control, but they did hope that food could play a role in channeling people’s postattack emotions away from chaotic, possibly anti-authoritarian expressions and toward more placid behaviors associated with the cozy image of Grandma’s Pantry.86 As housewives and welfare providers, women would be called upon to use their cooking skills to deliver the masses their nuclear comfort food. FCDA administrators were sensitive to the fact that housewives might frown upon these additional burdens of atomic domesticity. “Keeping up with the housework and Junior and the international situation—in addition to Mom’s 1,001 other duties, doesn’t leave much leisure time” for learning the language of atomic warfare, officials admitted.87 In fact, planners worried that this new language might be too scientific, that expectations to learn the elementals of atomic and biological warfare might frighten housewives away completely. But Howard reassured women that although not all could be trained in some of the highly technical areas of civil defense, “there is scarcely a woman alive who doesn’t know something about the problems of cooking, cleaning, extra blankets and unexpected visitors [i.e., evacuees].”88 The FCDA found some help for its promotion of atomic housewifery from manufacturers, inventors, and retailers who had their own commercial interests in home protection. Seeking to capitalize on Cold War insecurities about the bomb, they carved out an entire industry of home survival, and many of their marketing innovations were geared toward women. General Foods created a handy, portable meal preparation kit, and in 1955, Sears and Roebuck featured a civil defense window display at each of its stores, showcasing the family protection items housewives

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could purchase through their Sears catalogue.89 Supermarket managers invited local female volunteers to set up Grandma’s Pantry exhibits in their stores to educate the housewife about fortifying her larder. One of the largest of these efforts occurred in Montgomery, Alabama, where two hundred women from eleven different women’s clubs staffed Grandma’s Pantry exhibits in fifteen supermarkets.90 General Mills’ own icon of domesticity, “Betty Crocker,” even got involved, appearing in person at an FCDA women’s conference to instruct the participants on how to prepare a family evacuation kit.91 A women’s media facilitated this commercialization of atomic housewifery by providing free advertising for FCDA campaigns and producing features on home preparedness. Magazines such as Glamour, Mademoiselle, the Woman’s Home Companion, and the Ladies’ Home Journal published “how-to” articles about evacuation and shelter.92 On the radio, the FCDA advertised heavily during soap operas because, in the words of one official, “these programs pack a terrific wallop on the gals who follow them.”93 For the new medium of television, the FCDA coproduced programs with major networks. In February 1951, for example, the FCDA and CBS television produced a two-week educational program on women and civil defense. The New York Times called it an “admirable new television series for the housewife” that enabled her “to become versed in the needs of civilian defense without leaving her home.”94 The FCDA insured this kind of favorable press coverage by offering prominent female reporters seats on its Women’s Advisory Committee and by courting organizations such as American Women in Radio and Television, whose female media professionals provided “an invaluable opportunity for a direct and effective contact with the women at home.”95 Still, there was a darker side of this encouragement of the paramilitary homemaker, which took the form of a scolding litany about apathy and its consequences. Like Operations Doorstep and Cue, these odes to preparedness were morality plays with stock characters and behaviors representing “good” and “bad” housekeepers. The FCDA film House in the Middle, a widely distributed and referenced film, was a classic in this genre. It featured three single-family homes exposed to an atomic blast. The house on the right had newspapers lying around, clothing strewn about, a table littered with miscellaneous items—it was an “eyesore,” said the narrator. The house on the left had become weather-beaten and run down structurally. The “house in the middle,” however, had just undergone a spring cleaning and somehow survived the nuclear blast intact. To underscore the lesson, the narrator said, “Remember, civil defense housekeeping saved the house in the middle!” Discussing the film with a group of club women, as she often did, Howard preached that the middle house survived only because it was “presided over by such good housekeepers.”96

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In some instances, the FCDA blamed women outright for lagging public involvement. Women in Civil Defense declared: “You would hardly blame others for failing to provide food, clothing, and shelter for your family. That is your family responsibility. And so is family civil defense. . . . If your community does not have an active civil defense organization, much of the blame must fall on you. . . . Unless you, as a responsible American woman, take action you are gambling with the safety of your family, your friends, your community, and your country.”97 Club women, too, indulged in finger-wagging. An AAUW booklet on civil defense, for example, included a self-quiz for women on home protection. The lowest score yielded this bit of wisdom: “You deserve what you get.”98 Even the women’s media participated in shaming women into preparedness. After viewing the remains of a mannequin family during Operation Cue, a reporter from the magazine American Home told her readers: “I am appalled. Not at the atom bomb. No—at me. Appalled at what a risk I was running by my indifference.”99 Collectively, such admonitions replicated the worst of the postwar period’s carping prescriptive literature aimed at housewives. Whether produced by the FCDA or designed by club women, home protection campaigns held women responsible for everything from dirty houses to public apathy. Ultimately, their reproaches amplified the cacophony of voices preaching domesticity, by which all postwar women, whether involved in civil defense or not, were judged.

FEMINISM, LIBERALISM, AND CIVIL DEFENSE

This militarized elaboration of domesticity, however, was more than a one-note sermon on good housekeeping and maternal care, because it proved too malleable when implemented by its female adherents. Over the decade, it bent to accommodate paeans to domesticity, articulations of women’s rights, and everything in between. For FCDA officials, this was one of the disturbing facts of self-help militarization—that citizen adherents would embrace parts of FCDA dicta and then invent new ways to put them together. Even female administrators tried to put their own imprints on civil defense, ones that did not always reflect the FCDA’s projection of paramilitary readiness. To be sure, both female administrators and club women accepted militarization’s fundamental premises (the containment of communism, atomic diplomacy, military readiness), but they also tinkered with militarization’s implementation and thereby changed it into something noticeably different. During the Eisenhower era, family defense rhetoric gained momentum while the demands for “100% partnership” receded somewhat. Partly, this

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reflected the fact that the structures for women’s participation were already well established by 1953, and as discussed earlier, activists found that they could still be effective, even if not integrated, within them. Yet if the calls for partnership faded, they never disappeared completely. This was due, in part, to the strong leadership of Katherine Howard, Eisenhower’s women’s affairs director until 1954 and half-time FCDA adviser until 1957. She was a seasoned Republican Party activist who landed a job on Eisenhower’s campaign team during the 1952 elections when Ike had made special efforts to garner women’s political support.100 Born to a prominent family in Savannah, Georgia, she graduated from Smith College the year women gained the vote, and one year later she married Charles Howard, a Harvard lawyer and town selectman in Reading, Massachusetts. As she and her domestic servants raised two children, her husband built a political career in Massachusetts state politics. Frustrated with the lack of intellectual stimulation in full-time motherhood, Howard became active in the League of Women Voters and in her town’s Republican Party.101 From 1938 to 1952, she rose steadily in the ranks to become a member of the Republican National Committee, where she pledged to do much more than “sit at a head table and wear a pretty hat.”102 Howard’s outspokenness later won her a position on Eisenhower’s campaign staff. After seeing a picture of Eisenhower’s all-male election team in the newspaper, she sent an angry telegram to one of Ike’s closest advisers complaining about his “indifferent attitude” toward women in the party. Recalling her reaction to the photo, she said: “I was just furious. I was just burned up.”103 After her telegram was published in the Boston Herald, an embarrassed Eisenhower invited her to be on his campaign strategy staff. Although never a part of his inner circle, she was proud of her status as the only woman on his team. Still, she acknowledged the concessions she and other women had to make in politics: “Well, the men have to trust you. They have to know you’re discreet, they have to know you won’t talk too much. They have to know that you will abide by decisions, that you will contribute what you have.”104 Howard’s experiences encouraged her to set a tone in which female civil defense activists could demand esteem and quasi-professional status in a paramilitary mobilization. Although they reservedly accepted their armslength distance from the FCDA’s policy core, female administrators and network leaders still wanted respect in the male-dominated and masculinist security bureaucracy they pledged to serve, and feminism was the language they used to express this sentiment. In the postwar period, mainstream feminism expressed a demand for legal equality and equal opportunity in the labor force and education, but not necessarily support for the ERA. In this sense, network leaders and members could be considered feminists.105 Although largely a group of volunteers, they viewed their civil

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defense activism as a public service that deserved professional recognition. They decried men’s inability to work with women and their trivialization of women’s voluntary work and interests. The chair of Kansas’s women’s advisory board complained to Howard, “I think the men do not know the proper approach to the women [regarding] their part in the program.”106 Howard, too, was a vocal critic. She warned a mostly male audience of civil defense administrators not to assume that women’s clubs were “merely focal points for a lot of silly chatter. . . . Most women’s organizations today are the center for a lot of hard and enthusiastic work on the behalf of a great many worthy causes.”107 Often, women complained about sexism privately through correspondence. When Howard resigned her full-time job at the FCDA, letters from club and Republican Party women poured into her office, lamenting the loss of a strong woman leader. One writer said she had hoped Howard did not resign “because you were not allowed to function in the position that was given you. So often I have seen that happen because of the interference of a man, or men, who are jealous of women’s prerogatives, even the few that are donated.”108 Howard rarely encountered such interference at the FCDA, because male administrators had little interest in organizing women—and she knew this. Recalling her experiences on Eisenhower’s campaign train, she said: “I was very useful . . . because many of the men were much too busy to feel they wanted to see a woman about anything.”109 Yet this acknowledgment coexisted with a feminist insistence that paid or unpaid, segregated or integrated, women’s work still deserved validation. Sometimes women’s investment in earning professional respect took on bizarre dimensions imaginable only in an atomic age. Jean Fuller, who assumed Howard’s position in September 1954, led a female delegation to witness Operation Cue in May 1955. As one of the most prominent “helmeted housewives” to witness the blast, she accepted an invitation from the Los Angeles Times to share her first-person account with readers. After ducking and covering, she emerged from her trench to proclaim: “My experience . . . shows conclusively that women can stand the shock and strain of an atomic explosion just as well as men.”110 This declaration—a macabre assertion of women’s equality—served an important purpose for female officials. It certified them as more masculine than maternal. Both Howard and Fuller later noted that their blast experiences gave them credibility on the lecture circuit. “It was . . . very helpful to me in my work,” Fuller said, “because it gave me something just a little bit unique to talk about that no other woman was out talking about.”111 And given the high value placed on soldiering as an indication of fitness for service in Cold War defense bureaucracies, such daring acts of atomic adventure functioned as a kind of fraternity ritual that increased women’s credibility among their male colleagues.

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The passion with which network members criticized the sexist culture of civil defense did not ultimately translate into an open identification with feminism. Female administrators and activists ranged from the ambivalent to the strategic in eschewing the appellation “feminist.” To be sure, it was not an advantage to identify oneself as a feminist, for it had particularly pejorative meanings in the fifties, an era in which any oppositional social movement was cast as potentially subversive. Postwar media representations of women, although by no means monolithic, also fostered antifeminist denunciations of “selfish,” “ambitious” working women or domineering mothers.112 In this context, female administrators and club leaders used the “I’m not a feminist, but . . . ” disclaimer before launching into critiques of gender inequality. They were also careful to present themselves in ways that reassured the public that in spite of their involvement in a paramilitary program, they were still all woman. Just before her departure from full-time work at the FCDA, Howard summarized her contributions this way: “I have dedicated myself to the perpetuation of household responsibilities, not to their abandonment” (emphasis hers).113 Still, network members’ persistent irritation with the sexist attitudes in the larger culture and with what Fuller called “the male bottleneck” inside the FCDA suggests that their maternalism existed in some tension with their feminism.114 In the end, female activists embraced maternalism more exuberantly than they did feminism, leaving their sporadic critiques of sexism without a foundation that could nurture a full-scale analysis of the masculinist Cold War security culture. Their resultant mix of maternalist feminism nevertheless represented a partial challenge to the FCDA’s narrower definition of preparedness. Just as male planners had feared a program that was too militaristic, they worried about an orientation that was too maternalist or, just as worrisome, too liberal. Network leaders’ interest in stretching the meanings of preparedness threatened to move civil defense in a direction uncomfortably close to Eleanor Roosevelt’s liberal-maternal vision. True, the strict definition of civil defense as the “defense of life and property” had already been pushed in a more Rooseveltian direction when it came to welfare provision. But club women and FCDA planners had forged this path together; and even though women had led the way, FCDA planners were still able to reign in welfare expectations and use club women’s voluntarism as an example that postattack welfare could be secured through self-help. The new worry for FCDA planners was whether club women wanted to push even further the civil defense-as-welfare model—to espouse a distinctly liberal-democratic maternalist version of civil defense that pitched preparedness as the linchpin of the good society. There were certainly indications that this liberal vision might prevail. At the independent women’s conference, Margaret Hickey declared that

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“the battle for a secure world starts where you are: adequate schools, libraries, clinics, housing, the improvement of child labor laws and working conditions, solving the problems of the aged.”115 A prominent member group of the Assembly argued in a similar vein, claiming that “any community job which needs to be done at this time . . . is civil defense because, if we strengthen our resources at home, and build stronger communities, we will have a strong civil defense.”116 In fact, it was not unusual for national clubs to claim expansive definitions of civil defense as a way of coupling preparedness with their ongoing civic reform programs. The GFWC, for example, created a Housing Division within their National Defense Department, whose purpose was to lobby for rent control and affordable single-family housing.117 The BPW’s National Security Committee also linked civil defense with broader reforms, such as health and medical services, adult recreation, and funding for libraries.118 Thus the debate about civil defense’s character that had emerged during World War II between Eleanor Roosevelt and Fiorello LaGuardia had not been fully resolved before another group of female reformers got a hold of it and shaped it in ways that reflected their own postwar reform agendas. It can be argued, in fact, that civil defense never had a stable meaning because its implementation was always tied to the voluntary groups’ aspirations and political interests. As long as self-help prevailed as the engine of home front militarization, it would be subjected to an ideological tug of war about its core values, meanings, and implementation. Women’s groups understood this and, accordingly, tried to shape civil defense to reflect their reform interests.

THE FAILURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING

Many questions remain about how both club women and unaffiliated women responded to the call for militarization. FCDA planners hoped that women would comprise 60 percent of the volunteers, but it is impossible to say how many of the reported 4.5 million volunteers were female because the FCDA statistics did not differentiate by sex (and their definitions of volunteer were imprecise to begin with). In any case, self-help policy discouraged government tracking of how American housewives prepared their residences for attack because it celebrated citizen autonomy from government oversight. As previous chapters have shown, public interest in civil defense was sporadic and wide-ranging, with moments of overzealous voluntarism that exposed the incoherence of the FCDA’s own planning and periods of inactivity to the point of invisibility. Although it is difficult to pinpoint where women sat relative to these extremes, it is likely that the network’s activism was one of the few bright spots for

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beleaguered FCDA planners. It represented the most sustained organizing effort the FCDA had witnessed. Various other constituencies, such as veterans, fraternal, and civic associations, had coalesced around civil defense, but their efforts did not match club women’s sustained efforts on a variety of fronts. Because the FCDA did not track women’s participation, there remains only fragmentary statistical evidence of its dimensions. What the FCDA did count was requests for literature aimed specifically at women, and reports from regional and state women’s affairs directors and from women’s clubs indicate a significant interest in at least learning about family defense. In 1954, the FCDA reported that over 2 million copies of the Home Protection Exercises were requested that year alone. In 1955, Fuller reported 1.5 million requests for the Exercises, and in 1956, she recorded almost 3 million requests for the Grandma’s Pantry series.119 More modestly, her By, for, and about Women in Civil Defense newsletter started publication in 1954 with a circulation of 150 and reached 23,000 by 1955.120 Howard made the dubious claim that these requests for literature were proof of women’s participation, which is as difficult to substantiate now as it was then.121 Further, among those requesting literature, it is difficult to distinguish between club and unaffiliated women. Pamphlet orders might have been only an indication of club women’s interest—from groups already prone to activism. Indeed, it was often the case that national organizations ordered bulk copies for distribution to their local affiliates; the GFWC, for example, sent the Home Protection Exercises, along with a special message from FCDA chairman Val Peterson, to its almost 17,000 member clubs. But since clubs used civil defense to recruit new members, some of this literature likely made its way into the hands of nonmember housewives. In the late 1950s, female administrators at the state and federal level made a more concerted effort to quantify women’s participation (affiliated and unaffiliated) so they could reasonably make claims for congressional funding of various pilot projects. “For some time we have wondered how to check to see if women and their families were reading the Home Protection Exercises,” said a report on women’s participation, “and further, whether they had practiced the lessons.” In 1958, a regional women’s affairs director developed a Home Preparedness Award Program Kit to assess “whether homes were being readied (emphasis theirs).”122 The program was designed to both track and reward housewives’ implementation of family defense. A woman could request the kit from a local women’s club or her local or state civil defense office. If she prepared her home according to the kit’s checklist (twenty items), she earned a window sticker from Washington that read “This Home Is Prepared,” which planners hoped would function “both as a recognition and as an example to

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neighboring families.”123 After running several pilot programs, then national women’s affairs director Dorothy Pearl reported in 1960 that just over 2 million kits had been distributed since 1958, but that only about 40,000 women had earned the right to display an award sticker. These were, obviously, not the results that officials had hoped for.124 This crude accounting of pamphlets and award stickers, of course, does little to explain the deeper reasons for women’s nonparticipation. Club women’s enthusiasm for and participation in home preparedness was certainly a boon for the FCDA, but it represented only a tiny minority of American women. FCDA administrators puzzled over how to raise women’s bomb consciousness, but their diagnoses and solutions remained firmly anchored in the assumptions of their expert psychologists and marketing men—that women’s attitudes and behaviors could be tracked and molded with the best of what psychology and advertising had to offer. The widespread phenomenon of female nonparticipation led each women’s affairs coordinator to search for a more finely calibrated education program, a more appealing slogan, and a more eager women’s club. The faith in networking and marketing along with the fearsome visual power of the mushroom cloud was in large part what drove both female administrators and club women to sustain their campaigns, even as they were continually confronted with women’s “shocking apathy.” But rather than dismiss American women’s behavior as merely apathetic, it is important to speculate about their attitudes toward and ultimate rejection of family militarization. First, it may be that the ideological contests over the definition of civil defense, along with the variance in its implementation from club to club, cut both ways in terms of women’s participation rates. The patriotic, reformist, maternalist, even feminist possibilities in civil defense work, especially in the early years, drew many club members to join the cause, but others—the unaffiliated—may have seen confusion in mission and message. Another reason for women’s tepid support may well have been rooted in the specific demands of home protection itself. Presented as a mere extension of women’s work, family defense actually represented yet another set of household chores for housewives. Practically, it lengthened the list of women’s domestic obligations, and ideologically, it freighted housework with the drama of life and death. Even a female administrator admitted that women’s “interest and enthusiasm lessen when they realize that however essential a prepared home and family are to the national defense effort, the procedures to be followed in attaining such a goal require time, effort, and specific knowledge.”125 Added to this was the home defense literature’s unrelenting condemnation of women for family apathy, a claim not likely to attract more female adherents.

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Finally, a preparedness effort that assumed all women were full-time housewives was out of step with changes in women’s labor and family patterns already underway during World War II. Despite the cultural emphasis on female domesticity, more women (especially married women with children) were entering the paid labor force in the fifties. Yet civil defense officials (male and female alike) and network activists (many of them employed) clung to an increasingly anachronistic vision of a nonemployed militia of volunteer housewives available around the clock. This wishful thinking may have simplified the task of creating a defense scheme for some 160 million people, but it did little to cultivate active female constituents, whose lives did not mirror the propaganda. In the end, clear explanations for women’s tepid support of home front militarization remain difficult for the historian, partly because they are embedded in women’s moods and views about the bomb, which are puzzling phenomena to document, as civil defense proponents learned after time. To label women’s (or men’s) noninvolvement as merely “apathy” suggests a kind of political idleness or a naive lack of engagement that does not acknowledge citizens’ deep apprehensions about the bomb and opinions about its use. On some level, women rejected the litany of scare tactics, morality plays, and preparation tips that streamed out of government and volunteer home protection programs. But neither is it accurate to say that this rejection evinced a widespread maternalist pacifism or constituted some sort of “pre-political” pacifist expression that would later manifest itself in more organized ways. In fact, contrary to female activists’ claims to “special aptitudes and concerns,” it appears that women behaved quite like men in the shadow of the bomb: as Cold War citizens and taxpayers, they generally endorsed the arms race and its premises, but as private citizens, they rejected a level of household militarization that asked them to arrange household duties around external threats. The only constant in this story is that women’s views of militarization did not map out neatly: their materialism coexisted with feminism, their anticommunism with a fairly liberal welfare vision, and their rejection of family preparedness with a general endorsement of Cold War militarism.

————— Women’s clubs remained active in civil defense work through the end of the fifties. The Assembly’s leaders momentarily considered disbanding in 1953, apparently somewhat weary from the pace of the previous years’ activities, but they ultimately decided to reject a proposal to “wrap the program in mothballs.”126 The group continued to meet once or twice a year while still organizing locally. Minutes of the Assembly’s 1958 conven-

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tion cite almost a hundred representatives of womens’ clubs in attendance, an impressive show of staying power that likely thrilled beleaguered civil defense administrators.127 Though the Assembly had survived the transition from Truman to Eisenhower, the periodic flare-ups of Cold War tensions, and the episodic panics over fallout, it finally disbanded when the opportunity for official liaison with Washington evaporated.128 In 1961, President Kennedy’s sweeping restructuring of civil defense made the women’s division a casualty, severing the partnership between club women and female administrators that began with Sharp’s hiring in 1950. Fuller later recalled that Kennedy’s decision was “a shame,” for “it was the [club] women who went out and sold the program.”129 Still, although the women’s network scored no particular legislative, funding, or recruiting victories, its leaders cited some significant achievements. The Assembly’s onetime chair Howorth said that club women “learned to know each other and that in itself was helpful.”130 Another leader argued that beyond the social networks, the Assembly had increased the number of women interested in government service, and in turn, had fostered “greater awareness” among government officials about “the potentialities of women.”131 The story of the network’s emergence and durability suggests that club women intuitively grasped what it has taken historians longer to understand about the postwar cult of domesticity—that it was a malleable and widely applicable construction in the Cold War years. The fact that female activists saw progress for women in both a paramilitary and maternalist mobilization nudges historians toward a more complex view of the relationships among the Cold War, the feminine mystique, and women’s political activism. Certainly, there is ample evidence to support the contention that the Cold War buttressed gender and sexual conservatism. But as historians have rediscovered a wide spectrum of women’s movements in the so-called doldrums, this narrative has become more complicated. As Joanne Meyerowitz has argued, “The Cold War had no fixed association with the domestic ideal.”132 In the case of civil defense, the conventional gender politics of the postwar era created more, not less, opportunity for women’s activism; club women found the tenets of domesticity compatible with militarization, maternalism, and even liberal feminism. In some ways, network activists even echoed their sisters in the burgeoning peace movement, in that both camps found the emotional and political appeal of patriotic motherhood a useful organizing strategy. Yet civil defense activists’ challenge to the Cold War state remained limited: they questioned merely their exclusion from that state, not its authority or militarism.133 In sum, there were no predictable politics that unfolded from postwar domesticity, for as the network and its home protection campaigns reveal, “the cult of domestic, feminine values may be militarist as well as pacifist.”134

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In the end, it was club women’s unswerving commitment to militarization that constrained them the most, that blunted the potential for their maternalism and feminism to expand their role in the defense bureaucracy.135 The network’s mobilization featured some of the same liberal elements found in Progressive and New Deal women’s movements, but just as nativism, racism, and class paternalism could and did undermine those earlier struggles, Cold War anticommunism and militarism channeled the liberal maternalist and feminist impulses of the network into conservative ones. Maternalism itself encompassed conservative tendencies, for it was rooted in an ideology of women’s subordination, which limited club women’s attempts to achieve parity outside of its tenets.136 And by wedding themselves to militarization, female civil defense activists tightly circumscribed the roles they could assume in the national security mobilization. The gender ideologies undergirding the quest for total preparedness—in both the military and civilian realms—valorized masculine military prowess as a counterpoint to feminine weakness. No matter how essential home protection, welfare provision, and patriotic motherhood were to a self-help defense effort, women’s place in it would always be secondary, tenuous, and conditional.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Equal in Suffering”: Race, Class, and the Bomb

“IT IS AWESOME to reflect on what would happen . . . if colored people and white people were forced into close association in shelters, in homes and even evacuation reception centers,” wrote two National Security Resources Board consultants in late 1950. This assertion came from their study of the “sociological problems” of civil defense in Britain, which they hoped would be instructive for planners in the United States. After studying the myriad British reactions to bombing, the consultants theorized that citizens’ wartime morale could not be fashioned primarily through some tinkering with the national psyche, but that morale was partly an outgrowth of the structural arrangements of class and race. In fact, civilians’ economic and social locations at the time of attack seemed to significantly affect both their preparations for and reactions to military conflict. The report noted, for example, that in England “tensions arising from throwing families of different status together caused refusal of families to live with each other.” The consultants reasoned that such problems would be much worse in the United States because of its “polyglot population,” by which they meant racial diversity. The report ultimately framed the issue of equal access to shelter and welfare services as one of political stability rather than social justice: “How can we implement our defense organization in this country so that inequalities during defense activities do not arise to discredit our leadership?”1 This intersection of militarization with race and class arrangements troubled federal planners because they feared that frank discussions of extant racial and class fissures might expose the inequities built into “selfhelp.” The privatization of shelter was premised on suburbanization and home ownership, twin phenomena that included far more whites than nonwhites. Urban evacuation plans relied heavily upon private car ownership, leaving poor people dependent upon inadequate public transportation or their own feet to flea cities. Neither planners nor Congress had any intention of using civil defense as a vehicle for social leveling, but neither did they want to convey the impression that self-help was a callous triage solution that left the less fortunate to fend for themselves. If self-help defense was going to succeed, the FCDA had to illustrate that all Americans were equally imperiled and, at the very least, equally capable of saving themselves.

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Such concerns involved defense planners in a long-term effort to address the social—that is, the racial and class—relations of home front militarization. As historian Michael Geyer has pointed out, “Militarization reorders social arrangements and defines social identities,” which, he argues, makes it an intrinsically political process in which different groups struggle over who will bear its costs and reap its benefits.2 The decision to require citizens to share the costs of militarization necessarily raised questions about whether less racially and economically advantaged populations could or would do so. Despite the FCDA’s sloganeering about national unity, internal agency documents betrayed a grudging acknowledgment that racial and class strife might hamper recovery efforts. Planners worried that workers would abandon the assembly lines, a frightening scenario to those who believed that industrial production was the linchpin of national recovery. Similarly, documents reveal a range of official anxieties about race, from unfavorable “Negro reactions” to mock defense drills to the de facto erosion of Jim Crow in the postattack period. Workers and African Americans thus entered the planning imaginations of FCDA officials as potential “mobilization problems” that had to be anticipated and managed in order to maintain postattack stability. Yet if citizens were to bear the costs of militarization, then some of them wanted to share in its benefits. We have already seen how club women tried to shape the social arrangements of militarization through an identity politics of militarized maternalism. Similarly, organized labor and African American organizations tried to steer the militarization process down a path that enhanced their political and social status. Civil defense officials vigorously sought the support of workers and African Americans, as they did with club women. They did not anticipate, however, that these same citizens would contort the meanings of militarization in ways that departed from FCDA formulas about family, unity, and sacrifice. Organized labor supported civil defense but insisted that bargaining rights not be one of the casualties of nuclear war; African American groups, especially the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), insisted that preparedness reflect a government commitment to racial equality. For their part, FCDA officials maintained that preparedness transcended politics, even as they were embroiled in their own political struggles over the funding and parameters of militarization.

