Mass Public Education for Preparing for Nuclear War – from Duck and Cover to Protect and Survive

CHAPTER 3 MASS PUBLIC EDUCATION FOR PREPARING FOR NUCLEAR WAR – FROM DUCK AND COVER TO PROTECT AND SURVIVE INTRODUCTION: NUCLEAR PREPAREDNESS The period from 1950 to the late 1980s was one where the threat of nuclear war was very real for governments in the UK and the US. Although the threat of nuclear war has not disappeared, this period was one where mass public education campaigns were used to educate the population to prepare for nuclear attack. In this chapter I examine two periods and locales – the US in the 1950s and the UK in the 1970s / 1980s to consider the racial tropes and themes of education campaigns. DUCK AND COVER: WHITENESS AND CIVIL DEFENCE IN THE US SUBURBS OF THE 1950S The idea that the US is essentially a white nation has a long history. During the early Cold War, this idea became a central aspect of both strategic policy and anti-proliferation fantasies regarding nuclear weapons. The sympathetic heroes of strategic government propaganda were always white, and author after author colonised the lived experience of the Japanese hibakusha to imagine what would happen to the white middle class in the event of a nuclear Pearl Harbor (Sharp, 2007, p. 170) The white American middle classes of the 1950s could not be thought of as a homogenous group despite the popular cultural depictions of this class fraction. Culturally this group has now become a kitsch signifier of sinister conformity. There are truths and falsehoods in representations of the suburban middle class as hyper-conformist. Town planning and the application of mass production to building techniques produced a bland environment and there were massive governmental and civic pressures to behave in a respectable, patriotic and family centred manner a policy which Tyler May (1999) describes as ‘domestic containment’ (pp. 10–29). On the other hand, the suburban citizen, within the confines of a family, was expected to behave in an aggressively activist fashion in the public sphere including civil defence activities (Tyler May, pp. 80 – 89). Neither was the suburban middle class particularly homogenous. The class composition of suburbia was more diverse than might be expected with a mixture of blue and white collar workers and the newly emerging managerial class (Tyler May, p. 20). Particularly in terms of race, suburbia was a location that brought together a number of white immigrant groups and their children who were not 29 John Preston - 9789460918735 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 04:48:40PM via free access CHAPTER 3 formally located in close proximity in the inner cities. This early post-war period represented a time when ‘whiteness’ became even more a unifying identity, with white immigrants no longer representing the constitutive limits as being ‘intermediately white’ (Roediger, 2005) but being notionally accepted as ‘white Americans’, further bringing groups such as Italian Americans and Irish Americans (who had previously operated at the fringes of whiteness – see Ignatiev, 1995; Guglielmo and Salerno, 2003) into ‘whiteness’. ‘Whyte (in his 1956 book ‘The Organization Man’) called the suburbs the “new melting pot” where migrants from ethnic working-class neighbourhoods in the cities moved into the middle class. In the process they lost much of their identity as ethnic outsiders and became simply “white” (Tyler May, 1999, p. 20) The formation of this seemingly cohesive, suburban, whiteness was at the expense of African Americans and other people of colour who were kept out of the suburbs by discriminatory mortgage packages, covenants on land purchases and a continuation of restrictive housing (and labour policies) which began in the 1920s and 30s (Roediger, 2005). Moreover, the white middle classes continued to pathologise poor, rural whites as in earlier generations (Wray, 2007). Suburbia was also a site of the formation of national whiteness against other national ‘races’ and this extended to the manufacture of, and defence from, nuclear weapons (Cooper, 1995). On the level of political ideologies, participation in civil defence was taken to be a sign of ‘American(ness)’, ones patriotic duty and part of the re-formation of national identity and race following World War II. In particular, the Russians, formally America’s allies, were rapidly portrayed as enemies. In part, this involved re-racialising Russians as ‘cold hearted’ and ruthless, particularly with regard to their ability to survive and fight a nuclear war (and this message was emphasised in American schools – see Scheibach, 2003, pp. 72–103). This presented a challenge to the white, suburban middle classes in that to survive a nuclear attack they needed to be equally hardy and civil defence propaganda frequently invoked images of the frontier. Asian people were also represented negatively in the civil defence and nuclear propaganda of the time as being militaristic and dying ‘pleasant deaths’ following the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Sharp, 2007, p. 133). In this racialised context, civil defence was a trope of the suburban middle