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Persuaded to Prepare: Rhetoric and a Cold War Fallout Shelter

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Persuaded to Prepare: Rhetoric and a Cold War Fallout Shelter PERSUADED TO PREPARE: RHETORIC AND A COLD WAR FALLOUT SHELTER By Carol M. Hollar-Zwick Between 1958 and 1962, at the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, a Wisconsin physician collected government pamphlets on civil defense, articles from medical journals and news magazines, and other information on radioactive fallout and fallout shelters. He assembled the documents in a three-ring binder, which he stored in the fallout shelter that he designed and had constructed in the back yard of his home in July 1960. The physician responded to a rhetoric of preparation from the federal and state governments and from his profession to prepare for nuclear war, a campaign of persuasive education that stood in for what would have been a tremendously expensive and less-than-guaranteed system of public shelters. Designed to induce American households to build private fallout shelters in their basements and yards, preparedness rhetoric combined fear of death in nuclear attack and assurance of survival through preparation. He was one of few who acted; most Americans throughout the 1950s ignored the government’s exhortations to do the same. The historical contexts of the documents, the way the documents reached the physician, the arguments the documents made, and his response to the arguments are discussed in this thesis. Using historical accounts, archival documents from the Wisconsin Bureau of Civil Defense and the State Board of Health, and bound volumes of medical journals and magazines, I place the binder documents in the historical contexts and rhetorical situations in which they were created and circulated. Using Burke’s definition of rhetoric, I develop a definition of preparedness rhetoric and analyze the content of significant documents the physician saved in the binder. Further drawing on Burke, I consider the physician as an actor, a participant in a larger, national conversation about civil defense, rather than as a passive receiver of preparedness rhetoric. Drawing on actor-network theory developed by Latour, I trace the web of connections among the federal government, state government, the medical profession, and the physician to show how various documents in the binder may have reached him. I point out intertextual connections among the binder documents and provide information about bomb technology, radiation, shelters, fallout, patient care, and life after nuclear attack. In drawing together these threads, I consider why a doctor in the late 1950s might have felt especially compelled to prepare for nuclear war. PERSUADED TO PREPARE: RHETORIC AND A COLD WAR FALLOUT SHELTER by Carol M. Hollar-Zwick A Thesis Submitted In Partial Fulfillment ofthe Requirements For the Degree of Master ofArts-English at The University ofWisconsin Oshkosh Oshkosh WI 54901-8621 December 2013 COMMITTEE APPROVAL DEAN OF GRADUATE STUDIES ~(,[)~ 4eltw.1tC Advisor 4t.\.))(V\'\. C\.tt~-L'- \2/' 0 J,'3 Date Approved FORMAT APPROVAL Member /1 I::>r.> 3 Date Approved ,ur---~~~--------- r ./1 __"'---<--+--'--"'="-}-_ Date Approved To Ken, Addie, John, and Margaret ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many people helped support and guide this project. At the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, I thank Marguerite Helmers, my adviser, whose expertise, advice, and encouragement were invaluable throughout the process of research and writing. Douglas Haynes and Samantha Looker, both English faculty members on my thesis committee, provided inspiration, new perspectives, and practical advice. Christine Roth, Director of the Graduate English Program, and Stephen Kercher, Department of History, gave enthusiastic support as well. I owe thanks to the Office of Grants and Faculty Development, which provided funds through a Graduate Student/Faculty Collaborative Grant that allowed me to work with material from the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society. I am grateful to Joshua Ranger, University Archivist, who introduced me to the archival material. Closer to home, I thank Jane E. Aaron, Laureen and Steve Endter, Ellen and Christopher Kunz, Jane Lang, Jim Moran, Diane and Rick Underhill, and Judy and Duane Wanless for their enthusiasm for the fallout shelter in my backyard. I am also grateful to Betty and John Helms, Mary Ginke, and Harold Ginke Jr., for granting interviews. Finally, I owe tremendous thanks to my family—to Joan and Sam Hollar and to Ken, Addie, John, and Margaret Zwick—whose calm and patient encouragement made this lengthy project possible. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES . v INTRODUCTION . 1 Review of Scholarship . 5 Methods . 8 The Shelter . 14 The Binder . 17 Organization of Thesis Chapters . 19 CHAPTER 1 - Sounding the Alarm, Calmly: US Civil Defense and the American Medical Association in the 1950s . 21 Civil Defense under Truman and Eisenhower . 21 Civil Defense and the American Medical Association . 28 CHAPTER 2 - Tuning in to Preparation: 1958-1960 . 