WARTIME TRANSITIONS

Although FCDA planners worked in the make-believe world of mock attacks where the “polyglot population” acted cooperatively under ideal conditions, they also had to deal with the real world—a racially and eco-

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nomically diverse society changed by total war. Although World War II had created unprecedented employment opportunities, it had also exacerbated some of the most difficult socioeconomic problems of the pre-war years. The demands and promises of total war triggered another wave of mass migration, which reconfigured certain racial, ethnic, and class boundaries. Some 15 million people moved out of their counties during the war, seeking more lucrative defense-related jobs. These dramatic population shifts affected everyone, and people experienced them differently depending on class, race, and region. Among white ethnics, second- and third-generation immigrant communities became less homogeneous and concentrated. Over 250,000 Mexicans migrated to the United States under the braceros program, mainly working and settling in the southern and western cities where they found employment in agriculture. Racial antipathy toward the Japanese resulted in their coerced migration from West Coast cities. And the migration of over a million African Americans, from the South to northern and western industrial centers, and from rural to urban areas within the South, significantly redrew the racial landscape of the United States.3 These wartime migrations, as Richard Polenberg has argued, “disrupted certain features of the American caste system.”4 Certainly, neither de facto segregation nor Jim Crow laws were overturned, but employment and population shifts brought racial groups in closer orbit than they had been before the hostilities, especially on the job and in urban public spaces. The strains of war, such as housing scarcities, tensions between older residents and new migrants, and competition for jobs all accentuated preexisting racial hostilities in many urban centers. As a result, white backlash against the real and perceived wartime gains of nonwhite groups coalesced typically around access to housing, the use of social space, and employment. The results were often explosive, as was the case in the “race wars” of Detroit and Los Angeles in 1943. Wartime militarization, then, had rearranged the home front spatially, and depending on one’s perspective, this represented either a preview of better reforms to come or an erosion of pre war racial barriers that had to be abated.5 The war did relatively little to redistribute income and wealth. The availability of steady, better-paying jobs, higher rates of unionization, and the government’s partial regulation of prices and wages redistributed wealth only minimally. But the rich got richer more slowly, and many working Americans (white and nonwhite) were able to accrue more income and savings than ever before.6 Of course, people sacrificed and gained from the war in unequal proportions, determined largely by political struggles between government and industry, capital and labor. Despite the “no-strike” pledges from major unions, wildcat strikes were a persistent feature of wartime America. As George Lipsitz has shown, these

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strikes expressed the attempts of working men and women to lay claim to the enormous profits from war production, to fulfill “hopes for freedom and autonomy” that predated the war.7 As the war wound down, policymakers, economists, and workers all worried about whether a reconversion to a peacetime economy would result in another economic depression. Public opinion polls showed it was the economy, not communism, that preoccupied most citizens at war’s end.8 Victory and postwar economic prosperity fostered bipartisan support (albeit fragile) for the continuation of some of Roosevelt’s social and economic programs, which politicians and economists hoped would facilitate reconversion and curb further class conflict. Most Americans had grown to expect the government to play some kind of role in social welfare provision and economic regulation, and Truman proposed a variety of Keynesian domestic programs, including the ill-fated 1945 Full Employment Bill. But strikes, spiraling inflation, and consumer shortages—especially in housing and durable goods—illustrated the strains of reconversion and the need for renewed government intervention to stabilize the economy. While real income increased for most Americans in the late 1940s and 1950s, the image of all citizens enjoying postwar affluence was partly mythical. Sharp class distinctions remained after the war, as Michael Harrington’s Other America so clearly documented by 1962. In the end, however, for all of its disruptions, the war itself had “resurrected faith in the capacity of the capitalist system to serve the welfare of the American people,” and now in the postwar period, most viewed national security not as a roadblock to affluence but the paved road to it.9

DEFENDING THE ASSEMBLY LINE

The critical link between national security and affluence was industrial production—the celebrated hero of World War II and the would-be savior of the Cold War peace. Indeed, citizens saw in a thriving industrial output the promise of wage and consumer bounty long delayed by war, while defense elites saw in it the promise of military and diplomatic preponderance. The frightening possibility that a Soviet nuclear strike could cripple the nation’s industrial core thus spurred an ambitious effort among NSRB and FCDA staff to plan for what was called “industrial continuity.” Workers figured prominently in this planning, not only because they were the obvious building blocks of any economic recovery, but also because they had shown their willingness to strike for war’s spoils even during the war itself. Could they be counted on, planners wondered, to defend the production lines during and after a nuclear attack? The civil defense establishment hoped to extract from labor an endorsement of “plant defense”—

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industry’s version of home protection—and to develop educational programming that would insure workers’ loyalty to the production line, especially under duress. What marked all of the FCDA’s postattack recovery schemas was the call to “maintain morale and get people back to work as quickly as possible.”10 As the FCDA’s James Wadsworth put it: “Skilled workers constitute the key to our security. They represent the difference between world peace and world war, between winning or losing the cold war. . . . America’s workers are a precious commodity.”11 Pleased with its wartime gains and optimistic about its postwar future, organized labor concurred with this flattering depiction of workers. Union membership was strong at the end of the war—fully one-third of nonfarm workers belonged to a union—and there was no indication that membership would shrink dramatically during the conversion to peacetime. Political parties had finally recognized the potential payoff of courting union endorsements and votes. And the AFL and CIO, the major representatives of industrial workers, had positioned themselves to collaborate with government on postwar economic matters. And yet, as Melvyn Dubovsky has argued, “for all the power that labor leaders appeared to wield, the United States lacked a unified labor movement, one that acted with solidarity on both the industrial and political fronts.” The AFL and CIO, in fact, parted company in their political affiliations, with the CIO more dependent on the Democratic Party and the government’s protection than the AFL, whose strongest unions could still function effectively without such help. And even within these organizations, member unions’ political alliances and practices were diverse and often contradictory.12 There was, however, less division (although by no means consensus) in the union movement about the role of labor in the grand struggle against communism. Indeed, labor’s stance on civil defense reflected its evolving commitment to use unionism to fight communism. Certainly neither the AFL nor the CIO spoke in unison on foreign policy matters, but both emerged as dedicated anticommunist organizations supportive of the axioms of national security—whether pursued by Democratic or Republican presidents. Both organizations endorsed a strong military and an activist diplomacy, and both felt that labor could and should play a role in containing communism at home and abroad. The CIO was more riven by conflict over communism than the AFL, since some of its member unions were communist dominated. By 1950, anticommunist coalitions lobbied successfully to purge eleven of the CIO’s member unions so that the CIO could declare itself free of pro-Soviet “colonial agents,” as Walter Reuther called them, who used “trade unions as an operating base.”13 Although labor’s focus was rarely foreign policy per se, AFL and CIO leadership understood that some of labor’s domestic interests were connected with and could be advanced by an activist anticommunist foreign policy. This

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was one of the few areas in which both Democratic and Republican administrations could count on labor’s consistent support.14 Although confident in labor’s pledge to fight the Cold War, civil defense planners were not as secure about how this commitment would translate into action when it really mattered. Would workers’ anticommunism be enough to keep them on the line under stress of attack and in the miserable weeks and months following such an assault? Planners suspected not, and thus believed that something more had to compel worker loyalty: a sense of interclass esprit de corps, a belief that all citizens, whatever their economic station, were in the fight against the Soviets together, and that no one would bear militarization’s burdens disproportionately. Civil defense officials had earlier tried to promote this idea during World War II; in 1942, the Office of Civilian Defense brought representatives together from both the “chambers of commerce . . . and the workers in the war plants” to show that wartime patriotism could erase class distinctions and conflicts.15 Postwar defense officials wanted to build Cold War preparedness around this same premise, even if wartime and postwar class conflict had already suggested the superficiality of such corporate-labor cooperation. The industrial priorities of militarization, then, led NSRB planners to seek labor’s support more aggressively than that of any other constituency. Unlike the situation where women’s clubs had to push the NSRB to first recognize and then include them, the goal of industrial continuity led NSRB (and then later FCDA) staff to seek labor’s collaboration from the outset. The eagerness with which planners pursued labor also reflected their conventional assumptions about what men and women should contribute to militarization. Workers—assumed to be male—were viewed as the home front soldiers, the front line battalion that would defend and then rebuild, if necessary, the economic infrastructure. Women, as we have already seen, were viewed as the supporting cast for the civilian warriors, boosting morale, providing for families, and performing other kinds of important but ultimately secondary duties. The identification of labor as the more important group to fold into the civil defense mechanism, then, was not only about industrial continuity, but also a product of planners’ reflexive understanding that men—as soldiers or civilians—led the military enterprise. Although they were actually more welcome in civil defense planning circles, postwar labor leaders still felt they had been slighted, at least in the early mobilization planning stages. According to an NSRB report, in the early summer of 1950, labor leaders felt “very much on the outside” of preparedness planning “and on several occasions expressed serious complaints and criticism of the Board’s work.”16 Ironically, this feeling derived from organized labor’s newfound sense of political power, which made its leaders feel entitled to a “permanent entree into the nation’s decision mak-

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ing councils.”17 This expectation blinded them to their already coveted position in the NSRB relative to other groups. The NSRB’s immediate response to labor’s complaints likely reassured leaders that their words carried weight. In July 1950, NSRB chairman Stuart Symington arranged a series of meetings with leaders from the AFL and CIO. The result was an NSRB guarantee that planners would consult directly with labor as they sketched out an industrial mobilization plan and, more importantly, that the NSRB would pluck men directly from the union movement to fill new administrative positions created to address labor matters. Everett Kassalow became one of these new labor administrators, and he devoted his time to the particulars of civil defense—industrial dispersion, plant protection, and postattack economic recovery. He was a labor economist in the CIO’s research department who considered himself “one of those fringe intellectuals of the labor movement.”18 He did not so much make policy as advise other NSRB and FCDA staff about the kinds of programming and legislation that would draw either labor’s support or ire. Kassalow himself saw his position as a vehicle for “consultation with and explanation to interested labor organizations,” as well as something “useful in the testing and improving” of those programs affecting labor.19 Experience had shown, in his view, that “the cooperation and support of major labor organizations [had] often been the most difficult to establish,” so he was determined to create more harmonious relations this time around.20 Organized labor’s concerns about civil defense were essentially threefold: the physical safety and welfare of workers in the plants; the effect of military (and subsequent economic) crisis on workers’ rights; and the socioeconomic impact on workers and their families of proposed industrial dispersion plans. Labor leaders rightly sensed that those laboring in defense plants would be among the most vulnerable of civilian populations, and they were curious about how self-help might work in an industrial context. For example, did plant protection really mean dependence on management for workplace shelter safety? Would the government issue guidelines about worker safety that employers would be legally obligated to honor, or would workers have to fend for themselves? Further, would the government’s industrial dispersion plan force workers to migrate— either temporarily or permanently—to underdeveloped and undesirable rural areas? These questions evinced concern for conditions not only at the point of production but also at the point of consumption and of home and family life. Labor leaders got their chance to ask them at the FCDA’s first national conference in May 1951—a sort of debutante ball for the FCDA’s myriad technical and educational programs. Among the twelve hundred in attendance were AFL and CIO representatives and delegates from teachers’

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and railway unions. CIO representatives told the FCDA that they needed direction because they had a “pretty big stake” in civil defense. As CIO delegate Irving Abramson told conference officials: “I think that the Government has a direct responsibility to counsel us and advise and direct us on just how to mobilize these facilities in a community.” Yet as each FCDA official went to the podium to remark on “plans in progress,” labor leaders (much like congressmen at the first few civil defense hearings) grew impatient with the ambiguity of the proposals. They had come expecting to hear something more concrete. The CIO had already appointed someone to coordinate civil defense activities between city planners and industrial unions, and various member unions had already formed their own preparedness committees. Thus a frustrated CIO representative rose from his seat during a question and answer session to say: “Thus far in the information available to us I find no specific program which applies to the protection and the welfare of the individuals in [our] plants. . . . I know of no directives to take back to those people.” FCDA officials pledged that close consultation with Kassalow and other labor folk would soon yield the kind of industrial mobilization plans that reassured rather than perplexed.21 By the end of 1951, the FCDA managed to pull together Is Your Plant a Target? which would become the most widely circulated booklet for corporations and unions interested in industrial continuity and plant dispersion. It became a template for all future industrial preparedness efforts. In it, FCDA planners established self-help as the basis of industrial mobilization, the cognate to family self-help. “Increased and sustained production is the backbone of national security,” the brochure noted, but the initiative had to come from local government and private enterprise, who knew “first hand the problems of their particular localities.” With the technical guidance and “encouragement” of the federal government, industrial preparedness could be carried out more “economically, efficiently, and in the best interests of each production center.”22 What this signaled to the CIO’s Abramson and the rest of the labor movement was that plant owners, managers, and workers would themselves have to negotiate the terms of worker safety and industrial continuity. Concerned about what the decentralized, ad hoc character of plant protection portended for worker-management relations, labor leaders pressed the FCDA for a labor advisory committee that could somehow monitor local negotiations over plant safety to insure that they did not disproportionately advantage industrialists. Advisory committees had been a staple of the FCDA since its inception, so the creation in January 1952 of the National Labor Advisory Committee did not represent any particularly remarkable concession to labor. Yet among the fifty-odd FCDA advisory groups, the Labor Advisory Committee turned out to be one of the most consulted and active of the bunch. It was comprised of some of the heavy-

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weights in the labor movement, including AFL president William Green.23 Committee members made no formal rulings and had no regulatory power, but they established a labor presence in civil defense planning circles that was hard to ignore. As far as industrial mobilization was concerned, unions wanted two kinds of protection: protection of the plant and protection of already-established labor contracts, which would not be sacrificed, even during military emergency. Labor Advisory Committee members, major industrialists, and government officials all pledged their cooperation in an approach reminiscent of the way they had worked together in World War II, but their actual relationships were strained, as they had been during wartime as well. There were overlapping and competing interests among the three factions; all could agree that communism was bad and that their collaboration was necessary to contain it, but the rest was contested ground. Government planners’ paramount interests in the continuity of plant management (a goal owners shared) and the ready availability of skilled labor conflicted with labor’s emphasis on the maintenance of seniority and other contractual rights.24 Planners called for worker crash courses in plant defense “so that within two or three days we can get [workers] back into their jobs of production.”25 Labor representatives, on the other hand, were wary of such hastiness. They acknowledged that a defense emergency might temporarily disrupt workplace rules and customs, but they insisted that careful planning could insure industrial readiness without the erosion of worker rights. Everett Kassalow tried to broker these disputes from his position in the NSRB, an arrangement that seems to have favored workers’ interests. Kassalow viewed the relationship between government and labor as a “fruitful” one that promised “much cooperation,” and he felt that compromise was possible between corporate and labor chieftains.26 Among the most important matters facing Kassalow was the allocation of labor power in the weeks after attack. Government planners wanted to dispatch workers to any part of the country where military production needs required it, but unions worried that workers would be expected to migrate at government whim—even if for a good reason—without the right to negotiate the length and conditions of that employment. Kassalow told his NSRB colleagues that any industrial defense scenario would have to understand bargaining rights as portable, for only this would guarantee workers’ support of civil defense.27 He scored something of a victory when his recommendation worked its way into an important 1952 interagency task force report that issued a comprehensive set of guidelines on workerowner relations in the postattack period. These included an endorsement of seniority rights, management provision of “adequate employment standards and conditions,” and ongoing consultation and cooperation with union representation.28

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Kassalow’s ability to persuade government planners that employee rights were fundamental to full economic (and, therefore, military) recovery was impressive, but this was a shaky consensus continuously tested as planners and industrialists created, evaluated, and revised industrial mobilization policy throughout the decade. In early 1953, for instance, the NSRB and FCDA collaborated on a new manual for owners and managers, Principles of Industrial Security. The manual was designed to explain to both owners and managers the basics of plant security, but when Kassalow reviewed a first draft of it, he found its antilabor content so obvious that he warned unless it was changed, “it may kick up a rumpus in the labor community.” The draft stated, for example, that labor should not foment strikes or boycotts during the emergency; Kassalow, however, recommended adding the phrase, “for illegitimate purposes,” pointing out that there were, indeed, legitimate reasons for such actions. Another section said that management should avoid being “placed in a position where it may be accused of adopting anti-labor tactics in the name of industrial security,” but Kassalow suggested the edit: “Management must avoid adopting anti-labor tactics in the name of industrial security.” This was not a matter of mere semantics for Kassalow. He warned that the subordination of worker rights to plant protection “could really blow [plant defense] sky-high, so far as employee cooperation is concerned.”29 Significantly, while management’s view of industrial defense remained parochial, labor’s vision extended beyond the workplace. Unions argued that workers were entitled to social welfare supports that would enable them and their families to serve the mobilization and recovery without suffering unduly. Emergency labor migrations and the planned dispersion of industry into suburban and rural areas would require a massive relocation of workers and their families, and AFL and CIO leaders reasoned that the government—either federal or state—would have to provide for workers’ social and economic needs in such transitions. Here organized labor echoed the concerns of women’s clubs, who argued that civil defense had to include welfare services because home front mobilization involved more than just staffing the production lines. Labor’s own civil defense representatives complained as early as December 1951 that “the human aspects of mobilization are not being considered.” An AFL leader told Martha Sharp that he had reviewed carefully the NSRB’s industrial defense plans and was disappointed to see “no reference to housing, or to human welfare.”30 Welfare provision for workers would have been a significant departure for a civil defense administration that preached self-help for other citizens, but because workers were viewed as a precious military-economic resource, they were placed in a different category. A 1951 interagency report on postattack rehabilitation argued that it was in the nation’s best interests

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to prioritize workers as a special population essential to the restoration of war production. Its NSRB authors argued: “Temporary but adequate housing and community facilities must be provided for these selected workers. It is idle to expect effective production from workers whose families are improperly housed or who need medical care and cannot get it.” Without this, planners argued, “there is no hope of expanding or even maintaining the labor force.”31 According to another internal report, “There should be no attempt . . . to make labor feel that in terms of welfare it must fend for itself.”32 For the most part, descriptions of these labor welfare programs were sketchy, but some reports offer intriguing particulars. A July 1952 planning document proposed that any worker asked to relocate be compensated by the federal government for transportation and housing costs. If the family was unable to relocate with the worker, the worker would be given a stipend to maintain two residences and reimbursement for travel expenses related to family visits. Assumptions that all workers were male heads of households who provided the family wage were deeply embedded in these planning scenarios, so reports typically described the importance of caring for workers’ “wives and minor children” with government subsidies when “the worker’s normal expenditures for the care of his family” were interrupted by relocation. When women workers appeared at all in these scenarios, they were assumed to be housewives and mothers first and workers second. While relocation for men was understood as a strain on the family but nevertheless a necessity akin to a man going off to war, the report emphasized that “working wives shall not be asked to accept jobs in locations away from their homes.”33 The proof of the government’s commitment to subsidize workers could be tested only with a real Soviet strike, so there is no way to tell how earnest were these pledges for nuclear war welfare. As was so often the case, the NSRB and FCDA’s postattack welfare plans remained tentative, incomplete, and untested. Still, when it came to industrial continuity, it is noteworthy how quickly the discourse of self-help, with its inflections of the moral superiority of independence, became muted by a more urgent discussion about the necessity of government subsidy. In the interests of industrial preponderance, planners recast worker welfare supports as a matter of national security, thereby inoculating them from charges of special interest, welfare dependency, or big government. For their part, the AFL and CIO endorsed a preparedness politics based solidly on Cold War liberalism: respect of workers’ bargaining rights, government aid for workers inconvenienced by emergency relocation, and union-industry collaboration on plant protection during nonemergency periods. Separately and collectively, the AFL and CIO coordinated a variety of civil defense organizing drives. Like women’s clubs, unions produced

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civil defense literature tailored to their particular constituencies.34 The CIO, for example, published a booklet that outlined how an average worker could become a volunteer in the plant and a warden in the neighborhood. None of the AFL and CIO’s literature was particularly adversarial in its portrayal of worker-management relations. Their pamphlets urged workers to seek cooperative peacetime agreements with management and with state and local civil defense officials. The Labor Advisory Committee even endorsed the FCDA’s directive that all union members who participated in civil defense—either as paid employees or unpaid volunteers— take a loyalty oath. The committee argued there was “no reason why union members should not comply as do other citizens in the civil defense program.”35 And by 1956, President Eisenhower finally received the much sought nuclear-age no-strike pledge. As AFL-CIO president George Meany told him, “I want to give you my personal assurance that AFL-CIO unions will not cause any delay to critical activities by conducting strikes or other work stoppages.”36 Labor leaders’ endorsement of the loyalty pledge suggests that like other national organizations, organized labor saw in civil defense a chance to both expand its policy influence and enhance its public image. The militarization of industrial production had pulled workers into national security planning, and now workers could use that opportunity to replace older portraits of angry strikers with newer images of worker-volunteer armies patriotically defending their plants. Labor’s participation in home front militarization could thus demonstrate vividly that the union movement stood for Americanism, not communism, civil service, not corruption, and unity, not division. Meany’s pledge epitomized labor’s eagerness to use civil defense to reposition itself in the postwar political mainstream—as government’s partner, not adversary—with the ultimate goal of securing leverage on economic matters more important to them than plant protection.37 And yet, labor’s support of civil defense was conditional, even if squarely within the Cold War political mainstream: industrial continuity would happen only if industry and government respected worker rights.

MOBILIZING AFRICAN AMERICANS

Eleanor Roosevelt had been accused of “sissifying” civil defense during World War II, but her vision of “total preparedness” turned out to be much more prescient than that of her contemporaries. Her definition of wartime civil defense—always broader than just physical safety—expressed her social welfare politics, which meant that she saw preparedness partly as an issue of racial tolerance. She pushed for the establishment of a race relations division within the wartime Office of Civil Defense, hoping to

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connect its theme of national unity with racial harmony. Years before Cold War policymakers would fully realize the crucial links between domestic race relations and foreign policy, Mrs. Roosevelt saw a connection between racial reform and the credible projection of American democracy abroad. Postwar civil defense planners initially veered away from her approach, fearing it too politically divisive. But they soon realized that appeals for self-help and national unity would ring hollow if the racial schisms exposed during World War II went unaddressed. That civil defense planners even considered race relations as a preparedness issue reveals the extent to which militarization engineered social change, not only new types of weaponry and bureaucracy. As historians have shown, American involvement in world wars has always set in motion a series of social conversions, some of which outlast the war itself. This was especially true in the case of World War II, when a national security state supplanted a warfare state in relatively short order. The ambitious security interests of cold warriors forced them to confront the fact that racial segregation was an anachronistic system unbefitting a global leader and, moreover, an inefficient arrangement of personnel for a military superpower. The Nazis themselves had unintentionally pushed these insights forward sooner than might have been; in the aftermath of Hitler’s atrocities, the idea that racism was somehow “un-American” increasingly gained popular acceptance. This created a less than hospitable racial climate for policymakers who defended segregation in the military and elsewhere.38 Certainly, Cold War militarization did not radically alter the racial landscape, and it even spawned a new cast of villains, with Japanese enemies now replaced by the “red Chinese.” But the twin doctrines of national security and anticommunism also produced new and unexpected opportunities for racial minorities and immigrants to become fully credentialed Americans. McCarthyism spawned a whole set of performative citizenship rituals, the loyalty oath chief among them, which could publicly certify one’s patriotism in a security-oriented political culture. As Tom Engelhardt argues, this was often the path of inclusion for the problematic racial (or immigrant) outsider, who could now integrate by pledging allegiance to national security doctrine. And yet, as Engelhardt says, there remained in Cold War culture an “unresolvable tension between exclusion and inclusion, between . . . vigilance and tolerance,” which made it difficult for outsiders to rely on militarization as a vehicle that could deliver them long-term insider status.39 In one sense, militarization forced a reexamination and ultimate revision of segregation policies in the entire national security bureaucracy, most notably, in the military. But in another way, it hindered the ability of racial groups to demand radical social change without exposing themselves to attacks on their patriotism.40

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Civil defense was a major arena in which these larger themes of militarization and social change played out, where the security and partisan agendas of cold warriors encountered the racial reform agendas of civil rights organizations. While historians have done much to complicate definitions of race and racial identity, as a racial history of the fifties, civil defense is a chronicle in black and white. Local civil defense histories may reveal a more multifaceted story, but at least at the federal level, both security and reform impulses were manifest in black and white. Like organized labor, African American organizations saw in civil defense the possibility of inclusion—a chance to demonstrate citizenship through paramilitary service. This was a Cold War version of their wartime “double V” campaign. NSRB and FCDA officials, too, saw political and practical gains in the recruitment of African Americans. They could have cast the net widely and marketed civil defense voluntarism to all nonwhites, but they instead made tactical decisions to focus recruiting efforts on blacks. They did so, first, because the political battles over black military status had revealed a national security rationale for desegregation that logically implied a similar arrangement for a home front defense corps. Second, planners saw African Americans—like women—as a readily identifiable and already well organized population whose volunteer labor could be easily mobilized for selfhelp militarization. They assumed a monolithic black community that could be called into service with just a word from selected black leaders. Third, and most importantly, partisan interests in securing African Americans’ votes motivated black recruitment. Although the major dramas of the modern civil rights movement played out during both Truman and Eisenhower’s tenure, Truman more than Eisenhower identified African Americans as an important Democratic voting bloc, and thus his FCDA worked harder to include them in civil defense.41 Institutional racism during World War II in federal and local civil defense programs gave even more urgency to enlisting black support for preparedness. Early in the war, OCD director James Landis and Eleanor Roosevelt created a Race Relations Division and hired a white southern liberal, Jonathan Daniels, to coordinate outreach programs for African Americans. Daniels advised President Roosevelt on racial issues, and like Eleanor, he saw racial justice as inextricably linked with military readiness. The purpose of civil defense, he argued, was not only to enlist civilians to defend their turf, but to “free them . . . from prejudices and discriminations,” so that a “total people” could win a “total war.”42 Daniels worked to eliminate racial bias in the OCD’s volunteer screening and training programs, but Landis had appointed him as a token gesture and thus had no intention of making civil rights an OCD priority. Landis used his directorial powers to block most of Daniels’s initiatives, and as a result, civil defense training classes in both the North and South remained segre-

