Abstract
What follows is a history of the future that never happened in Washington, D.C.
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Notes
The Joint Chiefs of Staff weren’t the first to imagine an atomic attack on Washington, D.C. In November 1945, Life envisioned an atomic bombardment of Washington. See “The 36-Hour War,” Life 19, no. 21 (November 19, 1945). Nor was Washington the only target in these imaginary attacks. Atomic attack scenarios for other U.S. cities began regularly appearing in newspapers and magazines. See Kenneth D. Rose, One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 52–66.
Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 280–2.
Carl Abbott, Political Terrain: Washington, D.C., from Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 7–8.
Lucy G. Barber, Marching on Washington: The Forging of an American Political Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 44–107, 179–218.
Stanley Harrold, Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C., 1828–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 256.
Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington: Village and Capital, 1800–1878, vol. 1, Washington: A History of the Capital, 1800–1950 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), 296.
For the international ramifications of the District’s segregation during the Cold War, see Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 96–9.
Alan Lessoff, The Nation and Its City: Politics, “Corruption,” and Progress in Washington, D.C., 1861–1902 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 1–14.
Frederick Gutheim (consultant) and the National Capital Planning Commission, Worthy of the Nation: The History of Planning for the National Capital (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1977), 113–36 (the quote is on 135), 345–56.
Howard Gillette, Jr., Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 135–69.
FCDA, The National Plan for Civil Defense against Enemy Attack (Washington, D.C.: 1956), 2. For more on civil defense in the 1950s, see Rose, One Nation, 22–35;
Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000);
Harry B. Yoshpe, Our Missing Shield: The U.S. Civil Defense Program in Historical Perspective (Washington, D.C.: FEMA, 1981), 105–287.
DCD, District of Columbia Survival Plan, 1959, LOC
Steven J. Zaloga, The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword: The Rise and Fall of Russia’s Strategic Nuclear Forces, 1945–2000 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 31.
Allan M. Winkler, Life under a Cloud: American Anxiety about the Atom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 68–75.
Even before continuity preparations were underway, Clinton L. Rossiter addressed this problem in his book Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948). According to Rossiter, a dictatorship would be needed after an atomic attack; the challenge was to set up, prior to war, constitutional limits to ensure the dictatorship wasn’t permanent.
Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3–9, 52–4;
Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 319–33;
Andrew D. Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red: Civilian Defense and American Political Development during the Early Cold War (London: Routledge, 2001), 1–19; McEnaney, Civil Defense, 3–10.
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© 2006 David F. Krugler
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Krugler, D.F. (2006). Introduction. In: This is only a Test. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403983060_1
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