(Past Tense)
Something is missing here, and it’s not just all the people, although their absence is unmistakable from a deserted Fifth Avenue, a vacant New York Stock Exchange and along the West Side Highway, which is empty of all but a few ominous figures in uniform.
In these New York Times photographs, taken during mandatory civil defense drills in the fervid early years of the Cold War, you can almost hear the absence of sound. All the rumbling, honking, chattering, clattering noise of everyday life has suddenly paused as the city goes into hiding — leaving the click-click-click of a traffic signal or the flutter of a pigeon at Penn Station audible now, in eerie relief.
But even in the photos that show New Yorkers scrambling for cover in the streets or peering up from the shelter of a subway station, the terror that they’re running from is missing, like King Kong erased from the frame. It’s the threat of atomic annihilation, nebulous and unseen.
It’s tempting to imagine this period of American history as one of perpetual anxiety, clenched fear and misplaced faith in the government, with people readily believing that ducking beneath a desk would save them from a hydrogen bomb.
But that may be a misreading of the era.
“These pictures are always interesting to me, because they always suggest a kind of unanimity or a cultural consensus around this fear, and when I was researching my book, I found deep ambivalence,” said Laura McEnaney, a professor at Whittier College and the author of “Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the 1950s.”
Indeed, in November 1951 The Times noted “the apathy and indifference” of New Yorkers toward civil defense drills — although the streets were dutifully vacated two minutes after the blaring of air-raid sirens and remained so until the all-clear sounded eight minutes later.
By 1955, the federal government was coordinating drills nationwide, simulating a 61-city simultaneous Soviet strike — “designed to attack the lethargy that has clouded the Civil Defense problem both in Congress and the country at large,” The Times noted.
In trying to “historicize” all that “ambient emotion in the 1950s” — in other words, to meaningfully gauge how anxious, skeptical or indifferent Americans were at a particular moment in time — McEnaney mined government archives, news clippings and other sources that indicated federal officials were trying to figure out the same thing back then, coming at it like social scientists, military strategists and Madison Avenue admen all at once; even they couldn’t be sure.
“Their project was to convince Americans to be afraid enough that they would take action but not so afraid that they would be paralyzed,” McEnaney said. “They spent a great deal of time trying to puzzle over creating a national mood of receptiveness.” And although they might have been reluctant to admit failure, “they saw many signs that what they were trying to sell wasn’t being purchased by many Americans.”
Such drills and films fell under the auspices of a national civil defense arm — first the Federal Civil Defense Administration (1951-58), then a flurry of short-lived successors — although much of the on-the-ground preparations and funding came at the state and local levels.
And the frequency with which the D.C. agency had its name changed, got shuttled among Cabinet departments and came up short in congressional funding requests underscores civil defense’s status as “the unwanted stepchild of the national-security state,” said David F. Krugler, author of “This Is Only a Test: How Washington D.C. Prepared for Nuclear War.”
“It became important only during crises, and that’s why we see a parallel in our own time,” said Krugler, a University of Wisconsin-Platteville historian.
Those crisis moments included the surprise test of a nuclear weapon by the Soviets in August 1949, the start of the Korean War nearly a year later, and the failed Vienna summit between Kennedy and Khrushchev in 1961, after which the Soviets began erecting the Berlin Wall and constructing missile sites in Cuba, which triggered the Cuban Missile Crisis.
But even at the height of those tensions, only 5 percent of Americans reported to Gallup that they had built a basement shelter or made other home improvements with an eye to surviving nuclear war.
Americans eventually wearied of even the drills, with multiple scholars seeing 1959 as a tipping point. That year, a pair of young mothers who spontaneously refused to seek shelter — including 23-year-old Janice Smith, pictured in The Times with her two toddlers, “sick and tired of being forced underground like a desert rat” — helped expand the protest ranks from scattered old-left activists to throngs of clean-cut college students and young mothers.
The next year, protesters swarmed City Hall, singing “We Shall Overcome” and “We Shall Not Be Moved,” ignoring the sirens and the appeals of volunteer wardens and police. Among them was none other than Norman Mailer, who before the event said he would sign autographs and get arrested. It’s unclear whether he did the former, but he failed to do the latter.
“Politics is like sex,” Mailer said, according to “Bracing for Armageddon: Why Civil Defense Never Worked,” by the late Rutgers professor and peace activist Dee Garrison. “You have to go all the way.”
Losing control of the narrative, officials soon retired the drills.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.