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gated, and local civil defense administrators (especially in the South) denied black men the right to be auxiliary policemen and firemen.43 Mindful of this wartime precedent, postwar civil defense officials sought the cooperation of African American organizations immediately in 1950 so that the newly created FCDA would be an exemplar of racial democracy. The first few University of Michigan studies surveyed only a small percentage of black citizens on their views of the nuclear threat and civil defense, but the data nevertheless suggested that “Negroes represent, proportionally, a greater protential [sic] source of volunteers for civil defense work.”44 Again, the studies and their interpreters apparently presumed a discernable, undifferentiated black community that could be stirred to action by the urgings of its leadership. To mobilize this community, the FCDA hired liaisons, organized special advisory committees, and invited black “opinion leaders” to Washington conferences—just as they were doing to recruit women and workers. First hired was Alfred Smith, a black man with close connections with the black press, who was “to perform an essential public relations service with Negro organizations, institutions, and Negro public relations facilities throughout the country.”45 Martha Sharp, herself the women’s liaison in the NSRB, already enjoyed strong professional and personal ties with black liberals, and her work with female reporters from the black press had laid the groundwork for Smith. It was Sharp’s idea, for example, to extend a special invitation to African American women’s clubs to attend the important October 1950 women’s conference.46 The FCDA experimented with other methods that would spur black participation, especially at the grass roots—in black neighborhoods where home protection would be the primary means of self-defense. With the FCDA’s blessing, New York City civil defense officials turned their attention to Harlem, where they tried to educate black residents about selfhelp. In April 1951, organizers hosted two hundred Harlemites at a screening of an FCDA film about living with the bomb. Months later, the newly formed Harlem Committee for Civil Defense organized a much larger lunchtime recruiting rally that featured boxers Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson signing up for civil defense duty. The rally attracted two thousand participants, but signed up only one hundred volunteers. One week later, Harlem’s civic leaders organized their first “parade for preparedness,” with thousands of black Harlemites participating and marching under the auspices of their local community organizations and veterans’ associations.47 Despite the FCDA’s use of Smith to court the black press, coverage of civil defense issues was scant. There was the occasional article that featured civil defense as a “human interest” story. Ebony, for example, spotlighted the Negro American Legion of Erie, Pennsylvania, who stood watch for Soviet bombers around the clock. Ebony celebrated the fact that blacks

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made up 30 percent of the volunteer corps in Erie and reassured readers that they had experienced no discrimination at the post.48 This was the kind of spin the FCDA hired Smith to deliver, but such coverage never approached the desired volume. Despite Smith’s efforts, black periodicals covered civil defense topics using the same criterion that they applied to all other issues: What was the relevance for black political, social, or cultural life? Civil defense merited attention only when it intersected with prevailing racial issues of the day or when it offered an opportunity to highlight black achievement.49 A much more revealing look at black citizens’ views of and participation in civil defense comes from internal FCDA documents, albeit mainly from the perspective of white planners. The best evidence comes from reports of several mock evacuations that took place in 1954, one of which was “Operation Scat” in Mobile, Alabama, a city with a high concentration of blacks.50 The FCDA hired social scientists from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to observe how Mobile’s black citizens would respond to the call to scurry from the city to evacuation centers. NAS observers remained purposely anonymous in their reportage, so it is impossible to verify their race, but their anthropological tone and recorded conversations with black residents strongly suggests that they were white. Still, their reports display some surprising sensitivity to the racial and economic conditions that contributed to black nonparticipation in Scat, and their findings even implicated the FCDA in discouraging black involvement in civil defense generally.51 According to the NAS report on Scat, low participation rates among black citizens had more to do with local conditions in Mobile than with any inherent black apathy or inability to follow evacuation orders. Observers first postulated that “because of economic factors and education, [blacks] are not reached by the usual mass communication media” (emphasis theirs). They noted a high rate of black illiteracy and a low rate of black ownership of radios and televisions, concluding that African American citizens had not received adequate notice of the drill. One result of this “communication breakdown,” they reported, was a rampant rumor throughout black communities that a real atomic bomb was going to be dropped on Mobile. The NAS staffer who tracked the rumor and its many permutations learned that many African Americans thought the purpose of Scat was to bomb Mobile, “killing off most of the Negroes so that they wouldn’t have to go through with school de-segregation.” This rumor evidently became so pervasive that Mobile’s civil defense officials (all of whom were white) got wind of it and immediately pleaded with black leaders to explain the real purpose of the drill over the airwaves of the city’s black radio station.52

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Along with the “miscommunication” of the planned drill, another reason for black nonparticipation appeared to be poor local transportation. NAS observers reported that blacks were underserved by public transportation and that relatively few owned automobiles. Yet FCDA planners had envisioned privately owned cars leading the charge out of the city, buttressed by public transportation and the goodwill of car owners who would ride-share their way to safety. Instead, NAS onlookers watched as white and black drivers left the city without even picking up the carless among their own race. Far from the FCDA’s utopian scenario of interracial carpools, observers reported a high degree of social and spatial segregation (or “apartness,” as one called it) between Mobile’s blacks and whites— both in and out of their cars.53 Probably the biggest factor that contributed to blacks’ low participation rate, according to the NAS report, was the fact that neither the FCDA nor Mobile’s civil defense officials had included black community leaders in Scat’s planning. Usually when such an exercise was planned, federal and municipal officials would consult extensively with local leaders to insure the cooperation of their respective constituencies. After all, these drills were public spectacles, and federal and local planners had every interest in arranging a good show. In Mobile, white planners had wrongly identified the black school superintendent as the singular spokesman for black citizens. Mobile’s African American citizens, however, saw local ministers and NAACP representatives as their legitimate leaders. “This type of error,” an NAS witness noted pointedly, “is the rule rather than the exception in the selection of ‘leaders’ of minority groups.”54 The NAS issued a number of enlightened recommendations, including better public transportation and strengthened federal and local efforts to make use of “informal channels of communication” in black communities (such as church leaders, radio stations, and community groups). They even pointed out that most of the target areas were urban centers populated disproportionately by minority groups “who have value and belief systems distinct from those of the ‘community leaders’ ” (emphasis theirs). Scat’s observers strongly recommended that FCDA officials consider these demographic and cultural realities when formulating escape plans.55 At the same time, however, Scat was a laboratory experiment through which to study the social problems of nuclear warfare, and so NAS observers raised mainly scientific questions rather than political ones.56 More attention to the political context of Mobile in the 1950s—indeed, of the entire South—would likely have rendered a more reliable report about how white racism and the emergent southern civil rights movement shaped black response to Scat and other FCDA programs. For example, it is highly likely that Mobile’s white officials were well aware of who the real black leaders were—certainly if they were NAACP members—and simply

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decided not to invite them to planning meetings. Also, the NAS (and FCDA) assumption that black citizens would eagerly join anything that had the kind of white police presence and quasi-military regimen that characterized mock exercises suggests a willful ignorance of historic and newly brewing antagonisms between southern law enforcement and African Americans. Further, a deeper analysis of the rumor that Scat was actually designed to prevent school desegregation (they were anthropologists and sociologists, after all!) would have suggested something about the relative importance of civil defense for citizens who were not busy defending themselves against imaginary nuclear bombs from the Soviets but from the real bombings of their white neighbors. While white observers like the FCDA’s Jean Fuller hailed Scat as an example of “cooperation between officials of the city and the general public,” black commentaries on the event did not circulate widely, as the NAS report observed.57 Maybe black citizens’ minimal involvement in the exercise was their commentary. Perhaps African American communities used Scat to protest the white police, racist local civil defense programs, or the travesty of self-help without the means to carry it out. It is impossible to know for sure, as African Americans’ reactions were mediated through white observers who may have missed the “hidden transcripts” of black resistance. Though NAS scientists painstakingly recorded the details of their interviews with Mobile’s black residents, these official transcripts did not ultimately reflect what black citizens truly felt about preparedness.58 Undoubtedly, planners saw black participation as a “mobilization problem” that was fixable, but their whole approach pathologized black citizens in ways that white citizens were not. It would be foolish to deny genuine differences between white and black communities, which demanded different types of civil defense outreach and reaped different outcomes. The special council appointments, Harlem parades, and endorsements from black sports heroes probably did boost black participation to levels it would never have approached without FCDA attention. Still, by 1955, the FCDA openly admitted failure: “We have found some complete dead spots,” announced one official, “particularly with minority . . . and racial groups.”59 Yet if black citizens represented an intractable mobilization problem, then so did whites, for they, too, failed to volunteer to the FCDA’s satisfaction. In fact, it seems that the obstacles to black participation did not differ dramatically from those which affected white participation. Though the FCDA’s statistics on volunteers did not differentiate by race, its opinion research did, and the data suggest that black citizens shared the same kinds of expectations that undermined white participation: the belief that superior U.S. military hardware would protect civilians, that civil defense was more the government’s responsibility, and that self-help required too much effort.60 The FCDA, then, wisely understood

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that black citizens had to be recruited differently, but it failed to confront the more fundamental reasons why people—both white and black—endorsed civil defense without practicing it.

JIM CROW SURVIVES

Unfortunately for the FCDA, civil defense attracted the most attention among African Americans when President Truman appointed Millard Caldwell to head the new agency. Truman’s selection seemed initially nothing extraordinary. It was a purely patronage position, so neither he nor Caldwell were prepared for the firestorm of controversy generated by the nomination. The issue was Caldwell’s political past as a Florida congressman in the thirties and then as governor in the late forties. The NAACP charged that his support of segregation during his political career in Florida made him unfit to head a federal agency that was supposed to protect all citizens from nuclear danger. This episode represents one of the only places where we find black voices on civil defense, and even here their focus was less on civil defense than on civil rights. What made Truman’s nomination controversial was partly its timing. Caldwell’s appointment occurred at a critical juncture in Truman’s relations with various African American organizations over the future of civil rights in postwar society generally and within the Democratic Party specifically. When Truman assumed the presidency, he faced a panoply of unresolved domestic issues, chief among them civil rights. During World War II, he had supported the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), and when Congress in 1945 and 1946 drastically cut its funding, he tried to save it from extinction. At the same time, he chose not to pressure Congress to create a permanent FEPC. During the reconversion, he initiated a series of civil rights initiatives, calling for an end to poll taxes, an antilynching law, a ban on discrimination in federal employment, and the desegregation of the military. Southern Democrats and other conservative congressmen, however, fought these measures at every turn, while Walter White, A. Philip Randolph, and other civil rights leaders pressured Truman to use his power to end racial discrimination. Black leaders grew increasingly disillusioned with the president in the late 1940s and early 1950s, as his motivation seemed to be more about partisan politics than social justice. So when Truman first announced his nomination of Caldwell in December 1950, relations with major civil rights organizations were already strained.61 Upon learning of Caldwell’s nomination, the NAACP decided immediately to spearhead a movement to oust Caldwell and replace him with someone who symbolized a newer, more enlightened postwar racial order.

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The integrationist NAACP was well positioned to fight this battle, for it had gained a substantial following during the war as a result of its lobbying for an antilynching law, a permanent FEPC, and an end to Jim Crow. In 1940, the NAACP had 50,000 members; by the end of the war, that number had swelled to 450,000. Of course, it was not the only extant civil rights organization at this time, nor did it fully represent the heterogeneous views of black Americans on foreign and domestic issues. Still, it was a powerful organization with nationally recognized leaders, and often the public face of the early modern civil rights movement.62 Another reason the NAACP could fight this nomination with a reasonable chance of success was that its demands for racial reform were paired with its public commitment to anticommunist militarization, which placed it well within the mainstream of Cold War liberalism. As was the case with so many reform and radical organizations in the fifties, the NAACP was accused of harboring communists or, at the very least, of promoting communist ideology. NAACP leaders buckled to anticommunist political pressures, declaring their commitment to fighting both racism and communism, indeed warning that the former invited the latter if the United States did not solve its racial problems.63 The NAACP did not question the premises of civil defense, but rather molded its reform impulses to the contours of national security. Ironically, then, just as national security had become the prevailing rationale for the FCDA’s inclusion of blacks, it also became the NAACP’s rationale for opposing Caldwell’s nomination. What the NAACP’s anti-Caldwell campaign managed to do was turn preparedness into a national discussion about civil rights, not defense, embarrassing Truman’s FCDA and his party. This fusion of civil defense with civil rights can be best understood by following the paper trail of citizen protest letters and congressional testimony. Before Caldwell’s nomination hearing, hundreds of letters poured into the White House, mainly from NAACP chapters around the country, but also from African American weeklies and nonaffiliated concerned citizens.64 One of the earliest to arrive was from Harry Moore, executive director of Florida’s NAACP chapter, a man with firsthand experience of Caldwell’s policies. Moore recounted in detail Caldwell’s record on civil rights, citing his championing of the white primary and his tacit support of whites’ vigilante violence in small Florida towns, still a persistent problem for blacks throughout the South. (Moore himself would be killed one year later by a bomb planted by white supremacists.) His letter concluded, “It seems very doubtful that colored Americans would receive fair and unbiased consideration under any program administered by Millard Caldwell.”65 The next month, in January 1951, the NAACP stepped up its campaign as the nomination hearing rapidly approached. NAACP executive secre-

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tary Walter White, already at odds with Truman on an array of matters, presided over an NAACP vote to oppose the Caldwell nomination. He also demanded an NAACP presence at the nomination hearing before the Senate Committee on Armed Services. He dispatched the director of the NAACP’s Washington, D.C., bureau, Clarence Mitchell, to make a formal statement that would intentionally embarrass both Truman and the Democratic Party. Mitchell’s testimony elaborated on Moore’s, chronicling Caldwell’s endorsement of states’ rights, the white primary, and segregated educational facilities. He also detailed a series of cases in which Caldwell had refused to investigate a Florida sheriff’s role in the lynching of a black prisoner and the suspicious disappearance of a black veteran in the custody of two police officers. He further cited Caldwell’s refusal to address black NAACP members as “mister” in written correspondence: “The title ‘mister’ as you gentlemen here who are from the South know,” he testified, “is something that is not used when addressing colored people . . . because it is an effort to remind them forever that they are inferior.” Mitchell concluded with a stern warning about the consequences of Senate approval: the nomination would imperil black support for Truman and the Democrats because it was “an insult” to black citizens, and it might also convey the wrong message to the international community. Cleverly exploiting cold warriors’ anxieties about Jim Crow and foreign policy, Mitchell said: “Each time a man like Governor Caldwell is elevated to a position of national power, we tell the world that we put our stamp of approval on those who do not intend to uphold the guarantees of freedom and equality.”66 Caldwell’s protestations were tinged with a mixture of indignation and indifference. On the charge that he did not address blacks with a surname, he testified: “I reserve the right to address any person . . . in such manner as I please, and in accordance with my own views.” He defended the white primary based on the notion that political parties were civic associations that had the right to create their own membership criteria. The senators on the committee, three of whom were from southern states, ignored the NAACP’s specific charges and asked him only if he believed he could administer civil defense programs without racial bias. Caldwell, of course, replied affirmatively.67 Congress confirmed his nomination shortly thereafter. The Senate’s decision did not resolve the matter but, in fact, fanned the flames. The NAACP’s board of directors immediately issued an open letter to Truman, renewing the demand to oust Caldwell. In further protest, one board member resigned his position on New York City’s Council of Civil Defense.68 Other civil rights organizations, including the Congress of Racial Equality, joined the NAACP in condemning both Truman and Caldwell.69 White wrote yet another letter to Truman arguing that

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Caldwell’s testimony proved his racial politics were akin to “the apartheid doctrine” in South Africa.70 As these protests streamed into the White House, civil defense finally began to receive coverage in the black press, only not the kind the FCDA wanted. African American newspapers published scathing editorials after the confirmation, predicting that Caldwell’s appointment would mean no civil defense for the millions of black citizens who inhabited America’s industrial target cities. The editor of the Minneapolis Spokesman said that “15 million loyal American Negroes do not feel that Governor Caldwell . . . would operate civilian defense fairly and without regard to race, creed, or color.”71 The Pittsburgh Courier listed Caldwell’s confirmation as one of four “death blows” dealt to civil rights by the Eighty-second Congress.72 White editorialized both in and outside of the black press, warning readers of the Chicago Daily News that Caldwell’s confirmation would have “widespread and continuing repercussions” for Truman and the Democrats.73 In the months following the confirmation, it was not only notable civil rights leaders or the black press that inveighed against Truman’s decision. Members of local NAACP chapters also wrote to the President to convey their anger and disappointment and to forewarn him of the consequences. These letters reveal black citizens’ sense of betrayal by Truman not so much on the issue of civil defense but racial issues generally. For example, two of Pennsylvania’s NAACP members wrote: “Mr. President, remember, that the majority of negroes voted for you in the last election and they did so because they felt you would deal fairly and honestly with all people.”74 A Milwaukee NAACP member wrote: “We are unable to see how you as President who campaigned on a program of civil rights could select a person for this position who openly opposes all civil rights legislation.”75 Another member asked: “Is it possible a terrible mistake has been made?”76 Clearly, even though many African American organizations had become very critical of Truman, the surprise and disappointment conveyed in so much of this correspondence suggests that he had nevertheless raised blacks’ expectations about government intervention on behalf of civil rights. The letters also show the potential political price of blacks’ disappointment. Given the famously narrow margin of Truman’s 1948 election, one writer reminded him that “in 1952 the votes of these same U.S. citizens whom [Caldwell] so callously despises, will be needed to retain your party in power.”77 Throughout the controversy, the FCDA avoided making official statements about it and tried to emphasize the racially sensitive side of its programming. As a result, the FCDA’s public utterances and actions on race had a schizophrenic character. Only two months after Caldwell defended his views to the Senate, he declared that the bomb “does not discriminate”

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and that the FCDA would not either. Everyone would be “equal in suffering,” he insisted.78 Weeks later, he made a special effort to invite White and other NAACP members to attend the FCDA’s first national conference in May 1951. White viewed this as a public relations gimmick, however, and said that he would only show up if Caldwell repudiated his Senate testimony, which Caldwell refused to do.79 For his part, Truman realized the size of his political blunder and hoped he could compensate with the May 1951 appointment of African American reformer Mary McLeod Bethune to his National Civil Defense Advisory Council. A public relations adviser to the Red Cross had earlier urged Truman to do so, arguing that blacks had been passed over for most political appointments, and that “nothing would electrify Negro America [more than the] appointment of Dr. Bethune in an administratively strategic position by the President of the United States.”80 Bethune offered the FCDA an activist orientation (useful for a self-help program), but most importantly, she represented a way to quell the protests. Given that Bethune’s activism was more social welfare than paramilitary, her acceptance of Truman’s appointment to the Council seems curious. But she saw civil defense much in the same way her colleague Eleanor Roosevelt did, and so she framed her work for the FCDA within the rubric of social reform.81 Although the NAACP protests failed to oust Caldwell, they nevertheless provided, to the FCDA’s chagrin, a framework and language for other black clubs to define civil defense as a civil rights issue. African American women’s clubs, in fact, had been some of the earliest activists to articulate this vision of preparedness. At the series of women’s conferences in 1950, the National Council of Negro Women’s Jeanetta Brown defined home defense as a matter of “intercultural relations.” Home protection, she argued, was not only about family cooperation, but rather about “how we can work better with the neighbor next to us, or with the other people in the community.”82 Having been initially excluded from the Assembly of Women’s Organization’s first meeting, black club women learned quickly that preparedness contained racial meanings not readily apparent. By the time of the May FCDA meeting, the NCNW, the Urban League, and a host of other black organizations pledged only conditional support for civil defense. As the director of the NCNW explained it, before blacks would endorse civil defense, the FCDA had to “see to it that all segments of our population are thoroughly integrated into this program.”83 Yet as loud as all of these protests were, and as much as they embarrassed Truman, they remained firmly rooted in a national security framework that cast racial reform as military expediency and not social justice. African American groups accepted the assimilationist and anticommunist terms of the debate, demanding only inclusion in the defense mobilization. In fact, their anti-Caldwell campaign encouraged the anticommunist political

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climate that often served to stymie other progress on civil rights. Just as club women had done, African American groups muted their criticisms about the excesses of anticommunism as a way to guarantee their inclusion in the national security mobilization. As A. Philip Randolph put it, Caldwell was a liability because he represented “the best propaganda material Russian Communists can have against our American democratic system.”84 Two North Carolina NAACP members similarly called for Caldwell’s ouster in order to present a “racially-solid front against Communism.”85 Both FCDA and its black critics, then, yoked racial reform to militarization, which, as Michael Sherry has argued, made the Cold War’s racial reform agenda “both urgent and limited.”86

MANAGING THE “POLYGLOT POPULATION”

Away from the gaze of citizen interest groups, another set of civil defense planners pondered matters of inequality that went deeper than the racial symbolism of Caldwell’s appointment. As they debated the merits of public versus private shelters and evacuation, FCDA, military, and academic strategists found themselves confounded by questions about how people of different classes and races would respond to sharing a shelter space or opening up their homes to evacuees. Caldwell’s nomination was significant but less weighty for them than the larger issue of how home front militarization would rearrange spatial and social relationships. The problem of how to provide nuclear protection for a racially segregated, regionally diverse, and class-stratified society seemed unsolvable in a logistical sense, but also unsettling in a social sense because it would require different populations to share public and private spaces in ways that broke with structural inequality and social custom. Though civil defense planners moved gradually toward a family-centered privatization that enabled protection for some and not for others, they presented nuclear peril as an equal opportunity threat and civil defense as a collective endeavor. At the May 1951 conference, Caldwell emphasized the commonality—even community—of danger: “All of us are in this thing together, and what happens to one community will inevitably affect the others.”87 Like Caldwell, Katherine Howard spoke of “equality in suffering,” describing a superweapon that ignored distinctions of rich and poor: “The young couple’s hardwon home is just as likely to be devastated as the steel mills along the river. The country club is no more immune to damage than the rooming houses down by the railroad tracks.”88 Though the tenor of this official “unity in peril” rhetoric suggested an ignorance of class differences, the opposite was actually true. Civil defense planners were acutely aware that class differences would mean uneven and unequal access to safety, and that even a modest public shelter policy could

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not substantially change this economic reality. But they preferred to grapple with this matter behind closed doors, afraid that they could not control a popularly based class-conscious debate of shelter policies. They knew that millions of Americans lived in situations that could not easily accommodate privatization. True, there was a marked increase in the number of people who owned their own homes in the fifties, and on the whole, people were better housed. Indeed, 62 percent of all housing units were owner occupied by 1960, and the rate of rental occupied properties had declined precipitously. Still, 38 percent of Americans (or 62 million) lived in structures that they did not own, and a major proportion of these non–home owners were poor whites and people of color. Even a substantial percentage of home owners did not have the physical space to build a family shelter. Some lived on divided lot properties that precluded new construction. And only 54 percent of all owner-occupied housing units had a basement, which meant that 46 percent of home owners could not easily build the most popular FCDA shelter model.89 Each panic wave about the bomb raised concerns that these differential housing situations would lead to a new kind of class competitiveness and resentment over access to nuclear survival gear. During the 1950 congressional hearings, for instance, Val Peterson (then governor of Nebraska) warned Congress that “nearly everyone would want a shelter if the other fellow gets one.”90 Richard Gerstell’s widely circulated book on how to survive an attack also cautioned that shelter or evacuation arrangements had to be made as equitably as possible, or “the result can only make added trouble and possibly panic.”91 Several years later, when the “discovery” of fallout added another wrinkle to shelter planning, Ralph Lapp leveled with both Congress and FCDA planners, telling them to be “cold-blooded” in their decision making: “You can’t in this age afford security to everyone,” he said frankly.92 And Eisenhower worried about how the privatization of shelter might play to a class-conscious public, noting at a Cabinet meeting that Operation Alert had elicited criticism about “the ‘fat cats’ being rushed out of Washington while ordinary citizens stayed behind.”93 Planners agreed that class differences could not be ignored, but they did not view shelter programs as a policy vehicle for minimizing housing disparities. As they volleyed back and forth early in the decade between quasi-public and private solutions to the shelter problem, they understood that any shelter policy would be ultimately freighted with larger meanings about dependence and entitlement. Indeed, consultants warned the FCDA to publicize their deliberations sparingly, so as to not raise peoples’ expectations for federally funded cover. The average citizen, as one report recommended, should be disabused of the notion that he had “any imagined, inherent right . . . to have his life insurance risk improved” by the government.94

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Searching for clues about how to mitigate the class variances in shelter access, planners again looked backward to World War II. They studied the results of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, which had collected information on class differences and sheltering practices in Germany, Great Britain, and Japan. They also hired a raft of consultants to examine the “sociological problems” of preparedness, chief among them how “groups of low and high economic status” could possibly “avoid the serious tensions that will arise” from class differences in sheltering.95 Irving Janis’s Air War and Emotional Stress, a bible for FCDA public opinion researchers, also proved to be one of the most influential works on the matter of shelters and “intergroup conflict” (meaning race and class conflict). Air War’s findings, however, were not exactly what planners wanted to hear. Janis predicted that a shelter policy that excluded any group of citizens would elicit widespread class resentment. One of the major drawbacks of self-help sheltering, he argued, was that it would likely “arouse acute social resentments among those classes . . . which are not in a position to acquire or build expensive private shelters.”96 Janis’s solution was a modest government subsidy program that could “equalize the opportunity” for private shelter construction so as “to prevent disruptive social antagonisms from arising.” He viewed this proposal as both economically feasible for the government and “psychologically sound” for American citizens. By helping citizens acquire the financial means to shelter safety, he argued, the government was at the same time providing an “important source of reassurance” for frightened citizens. Home shelters could further diminish apathy and feelings of powerlessness in the face of such awesome technology: “Participation in this form of self-protective activity,” Janis contended, “would contribute to the feeling that ‘I am really able to do something about it.’ ”97 It is little wonder that Janis’s ideas were oft-cited by civil defense planners, for they blended self-help with limited government aid rather than positing more ambitious “big government” public shelter programs. Janis’s shelter proposal was not a replacement for privatization but rather a stimulant to it. Small subsidies, in the form of tax breaks, for example, still placed shelter construction in the laps of citizens without conveying a sense that the federal government had completely abdicated its protective responsibilities during a military crisis. This approach meshed well with the political sensibilities of those who saw in home front militarization the threat of an atomic welfare state. And the potential psychological value of the home shelter—a symbol of independence and family togetherness, even if partially subsidized—was certainly appealing to planners and politicians who understood the importance of pyscho-symbolic politics in the Cold War. As Janis summed it up, “If personal responsibility for providing one’s own shelter is accepted, there is less tendency to place full reliance for one’s protection on the . . . government,” which would in turn mini-

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mize the chances of civilians “reacting to apparent ‘neglect’ on the part of the government with anxiety and resentment.”98 If small subsidies for private shelters seemed a partial solution for potential nuclear-age class antagonisms, then racial differences seemed less amenable to government intervention. Having been warned of the negative consequences for the British in mixing different classes in a shelter, planners pondered even more anxiously the possible outcomes of mixing the United States’ racial populations.99 Concerns about contact between black and white tended to emerge more in relation to evacuation than shelter, for evacuation involved the mass migration of urbanites to suburbia and, ideally, their temporary resettlement in private residences. This kind of reorganization of public and private space, even if for military cause, generated palpable anxiety among white planners, for economic development policies by the early fifties had already created a more visibly racialized urban poor and, conversely, a more affluent white suburbia.100 Evacuation raised the specter of a rapid migration of urban blacks (even if they were not the majority population of a given city) from their ghetto target cities to the safe, prosperous, white suburbs. This realignment of public and private space might erase residential color lines already established and tenaciously defended by an array of bankers, real estate agents, politicians, and neighborhood residents. In fact, in a 1951 article on evacuation for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Chicago alderman Robert Merriam predicted that “latent antagonisms” between racial groups would surely result from evacuation because it involved the same rearrangements of physical space and social custom as black suburbanization.101 The evidence on how race relations would be managed during evacuation is more veiled and often anecdotal, but still fairly consistent in tone. A 1950 government report of a mock evacuation in St. Louis, for example, took pains to note the racial composition of those black and white citizens left homeless after the attack, and also described how order was restored to St. Louis’s educational system only when black children were returned to their “Negro schools” and the white children to their own facilities.102 A Johns Hopkins study of evacuation in the nation’s capital informed FCDA planners that “social problems” would likely emerge “when predominantly Negro populations [are] evacuated to predominantly white areas.”103 FCDA annual meetings and literature avoided direct conversation about the racial aspects of evacuation, emphasizing instead the importance of urban-suburban compacts and of suburbanites treating evacuees as “guests.” But latent racial fears bubbled up nevertheless. At the FCDA’s 1954 women’s conference, domestic icon Betty Crocker herself (Marjorie Husted) advised housewives to promote “community” in their civil defense work, but also forewarned them to prepare for “racial . . . invasions” if they lived in suburban reception areas.104

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The only frank discussions of race and public shelters came from those black citizens who challenged Caldwell’s appointment. They predicted that a racist administrator at the top would result in substandard sheltering and postattack services at the bottom. Walter White editorialized that “there would be bomb shelters marked ‘For White’ and ‘For Colored.’ ”105 At Caldwell’s nomination hearing, Clarence Mitchell tried to describe the grave consequences of a separate and unequal preparedness program: “If a bomb drops we do not want regulations that require citizens to run 10 blocks to a separate racial shelter when one marked for ‘white only’ is just around the corner. We do not want needless death and privation resulting from hospitals open to white only or food lines for colored only.”106 Operation Scat would later prove the spirit if not the letter of these predictions true: Jim Crow would survive a nuclear attack. Whites would be unwilling to share private and public spaces (even cars) with African Americans. Anticipating this and keenly aware of the larger structural inequalities of home front militarization, blacks would thus be unwilling to support civil defense. Indeed, Alderman Merriam’s comparison of evacuation with black suburbanization was the most sensible explanation for what was really in play in the debates over shelter and evacuation: home front militarization was a contest over the ownership and occupation of public and private space. It required a reconfiguration of the racial geography, forcing a confrontation with the ways in which class and race structured the material and social status quo. As civil defense policymakers debated urban evacuations, public shelters, and the role of government in insuring equality in suffering, suburbanization was already changing the postwar landscape in ways that further segregated black and white, rich and poor. In addition, civil rights activists—the same ones who tried to stop Caldwell’s appointment—were at the same time waging legal battles against the formal restrictions on the use of public space. In this context, evacuation and shelter raised controversial questions about the extent to which nuclear war would create class and racial fallout as unthinkable as the superbomb’s physical destruction. “Total readiness,” planners worried, might force changes that people were not ready for or, more accurately, were not willing to make.

