Neither Dead nor Red: Civil Defense and American Political Development During the Early Cold War
Andrew D. Grossman, 2001
For nine very long years—ever since Bush hit his Trifecta on September 11, 2001—an annoying little detail has lurked behind our Homelandification process.
The "duck and cover" civil defense campaigns of the Cold War appear so laughable now—yet how hard was it to get so much of the public to fall for an indeterminate War on Terra?
Yes, there was scoffing at color codes and the idea of biological weapon-proofing the house with duct tape. But year after year, there's that hunk of the population still willing to say, "I don't mind taking off my shoes/having my phone conversations listened to/my computer monitored/my [fill in the blank] – as long as it keeps me
safe..."
Given the sudden post-2001 state of indeterminate "war," there is much that is familiar in Andrew Grossman's study of how the early Cold War national security state and its civil defense structure evolved.
Grossman points to the the effects on executive power and jurisprudence, which would change private life:
• An indeterminate war led to increased presidential power, and laws made in an emergency planning atmosphere centralized power in the executive branch.
• Laws on "national security" conflated internal and external policy, and viewed the threat as coming not only from the Soviet Union but also from ideas. A goal of idea "containment" led the government to disregard differences between external and domestic security policy in handling perceived internal threats. Legislation was created around discretionary powers that aided growth of a national security bureaucracy.
Post-war Truman administration policy was to contain the Soviet Union through nuclear deterrence and defense alliances in Europe, strategies that had to be sold through "domestic education"—which would then pave the way for social control.
Creating public acceptance of a prospective war fought with atomic weapons was part of this effort, and it would have to counteract the public's reasonable fear of the bomb. After the bombings in Japan and US tests in the South Pacific later in the 1940s, the public had been exposed to realistic reporting about the effects of radiation on the human body. Important scientists had also engaged in public activism against further development and future use of nuclear weapons.
After some earlier bureaucratic incarnations, the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) created in 1950 became the agency responsible for disaster planning and for promoting those plans to the public—
The FCDA predicated its national policy planning on a general theory of emotion management or "crisis mastery." ... the American public had to be prepared to fight and win a war... As sociologist Guy Oakes notes: "If the attempt to preserve peace by threatening nuclear war produced the very consequences it was intended to divert, the American people would be required to pay the price ultimately exacted by the strategy. If the price of freedom proved to be nuclear war, would Americans be willing to pay?" It was the FCDA's mission under Truman to make sure the answer to this question was yes.
The agency functioned as a mediating institution, writes Grossman. It linked the government with major universities plus new think tanks and foundations. It also connected the Executive branch with the major media of print, broadcast, and film outlets, serving in this way as an extension of the wartime management of information. Under the pretense of independence from the government, material would be produced by the Ad Council, Hollywood, and broadcast outlets.
In sum,
The FCDA was part of a new postwar institutional and administrative architecture for long-term Cold War mobilization that was based on a public policy of national civic education regarding all facets of the Cold War... the Truman administration's policy of Cold War national security civic education is an example of how a liberal democratic state can expand its power into all spheres of both public and private life and use that power to garner the necessary domestic support for its larger grand strategy.
Through the FCDA "the state literally entered the home with its preparedness programs." While maintaining centralized control, the FCDA used local agents to present programs in primary and secondary schools; through business connections it established workplace education; it recruited citizens for local warden programs.
With passage of the National Security Act of 1947, institutions were created for continuous civilian, economic, and military mobilization. The public was to be mobilized through state institutions "applying a sophisticated version of 'communication science' developed during World War II..."
The public became "the consumer of the home front mobilization process." Not coincidentally, the target was the growing middle-class that was relocating to suburbs. These were the consumers who were driving the post-war economy, and they were the focus of magazines and broadcast media during the Fifties and early Sixties (as Thomas Hine writes about so well in
Populuxe).