34 Civil Defense and Wisconsin Households: 1958 . 35 Civil Defense and Wisconsin Doctors: 1958 . 43 Persuaded to Build: 1959-1960 . 48 CHAPTER 3 - Prepared for Nuclear War: 1961 and Beyond . 57 Civil Defense under Kennedy . 58 The Berlin Crisis on the News Media . 63 The Medical Profession’s Commitment to Preparedness . 70 CONCLUSION . 79 Rejecting Preparation: A New Rhetoric of Prevention . 81 NOTES . 86 APPENDIX: Binder Documents Organized by Type and Date . 88 ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE TEXT AND IN CITATIONS . 93 WORKS CITED . 94 iv LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1. Shelter Entrance . 15 Figure 2. Case of Shelter Supplies . 17 Figure 3. US Government Pamphlet, What to Do Now about Emergency Sanitation at Home, Stamped December 2, 1958 . 19 Figure 4. Mann’s List of Publications, Equipment, Manufacturers, and Supplies . 39 Figure 5. Mann’s Copy of The Family Fallout Shelter, 1959 . 51 Figure 6. Mann’s Building Plans for the Shelter, East Elevation . 55 Figure 7. Designs for Inexpensive Fallout Shelters, 1961 . 61 Figure 8. Cover of Clinical Symposia, 1962 . 73 v 1 Introduction Between 1958 and 1962, at the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, a physician in Neenah, Wisconsin, a small city in the northeast part of the state, collected government pamphlets, articles from medical journals and news magazines, and other information on radioactive fallout and fallout shelters. A doctor with a busy practice, William (Bill) Mann1 was middle-aged, married, and the father of four children. He assembled the documents in a three-ring binder, which he stored in the fallout shelter that he designed and had constructed in the back yard of his home in July 1960. The story of how the documents reached the doctor, the arguments they made, the contexts in which they made these arguments, and how he acted on them is the subject of this thesis. Mann responded to calls from the federal and state government and from his profession to prepare himself and his family for nuclear war. He was one of few who did; most Americans throughout the 1950s ignored the government’s exhortations to do the same. After all, a basement or backyard shelter assumed a homeownership and single- family home of a certain type, such as one with a basement or a fairly large yard. Building a shelter was very labor-intensive and expensive, and thus not realistic for many Americans. Even more, there were questions about whether shelters would provide adequate protection and about the quality of life in a post-attack world. Still, the government repeatedly asked Americans to take their protection for nuclear war into their own hands, disseminating a rhetoric of preparation through pamphlets, booklets, 2 television, radio, and film; through state and county government civil defense offices; and through civic, social, and professional organizations. More than conventional wars, the Cold War was a war of language. It was, writes Martin Medhurst, “a rhetorical war, a war fought with words, speeches, pamphlets, public information (or disinformation) campaigns, slogans, gestures, symbolic actions, and the like” (xiv). Continuing, he writes that rhetoric did not substitute for the “real issues,” but instead was “the issue” (xiv; emphasis in original). Yet militarily, there were actual nuclear bombs that were manufactured and pointed at real targets, and real people lost their lives in actual battles fought to contain communism in Korea and Vietnam. Civil defense, however, was in fact nearly entirely rhetorical. Kenneth Burke defines the basic function of rhetoric as “the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or induce actions in other human agents” (qtd. in Brock 349). Burke’s definition is especially apt for analyzing Cold War civil defense: Originating from the US government, the rhetoric of preparation aimed to form an attitude of fear, and to induce Americans to act on that fear by preparing themselves and their homes for nuclear attack. Even more, civil defense was a construction built of words, a campaign of persuasive education that stood in for what would have been a tremendously expensive and less- than-guaranteed system of public shelters. Indeed, had bombs actually fallen, there were no actual shelters for the vast majority of Americans throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. The rhetoric of preparation was one part fear of death and two parts assurance of survival through preparation. The message of fear, which was usually framed in language 3 along the lines of “in an attack, millions of people could die in the heat and blast of a nuclear explosion,” aimed to incite just enough angst that people would act, but not so much that they would become panicked or apathetic. The message of assurance usually appeared in statements like “but many more millions of people could survive if they are prepared.” If Americans were moved to action, by building shelters, making plans to evacuate, stockpiling food, and so on, the pamphlets assured, nuclear war was a manageable event. Indeed, prepared Americans could not only survive; after a few weeks, they could resume their lives.
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