————— Val Peterson was fond of saying, “We are Americans in trouble together,” but planners understood that militarization would extract different demands and sacrifices, depending on one’s racial or economic situation.107 Shelter and evacuation policies were essentially about “the politics of sacrifice,” or who would gain and who would pay.108 Public and private solu-

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tions both created potential problems: public shelter living could exacerbate racial and class antagonisms, even as it provided universal access; privatization ran the risk of fostering class and racial discord because of its inherent inequality. And if and when a proposal for a public shelter system was presented to the American people, planners knew it would be subjected to intense public scrutiny—one of the perils of a popularly implemented militarization—which would lead inevitably to questions about equality of sacrifice. A perennial challenge for the FCDA, then, was to promote civil defense as a “people’s defense” without creating any expectations that citizens had a right to the government’s sheltering hand. The brief flirtations with providing welfare for workers and tax breaks for shelter-building homeowners were partly an effort to deflect class-conscious criticisms of self-help. The FCDA uncomfortably acknowledged privatization as something of a laissez-faire approach to citizen safety, but it stubbornly and erroneously maintained that home protection had become so simple and affordable that it was “essentially democratic in its nature,” accessible to all.109 But social movements talked back to this rhetoric in ways defense planners never anticipated, transforming the FCDA’s discourse of freedom and self-sufficiency into a “talk of rights.”110 The NAACP seemed to understand better than labor or women’s organizations that civil defense was largely a symbolic issue (since no real defense program had materialized), so it fought to insure that FCDA symbols at least conveyed the right messages about race. In fact, all of these attempts by citizen groups to somehow make civil defense more responsive and open gave it a reformist content that it would not have had otherwise. And yet, these same groups also strengthened the ideological links between liberalism and the national security state. Rights talk was always yoked to containment and war. In some ways, this tension between reform and readiness had plagued civil defense policymakers since World War II; debates about civilian versus military control, welfare versus self-help, and the inclusion of women, workers, and blacks, were all, in some ways, struggles over the extent to which liberal precepts should shape and be expressed in a national defense mobilization.

Conclusion

THIS BOOK tells a war story without a war at the center of the narrative. Civil defense was about anticipating war, not actually fighting it. War was imagined—vividly so—but never realized. Now, in the Cold War’s wake, civil defense may seem a fanciful tale, in part because the long-imagined attack never came, and also because so many of the postmortems of the early atomic age seem to provide cutesy, wistful retrospectives that obscure the most profound legacies of the era. History teachers in the next century, for example, will be able to take their students on field trips to the atomic ghost towns that increasingly dot the national landscape. Like Katherine Howard did fifty years ago, students will be able to tour the homes of Doom Town and Survival City, wherein the mannequin families met their fractured fate. But instead of grabbing souvenirs from the test site itself, they will peruse the new Nevada Test Site Museum gift shop to purchase T-shirts, mugs, and even “Fat Man and Little Boy earrings.”1 By now, so many historians have noted the pervasiveness of atomic anxieties in the fifties that to catalogue the moments of nuclear fear becomes redundant—even if instructive as a history lesson. I have instead tried to historicize that fear by giving it a more concrete policy context and a grounding in the political and cultural currents of the period. That context shows us how elected officials, security bureaucrats, and ordinary people acted on their fear in ways that resulted in an incremental militarization of everyday life. To be sure, nuclear fear did not create a national security state in a formal sense: the military never assumed official control of civil society, nor did the United States devote all of its resources to civil defense or military mobilization. Rather, policymakers and citizens together embraced a more gradual militarization, a less jolting route to military readiness—especially in comparison to the flashpoint of war— but a process nevertheless thoroughly infused with military priorities and ethics. More than any other postwar defense bureaucracy, the FCDA paved the way for the intrusion of military ideas and structures into civilian life. FCDA planners asked citizens to reimagine their daily lives in ways more consonant with their nuclear present and future. They popularized and privatized military readiness, asking civilians to build national security from their basements up. And they targeted the nuclear family as the primary vehicle of home front militarization. Officials used the language and institutions of postwar domesticity to serve up countless images of ideal

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families reorganizing their lives according to the doctrine of home protection, with the family itself serving as its own reward for preparedness. Yet Americans, in general, did not invite civil defense into their homes with the zeal expected by the FCDA. Although a majority of citizens expressed strong support for civil defense conceptually, especially when relations with the Soviet Union approached the boiling point, public interest was sporadic, fickle, and only occasionally attentive to and compliant with FCDA directives. Citizens were ambivalent about the bomb—hopeful about its future applications, anxious about accidental nuclear mutations, and wary of a too costly arms race—and this was reflected in their qualified and infrequent involvement in civil defense. FCDA planners were constantly frustrated by the shifting temperaments, or “plastic moods,” of their audience, but they only tinkered with their scripts instead of confronting the fundamental conundrums of their project.2 Perhaps they did recast the nation’s mood, raising people’s bomb consciousness to new levels, but that change in consciousness rendered few changes in behavior. In the end, citizens rejected the level of personal, household militarization asked of them by their government. Yet, citizens did not dismiss all aspects of Cold War militarization. In fact, this is one of the great paradoxes of the national security state: there was a wide range of acceptance, grudging accommodation, and outright repudiation of militarization’s by-products. Some citizens protested the arms race but still espoused anticommunism; others inveighed against the legal excesses of communist purges yet still espoused liberal reform in the name of national security. Similar contradictions swirled around civil defense: Americans endorsed military readiness as sound foreign policy, but denied a certain level of family militarization; they accommodated many of militarization’s tax burdens, but were unwilling to finance their own shelter protection. In fact, the failure of civil defense can be located in these paradoxes of militarization. Confounded by weapons with ever-changing capacities for destruction, policymakers and citizens found it difficult to assimilate the new scientific realities of the era. As Katherine Howard recalled in 1968, “Just when you caught up with coping with the danger, another great danger came along.”3 The FCDA worked hard to present home front militarization as a decidedly nonmilitary activity—as family togetherness, as “national neighborliness,” as Howard called it, and even as a peaceful deterrent to war. Yet speaking about peace and practicing for war was simply too large a contradiction to overcome. Furthermore, planners could not control the myriad lore and images of nuclear war that emerged independently of their operation—in film, fiction, television, comic books, and the like—and neither could they manage popular responses to the images

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they themselves had created. They ricocheted between exalting military strength but decrying military rule, stoking anticommunism but denouncing its anti-statist politics, praising self-help defense but condemning its shortcomings of fatalism, panic, and apathy. Now and then, administrators felt they had scored some victories in elevating public awareness, but the triumphs were fleeting and hard to measure. The over 4 million volunteers, if an accurate count, represented only a tiny minority of adherents nationwide. And even so, who could predict how those trained self-helpers would react if real bombs rained down from the sky? In private, planners’ acknowledgments of small gains were always tempered by more somber ruminations of the travails of their task. In the first year of the FCDA’s existence, Ad Council president Ed Gerbic confessed to a White House colleague that he thought “a campaign to sell civil defense as an established way of life would have little or no chance for support” unless political leaders expressed more than rhetorical support.4 Five years later, under a new administration, Senator Estes Kefauver expressed similar skepticism. In preparation for yet another probe of civil defense by his Senate Armed Services Subcommittee, he asked a consultant to summarize the biggest obstacles to making the home front attack-ready. Charles Kress, himself a director of a local civil defense operation in New York State, issued a revealing report that captured some of the reasons for people’s lukewarm interest in home protection. Quoting some of the leading journalists he interviewed to find out why civil defense had become “practically a ‘dirty word,’ ” Kress wrote: “There’s been so much confusion, contradiction, and inconsistency in statements by civil defense officials that the public doesn’t pay attention any more.” He also suggested that in the fifties people sought “prosperity and fun,” not anxiety about “anything as dire and gloomy as civil defense.”5 Kress’s observations were echoed years later by James Wadsworth, whose own experiences in the Resources Board and the FCDA led him to conclude that people did not accept civil defense because they “hadn’t been told very much about it” and because they “didn’t know what this thing meant.”6 Looking back on the era, he concluded that the whole concept of defense against the bomb was simply “too fantastic, too cataclysmic for the ordinary human mind to encompass.”7 This collection of explanations about the failure of preparedness to become a household word suggests not only the obvious failure of the defense establishment to fully convey the dimensions of nuclear war, but also the realization on some level that postwar citizens were private pacifists but public militarists. Indeed, a lackluster civil defense program cannot be construed as a referendum on the entirety of Cold War militarization. Whatever the varied emotions and worldviews that led citizens to reject

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self-help defense inside their homes, they certainly made political choices to tolerate a much higher level of militarization outside. Rather than reorganizing their domestic space to fit national security priorities, most Americans endorsed an arms buildup and heartily supported a resolutely anticommunist diplomacy. Their rejection of self-help was hardly a no confidence vote on the national security state. Even for those who heartily endorsed both a private and public militarization, civil defense was attractive for what it promised them as public figures and members of political movements, not for its real protective value. Civil defense offered citizens a genuine experience of national service, as well as new possibilities to fulfill older political agendas. Club women adopted civil defense to enhance their professional and political status, and to some degree, its family orientation enabled them to circumvent some of the gender prescriptions that locked them out of the macho environment of national security planning. Labor, too, used their seat at the national security table as leverage to win other nonmilitary prizes. Black civil rights organizations enlisted in the cause to advance racial justice, even though class and racial structures would have prevented most African Americans from practicing self-help sheltering and evacuation. What these groups understood as well as any FCDA public relations strategist was that the symbolic politics of civil defense were just as important as its actual blueprints for implementation. Yet, in the end, if we cheer these civic organizations that insisted on a more democratic civil defense—in symbol and practice—then we must also be sobered by the trade-offs they accepted. Labor and the NAACP capitulated to domestic anticommunism, encouraging a conservative political environment that would stymie much of their postwar liberal vision. Club women’s attempt to make nuclear weapons familiar by making them familial helped defense strategists domesticate nuclear weapons; this troubling dissociation of the weapons of mass destruction from war and militarism has outlasted the Cold War itself. Such were the compromises and contradictions of hitching liberalism to the runaway train of militarism. The zeal with which civilians have pursued national security goals reminds us that militarization is a phenomenon much larger than the military itself. From the grass roots to the very top echelons of policymaking, postwar Americans have adopted a wide range of military outlooks and perspectives. As Michael Sherry has remarked, “America’s civilian leaders often pursued national security and embraced military values more fervently than military officers.”8 Civil defense certainly contributed to this synchronicity of military and civilian worldviews. Preparedness was the point at which the world of military planners met the daily lives of postwar citizens. Civil defense abetted the militarization of domestic

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political culture, fostering an ambient militarism, more illusory than formal military rule but an ideology of war nonetheless. The FCDA’s failure to privatize preparedness should not lead us to dismiss civil defense’s more public legacies. As diverse groups of scholars, activists, and policymakers scrutinize the Cold War for history lessons, it may well be instructive for them to peer inside the homes of atomic ghost towns in order to fully grasp the merger of military credo and everyday life.

Notes

Introduction 1. Pat Eaton to President Truman, 19 January 1951, National Security Resources Board (NSRB), Records of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, Record Group 304, Entry 31A (NSRB/OCDM), Box 5, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (NA). 2. I will refer to those who both created and publicized civil defense programs variously as “planners,” “officials,” “strategists,” or “policymakers.” Though some were involved only in the technological-logistical aspects of civil defense while others worked exclusively in public relations, their collective mission was the same. FCDA planners were, in the main, civilians, but many of them had served their government in a variety of civilian and military capacities during World War II. 3. Katherine Graham Howard, Oral History Interview, 1968–69, p. 179, Columbia Oral History Project; and Katherine Graham Howard, “A Great Light,” speech presented to the Convention of American Women in Radio and Television, Inc., Boston, Mass., 6 June 1953, Katherine Graham Howard Papers (KGH Papers), Box 1, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas (DDEL). 4. No historian has written a political and social history of civil defense, but several have contributed substantially to our understanding of nuclear-age culture and popular thought. See Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light; Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America; Winkler, Life under a Cloud; Weart, Nuclear Fear; Brown, “ ‘A Is for Atom.’ ” Philosopher Guy Oakes has written an insightful sociological analysis of the FCDA’s propaganda; see The Imaginary War. Excerpts of Oakes’s book have been published as articles in the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. See, for example, Oakes and Andrew Grossman, “Managing Nuclear Terror: The Genesis of American Civil Defense Strategy,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 5 (1992): 361–403; Guy Oakes, Arthur J. Vidich, John Lukacs, and Franco Ferrarotti, “The Culture of the Cold War: A Symposium,” in International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 8 (1995): 499–516. Finally, see my review of Oakes’s book in Peace and Change: A Journal of Peace Research 21 (April 1996): 242–46. Scientists, military planners, and social scientists have published volumes about civil defense, but these are generally institutional histories that offer no critical perspective. They are too numerous to list here, but some examples include Wigner, Survival and the Bomb; Wigner, Who Speaks for Civil Defense?; Morgenstern, Question of National Defense; Yoshpe, Our Missing Shield. A slightly more critical perspective is offered by Kerr, Civil Defense. 5. Katherine Howard to Val Peterson, n.d., KGH Papers, Box 2, DDEL. 6. I borrow liberally from scholars who have defined militarization as “the contradictory and tense social process in which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence.” This definition is taken from Michael Geyer, “The Militarization of Europe, 1914–1945,” in Gillis, Militarization of the Western World,

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79. Gillis also discusses the concept nicely in his introduction. Michael Sherry’s excellent survey of the United States since the 1930s is organized around militarization, and he offers useful and precise definitions of it and related concepts in his preface and prologue. See his In the Shadow of War; 134. On militarization’s origins in the United States before the Cold War, see Paul Koistinen, “Toward a Warfare State: Militarization in America during the Period of the World Wars,” in Gillis, Militarization of the Western World, 47–64. Cynthia Enloe also theorizes about militarization, particularly from a gendered but also a racial perspective, in Does Khaki Become You? and Banana, Beaches, and Bases. 7. It is important to note that many but not all theorists of militarization distinguish it from “militarism,” an older formulation that implies formal military power over civilian authority, a stricter separation between civilian and military domains, and the predominance of warrior values in society. See Gillis, Militarization of the Western World, 1–3. Like Sherry and others, I prefer “militarization,” as it suggests change over time and a kind of dynamism that is not implied with the use of militarism. However, readers will find that I also will sometimes use both terms for stylistic purposes. 8. Teller quoted in Winkler, Life under a Cloud, 37. 9. Historians of the Cold War have traditionally viewed diplomacy and socialcultural developments as discrete phenomena, resulting in a somewhat bifurcated historiography of the period. The more recent literature is increasingly interdisciplinary, treating the postwar state and postwar culture as dynamic and interactive. My work builds upon those who have already provided models of how to blend political and diplomatic and social and cultural history. Some of the varied writers and works that have influenced my work include Cynthia Enloe’s Banana, Beaches, and Bases; Akira Iriye on culture; Michael Hunt on ideology; Melvyn Leffler on “core values” and national security; Emily Rosenberg on gender in “A Round Table: Exploring the History of American Foreign Relations,” Journal of American History 77 (June 1990); Hunt, Ideology and Foreign Policy; Mark Leff, “Revisioning U.S. Political History,” American Historical Review 100 (June 1995): 829–53; William Luechtenburg, “Pertinence of Political History”; E. May, Homeward Bound; L. May, Recasting America; Ninkovich, “Interests and Discourse”; Rodgers, Contested Truths, 213–17; Rogin, Reagan; G. Smith, “National Security.” Chapter One The Dilemmas of Planning and Propaganda 1. John Bradley to Leslie Kullenberg, 10 January 1951, National Security Resources Board (NSRB), Records of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, Record Group 304, Entry 31A (NSRB/OCDM), Box 1, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (NA). 2. LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War. The literature on Cold War foreign policy is voluminous, and this study draws from a variety of works too numerous to list here. See, for example, Brands, Devil We Knew; Leffler, Preponderance of Power; McCormick, America’s Half-Century; Pollard, Economic Security; Sherry, In the Shadow of War; Yergin, Shattered Peace.

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3. Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 326. Yergin and Martin Sherwin also allude to how James Byrnes and Henry Stimson recorded feeling more confident in their negotiations at Potsdam after hearing news of U.S. atomic supremacy. See Yergin, Shattered Peace, 120–21; Sherwin, World Destroyed; 220–38. 4. Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 9, 323–33. 5. Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 128. For a detailed overview of the long-term impact of Truman’s and Eisenhower’s decisions to expand the nuclear arsenal, see Schwartz, Atomic Audit. 6. Yergin, Shattered Peace, 5, 193–220; Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 35–37. Despite the varied uses of the term, Melvyn Leffler argues that there were and continue to be a set of “core values” underlying national security ideology, although policymakers, interest groups, and individuals have not always agreed on what those are and how to pursue them. See Leffler, “National Security,” in Hogan and Paterson, Explaining the History, 204–5. Hogan, A Cross of Iron, discusses national security as both ideological enterprise and state formation. 7. On these reports, specifically, as well as for an overview of civil defense during World Wars I and II, see Neal Fitzsimons, “Brief History of American Civil Defense,” in Wigner, Who Speaks for Civil Defense? 28–46; Jordan, U.S. Civil Defense before 1950; Kerr, Civil Defense; 9–42; Mauck, “History of Civil Defense, 265–70; Yoshpe, Our Missing Shield, 1–161. 8. Kerr, Civil Defense, 25; Yoshpe, Our Missing Shield, 114. 9. John F. Kennedy to President Truman, 8 October 1949, NSRB/OCDM, Box 14, NA; New York Times, 10 October 1949. Bernard Baruch expressed his support for Kennedy’s sentiments, and Congressman Jacob Javits of New York also sent a letter to Truman to support Kennedy’s position. 10. Leffler, Preponderance of Power; 361–445. 11. Stuart Symington to President Truman and the National Security Council, 6 July 1950, President’s Secretary’s Files (PSF), Subject File (SF), Box 146, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri (HSTL). 12. The act also established a twelve-member National Civil Defense Advisory Council to advise the administrator on policy matters. The president was to appoint each member, selecting those who could represent state and city governments, volunteer organizations, and “matters affecting the public interest.” Yoshpe, Our Missing Shield, 157. The Caldwell nomination controversy will be addressed in chapter 5. 13. The phrase “atomic diplomacy” is taken from Gar Alperovtiz. See his recently revised and reissued Atomic Diplomacy. 14. Winkler, Life under a Cloud, 54. 15. On the May-Johnson proposal and the issue of civilian versus military control, see Herken, Winning Weapon; chap. 6; Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 136– 38; Winkler, Life under a Cloud, chap. 2. 16. Bull Report quoted in Yoshpe, Our Missing Shield, 86. 17. For a sample of this kind of argument, see testimony of Lt. Col. Barnet Beers in Congress, Senate, Committee on Armed Services (SCAS), Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services, 81st Cong., 2d sess., 7 December 1950, pp. 80–81. See also Paul Larsen

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to W. Stuart Symington, 2 June 1950, NSRB/OCDM, Box 1, and John Young to William Gill, 20 December 1949, NSRB/OCDM, Box 2, NA. 18. I rely here on feminist theorists who have argued that “war must be understood as a gendering activity” (emphasis theirs), and that wars are “events of gender politics” in which gender is reworked through military and political struggle. This quotation is taken from Higonnet et al. Behind the Lines, 4. This approach to studying war has been extraordinarily interdisciplinary, and some examples include Cohn, “Sex and Death”; Cooke and Woollacott, Gendering War Talk; Enloe, Does Khaki Become You?; Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America; Meyer, Creating G.I. Jane; Tickner, Gender in International Relations; and selected essays in Harris and King, Rocking the Ship of State. 19. Kerr, Civil Defense, 15–19; Mauck, “History of Civil Defense,” 265–66. 20. Miller, “War That Never Came,” chap. 2. 21. Eleanor also selected actor Melvyn Douglas to mobilize the nation’s actors, musicians, and artists in support of civil defense, and some conservative congressmen red-baited him for his liberal leanings as a way to discredit her. On wartime changes in sexual attitudes and behaviors, see John Costello’s Love, Sex, and War: Changing Values, 1939–1945 (London: Collins, 1985). On this incident, in particular, see Kerr, Civil Defense, 17–18; Miller, “The War That Never Came,” chap. 2. 22. William Gill to Paul Larsen, 29 June 1950, NSRB/OCDM, Box 1, NA. 23. “Extract on Civil Defense from the Report of the Committee on the National Security Organization to the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government,” vol. 3, 245–47, n.d., Harry S. Truman, Papers as President, Official File (OF), Box 1658, HSTL. 24. Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), Civil Defense against Atomic Attack: Hearings before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Part 3, 81st Cong., 2d sess., 17 March 1950, p. 85. 25. “Principles and Concepts of Civil Defense,” Report of the Project East River, Part 1, October 1952, p. 11, NSRB, Security-Classified General Correspondence of the Board, Record Group 304, Entry 31, Box 99, NA. 26. Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 193. Robert Pollard has argued that Truman was more restrained in his endorsement and creation of a national security state than historians have acknowledged. See Pollard, “The National Security State Reconsidered: Truman and Economic Containment, 1945–1950,” in Lacey, Truman Presidency, 205–34. 27. Press release, “Informal Remarks of the President to the White House Conference of Mayors Opening Conference,” 14 December 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Papers as President (DDE Papers as President), Ann Whitman File, Speech Series, Box 5, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas (DDEL). See also Minutes of Second Plenary Meeting of the Interim Assembly, 17 June 1955, DDE Papers as President, Ann Whitman File, Cabinet Series, Box 5, DDEL. 28. Television transcript, “Meet the Press,” NBC-TV, 8 March 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Records as President (DDE Records as President), White House Central Files (WHCF), Official File (OF), Box 1994, DDEL; Discussion at the 182d Meeting of the National Security Council (NSC), 28 January 1954, DDE Papers as President, Ann Whitman File, NSC Series, Box 5, DDEL. On constitu-

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tional issues related to military dictatorship, see Rossiter, “Constitutional Dictatorship in the Atomic Age.” 29. “Garrison state” is originally political scientist Harold Laswell’s formulation. See Hogan, Cross of Iron, 28–30, Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 53; Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 13. 30. JCAE, Civil Defense against Atomic Attack, Part 1, 23 March 1950, p. 2. Interestingly, this was also the argument of pacifists, who protested the bomb not only because of its destruction, but because its production symbolized the power of a mass society to destroy an individual’s autonomy and destiny. See R. Smith, “Mass Society and the Bomb,” 347–72. 31. Washington Post, 2 June 1950. 32. The term “mass society” originated in Europe at the turn of the century as a conservative reaction against Marxist theory, but in the United States, mainly left-wing social critics adopted the term to describe changes in mass production, technology, and media, and to describe wartime and postwar political regimes. See Jamison and Eyerman, Seeds of the Sixties; chap. 2. Warren Sussman smartly argues that citizens in the postwar era worried about mass participation as political dogma, but nineteenth-century citizens dreamed of mass participation in government. See his essay “Did Success Spoil the United States? Dual Representations in Postwar America,” in L. May, Recasting America, 19–37. Noted works on mass society include C. Wright Mills, White Collar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951); C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956); David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); William Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956). Feminist critics Barbara Ehrenreich and Wini Breines point out that mass society critiques expressed particularly masculine anxieties about the changing economic and psychological role of the male breadwinner. See Breines, Young, White, and Miserable, chap. 1; Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, chaps. 3–5. Dan Wakefield’s memoir of life in 1950s New York City touches on themes of mass society and masculinity. See his New York in the Fifties (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992). 33. JCAE, Civil Defense against Atomic Attack, Part 4, 20 March 1950, p. 105. 34. Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 10–14. 35. Discussion at the 163d Meeting of the NSC, 25 September 1953, DDE Papers as President, Ann Whitman File, NSC Series, Box 4, DDEL. On Truman’s view of this dilemma, see Hamby, Beyond the New Deal 6–12; Hogan, Cross of Iron, especially chap. 2; Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 304–11, 323, 358; and Pollard, “National Security State Reconsidered.” On Eisenhower’s approach to militarization and budgets, see Brands, “The Age of Vulnerability; Brands, The Devil We Knew, chaps. 2–3; Carter, Another Part of the Fifties, 32–35; Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower; Griffith, “Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Corporate Commonwealth,” 87–122; Hogan, Cross of Iron, chap. 9; Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 192–97. 36. Transcript of speech, Paul Larsen to Citizens Advisory Committees, Sacramento, California, 12 July 1950, NSRB/OCDM, Box 14, NA; JCAE, Civil Defense against Atomic Attack, Part 2, 30 March 1950, p. 35. 37. William Gill to Paul Larsen, 29 June 1950, NSRB/OCDM, Box 1, NA.

