Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties
- ISBN-10
- 1400843553
- ISBN-13
- 9781400843558
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 240
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2020-10-06
- Publisher
- Princeton University Press
- Author
- Laura McEnaney
Description
Dad built a bomb shelter in the backyard, Mom stocked the survival kit in the basement, and the kids practiced ducking under their desks at school. This was family life in the new era of the A-bomb. This was civil defense. In this provocative work of social and political history, Laura McEnaney takes us into the secretive world of defense planners and the homes of ordinary citizens to explore how postwar civil defense turned the front lawn into the front line. The reliance on atomic weaponry as a centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy cast a mushroom cloud over everyday life. American citizens now had to imagine a new kind of war, one in which they were both combatants and targets. It was the Federal Civil Defense Administration's job to encourage citizens to adapt to their nuclear present and future. As McEnaney demonstrates, the creation of a civil defense program produced new dilemmas about the degree to which civilian society should be militarized to defend itself against internal and external threats. Conflicts arose about the relative responsibilities of state and citizen to fund and implement a home-front security program. The defense establishment's resolution was to popularize and privatize military preparedness. The doctrine of "self-help" defense demanded that citizens become autonomous rather than rely on the federal government for protection. Families would reconstitute themselves as paramilitary units that could quash subversion from within and absorb attack from without. Because it solicited an unprecedented degree of popular involvement, the FCDA offers a unique opportunity to explore how average citizens, community leaders, and elected officials both participated in and resisted the creation of the national security state. Drawing on a wide variety of archival sources, McEnaney uncovers the broad range of responses to this militarization of daily life and reveals how government planners and ordinary people negotiated their way at the dawn of the atomic age. Her work sheds new light on the important postwar debate about what total military preparedness would actually mean for American society.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2000-07-09
- 238 pages
- Paperback
- Princeton University Press
Similar books
-
Cold War Civil Defence in Western Europe: Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Survival and Preparedness
By Casper Sylvest, Marie Cronqvist, Rosanna FarbølApplying the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to civil defence history, the chapters of this volume cover a range of new themes, from technology and materiality to media, memory, and everyday experience.
-
Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense
By Tracy C. DavisIn Stages of Emergency the distinguished performance historian Tracy C. Davis investigates the fundamentally theatrical nature of these Cold War civil defense exercises.
-
Protecting the Home Front: Women in Civil Defense in the Early Cold War
By Michael ScheibachTwo civil defenses classes were held each day during the week, with an emphasis on home and family protection. also on the agenda were demonstrations of Red Cross first-aid procedures and preparations for home emergencies, ...
-
The Civil Defense Book: Emergency Preparedness for a Rural Or Suburban Community
By Michael MabeeThis book is about taking pre-disaster mitigation to the next level, so that your whole town can be ready for any disaster, large or small.
-
Civil Defense and Homeland Security: A Short History of National Preparedness Efforts
By U.s. Department of Homeland SecurityThey have also instituted administrative reorganizations that reflected their preference for consolidated or dispersed civil defense and homeland security responsibilities within the Federal government.
-
Civil Defense In The United States: Bandaid For A Holocaust?
By Thomas J KerrAlthough Larson had previously opposed both approaches, he underwent a change of heart during the summer of 1950 and completely embraced the concept of shelters.13 There was, however, a division of opinion within the NSRB as to the most ...
-
After The Bomb: Civil Defence and Nuclear War in Britain, 1945-68
By M. GrantThis book will be the first history of the preparations to fight a nuclear war taken in Britain between the end of the Second World War and 1968.
-
Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War
By David MonteyneIn 1961, reacting to U.S. government plans to survey, design, and build fallout shelters, the president of the American Institute of Architects, Philip Will, told the organization’s members that “all practicing architects should prepare ...
-
Neither Dead Nor Red: Civil Defense and American Political Development During the Early Cold War
By Andrew D. GrossmanOn bomb shelters, see Horace R. Cayton, “Negro Morale,” Opportunity (December 1945):371–375. On segregated bomb shelters, see Rufus Wells, “What Would Happen if the Bomb Falls?” Sepia (January 1962):10–11. On the relationship between ...
-
National Cyber Emergencies: The Return to Civil Defence
By Greg AustinMatrix Games for Modern Wargaming Developments in Professional and Educational Wargames Innovations. In Wargaming Volume 2. The History of Wargaming Project, Bath. Curry J and T Price. 2017. Modern Crises Scenarios for Matrix Wargames.