In one bit of marketing to these consumers—
The FCDA's Alert America campaign in 1952 was an important first step in selling an illusion of protection for the suburban middle classes. Alert America caravans announced their arrival in various towns across the country as the "show that could save your life." The surrealistic "doomsday carnival" assuaged the nuclear fear of visitors by promising to teach everyone "how Civil Defense protects you and your family from modern terror weapons." Visitors to the exhibition were shown FCDA-produced and Ad Council-packaged movies, three-dimensional exhibits, and dioramas of the American family surviving and winning World War III. The gist of the message to the attending public was the importance of individualism, patriotism, voluntarism, and the "happy life" in the bomb shelter where families played popular board games and rehearsed FCDA "Home Protection Exercises" while urban America was reduced to radiating ruins. Most important to FCDA training, Alert America promoted the concept of the "responsible Cold War citizen": Each individual shoulders collective responsibility for civil defense and does so as a nuclear-age citizen-soldier. The public's internalization of this message was fundamental in the garrisoning process and in shaping ... politically correct behavior in a democratic state that was engaged in continuous levels of mobilization for the possibility of war.
If "preparedness" meant building and stocking individual family bomb shelters, then families living in suburbs had the required space; policy makers essentially wrote off large cities and their residents. And when Florida politician Milliard Caldwell was named the first head of the FCDA, his "states' rights" stance allowed communities in Jim Crow states to manage their own local shelter planning, without central oversight. NAACP-organized protest against Caldwell's appointment was unsuccessful.
At this point in 2010, as the right-wing rachets up the hate with its "Ground Zero Triumphalist Terror Training Mosque" shriek-out, Grossman's citations from a 1950 Gallup Poll resonate:
What do you think should be done about members of the Communist party in the United States in the event we get into a war with Russia?
Action/Percentage in support of action
Put them in internment camps/22
Imprison them/18
Send them out of the United States, exile them/15
Send them to Russia/13
Shoot them, hang them/13
Watch them, make them register/4
Nothing, everyone is entitled to freedom of thought/1
Miscellaneous/9
No opinion/10
Gore Vidal in
Screening History (1992), on two wartime periods and their aftermaths—
In 1917 Wilson had predicted that those oligarchs of capital whom he had tried to name in his first administration would now, under the excuse of wartime emergency, re-establish a more perfect boardroom state, which they did, and it lasted until the Depression.
After 1941 the same thing happened again. The famous dollar-a-year businessmen came to town to put the war on a businesss-like footing. Dr. New Deal, as FDR airily explained, had given way to Dr. Win-the-War. So we won the war and lost the deal. The businessmen found that they had so enjoyed running the United States that they set up that National Security State in which we still live...
Grossman treats the intentions of Cold War planning seriously—the planners were faced with the prospect of a World War III fought with nuclear weapons—and he rejects the "
Atomic Café" approach of poking fun at the period's civil defense campaigns. Yet Grossman acknowledges that planners at the highest levels
... distrusted the very social order they were defending... These "wise men" of American foreign policy believed that postwar consumerism, combined with the kind of democracy that was practiced in the United States, would not generate the kind of citizen necessary to combat what was known as "Red Fascism."
Grossman ends by looking at the "superterrorism" scenarios under discussion in government quarters from the 1990s. Just as in the early Cold War period
... current antiterrorist lawmaking, civil defense preparedness, and disaster planning have two ominous interrelated features that bode ill for the protection of individual civil liberties and pave the way for a regarrisoning of civil society: enormous discretionary power and cumbersome judicial overlap among agencies... [the policy history shows that] crisis lawmaking ... will result in highly discretionary and ambiguously written legislation.
Grossman reproduces this chart, presumably from the late 1990s—
Grossman notes the threats to civil liberties inherent in this "hydra-headed bureaucratic planning structure." The chart's many tentacles do not, of course, include the "Homeland Security" tentacles added since late 2001.
The bureaucratic machinery begun post-WWII still expands endlessly. And in a sense, it is a joke played endlessly on the American public.
Grossman's book was published in July 2001. His closing thought could serve as an unforeseen punch line to the joke: that we should heed the lessons of Cold War mobilization, "for the stakes are always high in a liberal democracy that cherishes individual civil liberties."
"
L-word democracy*"...?
* efforts to make this one a dirty word—"We have a Republic [add "an" after the "c"], not a democracy [= democRat party] haven't completely gotten through yet...
And there's that punch line: "civil"-what? Among just two recent stories:
For travelers who decline having their naked body images displayed by
airport scanners profiting Michael Chertoff, TSA will conduct "searches" by
retaliatory groping.
And
this, in the ever-growing category of, "
Fourth Amendment? We don't need no steenking
Fourth Amendment."
Again, in Vidal's words (
Screening History): our "military-industrial-political combine that has locked us all up inside a National Security State and thrown away the key."
... Stephen Colbert, breaking character.