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38. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Armed Services (HCAS), Subcommittee Hearings on H.R. 9798: To Authorize a Federal Civil Defense Program, 81st Cong., 2d sess., 5 and 7 December 1950, pp. 7737, 7748. Yoshpe reports that the War Department’s 1945 study preferred “civil” over “civilian” for the same reason. See Our Missing Shield, 78. 39. Millard Caldwell, address at Opening Session of the 20th Anniversary Annual Conference of U.S. Mayors, New York City, 15 May 1952, Papers of Harry S. Truman (HST Papers), Spencer Quick Files (Quick Files), Box 5, HSTL. 40. Kerr, Civil Defense, 28. On Britain’s civil defense program, see Vale, Limits of Civil Defence, chap. 6. 41. “Report of the War Department Civil Defense Board,” February 1947, Secretary of Defense, Department of Defense (DOD), Record Group 330, Entry 96, Box 1036, NA. 42. Griffith, “Forging America’s Postwar Order: Domestic Politics and Political Economy in the Age of Truman,” in Lacey, The Truman Presidency, 67. Other works that analyze postwar conservatism and political opposition to the New Deal state include Carter, Another Part of the Fifties, chaps. 1–2; Hamby, Beyond the New Deal; McQuaid, Uneasy Partners; Theoharis, “The Rhetoric of Politics: Foreign Policy, Internal Security, and Domestic Politics in the Truman Era, 1945– 1950,” in Bernstein, Politics and Policies, 196–241; Yarnell, Democrats and Progressives, chap. 6. 43. DOD, Semiannual Report of the Secretary of Defense, January 1 to June 30, 1950, 20. 44. For further budget specifics and analysis, see Kerr, Civil Defense, 144–45; Yoshpe, Our Missing Shield, 164–68. Philip Funigiello’s study of the NSRB argues that conservative Republicans and Democrats used the costs of the Korean War to slash every civil defense budget request; they framed civil defense as a Fair Deal measure, making it a casualty of a much larger budget and partisan political fight between Truman and Congress. See his “Managing Armageddon.” 45. The FCDA’s annual reports detail what it contributed to each state for supplies and operations. For a more comprehensive view, see the FCDA, Annual Statistical Report (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1956), which covers federal budgetary allocations from 1951 through 1956. Federal contributions to states varied. For example, in 1952 and 1953, the FCDA gave $8.5 million to New York, while it contributed only $344,000 to Indiana. These variations depended upon whether the state’s cities were designated “target areas” by the DOD, the strength of the state’s civil defense program, and, no doubt, the relationship between the state’s governor and the FCDA. 46. FCDA, Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1954), 118. 47. Norvin Kiefer to William Gill, 19 January 1950, NSRB/OCDM, Box 12, NA. Also, Paul Larsen to Jack Gorrie, 23 June 1950, NSRB/OCDM, Box 12, NA. 48. Notes for Working Group, Financial Task Force, Income Maintenance, Post-Attack Rehabilitation Project, 10 April 1952, Office of Defense Mobilization, NSRB, Office of the Chairman, Office File of Everett M. Kassalow, Special Assistant for Labor, Record Group 304, Entry 10 (Kassalow Office File), Box 10, NA. 49. FCDA, Annual Report (1951), 55–56. 50. FCDA, Annual Report (1953), 141.

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51. FCDA, Role of Farm Women in Civil Defense, 15 October 1953, Papers of Katherine Graham Howard (KGH Papers), Box 6, and The Participation of Women and Women’s Groups in Evacuation, September 1955, KGH Papers, Box 10, DDEL. 52. FCDA, Cue for Survival (Washington, D.C., GPO, 1955), 88; FCDA, Annual Report (1953), 131; FCDA, The Nurse in Civil Defense (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1954). Interestingly, the FCDA did not neglect mental health. In consultation with several professional social work associations, it issued The Social Worker in Civil Defense (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1956). 53. Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, The National Plan for Civil Defense and Defense Mobilization, Annex 2, Individual Action, October 1958, 4. in White House Office (WHO), Office of Staff Secretary: Carroll, Goodpaster, Minnich and Russell, Subject Series, Alphabetical Subseries, Box 8, DDEL. 54. Robert Clark to David Stowe, 28 July 1950, NSRB/OCDM, Box 12, NA. 55. This phrase is Yergin’s, Shattered Peace, 173. 56. Materials for National Civil Defense Advisory Council Meeting, 28–29 May 1957, KGH Papers, Box 6, DDEL. 57. NSC-68, 14 April 1950, “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” in Etzold and Gaddis, Containment, 442. 58. Margaret Banister to Chief of Civilian Liaison Branch, 18 February 1948, Secretary of Defense, Assistant Secretary of Defense, Legislative and Public Affairs, Office of Public Information, Record Group 330, Entry 133 (Secretary of Defense, Office of Public Information), Box 59, NA. 59. I use the term “propaganda” not in a pejorative sense, but to describe the techniques civil defense planners used to convey information and ideas about the bomb, fallout, and the survivability of nuclear war. I use the term “public education” in this chapter critically, because although NSRB and FCDA officials understood their task as “educational,” theirs was a public relations effort. On the meanings and uses of propaganda, see Jackall, Propaganda; Oakes, Imaginary War; Weart, Nuclear Fear; Medhurst et al., Cold War Rhetoric. 60. Weart, Nuclear Fear, 179–82. 61. Martha Sharp to Carl Clewlow, 27 February 1952, Office of Defense Mobilization, NSRB, Office File of Martha Sharp, Record Group 304, Entry 17 (Sharp Office File), Box 38, NA. 62. “The Story Nobody Wants to Hear,” March 1955, WHCF, General File, Box 377, DDEL; Materials for the Civil Defense Advisory Council Meeting, 28– 29 May 1957, KGH Papers, Box 6, DDEL. 63. A discussion of the nuclear-military “secrecy system” is found in Hilgartner, Bell, and O’Connor, Nukespeak, chap. 5. 64. Paterson, “Presidential Foreign Policy”; See also Almond, The American People and Foreign Policy; Bernard C. Cohen, The Public’s Impact on Foreign Policy (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1973); Levering, The Public and American Foreign Policy; Wittkopf, Faces of Internationalism. On polling as part of the American political structure, see Cantrell, “Opinion Polling,” 405–37. On public opinion and defense spending, see Higgs and Kilduff, “Public Opinion.” On historians’ use of public opinion data, see Small, Public Opinion and Historians.

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65. One indication of the military-psychological collaboration was that by the close of the war, about seventeen hundred psychologists were working directly for the military, while hundreds of others were involved in psychological research for war-related agencies. On the issue of how psychology came to claim unprecedented moral, social, and political authority in the postwar period, see Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 29, 48, and chaps. 2–3. On the use of psychological warfare in the 1950s, see Hixson, Parting the Curtain. 66. Millard Caldwell to Robert Lovett, n.d., PSF, Subject File, Box 144, HSTL; Osgood Roberts to Mr. Fritchey, 6 November 1951, Secretary of Defense, Office of Public Information, Box 59, NA. For survey data on this issue, see Withey, Survey of Public Knowledge and Attitudes Concerning Civil Defense, 60–62. 67. Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 83, 32–57, chap. 5. 68. Yoshpe, Our Missing Shield, 76–77; Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 42–43. 69. See Survey Research Center, Public Thinking about Atomic Warfare and Civil Defense; Survey Research Center, The Public and Civil Defense in Sharp Office File, Box 33, NA; also Withey, Survey of Public Knowledge. The director of Michigan’s Survey Research Center, Rensis Likert, had served as the director of the USSBS’s Morale Division. See Herman, Romance of American Psychology, chap. 5 70. Associated Universities was an Ivy League Cold War think tank and operator of the Brookhaven National Laboratory for the AEC. Its affiliated universities were Cornell, Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, University of Rochester, and Yale. Project East River was charged with recommending to the FCDA, NSRB, and the DOD the most effective nonmilitary measures that would minimize destruction from a nuclear attack. The study involved over one hundred prominent scientists, educators, businessmen, and government staff. The Report of the Project East River consisted of ten parts, two of which focused on panic and educational measures to prevent it. See Report of the Project East River, NSRB Correspondence, Box 99, NA. 71. FCDA, Impact of Air Attack in World War II: Selected Data for Civil Defense Planning, Division III: Social Organization, Behavior, and Morale under Stress of Bombing, vols. 1 and 2, prepared for FCDA by Stanford Research Institute (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1953). See also Martha Sharp to James Kunen, 7 July 1952, Sharp Office File, Box 37, NA. 72. Eisenhower quoted in Vandercook, “Making the Best of the Worst”; President Eisenhower to Val Peterson, 23 March 1956, DDE Papers as President, Ann Whitman File, Administrative Series, Box 14, DDEL Two other public opinion/ human behavior studies during Eisenhower’s tenure are noteworthy. See the FCDA’s “Civil Defense Implications of the Psychological Impact and Morale Effects of Attacks on the People of the United States,” April 1953, in Files of Special Assistant Relating to the Office of Coordinator of Government Public Service Advertising, James M. Lambie Records (Lambie Records), Box 3, DDEL; and Cabinet Paper, “Human Behavior in Disaster,” April 22, 1958, WHO, Office of Staff Secretary, Subject Series, Alpha Subseries, Box 12, DDEL. 73. FCDA, Impact of Air Attack 1:116–20. 74. Janis, Air War and Emotional Stress.

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75. Irving Janis, “Psychological Problems of A-Bomb Defense,” in Wigner, Survival and the Bomb, 52–78. 76. FCDA, “Civil Defense Implications,” 16. 77. “Panic Prevention and Control,” in Report of the Project East River: Information and Training for Civil Defense, pt. 9, 56–62. Dale Cameron, a psychiatrist and assistant director of the National Institute of Mental Health from 1945 to 1950 was one of the authors of this section of the report. He delivered a paper before the American Psychiatric Association, later published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, on the psychological dimensions of atomic war. See his “Psychiatric Implications of Civil Defense,” American Journal of Psychiatry 106 (February 1950): 587–93. 78. Quoted in Vandercook, “Making the Best of the Worst,” 190. 79. FCDA, Impact of Air Attack 1:116. 80. Indeed, he made this gender difference a self-fulfilling prophecy. The article’s answer key to a reader self-quiz on panic read: “Men should score a trifle higher than women.” See Val Peterson, “Panic: The Ultimate Weapon?” Collier’s, 21 August 1953, 100–109. 81. Acheson quoted in Yergin, Shattered Peace, 5. Two of the most important architects of the Cold War, George Kennan and John Foster Dulles, were skeptical about the moral and psychological fitness of Americans to fight the Cold War. This concern about the lack of “national will” and “toughness” permeated diplomatic discourse in the postwar era, although Oakes does not speculate much about its gender meanings. See Oakes, Imaginary War, 23–30. For analysis of these issues sensitive to gender themes see Costigliola, “ ‘Unceasing Pressure’.” 82. Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 57. 83. Rossiter, “Constitutional Dictatorship,” 396. 84. Janis, “Psychological Problems,” 60. 85. Representatives of the Ad Council complained about the FCDA’s slowness in developing certain publicity items, and personal clashes between FCDA and Ad Council staff almost severed the partnership completely. See “Status Report— Government Public Service Campaigns,” January to July 1952, Quick Files, Box 5, HSTL. BBD&O was the second largest advertising agency in the world, and its executives played a critical role in Eisenhower’s presidential campaigns. See Allen, Eisenhower and the Media. 86. FCDA, Annual Report (1951), 11–12. 87. FCDA, Annual Report (1952), 43, 45; Notes on National Magazine Program, 23 February 1953, Lambie Records, Box 3, DDEL. 88. On the media’s role in promoting Cold War ideologies, see Baughman, Republic of Mass Culture; Kozol, “Life” ’s America; Marling, As Seen on TV. For analysis of television’s growth, network anticommunism, and the bomb, see Barnouw, Tube of Plenty; Joyce Nelson, “TV, the Bomb, and the Body: Other Cold War Secrets,” in Garber and Walkowitz, Secret Agents. 89. FCDA, “Press Information,” n.d., and advertisement for “Survival,” n.d., in Quick Files, Box 5, HSTL. For information on the FCDA’s television programming, see its Annual Report (1951–53); FCDA Office of Public Affairs, “Alert America Campaign Progress Report,” 15 October 1951, HST Papers as President, OF, Box 1671, HSTL.

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90. FCDA, Annual Report (1955), 77–78. 91. Carol Conant to Millard Caldwell, 30 January 1951, NSRB/OCDM, Box 13, NA. 92. For a critical assessment of news coverage of the atomic bomb, see Manoff, “Covering the Bomb,” 18–27. 93. Report of the Project East River, pt. 9, 57. 94. FCDA, “The Role of the Warden in Panic Prevention,” Civil Defense Technical Bulletin (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1955). 95. Peterson, “Panic,” 106–9. 96. Public Thinking about Atomic Warfare and Civil Defense, 5. 97. Gerstell and Lapp were two of the best known scientific experts to write about civil defense. See Gerstell, How to Survive an Atomic Bomb; Lapp, Must We Hide? On the role of scientists in the politics of nuclear war, see Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light; Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon; Winkler, Life under a Cloud, chap. 2. On media figures and civil defense, see Jesse Butcher to Bing Crosby, 12 February 1951, NSRB/OCDM, Box 13, NA; Martha Sharp, “Outline Report on Visit to Great Britain,” n.d. Sharp Office File, Box 32, NA; Ansel Adams to Joseph Short, 2 January 1951, NSRB/OCDM, Box 5, NA. 98. On dependency as a “keyword” of the welfare state, see Fraser and Gordon, “A Genealogy of ‘Dependency.’ ” 99. Press release, 1 October 1953, WHO, Office of Press Secretary, Box 1, DDEL. 100. On Operation Candor and the “atoms for peace” campaign, see Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, chaps. 8–9; Hilgartner, Bell, and O’Connor, Nukespeak, chap. 4; Weart, Nuclear Fear, chap. 8; Winkler, Life under a Cloud, chap. 6. 101. Edward Lyman to Henry Wehde, 21 July 1955, Lambie Records, Box 19, DDEL. On “balanced reporting,” see also Val Peterson to Nelson Rockefeller, 23 November 1955, DDE Records as President, WHCF, OF, Box 196, DDEL; “Story Nobody Wants to Hear,” 4–7; NSC-5525, “The Civil Defense Programs,” Status of National Security Programs, Part 5, 30 June 1955, WHO, Office of Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Series, Status of Projects Subseries, Box 6, DDEL. On related marketing approaches, see “Call Report of BBD&O,” 1 May 1953, Box 3, Ad Council; “Conference Report, Civil Defense Campaign,” 11 November 1954, Box 12, Ad Council; and “Tentative Objectives for a Proposed Civil Defense Campaign,” 4 March 1953, Box 3, all in Lambie Records, DDEL. 102. Peterson, “Panic,” 100. Guy Oakes makes a similar argument in Imaginary War, 62–63.

Chapter Two Living Underground 1. New York Times, 20 February 1995; Los Angeles Times, 19 April 1998. Another vivid example of nuclear war paraphernalia as museum curiosity is the Titan Missile Museum near Tucson, Arizona, where visitors can go thirty-five feet under-

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ground to see the control center and silo that still contains a decommissioned Titan II missile. See Jon Wiener, “Doomsday on Display,” Nation, 15 March 1993, 350–54. 2. Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 139. 3. Planners distinguished between blast shelters, underground structures that could ideally shield one from the bomb’s blast, and fallout shelters, above- or belowground structures that could provide cover from radiation. 4. Washington Post, 21 May 1950. 5. Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), Hearings, Civil Defense against Atomic Attack, pts. 1–3, 5–6, 81st Cong., 2d sess., 17, 23, 30 March and 3 April, 1950, pp. 1–2, 30, 84, 135. For a useful overview of shelter legislation and policy, see Kerr, Civil Defense, 37–42. Kerr notes that much of the testimony in this hearing was heavily censored. 6. Kerr, Civil Defense, 39–40. 7. Blue Book excerpts and budget figures are taken from Yoshpe, Our Missing Shield, 136–37. It is important to note that “public” meant the structure was financed (and later stockpiled) using government money, and that it was designed to accommodate any number of people with no particular relation to one another. Families could seek refuge in a public shelter, but they could not expect privacy. 8. See, for example, Congress, House, Committee on Armed Services (HCAS), Hearings to Authorize a Federal Civil Defense Program, 81st Cong., 2d sess., 7 December 1950, pp. 7730–7766. 9. Ibid., 12 December 1950, p. 7831; Kerr, Civil Defense, 43; New York Times, 22 October 1950. 10. Congress, Senate, Committee on Armed Services (SCAS), Hearings, Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950, 81st Cong., 2d sess., 6–7 December 1950, pp. 13, 41. 11. Yoshpe, Our Missing Shield, 158–59; Kerr, Civil Defense, 46. The FCDA still pursued research on shelters; for example, it prepared technical manuals to help cities determine how to survey and modify existing buildings for public shelter use. See FCDA, Annual Report (1951), 50–52, and Annual Report (1952), 101. 12. Again, Philip Funigiello’s study of the NSRB covers this tension nicely. See his “Managing Armageddon.” 13. On Cold War politics and New Deal liberalism, see Black, Casting Her Own Shadow; Griffith, “Forging America’s Postwar Order”; Hamby, Beyond the New Deal; McQuaid, Uneasy Partners; Theoharis, “Rhetoric of Politics”; Yarnell, Democrats and Progressives, chap. 6. 14. Caldwell quoted in Kerr, Civil Defense, 49; New York Times, 19 February 1951. 15. This is Kerr’s term. 16. SCAS, Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950, 6–7 December 1950, p. 53; HCAS, To Authorize a Federal Civil Defense Program, 7 December 1950, p. 7764. 17. On the meanings of dependency in the twentieth century, see Fraser and Gordon, “A Genealogy of ‘Dependency.’ ” 18. Short quoted in Kerr, Civil Defense, 45. Even a native son of Truman’s home state, Democrat Clarence Canon, chair of the House Appropriations Com-

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mittee, was deeply critical of massive spending on public shelters. On Congress’s specific postwar measures to control spending, see Congressional Quarterly, Guide to Congress, 3d ed. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1982), 61–63. 19. Statement by the President, 2 November 1951, Office Files of Martha Sharp, Record Group 304, Entry 17 (Sharp Office File), Box 38, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (NA). On Truman’s views of militarization, see Sherry, In the Shadow of War, chap. 3; and Hogan, Cross of Iron. 20. Press release, excerpts of James Wadsworth speech presented to the American Welfare Association, Chicago, Illinois, 30 November 1950, NSRB, SecurityClassified General Correspondence of the Board, Record Group 304, Entry 31 (NSRB Correspondence), Box 92, NA; Chicago Daily Tribune, 1 December 1950. Author Philip Wylie, a one-time consultant to Caldwell, argued that citizens had to ready themselves mentally and stay in the cities to meet the attack. See Philip Wylie, “A Better Way to Beat the Bomb,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1951, 38–42. 21. This marked a reversal in thinking for Peterson, who had previously endorsed federal financing of public shelters while governor, although not without reservations. See SCAS, Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950, 11 December 1950, 152–53; Kerr, Civil Defense, 44. 22. On defense budgets, the New Look, and “massive retaliation,” see Brands, “The Age of Vulnerability”; Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War, chap. 2; Warner R. Schilling, “The Politics of National Defense: Fiscal 1950,” and Glenn H. Snyder, “The ‘New Look’ of 1953,” in Schilling, Hammond, and Snyder, Strategy, Politics, and Defense Budgets. 23. On the history of nuclear testing, see Divine, Blowing on the Wind; Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for Peace and War; Winkler, Life under a Cloud. On the creation of the hydrogen bomb, see Rhodes, Dark Sun. 24. He said this to a House Appropriations Committee, and this was a favorite phrase in public speeches on evacuation. Quoted in Kerr, Civil Defense, 63. 25. FCDA, Annual Report (1954), 33–45. FCDA official Russell Prior suggested collaborative rural-urban neighborhood planning compacts to facilitate urban-suburban-rural cooperation. See J. Russell Prior to Katherine Howard, 5 October 1955, Katherine Graham Howard Papers (KGH Papers), Box 10, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas (DDEL). The 1954 University of Michigan study found that almost 70 percent of respondents said they would expect they would have to provide some sort of assistance and welfare service for evacuees. See Withey, Survey of Public Knowledge, 130–34. 26. FCDA, Annual Report (1954), 13–16; A. C. Shire to Corwin Wilson, 15 December 1950, Office File of Ralph R. Kaul, Office of Defense Mobilization, NSRB, Human Resources Office, Record Group 304, Entry 108 (Kaul Office File), Box 2, NA. 27. “Remarks of Frank P. Zeidler,” in A Report on the Washington Conference of Mayors and Other Local Government Executives on National Security in Washington, D.C., 2–3, December 1954, by the FCDA (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1955), 40–43. 28. Edward Lyman to Henry Wehde, Jr., 20 October 1954, Files of Special Assistant Relating to the Office of Coordinator of Government Public Service Advertising, James M. Lambie Records (Lambie Records), Box 12, DDEL; “FCDA

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Advisory Bulletin no. 179,” 9 February 1955, Records of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization (OCDM), Administrative Issuances Relating to Civil Defense, Record Group 304, Entry 281 (OCDM Admin. Issuances), Box 3, NA; Lyman to Wehde, 20 October 1954. See also “Answers by FCDA Administrator Val Peterson to Press Questions on Fallout,” 16 February 1955, Lambie Records, Box 19, DDEL. 29. “An Approach to Advertising Council Support of Civil Defense Objectives in 1954–55,” prepared by Theodore Repplier and the Ad Council, 29 June 1954, and “Conference Report, Civil Defense Campaign,” prepared by Henry Wehde, Jr., and the Ad Council, 11 November 1954, both in Lambie Records, Box 12, DDEL. Other documents on the psychological value of drills are Minutes of Meeting of the National Civil Defense Advisory Council, 24–25 June 1955, Colorado Springs, Colorado, KGH Papers, Box 6, DDEL; and Minutes of Cabinet Meeting, 12 July 1957, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Papers as President (DDE Papers as President), Ann Whitman File, Cabinet Series, Box 9, DDEL. At this meeting, Eisenhower suggested that FCDA officials devise a plan for the early evacuation of all nonworking women and children. 30. On the Mobile exercise, see Director, Evacuation Office, to Administrator, 23 March 1955, Records of U.S. Senate, 84 1/2, Committee on Armed Services, Record Group 46, Box 315, NA. On others, see FCDA, Annual Statistical Report (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1956), 36–45 and (1958), 54–70, respectively. The 1956 report lists only 150 exercises, but notes that 2,400 were reported to the FCDA. The 1958 report states that 500 training exercises took place. The number of drills that actually involved the movement of ordinary civilians is difficult to pinpoint, as some involved the evacuation of military bases, and others were “paper evacuations,” meaning the drill was simulated only on paper. 31. Oakes provides an excellent chronology and analysis of this national drill in The Imaginary War; 84–104. On pacifist resistance to Operation Alert, see Garrison, “ ‘Our Skirts Gave Them Courage’: The Civil Defense Protest Movement in New York City, 1955–1961,” in Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver, 201–26. 32. Eisenhower quoted in “Civil Defense: Best Defense? Prayer?” Time, 27 June 1955, 17–18. 33. See Oakes’s discussion of how the FCDA and national media collaborated to mute public criticism. Imaginary War, 84–104. For a survey of the national media coverage, see FCDA, Daily News Digest, July 1955, Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP), OCDM Publications, 1950–60, Record Group 396, Entry 1022, Box 2, Notebook: Operation Alert, 1956, Basic Documents, NA. 34. “Civil Defense: So Much to Be Done,” Newsweek, 27 June 1955, 21–22. For FCDA interpretations of the exercise, see its Annual Report (1955), 32–37. 35. Ed Lyman to Murray Snyder, 1 August 1956, Dwight D. Eisenhower, DDE Records as President, White House Central Files (WHCF), Official File (OF), Box 658, DDEL. 36. Ralph Lapp, “Face the Nation,” 19 June 1955, in Face the Nation: The Collected Transcripts from the CBS Radio and Television Broadcasts (New York: Holt Information Systems, 1972), 261–65. 37. “Remarks of Frank P. Zeidler,” Report on the Washington Conference of Mayors, 41.

