Civil Defense Begins at Home
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A01=Laura McEnaney
Activism
African Americans
Americans
Anti-communism
Atomic Age
Author_Laura McEnaney
Big government
Bomb shelter
Bureaucrat
Category=JWK
Category=NHK
Civil defense
Civil society
Cold War
Communism
Containment
Criticism
Deliberation
Duck and cover
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Employment
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Fallout shelter
Federal Civil Defense Administration
Feminism
Foreign policy
Funding
Harry S. Truman
Home front
Housewife
Ideology
Indication (medicine)
Legislation
Literature
Mass hysteria
Mass society
Maternalism
McCarthyism
Militarism
Militarization
Military
Military strategy
Mushroom cloud
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
National security
Nuclear family
Nuclear warfare
Nuclear weapon
Office of Civil Defense
Pacifism
Pamphlet
Policy
Political culture
Politician
Politics
Preparedness
Privatization
Public interest
Racism
RAND Corporation
Rhetoric
Strategist
Subsidy
Subversion
Survival Under Atomic Attack
The New York Times
War
Warfare
Weapon of mass destruction
Welfare
Welfare state
White House Office
World war
World War II
Product details
- ISBN 9780691001388
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 09 Jul 2000
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Laura McEnaney is Assistant Professor of History at Whittier College in California.