class but the responses made to civil defence, including those of educational professionals and teachers, cannot be read off in a direct way from civil defence policies. The ‘fantasy documents’ (Clarke, 1999) produced by civil defence planners during this time elicited a ‘fantasy response’ amongst actors. This was frequently less than planners expected (the construction of nuclear shelters which was minimal) but sometimes more (in terms of the activities of teachers and school administrators who frequently adopted a more intensive reaction to civil defence than the civil defence planners expected (Brown, 1998) and in the practicing of civil defence drills by suburban women (McEnaney, 2000, pp. 88–122). This was not a direct and conformist following of government orders by the white suburban middle class. Although McEnaney (2000) and Bourke (2006) argue that the post 30 John Preston - 9789460918735 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 04:48:40PM via free access MASS PUBLIC EDUCATION FOR PREPARING FOR NUCLEAR WAR WWII period was one in which militarisation of US society was occurring this was more of a governmental fantasy than a lived reality of suburban families. McEnaney describes the family as the (notional) paramilitary unit of civil defence in terms of participation in civil defence drills, putting together ration kits and building shelters. However, actual participation in these drills was low, and few families followed exactly the advice of the FCDA (Federal Civil Defence Administation) (although this was variable, in some alert exercises virtually whole cities were cleared). Militarisation, at least in terms of hierarchy and mobilisation, was a theme of official documentation but was both ideologically and practically distinct from the actual responses of the white suburban middle classes. Ideologically, militarization of society and acceptance of the command and control structures thought to characterise the Soviet Union were frequently rejected even in the lead in and follow up to atomic attack:-’The center of the FCDA’s philosophy was “self help”: there was a broad political consensus that American style civil defense should avoid a centralized Communist-style system and instead reflect the “American” characteristics of voluntarism and self-reliance’ (Sharp, 2007, p. 188) This notion of ‘self help’ was based on fears not only of Communism but also of ‘over-civilisation’ and ‘momism’ (fear that over doting Mothers would lead to weak American sons: Sharp, 2007, p. 200) The ‘self help’ doctrine was indicative of the general approach to civil defence which was more on the lines of what has been called a ‘civic garrison’ (Grossman, 2001, pp. 108–110) rather than a militarization. Civil defence was primarily ‘civic’ defence with an emphasis on the community as self-regulating and internally socially controlling. Promotion of civil defence materials was based on travelling exhibitions to communities, talks to community groups and at the level of the street or the school rather than distributed through national television or film. Not to participate in civil defence was Communist, or morally suspect but this was informally reinforced by neighbours rather than by law enforcement or government propaganda. The proximity of housing in the suburbs and an emphasis on neighbourliness produced the conditions for ‘civic defence’ (located at the level of the neighbourhood). Nuclear war was thus sanitised and domesticated along the lines of suburban homes during that time. The social guidance film ‘The House in the Middle’ (sponsored by the National Paint Varnish and Lacquer Association, 1954) even shows that a clean, tidy and ordered house is more resilient to nuclear attack than a dirty and untidy one. The gendering of preparing nuclear shelters was explicit through the emphasis on women’s work in the stocking of shelters or the care of children during a nuclear attack. The imagery and iconography of both government publications and advertising of shelters during this time often showed the reproduction of the suburban middle class home with strict gender roles intact. Sanitisation involved emphasising the survivability of a nuclear war and also the use of childlike imagery, even jokes, to represent nuclear holocaust. For example, the use of the ‘Duck and Cover’ (FCDA, 1952) programme. In these booklets and short films even the aftermath of a nuclear attack appear to be similar to the after effects of a storm in Bambi’s forest and the cartoon was explicitly aimed at children. 31 John Preston - 9789460918735 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 04:48:40PM via free access CHAPTER 3 Figure 1: ‘Duck and Cover’ was shown in American schools in the 1950s and children were expected to participate in ‘Duck and Cover drills’. Children were expected to follow the advice of ‘Bert the turtle’ in the film and duck and find shelter in the event of an atomic blasy. In the ‘Duck and Cover’ cartoon film an African American child only appears when the narrator discusses some of the ‘threats’ faced by the country, the atomic bomb being only one of these.

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