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38. Val Peterson, “Address,” 41–50. See also Peterson, “Mass Evacuation,” 294–95. 39. SCAS, Hearings on the Operations and Policies of the Civil Defense Program, 84th Cong., 1st sess., 22 February 1955, 46–47. In an odd twist of fate, Libby’s own home shelter was destroyed by a brushfire that swept through the Los Angeles area. Winkler, Life under a Cloud, 129. 40. SCAS, Operations and Policies of the Civil Defense Program, 26 February 1955, 117; 3 March 1955, 118–25. 41. Chicago Daily Tribune, 29 September 1954; Val Peterson, “Address,” 45. 42. On the possible civil defense uses of the new federal highway system, see SCAS, Operations and Policies of the Civil Defense Program, 8 March 1955, 204– 15. FCDA, Annual Report (1953), 1, 11; FCDA, Annual Report (1954), 13. See also Yoshpe, Our Missing Shield, 197–200. 43. Withey, Survey of Public Knowledge, 110. 44. For an overview of families and family politics in the 1950s, see E. May, Homeward Bound; Breines, Young, White, and Miserable; Coontz, The Way We Never Were; Marling, As Seen on TV; Spigel, Make Room for TV. Chapters 3 and 5 will further address the disparities between the ideal and real families of civil defense literature. 45. HCAS, To Authorize a Civil Defense Program, 7–8 December 1950, 7764– 68, 7815. 46. Ray D. Spencer, “The Shelter Program,” in National Civil Defense Conference Report: Proceedings of National Civil Defense Conference in Washington, D.C., May 7–8, 1951, by the FCDA (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1951), 42–43. 47. NSRB, Survival under Atomic Attack (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1950). Public relations officials worked with representatives from the White House and the Advertising Council to distribute this booklet as widely as possible. In its first printing, the NSRB distributed 250,000 copies of Survival to congressmen, the media, selected civic and professional groups, and state and municipal civil defense directors. Within only one year, industry, media, and civic groups had reproduced 20 million copies of this booklet, and the FCDA produced it as a movie under the same title with Edward R. Murrow as narrator. The FCDA’s 1951 Annual Report claimed the Superintendent of Documents actually sold 1.7 million copies; see pp. 10–11. Officials agreed that it “should be gotten into every American home in the interests of our national security.” See “The Story Nobody Wants to Hear,” March 1955, White House Central Files (WHCF), General File (GF), Box 377, DDEL; John DeChant to James Wadsworth, 9 November 1950, NSRB, Records of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, Record Group 304, Entry 31A (NSRB/ OCDM), Box 13, NA. 48. Leslie Kullenberg to John Bailey, 26 January 1951, NSRB/OCDM, Box 16, NA. 49. FCDA, Operation Doorstep (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1953); FCDA, Operation Cue: The Atomic Test Program (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1955), and FCDA, Cue for Survival (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1956). All major networks televised Operation Doorstep, and both Cue and Doorstep received wide coverage in newspapers and magazines. On government and private corporate collaboration on

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these tests, see Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 144–50; and Cue for Survival, 159–62. 50. Operation Doorstep, FCDA; and Byron, Inc., 1953, NA. 51. FCDA, Cue for Survival, 5. I thank Cynthia Enloe for sending me a copy of her father’s “souvenir menu” from Operation Cue, which detailed the kind of meal planning and experimentation often done at these exercises. 52. FCDA, Home Shelters for Family Protection in an Atomic Attack (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1953), 1. 53. FCDA, Four Wheels to Survival, (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1955). 54. “A-Bomb vs. House,” Life, 30 March 1953, 21–25; Washington Post, 17, 18 March 1953. Wendy Kozol offers a critical analysis of the Life article in her “Life” ’s America, 181–83. 55. On the debates and public anxiety surrounding fallout and above ground testing, see Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 285–88; Divine, Blowing on the Wind, chap. 2; Weart, Nuclear Fear; Winkler, Life under a Cloud, chap. 4. 56. Holifield quoted in Dyke, Mr. Atomic Energy, 187. Also on Holifield’s political career and involvement with nuclear issues, see Dyke and Gannon, Chet Holifield. 57. Dyke, Mr. Atomic Energy, 193. Dee Garrison reports that in her 1989 interview with Congressman Holifield that he said he proposed a federal shelter system to emphasize the futility, not the viability, of shelters. See Garrison, “Our Skirts Gave Them Courage,” n. 23, 223. 58. LeMay quoted in Kerr, Civil Defense, 109. 59. Agenda, Civil Defense Advisory Council Meeting, 28–29 May 1957, OEP, Records Relating to Civil Defense Advisory Council, Record Group 396, Entry 1044 (Records of Advisory Council), Box 1, NA. 60. Gaither Report excerpts quoted in Kerr, Civil Defense, 108. 61. Discussion at the 343d Meeting of the NSC, 7 November 1957, 5, DDE Papers as President, Ann Whitman File, National Security Council (NSC) Series, DDEL. On the Gaither Committee, see Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon, chap. 8; and Snead, Gaither Committee. 62. For a detailed analysis of the political fallout related to the Gaither Committee’s recommendations, see Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon, chaps. 8–9. On Sputnik, see Divine, The Sputnik Challenge; McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth; Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 214–33. 63. A more recent version of the 1958 Rockefeller study is Rockefeller Panel Reports, Prospect for America (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1961), chap. 9; Nelson Rockefeller to Sherman Adams and Percival Brundage, 12 April 1957, and attachment, “Outline of Study to Be Made by Special Study Group on NonMilitary Defense,” White House Office (WHO), Office of Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Series, Briefing Notes Subseries, Box 4, DDEL. Herman Kahn headed the Rand study on shelters. See Rand Corporation, Report on a Study of Non-Military Defense, (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation Report R322-RC, 1958). On the Rand Corporation, see Kaplan, Civil Defense, chap. 4. 64. Discussion at the 343d Meeting of the NSC. His decision also perhaps betrayed a more privately skeptical view of the whole notion of preparedness. See Oakes, Imaginary War, chap. 5.

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65. The issuance of the National Shelter Policy coincided with a consolidation of the FCDA and the Office of Defense Mobilization into the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization. The OCDM received a permanent seat on the NSC. See Yoshpe, Our Missing Shield, chap. 5. Peterson resigned in June 1957 and was replaced by Leo Hoegh, former governor of Iowa. 66. “Measures to Carry Out the Concept of Shelter,” NSC 5807/1, 24 December 1958, WHO, Office of Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Series, Policy Papers Subseries, Box 24, DDEL. 67. OCDM, Draft Staff Paper, Discussion of Possible Non-Military Defense Legislative Proposals, Records of Advisory Council, Box 1, NA. 68. “Individual and Family Preparedness,” app. 1 of The National Plan for Civil Defense and Defense Mobilization, October 1958, OCDM, 4, in WHO, Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, Subject Series, Alpha Subseries, Box 8, DDEL. 69. It appears that these proposals were not passed onto Congress for consideration. For a more detailed financial breakdown of the anticipated costs of these incentives, see “A Federal Shelter Program for Civil Defense,” NSC 5079, 29 March 1957, WHO, Office of Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Series, Policy Papers Subseries, Box 21, DDEL. See also Discussion at the 306th Meeting of the NSC, 21 December 1956, DDE Papers as President, Ann Whitman File, NSC Series, Box 8, DDEL; also OCDM, Discussion of Possible Non-Military Defense Legislative Proposals. 70. SCAS, Operations and Policies of the Civil Defense Program, 3 March 1955, 118. “Inside out” is a quote from Walmer Strope, an official of the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, in Kerr, Civil Defense, 91–95. 71. On the family-oriented consumer culture of the 1950s, see Cowan, More Work for Mother, chap. 7; Hine, Populuxe; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, chaps. 13– 14; E. May, Homeward Bound, chap. 7; Spigel, Make Room for TV, chap. 3. 72. FCDA, Annual Report (1954), 256–58. 73. The Central Intelligence Agency gathered intelligence information on the Soviet shelter program, and the FCDA collected whatever news it could about Soviet civilian mobilization strategies. Rand Corporation strategist Leon Goure´ wrote two studies about Soviet civil defense. See his Civil Defense in the Soviet Union; and Soviet Civil Defense, 1969–1970 (Miami: Center for International Studies, 1971). A more comparative scholarly treatment of Soviet civil defense can be found in Vale, The Limits of Civil Defence, chap. 7; Weart, Nuclear Fear, 136, 257–58. 74. Katherine Howard, “The Responsibility of Women in Civil Defense,” speech presented to the New England Conference of Federated Women’s Clubs, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, 17 September 1953, KGH Papers, Box 4, DDEL. 75. Discussion at 351st Meeting of the NSC, 17 January 1958, DDE Papers as President, Ann Whitman File, Box 9, DDEL. 76. Discussion at 182d Meeting of the NSC, 28 January 1954, DDE Papers as President, Ann Whitman File, Box 5, DDEL. Oakes notes that Eisenhower was undecided about building a shelter at his Gettysburg retreat because he worried it

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might suggest his own fear of attack and “scare other people to death.” See Oakes, Imaginary War, 152. 77. Katherine Howard, untitled speech, n.d., in “Miscellany” folder of speech materials, KGH Papers, Box 6, DDEL. 78. The Public and Civil Defense (Ann Arbor: Survey Research Center, 1952), 17–33, 92–99, in Sharp Office File, Box 33, NA. 79. NSC 5611, “The Civil Defense Program,” in Status of National Security Programs, pt. 5, 30 June 1955, WHO, Office of Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Series, Status of Projects Subseries, Box 7, DDEL; FCDA, Annual Report (1952), 2, 19–24, 87; FCDA, Annual Report, (1953), 96; John DeChant to Philip Wylie, 11 September 1951, Philip Wylie Papers, Box 180, Firestone Library, Princeton, New Jersey. 80. FCDA, Annual Report (1952), 5. 81. Withey, Survey of Public Knowledge, 96, 98. 82. “The Story Nobody Wants to Hear,” March 1955, WHCF, General File, Box 377, DDEL; Public Thinking about Atomic Warfare and Civil Defense (Ann Arbor: Survey Research Center, 1951), 99, in Sharp Office File, Box 33, NA; Ralph Garrett, “Civil Defense and the Public: An Overview of Public Attitude Studies” (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1971). Garrett’s findings are based on over 500,000 responses from approximately 500 public opinion surveys taken from the 1950s through the 1960s. 83. FCDA, Annual Report (1952), 55. 84. Public Thinking about Atomic Warfare and Civil Defense, 126. 85. Ibid., 36–45, 91, 93, 102–3, 123–24. Gallup Polls in 1950 and 1951 also found that people identified the threat of war as the most important problem, and that seven out of ten inhabitants of large cities believed attack was a distinct possibility. See American Institute of Public Opinion, Gallup Poll Reports, 35, 237. 86. Some Factors Influencing Public Reactions to Civil Defense in the United States (Ann Arbor: Survey Research Center, 1956), 3, 13, in Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, Publications Office, Publication History Files, 1950–62, Record Group 397, Entry 7, Box 7, NA. 87. “Wonderful to Play In,” Time, 5 February 1951, 12. 88. New York Times, 11 September 1951. 89. I reviewed over 350 citizen letters in the NSRB/OCDM Records at the National Archives and in the civil defense collections at the Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower Libraries. These letters are not a representative sampling of popular thought about civil defense, but they offer one access point into citizen views about shelter policies. 90. The questionnaire and replies, as well as related congressional and OCDM testimony, can be found in House Committee on Government Operations, Hearings, Civil Defense, pt. 1 and app. 86th Cong., 2d sess., 28 March 1960. See also a shelter survey in Kerr, Civil Defense, 115. 91. Winkler reports this based on his review of OCDM and AEC documents (Life under a Cloud, 122). Russell B. Clanahan, a public affairs specialist with the FCDA throughout the 1950s, said the FCDA had no idea how many family shelters were built, and that any published figures were “educated guess work.” Russell B. Clanahan, telephone interview with author, 2 July 1998.

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92. U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of Housing: 1960, vol. 1, States and Small Areas, pt. 1, United States Summary (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1963), xxvi– xxvii. 93. On the creation of this persona, see Allen’s Eisenhower and the Media. Allen notes that even at the height of President Kennedy’s popularity, public opinion polls showed Eisenhower enjoying equal popularity (191). Kozol describes how Life photographed Eisenhower and other politicians in domestic settings to connect fatherhood with steady and capable political leadership. See pp. 73–78. 94. Discussion at the 343d Meeting of the NSC. 95. Dulles quoted in Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 223. 96. Minutes of Cabinet Meeting, 29 July 1955, DDE Papers as President, Ann Whitman File, Box 5, DDEL. 97. Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 1. 98. Robert Jervis argues that civil defense was an escape method used by both nuclear strategists and civilians to avoid the painful realities of nuclear holocaust. See his The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy, 47–64. Margot Henriksen also notes the inadequacy of apathy theories to explain people’s reaction to the bomb. She identifies a “culture of atomic consensus” around the bomb as the basis of American foreign policy, but she also describes a growing culture of dissent: “Life in Dr. Strangelove’s America meant living with the bomb, but it did not mean loving the bomb or accepting the bomb’s promise of an apocalyptic future.” She also traces the shelter debate into the sixties. See Dr. Strangelove’s America, p. 387, chaps. 3 and 6. Elizabeth and Jay Mechling argue that the peace movement’s campaign against shelters was ultimately more persuasive than the FCDA’s promotion of them because pacifist rhetoric spoke more directly to the ordinary, daily concerns of most Americans. For an excellent rhetorical analysis of the shelter debate, see their “Campaign for Civil Defense,” 105–33. 99. The phrase is Eisenhower’s, quoted in Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 235. Chapter Three The Nuclear Family 1. Dr. Jack A. Vernon, “Project Hideaway: A Pilot Feasibility Study of Fallout Shelters for Families,” prepared under contract for the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization (OCDM), 21 December 1959, 20, Records of the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP), Nuclear Attack Research Papers, 1956–62, Record Group 396, Entry 1019, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (NA). 2. New York Times, 16 August 1959; Vernon, “Project Hideaway,” 20. 3. I thank Michael Sherry for helping me clarify my arguments on these issues. 4. National Security Resources Board (NSRB), United States Civil Defense (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1950), 2; Paul Larsen, “Self-Help and Mutual Aid in Civil Defense,” speech presented to the Aviation Industry, Beverly Hills, California, 14 July 1950, Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM), NSRB, Office File of Martha Sharp, Record Group 304, Entry 17 (Sharp Office File), Box 40, NA. 5. Transcript of radio broadcast, “Capitol Spotlight,” WCFM, Washington, D.C., 18 December 1951, Sharp Office File, Box 41, NA.

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6. On the meaning of combat during World War II, see Westbrook, “Fighting for the American Family.” 7. Transcript of recorded statement of President Eisenhower opening National Civil Defense Week, 9 September 1956, Files of Special Assistant Relating to the Office of Coordinator of Government Public Service Advertising, James M. Lambie, Jr. Records (Lambie Records) Box 27, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas (DDEL). 8. Katherine Howard, “The Ramparts We Watch,” speech presented to the 63d Continental Congress of the Daughters of the American Revolution, Washington, D.C., 20 April 1954, Katherine Graham Howard Papers (KGH Papers), Box 3, DDEL. 9. E. May, Homeward Bound, 3–14. On family themes in film, see Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983); in television, see Spigel, Make Room for TV; in photojournalism, see Kozol, “Life” ’s America. On the dual representations of family in postwar society, see Warren Susman, “Did Success Spoil the United States? Dual Representations in Postwar America” in L. May, Recasting America, 19–37. 10. These statistics are taken from Coontz, The Way We Never Were, chap. 2, 160–162; E. May, Homeward Bound, 3–8; Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, chap. 9; U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of the Population: 1960, Subject Reports, Families (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1963), 11; U.S. Census of Housing, 1960, vol. 1, States and Small Areas, pt. 1, U.S. Summary (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1963), 1–4. 11. Coontz, The Way We Never Were, 28. 12. “An FCDA Mass Consumer Advertising Campaign,” Papers of Harry S. Truman (HST Papers), Files of Spencer R. Quick (Quick Files), Box 5, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri (HSTL). 13. Katherine Howard, “A New Stronghold of National Security—Civil Defense,” speech presented to the Region 1 Women’s Advisory Committee Meeting, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 24 April 1957, KGH Papers, Box 10, DDEL. 14. Scholars have explored this process of “domestication” previously, but with muted attention to the practical importance of the family in the campaign to pacify the atom. See, for example, Lifton, The Broken Connection; 337; Lifton and Falk, Indefensible Weapons. Paul Boyer describes how government, corporate, and media efforts drew on domestic imagery, but the years of his study are confined to the 1945–50 period. See his By the Bomb’s Early Light, 291–333. Elaine Tyler May has explored the symbolic utility of the family within the popular and political culture of the atomic age, but she does not situate the discussion within the politics or policies of the national security bureaucracy. See her Homeward Bound, chaps. 3–4. More recently, sociologist Guy Oakes has given the family serious treatment as a central component of Cold War civil defense policy. See The Imaginary War. 15. Katherine Howard, “The Changing Civil Responsibilities of Women,” speech presented to Indiana University, South Bend, Indiana, 16 February 1954, KGH Papers, Box 4; Howard, “The Land of the Free,” speech presented to the Ladies Auxiliary to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 5 August 1953, Box 5; Howard, “Home of the Brave,” speech presented to the National

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Amvets Auxiliary, Indianapolis, Indiana, 3 September 1953, Box 1, in KGH Papers, DDEL. 16. NSRB, Survival under Atomic Attack. The FCDA’s attempt to militarize women’s housework will be discussed in chapter 4. 17. John DeChant to James Wadsworth, 9 November 1950, NSRB/OCDM, Box 13, NA. 18. On the importance of language in politics, see Rodgers, Contested Truths. 19. “The Story Nobody Wants to Hear,” p. 2, March 1955, White House Central Files (WHCF), General File, Box 377, DDEL. 20. NSRB, United States Civil Defense, 4. 21. Spencer Quick to Frank J. Wilson, 19 March 1952, Quick Files, Box 5, HSTL. 22. “Story Nobody Wants to Hear,” 4. 23. “Putting Civil Defense Awareness to Work: A Program for Implementing Family Action at the Local Level,” n.d., KGH Papers, Box 2, DDEL. 24. FCDA, Home Protection Exercises (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1956). 25. Oakes, Imaginary War, 112, 108. 26. Guy Oakes disagrees with this interpretation, arguing that “there were not important gender distinctions relevant to civil defense.” Imaginary War, 140–41. The following chapter will address fully the gender dimensions of civil defense work. 27. Katherine Howard, “Think on These Things,” speech presented to the Catholic Federation of Women’s Clubs of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio, 12 January 1956, Box 2; Howard, “Evacuation Planning and the Home,” speech presented to the Fourth Annual Conference of the U.S. Civil Defense Council, Boston, Massachusetts, 30 September 1955, KGH Papers, Box 11, DDEL. 28. On postwar masculinity and fatherhood, see Griswold, Fatherhood in America. 29. Katherine Howard, “Civil Defense Progress,” Armed Forces Chemical Journal (May–June 1954), KGH Papers, Box 13, DDEL; Washington Times-Herald, 17 March 1953. 30. John DeChant to C. D. Jackson, 10 December 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Records as President (DDE Records as President), WHCF, Confidential File (CF), Subject Series, Box 27, DDEL. 31. Congress, Senate, Committee on Armed Services (SCAS), Hearings on the Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950, 81st Cong., 2d sess., 8 December 1950, 94. 32. “Project Hideaway,” 28–29. On dual uses of family shelters, see also “Report on the Status of Shelter Measures,” 30 June 1958, White House Office (WHO), Office of Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Series, Policy Papers Subseries, Box 24, DDEL. 33. “A Study of the Effect of Catastrophe on Social Disorganization,” 18 July 1952, Sharp Office File, Box 36, NA. This study was actually done by the University of Oklahoma Research Institute for the Operations Research Office of Johns Hopkins University. 34. Ibid. 35. Killian, “Significance of Multiple-Group Membership.” 36. Eugene Rabinowitch, “Civil Defense,” 226–30.

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37. Val Peterson, “Address,” A Report on the Washington Conference of the National Women’s Advisory Committee in Washington, D.C., October 26–27, 1954, by the FCDA (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1954), 44–45. 38. Minutes of Meeting of the National Civil Defense Advisory Council, 25 April 1955, KGH Papers, Box 6, DDEL; Katherine Howard, “Welfare Planning for Civil Defense,” speech presented to the Colorado Conference of Social Welfare, Denver, Colorado, 20 November 1953; Howard, “Think on These Things,” Box 2, KGH Papers, DDEL. A 1953 FCDA study also expressed fear about citizens resisting reconstruction efforts if they were prevented from returning to their homes. See FCDA, “Civil Defense Implications of the Psychological Impact and Morale Effects of Attacks on the People of the United States,” April 1953, 24, Lambie Records, Box 3, DDEL. 39. Killian, “Significance of Multiple-group Membership,” 313–14. 40. FCDA, Registration and Information Services (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1954). 41. Report of the Project East River, pt. 9, 59, Security-Classified General Correspondence of the Board, Record Group 304, Entry 31, Box 99, NA. 42. FCDA, Women in Civil Defense (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1952). See also FCDA, Home Protection Exercises, 31. 43. J. M. Chambers to Allan Wilson, 27 February 1953, Lambie Records, Box 3, DDEL. 44. E. May, Homeward Bound, 24. 45. Coontz, The Way We Never Were, 125. 46. Coontz offers a thorough analysis of the historical shifts in the meaning of “public” and “private” as they related to the family. See ibid., chap. 6. On the shifting definitions of public and private in nineteenth-century American culture, as well as within the historiography of women’s history, see Ryan, Women in Public. Kozol offers an analysis of representations of public and private in Life. See Kozol, “Life” ’s America, chap. 4. On definitions of public and private as they relate to war, see Joan Scott, “Rewriting History,” in Higonnet et al., Behind the Lines, 28; Westbrook, “Girl That Married Harry James,” 587–614. 47. Mark Leff analyzes the political meanings of sacrifice during World War Two in “The Politics of Sacrifice on the American Home Front in World War II.” On the pursuit of personal satisfaction through family, see Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 178; E. May, Homeward Bound, chaps. 6–7. For nonwhite groups, the meanings of postwar sacrifice, reward, and personal satisfaction were somewhat different. For African Americans in particular the struggle for “the good life” was about gaining civil rights—the right to consume, the right to housing, the right to vote, and so on. See, for example, Sugrue, Origins of Urban Crisis. 48. Millard Caldwell, “Fortress Main Street,” speech presented to the Philadelphia Bulletin Forum, Washington, D.C., 14 March 1951, Sharp Office File, Box 37, NA. 49. John DeChant, “The Public Education Problem,” in National Civil Defense Conference Report: Proceedings of National Civil Defense Conference in Washington, D.C., May 7–8, 1951, by the FCDA, (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1951), 26. 50. Ibid. 51. “Putting Civil Defense Awareness to Work,” KGH Papers, Box 2, DDEL.

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52. FCDA, “The Role of the Warden in Panic Prevention,” Civil Defense Technical Bulletin (Washington, D.C.: GPO, September 1955). 53. “The Civil Defense Program,” NSC 5525, Status of National Security Programs, pt. 5, 15 August 1955, WHO, Office of Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Series, Status of Projects Subseries, Box 6, DDEL. 54. FCDA, “The Role of the Warden in the H-Bomb Era,” Civil Defense Technical Bulletin (Washington, D.C.: GPO, August 1955). 55. Jean Fuller, “Wisdom Is Defense,” speech presented to the State Meeting of Women in Civil Defense, Augusta, Georgia, 10 November 1954, Jean Wood Fuller Papers, Folder 2, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts (SL). 56. “Fact Sheet,” Civil Defense Federal Assistance to Local Civil Defense, n.d., Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, Office of Civil Defense, Industrial Participation Directorate, General Records Relating to Industrial Participation in the Civil Defense Effort, Record Group 397, Entry 15, Box 1, NA. 57. Ibid. 58. Katherine Howard, “A Woman’s View on Civil Defense,” speech presented to the Annual Meeting of the Assembly of Women’s Organizations for National Security, Washington, D.C., 14 April 1953, Somerville-Howorth Family Papers, Folder 146, SL. 59. FCDA reprint of Val Peterson, “The First Hours of an H-Bomb Attack,” Parade 27, March 1955. Chapter Four Raising Women’s Bomb Consciousness 1. Mrs. J. Edward Jones to George C. Marshall, 16 August 1950, Records of the National Security Resources Board, Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, Record Group 304, Entry 31A (NSRB/OCDM), Box 2, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (NA). 2. Katherine Howard, transcript of “Women as Atomic Age Citizens,” Negro Women 20 (August 1953), Katherine Graham Howard Papers (KGH Papers), Box 13, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas (DDEL). 3. Hartmann, Home Front and Beyond, 70. Other surveys of women’s wartime experiences include Anderson, Wartime Women; Campbell, Women at War with America: Private Lives in a Patriotic Era; Meyer, Creating G.I. Jane; Milkman, Gender at Work. Of course William Chafe’s survey of women in the twentieth century includes his discussion of women’s wartime work as a “watershed.” See his American Woman. 4. Harrison, On Account of Sex, 3. 5. General Federation of Women’s Clubs, “Women in Civil Defense,” 29 September 1950, Office of Defense Mobilization, National Security Resources Board (NSRB), Office File of Martha Sharp, Record Group 304, Entry 17 (Sharp Office File), Box 34, NA. 6. Hundreds of these citizen letters can be found in NSRB/OCDM files, Boxes 5–10, NA.

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7. Mrs. Donovan Mann to John DeChant, 29 June 1950, NSRB/OCDM, Box 9, NA. 8. Lillian Rasmussen to Civil Defense Office, 24 January 1950, NSRB/ OCDM, Box 10, NA. 9. Mrs. C. A. Russell to Harry Truman, 25 July 1950, NSRB/OCDM, Box 8, NA. 10. Statistics from General Federation of Women’s Clubs Archives, Washington, D.C. (GFWC Archives). 11. AAUW Journal 44 (Fall 1950), 30. 12. National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, A History, 341. 13. On women’s club activism and party politics in the post–World War II era, see Harrison, On Account of Sex; and Rupp and Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums. For a sociological analysis of the close linkages among postwar women’s organizations, see Beal, System Linkages among Women’s Organizations. 14. Hartmann, Home Front and Beyond, 144–48. 15. On racial and class divisions within women’s movements (not all of them “women’s rights” advocates) after the passage of women’s suffrage, see Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Giddings, When and Where I Enter, pt. 2; Rupp and Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums, 144–65; Harrison, On Account of Sex, chaps. 1–2; Hartmann, Home Front and Beyond, chap. 8. 16. Transcript of meeting, 6 October 1950, Washington, D.C., 44–45, Somerville-Howorth Family Papers, Folder 146, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts (SL). 17. Chapter 5 will discuss the racial dimensions of preparedness. 18. There is much debate in the secondary literature on maternalism and its uses in women’s movements. This definition of maternalism is taken from Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 55. On the varied political uses of motherhood, see Jetter, Orleck, and Taylor, Politics of Motherhood. On the “ideology of nurturant motherhood” as it was used specifically by women’s movements during World War I, see Steinson, “ ‘Other Half of Humanity,’ ” 259–84. On postwar women reformers who critiqued militarism, see Lynn, Progressive Women. On peace politics, maternalism, and feminism in the nuclear age, see Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace. 19. Harrison, On Account of Sex, 16, 31–32. 20. Stuart Symington to Mrs. Hiram Cole Houghton, 21 August 1950; and Paul Larsen to Mrs. C. Buxton Love, 5 July 1950, NSRB/OCDM, Box 2, NA. 21. William Gill to Paul Larsen, 18 July 1950, NSRB/OCDM, Box 1, NA. 22. Washington Post, 15 July 1950. 23. Gill to Larsen, 18 July 1950. 24. Martha Sharp to Gertrude McConnell, 17 October 1950, Sharp Office File, Box 31, NA. In another letter, Sharp notes that Symington was looking to fill the women’s affairs position with a woman “who was married and had children,” which suggests that NSRB officials felt only an authentic housewife-professional could best relay the message of home protection to American women. See Martha Sharp to Thomas Robinson, 2 February 1951, Sharp Office File, Box 31, NA.

