Just the other day, a reader of these dispatches, Adam Hedinger, responded to the hysteria of the moment with the following comment,
"And honestly ... duct tape and plastic sheeting? In a room for three days ... you'd better make it the BATHROOM with a TV inside to tell you when it is safe! I mean, if you seal off the doors and windows properly are you going to have enough oxygen for three days. This is even more ludicrous than building a basement fallout shelter in the 1950s with layers of books on top to shield against radiation."
He's right, of course, and his impulse -- to put the Bush administration's campaign of fear, itself an assault on the American people -- into historical context is no less on target. Like my age peers, I well remember the 1950s version of this hysteria. I ducked and covered. With Conelrad blasting from the radio on my teacher's desk, we crouched beneath ours, while outside the sirens screamed and all the activities of city life came to a halt.
A vision of the world in ashes lay just under the golden fifties of nostalgic memory. Of course, we children had only a vague idea of what exactly had happened under those mushroom clouds that rose over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but we knew enough to realize that our desks were not likely to save us from the world's most powerful weapons, that the message being delivered was not of safety but of ultimate vulnerability.
America prepared the way for the sixties in those moments, indicating that just under the surface of American triumphalism lay a vision of horrifying defeat. The triumphalism of this moment is, I think, far more brittle (and so more dangerous), the sense of futurelessness far closer to the core. Who knows what it is preparing us for?
No one has written more strikingly about how the cultural fallout of the bomb affected American society from August 6, 1945 through the great antinuclear upsurge of the early 1980s than historian Paul Boyer in his classic book By the Bomb's Early Light, American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. And so I thought no one would be better equipped to put the hysteria of this moment in historical context.
As we head out today to demonstrate, along with millions of others around the world, Boyer helps remind us that we are demonstrating against a world ruled by fear even as we face the genuine dangers of our moment, including the imminent danger of war in the Middle East. Tom
Duct (Tape) and Cover
By Paul Boyer
Well, at least we now know who's behind the current terrorism crisis:
Polyken Technologies of Westwood, Massachusetts, the manufacturer of duct
tape. They must be making millions. As a journalist in the Daily Press of
Hampton, Virginia, writes, "Never in American history has simple duct tape
assumed such prominence." Citizens are lining up at Home Depot to buy the
rolls of it. As one customer commented to a reporter, "In case there isn't an
event, duct tape is something I can use later." Oliver Stone is probably planning
a movie right now exposing the whole scheme.
Talk about déjà vu all over again! Suddenly, it's 1955, or 1961, or
perhaps 1982. Our current obsession with bottled water, spare blankets,
fresh batteries, duct tape, and plastic sheeting triggers weird memories of
"civil defense" hysterias past, when our leaders warned us in apocalyptic
tones to prepare for the worst. In the Eisenhower era, they advised us to
keep at least a half tank of gas in our car at all times, so we could head
off for God knows where when the missiles began to fall. At other times,
they advised us to hole up in the basement, reciting nursery rhymes or the
multiplication tables to keep calm. Men were told to wear wide-brimmed
hats, and women long-sleeved blouses, to protect against the "heat flash"
of an atomic blast or ward off radiation. As John F. Kennedy sparred with
Nikita Khrushchev over Berlin in 1961, he proved his toughness by terrifying
the nation with talk of an imminent atomic attack and urging everyone to build
fallout shelters.
School kids cowered under their desks and watched civil-defense films in
which Bert the Turtle taught them to "duck and cover." The narrator in Tim
O'Brien's novel The Nuclear Age recalls, as a small boy in the 1950s,
building his own card-table shelter and covering it with "lead" pencils,
thinking they would absorb the radiation. What will today's kids remember --
their parents frantically taping up plastic sheeting around the house, as in
a kind of bizarre improv theater routine?
In the early 1980s, when President Reagan was denouncing Russia as "the
focus of evil in the modern world," the civil-defense mantra was "crisis
relocation": when atomic war loomed, millions of residents of the big
cities were to rush en masse to designated towns and villages in the
hinterland. Wait a minute, said California governor Jerry Brown, Los
Angelenos can't even get out of town on a normal Friday afternoon without
traffic jams tying up the freeways for hours.
As our current crop of protectors-Ridge, Tenet, Mueller, Ashcroft, and the
rest-warn of horrors ahead from chemical and biological weapons, the
old-fashioned nuclear threat from North Korea can almost induce nostalgia.
As citizens go down their checklist provided by the Homeland Security folks,
it all seems eerily familiar. How long before we begin to debate the ethics
of shooting a neighbor who tries to steal our bottled water or break into
our duct-tape-sealed safe room? How long before we realize that going
underground is surely safer than simply hiding out in the bedroom? How many
basement or backyard fallout shelters, long since forgotten or sheepishly
converted into "wine cellars" or "storage areas," are being dusted off and
refurbished?
In the 1950s, Life magazine published cheery photographs of well-dressed
suburban families sitting in their fallout shelters. In one issue, the
magazine gleefully featured a newlywed couple who spent their honeymoon in a
fallout shelter. Life is long gone, but it's only a matter of time before some
enterprising TV reality-show producer imprisons twelve strangers in a safe room,
to see who cracks first and bursts through the sealed door to freedom.
As I look at the photos of those well-equipped fallout shelters from the
1950s, I realize that our advisors have missed some important details in
their pell-mell efforts to protect us. Portable toilets, for example, and
industrial-strength air freshener. Those tightly sealed rooms are going to
become pretty insufferable pretty fast without them. And games. No
respectable fallout shelter of the 1950s lacked Scrabble or some other neat
game to help people while away the long hours of waiting.
And how long till CONELRAD, that fabled government radio system
designed to reassure us in times of emergency, is revived? Well-loved radio
personalities like Arthur Godfrey and Walter Cronkite pre-recorded messages
to calm the public after atomic attack. Who will Tom Ridge recruit for this
task today? Oprah? Charlton Heston? (He would surely insist on adding
another essential item to the home-security checklist: your faithful .22 or
.357 Magnum.)
In the 1950s, President Eisenhower and other top officials periodically
disappeared to a mysterious crisis center (later identified as a vast
complex under a luxury resort in West Virginia) to practice for the day when
the government would carry on as usual while Washington, D.C. lay in
smoldering ruins. Today, only Vice President Dick Cheney seems in
perpetual hiding in an "undisclosed location," periodically resurfacing to
address some business group.
The basic message then, as now, was clear: you're on your own, folks. The
government can warn you of dangers ahead-from Yellow to Orange to Red in
three quick steps-but offer no information on where or when the enemy may
strike. Carry on with your normal life, but "be alert." As for addressing
the underlying causes of the danger, forget about it. In the early Cold
War, the response consisted of building as many bombs as fast as possible, and
making them as powerful as possible. Today, a maddeningly diffuse global threat
with complex political and social sources is reduced to shadowy "terrorists"
who hate us for no discernible reason, and to a single obsessive goal: blast
Saddam Hussein to kingdom come.
In 1950, when President Truman responded to the Russian atomic bomb by
announcing a crash program to develop the hydrogen bomb, vastly escalating
the nuclear arms race, President James Conant of Harvard, a key figure in
the World War II A-bomb project, wrote to his friend Vannevar Bush of MIT
that he had the sinking feeling of being forced to watch the same rotten
movie a second time. My sentiments exactly.
Paul S. Boyer, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and currently a visiting professor of history at the College of William and Mary, is the author of, among other works, By the Bomb's Early Light, American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (University of North Carolina Press).
Copyright Paul Boyer