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25. NSRB, United States Civil Defense (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1950), 18, 44, 102. 26. Thomas Needham to John DeChant, 8 November 1950, Box 1; Kenneth Spangler to James Wadsworth, n.d., Box 2; Joseph Byrne to Millard Caldwell, 12 January 1951, Box 13; Paul Larsen to William Henning, 12 September 1950, Box 16, all in NSRB/OCDM, NA. 27. Hugh Gallagher to Millard Caldwell, 18 December 1950, NSRB/OCDM, Box 1, NA. 28. Ibid. 29. Pleased with the results, NSRB officials distributed twenty thousand copies of the hearing transcripts to state governments, newspaper and magazine editors, and especially voluntary organizations. See Memo for the Record, John DeChant and Paul Larsen, 24 March 1950, Box 13; DeChant to Larsen, 24 March 1950, Box 1; DeChant to William Gill, 3 April 1950, Box 13, all in NSRB/OCDM, NA. 30. James Wadsworth to Dwayne Orton, 20 February 1951, NSRB/OCDM, Box 12, NA. 31. Martha Sharp, “Outline for Mr. Symington for Speech at Women’s Conference,” n.d., Sharp Office File, Box 32, NA. 32. Stuart Symington to John Steelman, 15 September 1950, Sharp Office File, Box 39, NA. 33. Martha Sharp, “Women and Civil Defense,” speech presented to the Women and Civil Defense Conference, Washington, D.C., 4 October 1950, Sharp Office File, Box 32, NA. 34. Ibid. 35. Sharp, abstract of speech “Women in Civil Defense,” n.d., Sharp Office File, Box 32, NA. 36. While not denying the reach of Cold War gender and family norms in circumscribing women’s lives, Joanne Meyerowitz has argued that historians have depended too heavily on Friedan’s thesis to explain postwar women’s experiences. See her “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946–1958.” 37. Transcript of meeting, 3. 38. Ibid., 127. 39. Ibid., 129. 40. Loula Dunn to Stuart Symington, 18 August 1950, NSRB/OCDM, Box 2, NA. As a veteran of wartime welfare service herself, Sharp understood the welfare dimensions of civil defense better than Symington, as evidenced by her invitation to the National Catholic Community Service and the National Jewish Welfare Board to attend her conference. 41. On this theme in nineteenth-century women’s reform, see, for example, Lori Ginzberg’s Women and the Work of Benevolence. 42. Transcript of meeting, 149. 43. Harry Truman to Stuart Symington, 9 September 1950, Sharp Office File, Box 39, NA. Truman’s directive sprang from his concern that a number of individual departments, including Labor and Defense, were already organizing their own women’s advisory committees, thereby duplicating the efforts of the NSRB and creating a decentralized, disorganized policy on women in defense. See also draft

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letter from Stuart Symington to Secretaries of Defense and Labor, 15 September 1950, Sharp Office File, Box 39, NA. 44. Handwritten note by Martha Sharp, n.d., Sharp Office File, Box 39, NA. 45. Transcript of meeting, 13. 46. Transcript of meeting, 14. 47. Radio transcript, “Handbook for Life: Atomic Bomb Do’s and Don’ts, Part 3,” Mutual Broadcasting System, 5, 11 November 1950, Sharp Office File, Box 34, NA. 48. Washington Post, 15 July 1950. 49. Sharp, “Women and Civil Defense.” 50. Transcript of meeting, 15. 51. Transcript of speech, Mrs. Hiram Cole Houghton, “Today’s Challenge,” n.d., Presidents’ Papers, Record Group 2, Papers of Dorothy Houghton, Folder: Speeches 20 October 1950–12 May 1952, GFWC Archives. 52. Cott, “Feminist Theory and Feminist Movements.” 53. Sharp, “Women and Civil Defense.” 54. Martha Sharp to Millard Caldwell, 28 December 1950, Sharp Office File, Box 38, NA. 55. This figure is based on a review of the number of women’s clubs represented among the 208 voluntary organizations that comprised the FCDA’s advisory committees for 1951. See FCDA, Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1951), 82–88. 56. Ibid., 19–20. Membership on the FCDA Advisory Committee was granted usually to the club’s national leader. 57. Data Sheet, Assembly of Women’s Organizations for National Security, Somerville-Howorth Papers, Folder 147, SL. Original members of the Assembly included: AAUW, GFWC, BPW, National Association of Women Lawyers, American Federation of Soroptimist Clubs, National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women, Ladies Auxiliary to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion Auxiliary, Pilot International, American Women’s Voluntary Service, Zonta International, Associated Women of the Farm Bureau Federation, Women’s Auxiliary to the American Medical Association. Organizations that joined in 1952 were: National Home Demonstration Council, National Home Demonstration Agents’ Association, Ladies Auxiliary of Jewish War Veterans, National Federation of Women’s Republican Clubs, and the Women’s Division of the National Democratic Committee. 58. Jean Wood Fuller, Oral History Interview, 165, State Historical Society of Wisconsin Archives, Madison, Wisconsin. 59. Howorth served on the Veterans Administration Board from 1934 until 1950, where she was expected to bring a “woman’s angle” to the deliberations. On women’s political activism in the New Deal era, see Ware, Beyond Suffrage, 65–66. 60. FCDA, Notes on History of Women’s Activities in Civil Defense, n.d., Records of Office of Emergency Preparedness, Record Group 396, Entry 1025, Women’s Activity Subject Files, 1957–61 (Women’s Activity Subject Files), Box 4, NA. 61. Transcript of meeting, 44, 192–93.

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62. An AAUW member, probably sensitive about the earlier exclusion of Terrell, urged Assembly leaders to waive it. Membership rules stipulated that organizations could pay $100 “or less,” but it does not appear that the NACW ever joined the Assembly. Eleanor F. Dolan to Mrs. Houghton, 8 March 1951, SomervilleHoworth Papers, Folder 147, SL. On this issue and the Assembly in general, see also Rupp and Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums, 78–79. 63. Katherine Graham Howard, Oral History Interview, 1968–69, 207, Columbia Oral History Project, DDEL. 64. Final Report of the Chairman, Lucy Somerville Howorth, of the Assembly of Women’s Organizations for National Security, July 1951–February 1952, Somerville-Howorth Papers, Folder 147, SL. 65. “Assembly of Women’s Organizations for National Security,” General Federation Clubwoman (January 1954): 11. 66. Houghton, “Today’s Challenge.” 67. GFWC Bulletin, no. 2, 7 January 1952, Program Records, Record Group 7, National Defense Department, Dorothy Houghton, Box 4, GFWC Archives. 68. BPW, Annual Reports, 1952–1953, 36, National Board of Directors Meeting, 27 June to 1 July 1953, BPW’s Board of Directors Files (Board of Directors Files), Folder: 1953 Board, New York, BPW Archives, Washington, D.C. (BPW Archives). 69. “Civilians Must Be Ready for Attack,” National Business Women’s Week, 23–29 September 1951, BPW Membership Files, BPW Archives. 70. BPW, Annual Reports, 1953–1954, Twelfth Biennial Convention, St. Louis, Missouri, 27 June to 2 July 1954, Board of Directors Files, Folder: 1954 Board, St. Louis, BPW Archives. 71. Katherine Howard, “First Year Report,” 31 July 1954, KGH Papers, Box 1, DDEL. 72. Guy Oakes also discusses this aspect of civil defense. See Imaginary War, 117–29. 73. United States Civil Defense, 44. 74. Sharp, “Women and Civil Defense.” 75. Katherine Howard, “The Ramparts We Watch,” speech presented to the 63d Continental Congress of the Daughters of the American Revolution, Washington, D.C., 20 April 1954, KGH Papers, Box 3, DDEL. 76. Katherine Howard, “The Third Circle,” speech presented to the American Association of University Women, Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 5 June 1954, Box 1; Howard, “Think on These Things,” speech presented to the Catholic Federation of Women’s Clubs of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio, 12 January 1956, Box 2, KGH Papers, DDEL. 77. FCDA, Women in Civil Defense (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1952); NSRB, Survival under Atomic Attack (Washington, D.C.: 1950); FCDA, Firefighting for Householders (Washington, D.C.: 1951). 78. On the rise of scientific expertise and advice literature in the postwar era, see Breines, Young, White, and Miserable, chap. 1; Herman, The Romance of American Psychology.

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79. Katherine Howard, “Civil Defense at Home and Abroad,” speech presented to the Massachusetts Society of Colonial Dames of America, Boston, Massachusetts, 31 March 1955, KGH Papers, Box 5, DDEL. 80. E. May, Homeward Bound, 104–7; Katherine Howard, “Women and Welfare in Civil Defense,” speech presented to the Massachusetts Civil Defense Meeting, Boston, Massachusetts, 22 April 1953, KGH Papers, Box 5, DDEL. 81. Women in Civil Defense; FCDA, What You Should Know about Biological Warfare (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1951); FCDA, Home Protection Exercises (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1957). Spencer Weart discusses growing popular fears about radioactive dust and contamination as a result of nuclear testing. See Nuclear Fear, 184–90. 82. Shelter on a Quiet Street, Department of Defense, Office of Civil Defense, 1962, NA. Although made in the early sixties, this film typifies the FCDA productions and literature distributed in the 1950s. 83. FCDA Advisory Bulletin, no. 192, 3 January 1956 and OCDM Advisory Bulletin, no. 234, 30 March 1959, OCDM Administrative Issuances, Record Group 304, Entry 281, Box 3, NA. 84. Radio script, United Press Service, 6 April 1954, Box 9, KGH Papers, DDEL. 85. Department of Defense, et al., Basic Course in Emergency Mass Feeding Handbook (Washington, D.C.: GPO: 1966), 35. This is a revised version of a 1953 pamphlet. 86. “Food,” n.d., “Speech Material,” KGH Papers, Box 10, DDEL. 87. “Civil Defense News for Women,” vol. 1, no. 3, July 1953, Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, Office of Civil Defense, Publication Office, Publication History Files, 1950–62, Record Group 397, Entry 7, Box 4, NA. 88. Katherine Howard, “Welfare Planning for Civil Defense,” speech presented to the Colorado Conference of Social Welfare, Denver, Colorado, 20 November 1953, KGH Papers, Box 2, NA. 89. FCDA, By, for, and about Women in Civil Defense, 6th ed. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1956), 8. 90. By, for, and about Women, no. 21 (1957), 4. The National Grocers’ Association, the American National Dietetic Association, and several pharmaceutical companies assisted in the production of “Grandma’s Pantry.” See E. May, Homeward Bound, 104. 91. Marjorie Child Husted, “Report on Roundtable No. 1, Family Plans for Dispersal,” in A Report on the Washington Conference of the National Women’s Advisory Committee, October 26–27, 1954, Washington, D.C. by the FCDA (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1954), 31–34. 92. See, for example, “Survival at Home,” Woman’s Home Companion, May 1951, 21–27. 93. Jesse Butcher to Hal Goodwin, 9 February 1951, NSRB/OCDM, Box 15, NA. 94. New York Times, 28 February 1951. 95. Hazel Markel, host of a popular radio and television show, served on the FCDA’s Women’s Advisory Committee in the mid-1950s, as did Margaret Hickey, an editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal. Markel, not surprisingly, featured Howard

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on her television show several times. See FCDA, For Your Information, 13 November 1953. See also Jesse Butcher to John DeChant, 14 February 1951, NSRB/ OCDM, Box 13, NA. 96. Katherine Howard, “Civil Defense at Home and Abroad”; FCDA, The House in the Middle, 1954. 97. Women in Civil Defense. 98. “AAUW and Civil Defense,” n.d., KGH Papers, Box 1, DDEL. 99. “Can You Survive This?” American Home, August 1955, 8, 116. 100. Eisenhower courted female voters by emphasizing the important role women would play in his administration’s crusade to preserve and strengthen American values. Harrison describes how Bertha Adkins, head of the Republican National Committee’s Women’s Division, pressured Eisenhower to fulfill his campaign promises to appoint women to his administration. Her lobbying efforts resulted in a record of female appointments that exceeded Truman’s, but Harrison argues that these presidential appointments were token gestures that did not address the more fundamental issues facing American women. See Harrison, On Account of Sex, 58–65. 101. Her autobiography details her professional and personal life. See Howard, With My Shoes Off. 102. Howard Oral History, 6. 103. Ibid., 355. 104. Ibid., 9. Howard skirts an explanation of how the telegram got published. 105. For a discussion of the multiple meanings of feminism in the postwar period, see Harrison, On Account of Sex, 219–21, Rupp and Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums, 39–40, 52–59. 106. Margaret Haucke to Katherine Howard, 27 July 1954, KGH Papers, Box 3, DDEL. 107. Katherine Howard, untitled speech presented to the United States Civil Defense Council, Atlanta, Georgia, 11 October 1956, KGH Papers, Box 12, DDEL. 108. Margery Scranton to Katherine Howard, 17 August 1954, KGH Papers, Box 3, DDEL. 109. Howard Oral History, 368. One of the traditions Howard most resented was the seating protocol of White House entertaining, where the wives of highranking officials would get priority seating over women who had government positions in their own right. She believed this spatial arrangement epitomized the predominant attitude toward women in politics, and she spoke angrily about it in both her oral history and her autobiography. See Howard Oral History, 252; Howard, With My Shoes Off, 270–72. 110. Los Angeles Times, 6 May 1955. May describes this episode as well in Homeward Bound, 103–4. Howard had made similar comments a few years earlier after witnessing several blasts. She boasted that her entry into a freshly blasted and radiated AEC test home during Operation Doorstep in 1953 was “another first for a woman.” Howard, With My Shoes Off, 273. 111. Fuller Oral History, 216.

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112. On postwar antifeminism and its effects on women’s rights organizing, see Rupp and Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums, 18–23, 131–32. On media representations, see Douglas, Where the Girls Are, chaps. 1–2. 113. Katherine Howard, “Civil Defense Progress,” Armed Forces Chemical Journal (May–June 1954), KGH Papers, Box 13, DDEL. 114. Jean Fuller, “Wisdom Is Defense,” speech presented to the State Meeting of Women in Civil Defense, Augusta, Georgia, 10 November 1954, Jean Wood Fuller Papers, Folder 2, SL. During World War II, Sara Whitehurst, then president of the GFW and a member of Maryland’s state civil defense council, lodged similar complaints about women being left out of critical policymaking bodies. See Miller, “War That Never Came,” 320. 115. Transcript of meeting, 18. 116. Ibid., 32. 117. Memo from Mrs. G. William Jones to State Presidents of the GFWC, 1951, Program Records, National Defense Department, Box 4, GFWC Archives. 118. Independent Woman 33, May 1953, 161, BPW Archives. 119. By, for, and about Women, no. 7 (1955), p. 8; Jean Wood Fuller to Eugene Ingold, 1 August 1956, Women’s Activity Subject Files, Box 2, NA. 120. Fuller Oral History, 165. 121. FCDA Annual Reports routinely cited literature request numbers in a way that implied public interest was commensurate with the amount distributed. 122. Briefing on Award Program, n.d., Women’s Activity Subject Files, Box 1, NA. 123. Assistant Administrator to Executive Assistant Administrator, n.d., Women’s Activity Subject Files, Box 1, NA. 124. Deputy Assistant Director of Women’s Activities to Director, 14 April 1960, Women’s Activity Subject Files, Box 1, NA. Not all states reported participation rates, however, so these figures are incomplete. 125. Pearle H. Wates, A Suggested Format for Presenting the Home Preparedness Award Program, 1959, Women’s Activity Subject Files, Box 1, NA. 126. Pauline Mandigo to Judge Lucy Howorth and Marguerite Rawalt, 2 February 1953, Somerville-Howorth Papers, Folder 147, SL. 127. Marguerite Rawalt to Participating National Organizations, September 1958, Presidents’ Papers, Record Group 2, Dorothy Houghton, Folder: Committee Work 1 February 1951–20 September 1958, GFWC Archives. 128. The last reference to the Assembly I located was in the BPW’s own history book, which notes that its president attended an Assembly meeting in 1959. BPW, A History, 236. 129. Fuller Oral History, 170. 130. Title page of Somerville-Howorth Papers. 131. Mandigo to Howorth, 2 February 1953. 132. Meyerowitz, “Introduction,” in Not June Cleaver, 8. It should be pointed out that historians’ challenges to “the containment model” of postwar women’s history have largely focused on liberal and radical women’s activism, but as this chapter suggests, such revisions should incorporate more politically conservative women’s activism as well.

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133. On the antinuclear movement, see Wittner, Resisting the Bomb. For a survey of the women’s peace movement, see Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue; Alonso, “Mayhem and Moderation: Women Peace Activists during the McCarthy Era,” in Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver, 128–50. For an excellent case study of female activism against civil defense, in particular, see Garrison, “ ‘Our Skirts Gave Them Courage,’ ” 201–26; also, Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace. 134. Margaret R. Higonnet and Patrice L.-R. Higonnet, “The Double Helix,” in Higonnet et al., Behind the Lines, 44. 135. Howard Oral History, 195. 136. Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 55. Ginsberg’s Women and the Work of Benevolence offers a good discussion of the limits of female moral superiority and maternalism in an earlier time period. Chapter Five “Equal in Suffering” 1. Dean R. Brimhall and L. Dewey Anderson to L. Edward Scriven, 3 November 1950, NSRB, Records of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, Record Group 304, Entry 31A (NSRB/OCDM), Box 1, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (NA). 2. Geyer, “The Militarization of Europe,” 79–80. 3. For an overview of the effects of these population movements, see Polenberg, One Nation Divisible, 69–85. 4. Ibid., 72. 5. On the racial “hate strikes,” see Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, chap. 3. On urban inequality and conflict in the war era, see also George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900– 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), chap. 12; Kelley, Race Rebels, Sugrue, Origins of Urban Crisis, chaps. 1–2. 6. Polenberg, One Nation Divisible, 61–69; Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 69–80. 7. Lipsitz, Class and Culture, 2; Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, chaps. 5–6. 8. Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 123–44, 170–77. 9. Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 13; Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 143. 10. FCDA, Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1953), 138. 11. James Wadsworth, “Wartime Production and Protection,” speech presented to the Annual Convention of the International Union of Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, CIO, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 8 October 1952, Papers of Harry S. Truman, Files of Spencer R. Quick (Quick Files), Box 5, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri (HSTL). Interestingly, this union was the CIO’s third largest and it had a significant communist leadership. 12. Dubofsky, State and Labor, 199. In 1950, AFL and CIO combined membership wa approximately 12 million workers. See Green, The World of the Worker, 203. 13. Ruether quoted in Zieger, American Workers, 292. 14. Ibid., chaps. 10–11. On labor involvement in foreign policy during World War II, see Roberts, Putting Foreign Policy to Work.

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15. Quoted in Polenberg, One Nation Divisible, 46. Interestingly, the Nazi state also “proclaimed the death of class and class conflict.” See Rupp, “I Don’t Call that Volksgemeinschaft,” 37–54. 16. Everett Kassalow, Briefing Memorandum, December 1952, Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM), NSRB, Office of the Chairman, Office File of Everett M. Kassalow, Special Assistant for Labor, 1950–53, Record Group 304, Entry 10 (Kassalow Office File), Box 9, NA. 17. Zieger, American Workers, 190. 18. Everett Kassalow, “The Perlman Theory of the Labor Movement—Wisconsin Revisited,” speech presented to the Industrial Relations Research Association Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, 28 December 1950, Kassalow Office File, Box 10, NA. 19. Kassalow, Briefing Memorandum. 20. Ibid. 21. National Civil Defense Conference Report: Proceedings of National Civil Defense Conference in Washington, D.C., May 7–8, 1951, by the FCDA (Washington D.C.: GPO, 1951), 22. 22. FCDA, Is Your Plant a Target? (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1951). 23. Unions represented in the first advisory committee were: National Association of Letter Carriers; International Association of Firefighters; International Association of Machinists; International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Asbestos Workers; United Rubber, Cork, Linoleum, and Plastic Workers of America; Textile Workers Union of America; United Steelworkers of America; United Automobile Workers of America; and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. The absence of female-dominated unions is significant, but not surprising, given the FCDA’s gender assumptions. The FCDA recruited women as community volunteers, not workers, even though women’s (especially married women’s) labor force participation rates were on the rise. 24. Stanford Research Institute, “Tentative Program for the Post-Attack Rehabilitation Effort of an Industrial Community,” n.d., Kassalow Office File, Box 10, NA. 25. NSRB, “Orientation Briefings for the East River Project,” 29, 15 January 1952, NSRB Central Files, Record Group 304, Entry 31, Box 97, NA. 26. Everett Kassalow to Presley Lancaster, 2 June 1952, Kassalow Office File, Box 9, NA. 27. Everett Kassalow to John F. Hilliard, 19 June 1952, Kassalow Office File, Box 10, NA. 28. Preliminary Report of the Manpower Task Force on Post-Attack Industrial Rehabilitation, 29 August 1952, Kassalow Office File, Box 10, NA. 29. Everett Kassalow to Robert J. Foley, 5 March 1953, Kassalow Office File, Box 9, NA. 30. Martha Sharp to Chairman, 12 December 1951, Kassalow Office File, Box 5, NA. 31. NSRB, Brief Statement of the Problem of Post-Attack Industrial Rehabilitation, 14 November 1951; and NSRB, Description of NSRB Planning Project, Housing and Community Facilities in Post-Attack Industrial Rehabilitation, 13 November 1951, both in Kassalow Office File, Box 10, NA.

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32. U.S. Department of Labor, Defense Manpower Administration, Working Paper on Manpower for Post-Attack Industrial Rehabilitation, 18, 27 July 1952, Kassalow Office File, Box 10, NA. See also Preliminary Report of the Manpower Task Force. 33. Working Paper on Manpower, 20. 34. Some examples include: AFL-CIO, Policy for Survival, AFL-CIO Publication no. 39 (1956); National CIO Community Services Committee, Civil Defense: A Guide for Union Participation in Civil Defense Programs (n.p., n.d.) in Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, Publication Office, Publication History Files, 1950– 62, Record Group 397, Entry 7, Box 8, NA. 35. General Order no. 21, 2 April 1951, Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization (OCDM), Administrative Issuances Relating to Civil Defense (hereafter OCDM Admin. Issuances), Record Group 304, Entry 281, Box 1, NA; FCDA, Annual Report (1952), 127–28; “Labor Advisory Committee Pledges CD Cooperation,” Civil Defense Alerts, June 1952, 7. Arnold Zandler, the international president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) objected to the Labor Advisory Committee’s formal endorsement of the loyalty oath, only not as an issue of civil liberty: “Our organization has always been in the front line against communist infiltration in the American labor movement. . . . The resentment felt by our members in being required to take a loyalty oath is under the circumstances understandable.” See Arnold Zandler to Millard Caldwell, 28 December 1950, and Millard Caldwell to Arnold Zandler, 11 January 1951, NSRB/OCDM, Box 16, NA. The American Civil Liberties Union, however, protested the loyalty oath as an attack on free speech. See John Paul Jones to Arthur Wallander, 9 November 1950, NSRB/OCDM, Box 5, NA. 36. George Meany to President Eisenhower, 20 July 1956, Dwight David Eisenhower, Records as President (DDE Records as President), White House Central Files (WHCF), Official File (OF), Box 658, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas (DDEL). 37. Ronald Radosh has suggested the term “labor statesman” to describe the role organized labor increasingly played in American diplomatic and domestic politics. See American Labor and U.S. Foreign Policy, 3. 38. On these themes, see Sherry, In the Shadow of War, chap. 3, esp. 144–56; Dudziak, “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative”; Von Eschen, Race against Empire. 39. Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture, 99–100. 40. Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 147. 41. Black voters comprised a tiny percentage of Eisenhower’s 1952 victory, but in the 1956 election, Ike gained an additional 5 percent of the black vote. Still, Eisenhower did not court the black vote to any significant degree, and about 65 percent of black voters nationwide preferred the Democrat Adlai Stevenson. On black civil rights in the Eisenhower years, see Burk, Eisenhower Administration and Black Civil Rights; Alexander, Holding the Line, 118–19. 42. Daniels quoted in Miller, “War That Never Came,” 278. World War I’s civil defense corps was also racially segregated. See Mauck, “History of Civil Defense,” 265.

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43. Even if Landis had taken a stronger stand against racial segregation, however, it might have made only a marginal difference, due to the fact that civil defense was a locally implemented program. See Miller, “War That Never Came,” chap. 4. 44. There is no evidence that other racial groups were studied or surveyed, though this could have happened at the local level. The first study, done in 1951, measured attitudinal differences of 614 people by sex, age, region, educational background, occupation of head of household, family income, marital status, home ownership status, but only nominally, by race. Of the sample size, 1 percent were black, and less than half of 1 percent were recorded as “other.” See Survey Research Center, Public Thinking about Atomic Warfare and Civil Defense. In the 1952 study, blacks comprised 95, or 11 percent, of the 813 surveyed. See Survey Research Center, The Public and Civil Defense, 116. 45. James Wadsworth to Hon. Robert Ramspeck, 28 November 1952, HST Papers as President, Official File (OF), Box 1743, HSTL. A similar government outreach effort occurred during World War II to persuade African American citizens to buy war bonds. See Samuel, Pledging Allegiance. 46. Anne Roberts to Martha Sharp, 6 October 1950, Office File of Martha Sharp, Record Group 304, Entry 17 (Sharp Office File), Box 40, NA. 47. New York Times, 11 April 1951; 1, 12 November 1951. 48. “Plane Spotters,” Ebony, July 1953, 16–25. See also the Pittsburgh Courier, 29 November 1952. 49. On the history of the black press in the war and postwar years, see Finkle, Forum for Protest; Wolseley, The Black Press, U.S.A.. 50. According to census data, of the approximately 129,000 adult residents of Mobile, 46,000 (35 percent) were “nonwhite.” U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of Population: 1950, vol. 2, Characteristics of the Population, pt. 1, U.S. Summary, Chap. B (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1952). 51. In addition to Mobile, the FCDA sent the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) observation staff to Spokane and Bremerton, Washington. The NAS’s Committee on Disaster Studies prepared the reports, with extensive assistance and input from the Rand Corporation, Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, Tulane University, and the University of Washington. See Committee on Disaster Studies, Division of Anthropology and Psychology, National Academy of Sciences– National Research Council, “Operations Walkout, Rideout, and Scat: Studies of Civil Defense Dispersal Test Exercises in Spokane, Bremerton, and Mobile,” n.d., in Papers of John M. Redding, Advisory Committee to the Trucking Industry File, Box 25, HSTL. 52. NAS, “Report on ‘Operation Scat’: A ‘Drive Out’ Evacuation of a Part of Mobile, Alabama,” 3–4. On the function and use of rumor in African-American culture, see Patricia A. Turner, I Heard It through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 53. NAS, “Report on ‘Operation Scat,’ Participant Observer ‘S,’ ” 6. 54. NAS, “Report on ‘Operation Scat,’ ” 2. 55. Ibid., 1–3, 11. 56. On Cold War military psychology and race, see Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 57–69, chap. 6.

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57. Jean Fuller, “Civil Defense—Your Responsibility,” speech presented to the California Federation of Republican Women, San Jose, California 11 January 1955, Jean Wood Fuller Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Boston, Massachusetts (SL). Val Peterson conveyed a similarly positive impression of Scat in his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. See SCAS, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Civil Defense on Operations and Policies of Civil Defense Program, 84th Cong., 1st sess., 26 February 1955, 81. 58. Robin Kelley argues that many historians, as well, have missed these “hidden transcripts.” See “ ‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black WorkingClass Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History 80 (June 1993): 75–112; Kelley, Race Rebels. 59. FCDA, A Report on the Washington Conference of the National Women’s Advisory Committee, November 3–4, 1955 (Washington, D.C., GPO, 1956), 9. 60. These public opinion studies are discussed and cited in detail in chapters 1 and 2. 61. On the racial politics and policies of the Truman administration, see Berman, The Politics of Civil Rights; Barton Bernstein, “The Ambiguous Legacy: The Truman Administration and Civil Rights,” in his Politics and Policies of the Truman Administration; William Chafe, “Postwar American Society: Dissent and Social Reform,” in Lacey, The Truman Presidency; Dudziak, “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative”; Horne, Black and Red; McCoy and Ruetten, Quest and Response; Plummer, Rising Wind, chaps. 4–5. 62. On the NAACP and racial reform in the Cold War era, see Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion, chaps. 2–3. 63. Horne’s Black and Red details the long and complicated relationship between racial liberalism and Cold War conservatism as it played out in NAACP politics, particularly between W. E. B. Du Bois and Walter White. See also Plummer, Rising Wind, chaps. 4–5. 64. Caldwell also received some correspondence, including a supportive letter from a black newspaperman, William Gray, Jr., of the Philadelphia Afro-American, who said it was “regrettable that some of the leaders of my race, and many of our publishers, have voiced disapproval of your appointment.” See William Gray, Jr., to Millard Caldwell, 22 January 1951, HST Papers as President, OF, Box 1743. 65. Harry T. Moore to President Truman, 28 December 1950, HST Papers as President, OF, Box 1743, HSTL; New York Times, 27 December 1951. 66. Congress, Senate Committee on Armed Services (SCAS), Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services on Nomination of Millard Frank Caldwell, Jr., 82d Cong., 1st sess., 15 January 1951, 1–10. 67. Ibid., 10–14. 68. McCoy and Ruetten, Quest and Response, 262. 69. George Houser to President Truman, 30 April 1951, HST Papers as President, OF, Box 1743, HSTL. 70. Walter White to President Truman, 21 February 1951; White to Truman, 15 January 1951; and Elmer Henderson to President Truman, 15 January 1951, all in HST Papers as President, OF, Box 1743, HSTL. 71. Cecil E. Newman to President Truman, 26 December 1950, HST Papers as President, OF, Box 1743, HSTL.

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72. Pittsburgh Courier, 13 January 1951. Editorials appeared also in the Chicago Defender, the Amsterdam (New York) News, the Afro-American, and the Call. See McCoy and Ruetten, Quest and Response, 261. 73. Chicago Daily News, 5 March 1951. 74. James Watson and Elnora Parker to President Truman, 21 March 1951, HST Papers as President, OF, Box 1743, HSTL. 75. Ardie Halyward to President Truman, 15 March 1951, HST Papers as President, OF, Box 1743, HSTL. 76. Mrs. Frances Hannah to President Truman, 14 March 1951, HST Papers as President, OF, Box 1743, HSTL. 77. M. E. Diggs to President Truman, 21 March 1951, HST Papers as President, OF, Box 1743, HSTL. 78. Millard Caldwell, “Who Runs Civil Defense?” speech presented to the Philadelphia Club of Printing House Craftsmen, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 10 March 1951, Sharp Office File, Box 41, NA. 79. Walter White to President Truman, 4 April 1951, Papers of David K. Niles, Civil Rights and Minorities, Box 27, HSTL; New York Times, 6 April 1951. 80. Jesse O. Thomas to President Truman, 22 January 1951; Donald Dawson to William Hopkins, 5 May 1951, both in HST Papers as President, OF, Box 1744, HSTL. 81. Lovonia Brown to Joseph Albright, 5 December 1950; Joseph Albright to Philleo Nash, 8 December 1950, NSRB/OCDM, Box 4, NA. See also Mary McLeod Bethune to Martha Sharp, 8 April 1952, Sharp Office File, Box 42, NA. Interestingly, the FBI investigated Bethune in 1942 for alleged disloyalty, and one year later, the House Un-American Activities Committee accused her of being a communist. She was found innocent both times. Her service on the NCDAC may have been one way for her to publicly cleanse herself of any associations with “unAmericanism.” Ultimately, Bethune served for only six months, resigning in late 1951 reportedly for health reasons. It may be that she resigned due to the Caldwell controversy, but I found no correspondence regarding her resignation. Truman replaced her with another prominent black woman, Dr. Margaret Just Butcher. See Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 197–215, 220–30, 243–46; “Dr. Butcher Named to Civil Defense Advisory Council,” Civil Defense Alert, August 1952, 6. 82. Transcript of meeting, 6 October 1950, Washington, D.C., 45, SomervilleHoworth Family Papers, Folder 146, SL. 83. FCDA, National Civil Defense Conference Report, 24–25. 84. A. Philip Randolph to President Truman, 30 April 1951, HST Papers as President, OF, Box 1743, HSTL. 85. France and Gore to Truman; Gordon Rodgers, Jr., to President Truman, 7 May 1951, both HST Papers as President, OF, Box 1743, HSTL. 86. Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 147. 87. National Civil Defense Conference Report, 24; James Wadsworth, speech presented to the Annual Convention of the National Association of Social Work, Atlantic City, New Jersey, 17 May 1951, Sharp Office File, Box 37, NA. 88. Katherine Howard, “A Woman’s View of Civil Defense,” speech presented to the Women’s City Club, Berkeley, California, 11 May 1953, Katherine Graham Howard Papers (KGH Papers), Box 12, DDEL.

192

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89. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of Housing: 1960, vol. 1, States and Small Areas, pt. 1, “United States Summary” (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1963). 90. SCAS, Hearings on Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950, 81st Cong., 2d sess., 11 December 1950, p. 153. 91. Gerstell, How to Survive an Atomic Bomb, 129–30. 92. SCAS, Civil Defense Program: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services, 84th Cong., 1st sess., 20 May 1955, p. 707. 93. Minutes of Cabinet Meeting, 19 July 1957, DDE Papers as President, Ann Whitman File, Cabinet Series, Box 9, DDEL. See also Discussion at the 351st Meeting of the NSC, 17 January 1958, DDE Papers as President, Ann Whitman File, NSC Series, Box 9, DDEL. Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy further pointed out the possibility of regional resentments erupting over possible locations for public shelters. He said it would be “difficult to ask the people in the cities, the main sources of taxes, to put up the money for a shelter program which would give no protection [to them].” The Ad Council’s Allan Wilson also pointed out the potential for regional class conflicts, arguing that one of the obstacles to getting rural people to support civil defense was their perception that they were “giving their time only to protect some city slickers.” Allan Wilson to Hayes Dever, 13 February 1953, James M. Lambie, Jr. Records (Lambie Records), Box 4, DDEL. See also “A Federal Shelter Program for Civil Defense,” 29 March 1957, WHO, Office of Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Series, Policy Papers Subseries, Box 21, DDEL. See also Materials for the National Civil Defense Advisory Council Meeting, 28–29 May 1957, KGH Papers, Box 6, DDEL. 94. G. L. Schuyler and Ellery Husted to Leslie Kullenberg, 8 February 1951, NSRB/OCDM, Box 14, NA. 95. On the psychological profession’s attempts to prevent racial riots and other “intergroup conflicts” that threatened the successful prosecution of war, see Herman’s Romance of American Psychology, 57–66. 96. Janis, Air War and Emotional Stress, 199–203. See also Irving Janis, “Psychological Problems of A-Bomb Defense,” in Wigner, Survival and the Bomb, 52– 78. 97. Janis, Air War and Emotional Stress, 202–203. 98. Ibid. 99. Brimhall and Anderson to Scriven. 100. On urban and suburban development, see Sugrue, Origins of Urban Crisis; Cohen, “From Town Center to Shopping Center.” 101. Robert Merriam, “Cities Are Here to Stay,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 7 (September 1951): 251–62. Merriam was an alderman for the city’s fifth ward, located on the city’s south side, which had a sizable black population. 102. “Field Problem,” 307th Military Government Group, Fall 1950, NSRB/ OCDM, Box 4, NA. 103. John Ballock, “Effectiveness of Some Civil Defense Actions in Protecting Urban Populations,” 10 April 1957, Operations Research Office, Johns Hopkins University, Chevy Chase, Maryland, in Bragdon Records, WHO, Box 1, DDEL. Ballock recommended a system of private and public shelters, so that non–home owners and urban dwellers (with little space) would have equal access to shelter.

NOTES TO CONCLUSION

193

104. Marjorie Child Husted, “Report on Roundtable No. 1, Family Plans for Dispersal,” in Report on the Washington Conference of the National Women’s Advisory Committee, 32. 105. Chicago Daily News, 5 March 1951; C. L. Dellums to President Truman, 27 March 1951, HST Papers as President, OF, Box 1743. 106. SCAS, Nomination of Millard Frank Caldwell, 6. 107. Val Peterson, speech presented to the American Society for Public Administration, Washington, D.C., 6 March 1953, Files of Special Assistant Relating to the Office of Coordinator of Government Public Service Advertising, Lambie Records, Box 3, DDEL. 108. Mark H. Leff, “Politics of Sacrifice.” 109. National Civil Defense Conference Report, 30. 110. Rodgers, Contested Truths, 217–19. As Brenda Plummer argues, the equation of “Americanism” with whiteness, an especially close association during foreign policy crises, has complicated blacks’ identification with patriotic causes. Historically, black activists have challenged the exclusionary racial meanings of “freedom” and Americanism, and have fought to add racial equality to such definitions. Plummer, Rising Wind, 10–11.

Conclusion 1. Los Angeles Times, 19 April 1998. Another example of the presentation of civil defense as nostalgic kitsch can be found in the History Channel’s 1997 ad campaign for “The Fifties,” which featured ads that mingled images of television and Howdy Doody with text that described a father building a family shelter as if it were a child’s underground fort. 2. This is Gabriel Almond’s term, quoted in Ole R. Holsti, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, 26–27. 3. Katherine Graham Howard Oral History, 1968–69, 227, Columbia Oral History Project, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library (DDEL). 4. E. G. Gerbic to Charles Jackson, 3 August 1951, Papers of Harry S. Truman, Spencer Quick Files, Box 1, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri. 5. Charles Kress to Senator Estes Kefauver, 2 July 1956, Records of the U.S. Senate, 84th session, 1–2, Committee on Armed Services, Record Group 46, Box 315, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 6. James Wadsworth, Oral History Interview, 1967, 58, Columbia Oral History Project, DDEL. 7. Ibid., 62. 8. Sherry, In the Shadow of War, xi.

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Index

Abramson, Irving, 130 Acheson, Dean, 34 active defense, 17 Adams, Ansel, 37 Adkins, Bertha, 97 Advertising Council, 35, 49–51 Advisory Committee for Women’s Participation, 102, 112 African-Americans: and Caldwell nomination, 141–46; and civil defense during World War II, 136–37; and evacuation, 138–41, 149; mobilization of, 134–38; as “mobilization problem,” 123–24; views of civil defense, 137; and wartime migrations, 125 Air War and Emotional Stress, 148 Allen, Gracie, 37 American Association of University Women (AAUW): membership of, 91; and racism, 92; and role in Assembly, 105; and women’s civil defense duties, 113 American Cemetery Association, 95 American Federation of Labor (AFL): 92, 97, 105; and plant defense, 126–34 American Legion, 95–96 American Red Cross, 46 American Welfare Association, 47 American Women in Radio and Television, 112 Assembly of Women’s Organizations for National Security: activities of, 105–106; dissolution of, 120–21; fissures within, 105; formation of, 102–103, 181n.57; and liberal vision of civil defense, 116–117; organizational structure and functions of, 104–05; relationships within, 105 Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 16, 29, 48 Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn (BBD&O), 35 Beers, Barnett, 53 Bert the Turtle, 36 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 145 Betty Crocker, 112, 149

Blue Book, 15, 42–43, 45, 70, 75, 95, 98, 108 Bowron, Fletcher, 19 Bradley, John, 11 Brown, Jeanetta, 105, 145 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’, 81, 149 Burns, George, 37 By, for, and about Women in Civil Defense, 118 Caldwell, Millard: appointed director of FCDA, 15; appointment of Sara Whitehurst, 102; on class differences in defense, 146; on family sacrifice, 85; and nomination controversy, 141–46; on public confidence in military, 31–32; on selfhelp, 23; on shelter planning, 45–46 Childs, Marquis, 21 civil defense: British models, 24, 124–125; citizen practice of, 62–66, 117–20; 153– 55; congressional opposition to funding of, 24–26; definition of, 5–6; and dependency, 37; and domestication, 73–75; emergence of women’s network, 89–93; and evacuation, 47–52; failure of, 153– 55; family orientation of, 68–72; and family sacrifice, 85–86; family training programs, 75–78; federal versus state and local responsibilities, 22; feminization of, 98–100; garrison state concerns, 20–23; gender definitions of, 17–19, 97–98, 128; and gender roles in family, 77–78; and human behavior studies, 33–34, 80– 81; labeling of, 22–23; military control of, 15–20; National Shelter Policy, 58– 60; paramilitary nature of, 5, 16; and participation of African-Americans, 138–41; and plant defense, 126–34; and racial inequality within, 141–46, 150; as racial matter, 134–36, 145; and recruitment of African-Americans, 137; and self-help policy, 7–8, 23–28, 37; shelter funding, 44–47; shelter policies, 42–47, 52–60, 147–49; and volunteer interest in, 95– 96, 153; as welfare program, 26–28, 46,

210 82, 98–100, 132–34; and women’s housework, 108–113; women’s participation in, 93–108, 113–17, 117–20; during World War I, 23; during World War II, 14, 17–18, 23, 128, 134–35, 136–37. See also FCDA Cobo, Albert, 44 Collier’s, 34 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO): 92, 97, 105; and plant defense, 126–34 Congress of Racial Equality, 143 Coontz, Stephanie, 71, 84 Cott, Nancy, 101 Crosby, Bing, 37 Daniels, Jonathan, 136 DeChant, John: complaint about Eisenhower’s speech, 79; on family sacrifice and civil defense, 85 Department of Defense: expenditures in 1951, 26; on military control of civil defense, 17; on shelters, 53, 57 domestication, 73–75 Dubovsky, Melvyn, 127 duck and cover, 6, 36, 51 Dulles, John Foster, 58, 61, 65 Dunn, Loula, 99 Ebony, 137–38 Edwards, India, 97 Eisenhower, Dwight D.: and access to shelter, 147; on failure of shelter construction, 65–66; on family as combatant, 70; and labor’s “no-strike” pledge, 134; on militarization, 19–20, 21–22, 67; on military rule of civil defense, 19–20; and New Look, 48; on panic, 38; participation in Operation Alert, 50; on psychological impact of shelters, 61; overview of shelter policies, 54–60 Engelhardt, Tom, 135 Equal Rights Amendment, 90, 92 evacuation: and family loyalty, 81–82; family reunification plans, 82; media campaigns, 49–50; Operation Alert, 50–51; overviews of plans, 48–49; and public opinion, 52; and racial integration, 138– 40, 149–50

INDEX

Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC): 141 family: as Cold War combatant, 70–72; militarization of, 70–72, 75–78, 82–83, 108– 113; as private and public institution, 83–86; statistics on, 71; symbolic meanings of, 71; tensions within during attack, 78–82; and wartime sacrifice, 84–85 family shelters: access to, 147–49; civilian construction of, 63–66; evolution of government policies, 52–60; financing of, 53–54, 59–60; Operations Doorstep and Cue, 54–55; public attitudes towards, 62–64; symbolic aspects of, 60–62, 80; recreational use of, 80; and women’s work, 110–11. See also shelters Federal Civil Defense Act, 15, 22–23, 43, 44 Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA): Ad-Council partnership, 35; budget, 25–26; and Caldwell nomination, 141–46; concerns about family loyalty, 78–81; concerns about family privacy, 83–86; creation of, 3, 11, 15; and domestication of nuclear war, 73–75; evacuation plans, 47–52; family as defense concept, 68–72; family preparedness campaigns, 75–78; and good housekeeping, 108–113; knowledge of bomb’s perils, 29–30; media collaboration and campaigns, 34–38; and plant defense, 129–34; as propaganda agency, 30; and public opinion and human behavior, 28–34, 52; and participation of AfricanAmericans, 140–41; and recruitment of African-Americans, 137; relationship with women’s network, 104–105; shelter planning, 43–47; shelter policies under Truman, 53–54; shelter policies under Eisenhower, 54–60; and shelter access schemes, 147–49; welfare planning, 26– 28, 46, 82, 132–34; and women’s liberalism, 113–17; and women’s media, 112; and women’s participation, 117–20; women’s role in, 102–113. See also civil defense feminine mystique, 98, 108, 121 Ferebee, Dorothy, 97 Four Wheels to Survival, 55 Fuller, Jean Wood: on demise of women’s network, 121; on family privacy, 86; and

INDEX

Grandma’s Pantry, 110; on Operation Scat, 140; and women’s equality in civil defense, 115–16; and women’s participation in civil defense, 118 Gaither Committee, 57–60 garrison state: definitions of, 20–21. See also mass society General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC): activities of, 106–107; membership of, 90–91; and liberal vision of civil defense, 117; and recruiting, 118; and role in Assembly, 105; and women’s role in civil defense, 100–101 Gerbic, Ed, 154 Gerstell, Richard, 36, 147 Geyer, Michael, 124 Gill, William, 94 Grandma’s Pantry, 110, 111, 112 Green, William, 131 Harlem Committee for Civil Defense, 137 Harrington, Michael, 126 Hartmann, Susan, 90 Herman, Ellen, 31 Hickey, Margaret, 100, 101, 104, 116–17 Holifield, Chet, 21, 42; and proposed shelter legislation, 56–60 Home Protection Exercises, 55, 76–78, 83, Fig. 7, 107, 109–110, 118 Home shelters. See family shelters Houghton, Dorothy, 101, 106 House in the Middle, Fig. 5, 112 Housecleaning: as deterrent to nuclear firestorm, 74; as way to remove radioactivity, 74 Howard, Katherine Graham: activities of, 107; on bomb’s dangers, 153; on class differences in defense, 146; contradictions in family preparedness rhetoric, 86; definition of preparedness, 6; on diplomatic use of shelters, 62; on family defense, 3–4, 70–71, 72–73, 153; on family loyalty, 82; and feminism of, 114–16; and food preparation, 111; on gender roles in civil defense work, 77–78; political career of, 114; on Soviet civil defense, 61; on women in Cold War, 88; on women’s accomplishments, 106; on women’s housework and civil defense, 109–112;

211 and women’s participation in civil defense, 118 Howorth, Lucy, 103, 106, 121 Hynes, John, 44 Impelletteri, Vincent, 44 Is Your Plant a Target?, 130 Janis, Irving: on human reaction to attack, 33; on public education campaigns, 34; shelter access, 148–49 Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, 14; hearings on shelters, 42 Kassalow, Everett, 129–32 Kefauver, Estes, 51, 154 Kennedy, John F., 14, 121 Kerr, Florence, 18 Killian, Lewis, 81–82 Korean War, 14, 43, 47, 97 Kress, Charles, 154 Labor unions: and plant defense, 126–34 La Feber, Walter, 12 LaGuardia, Fiorello, 17–18, 95, 117 Landis, James, 136 Lapp, Ralph, 36, 51, 147 Larsen, Paul, 21, 22, 94 League of Women Voters, 114 Leffler, Melvyn, 12–13 Libby, Willard, 51 Lifton, Robert Jay, 73 Lindsay, Malvina, 94, 101 Lipsitz, George, 125–26 Louis, Joe, 137 Lovett. Robert, 31 Lyman, Ed, 49, 51 Marshall, George, 88 Marx, Groucho, 37 mass society, 21 maternalism, 93, 100–101, 116, 122 May, Elaine Tyler, 71, 83, 110 May-Johnson Bill, 16 McMahon, Brien, 14, 42 Meany, George, 134 Merriam, Robert, 149, 150 Meyerowitz, Joanne, 121 militarism: uses and definition of, 157n.7 militarization: and citizen views of, 153; and class, 126–34, 150–51; and gender,

212 militarization, (con’t) 88–89, 121–22; and race, 135–36, 150– 51; uses and definition of, 6, 157n.6 Miller, Frieda, 97 Mitchell, Clarence, 143, 150 Mobile, Alabama, 50, 138–40 Moore, Harry, 142 Murrow, Edward R., 37 NSC-68, 29 National Academy of Sciences (NAS), 138– 41 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP): and Caldwell nomination, 141–46; membership of, 142; views of civil defense, 8, 124, 151 National Association of Colored Women, 105 National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women, 93, 105, 107 National Civil Defense Advisory Council, 145 National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), 92, 97, 105, 145 National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs (BPW): activities of, 107; and independent women’s conference, 99; and liberal vision of civil defense, 117; membership of, 91; race and racism, 92; and role in Assembly, 105 National Federation of Colored Women, 97 National Home Demonstration Council, 92, 107 National Labor Advisory Committee, 130– 31, 134, 187n.23 national security, 79 National Security Resources Board (NSRB): creation of, 14–15; and family survival, 74; and plant defense, 128–29; and shelter plans, 42–43; and women’s role in civil defense, 93–101 national security state: definition and development of, 13–15 National Shelter Policy, 58–60, 68. See also shelters New Deal, civil defense as, 17–18; as big government, 20, 22; hostility towards, 25; and shelter policy, 45–47; and women’s activism, 93, 103–04 New Look, 48, 65

INDEX

Oakes, Guy, 50 Operation Alert, 50–51, 147 Operation Candor, 38 Operation Cue, 54, Fig. 6, 115 Operation Doorstep, 54–55, Figures 1–4 Operation Scat, 138–41, 150 Other America, 126 panic, 33–34, 39; 109 Parade, 86 paramilitary: definition of, 5; and civil defense, 16 passive defense, 17 Pearl, Dorothy, 119 Perkins, Frances, 97 Peterson, Val, 47: on access to shelter, 147; on advantages of evacuation, 48; on citizen failure to build shelters, 65; contradictions in family preparedness rhetoric, 86; evacuation proposals, 51; on family separation in evacuation, 81–82; on fear, 36; on military control of civil defense, 20; on panic, 39, 51; on panic and women, 34; on public shelters, 47; on survival of h-bomb, 48 Polenberg, Richard, 125 Powner family, 68–69, 77, 80, 87 preparedness: definition of, 5–6 Prince, Harry, 44 Principles of Industrial Security, 132 privatization of defense, 7–8: of shelters, specifically, 52–60; failure of, 65–66 Project East River, 19, 33, 36, 83, 164n.70 Project Hideaway, 68–69, 77, 80 Rabinowitch, Eugene, 81 Rand Corporation, 33, 58 Randolph, A. Philip, 141, 146 Reuther, Walter, 127 Robinson, Sugary Ray, 137 Rockefeller Fund, 58 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 17–18, 116–17, 134– 35, 136, 145 Rossiter, Clinton, 34 self-help: definition of, 7–8; and family autonomy, 84–87; media portrayals of, 37; as related to shelters, 53–60 Sharp, Martha: appointed as NSRB women’s affairs coordinator, 94–95; on atomic warfare, 70; on gender classifications in civil defense, 97–98, 101, 108;

INDEX

organization of women’s conference, 96– 99; 132; and race relations, 137; on women and wartime morale, 97; on women’s advisory committees, 100 Shelter on a Quiet Street, 110 shelters: access to, 147–48, 150; Blue Book plans for publicly-financed shelters, 42– 43; citizen expectations of, 53, 147; and class antagonisms, 146–49; congressional hearings on, 43; congressional opposition to funding of, 44–47, 57; as contemporary folklore, 40, 152; National Shelter Policy, 58–60; as New Deal revival, 45–47; Operations Doorstep and Cue, 54–55; and racial integration, 150; as urban renewal, 43–44, 46. See also family shelters Sherry, Michael, 13, 66, 155 Short, Dewey, 46 Smith, Alfred, 137 Soviet Union: acquisition of atomic bomb, 13–15; civil defense system, 60–61 Sputnik, 58–59 Stalin, Josef, 12 Stanford Research Institute, 32, 34 Stratton, Dorothy, 100 “Survival” (television program), 35 Survival Through Emergency Preparedness Program (STEP), 85–86 Survival Under Atomic Attack, 53, 74, 170n.47 Symington, Stuart, 15, 97, 99–100, 129 Teller, Edward, 7 Terrell, Mary Church, 92 Truman, Harry S.: on acceptance of atomic warfare, 37–38; administration’s shelter policies, 53–54; and Caldwell nomination, 141–46; and citizen queries, 3, 64, 90–91, 144; on civil defense planning,

213 14; on garrison state, 21; and postwar conversions, 126; and race and party politics, 136; on shelters, 47; and women’s advisory committee, 100 United Council of Church Women, 105 United States Civil Defense Corps, 62–63 United States Strategic Bombing Survey, 148 Urban League, 145 Valentine, Geneva, 105 Veterans of Foreign Wars, 95 Wadsworth, James, 46: on evacuation, 47; on failure of civil defense, 154; on plant defense, 127 Warden Service, 62–63, 85–86 White, Walter, 141, 143–44, 150 Whitehurst, Sara: appointment by Caldwell, 102; establishment of women’s advisory committee, 102–103 women: African-American in civil defense, 92; emergence of civil defense network, 91–93; and feminism in civil defense network, 93, 114–17; and liberal vision of civil defense, 113–17; participation in civil defense, 117–20; racism in club movement, 92; racism in network, 92– 93; roles of in civil defense, 97–113; in World War II, 90, 92 Women in Civil Defense, 109, 113 World War II: civil defense during, 14, 17– 18, 23,128, 134–35, 136–37; and social changes, 90, 92, 124–26 Yergin, Daniel, 13–14 Zeidler, Frank, 49