Abstract
On the night of September 22, 1955, Edward Beach took the presidential pleasure boat Barbara Anne on the Potomac for a cruise. The 25 guests enjoyed a buffet dinner as they talked about civil defense in the capital region. Officials from the FCDA, Defense Department, and NSC were aboard, joined by John Fondahl and suburban officials such as Hal Silvers, the director of Civil Defense for Prince Georges County, Md. Beach proposed they discuss ways in which overlapping jurisdictions might cooperate with one another to ensure the continued functioning of the federal government and the safety of the area’s population. Maryland director of Civil Defense Sherley Ewing found the meeting both productive and encouraging. As he told the President, this ‘direct evidence of your interest and leadership will be a real inspiration to all of us for the future.‘3
… if there is an atomic attack on Washington … there are only three things you can do—there are three alternatives: dig, die, or get out.
Val Peterson1
… when I picture myself in the midst of danger, then I insist with clenched teeth and all my will that the burrow should be nothing but a hole set apart to save me, and that it should fulfill that clearly defined function with the greatest possible efficiency, and I am ready to absolve it from every other duty. Now the truth of the matter—and one has no eye for that in times of great peril, and only by a great effort even in times when danger is threatening—is that in reality the burrow does provide a considerable degree of security, but by no means enough, for is one ever free from the anxieties in it?
Franz Kafka, “The Burrow”2
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Notes
Quoted in Thomas J. Kerr, Civil Defense in the U.S.: Bandaid for a Holocaust? (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1983), 63.
Franz Kafka, “The Burrow,” in The Great Wall of China: Stories and Reflections, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), 60.
Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 394–405.
Kerr, Civil Defense, 95, 106–12 (the quote is on 108); David L. Snead, The Gaither Committee, Eisenhower, and the Cold War (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1999), 91.
Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 58–62; Kerr, Civil Defense, 112–13.
Harry B. Yoshpe, Our Missing Shield: The U.S. Civil Defense Program in Historical Perspective (Washington, D.C.: EEMA, 1981), 251.
Eileen S. McGuckian, Rockville: Portrait of a City (Franklin, Tenn.: Hillsboro Press, 2001), 125–57.
George Q. Flynn, Lewis B. Hershey, Mr. Selective Service (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 304–9 (the quote is 309); oral history interview with Brigadier General Paul H. Griffith by Jerry N. Hess, March 9, 1971, Washington, D.C., HSTL; FCDA Press Release 267, undated, box 5, folder “Civil Defense Campaign—General folder 2,” HST Papers, Files of Spencer R. Quick, HSTL; Minutes of the Civil Defense Advisory Committee Meeting, January 5 and March 1, 1956, box 8, folder “Civil Defense,” Papers of Paul H. Griffith, HSTL.
Pamela Scott and Antoinette J. Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 235–7; GSA, “Federal Buildings Construction Program, Washington and Vicinity 1956–1965,” January 1956, box 29, folder “Current Public Building Program,” RG 328, Office Files of John F. Nolen, Jr.; GSA, “Federal Space Problem in Washington, D.C. and Its Solution,” August 1959, box 29, folder “Federal Buildings Construction Program,” John S. Bragdon Records as Special Assistant to the President, DDEL.
James B. Banks et al., “Civil Rights in Washington, D.C., 1948–1958: Status and Trends in Housing,” in Ben D. Segal et al., eds., Civil Rights in the Nation’s Capital: A Report on a Decade of Progress (New York: National Association of Intergroup Relations Officials, 1959), 41–2. For more on how federal home ownership programs spurred white flight,
see Peter Dreier et al., Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 107–10.
“Race Problem in Nation’s Capital,” U.S. News & World Report 43, no. 13 (September 27, 1957): 35; Washington Board of Trade News, August 1957; Robert A. Harper and Frank O. Ahnert, Introduction to Metropolitan Washington (Washington, D.C.: Association of American Geographers, 1968), 15–8.
Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 286, 296–8 (the quote is on 286);
George B. Nesbitt, “Non-White Residential Dispersion and Desegregation in the District of Columbia,” Journal of Negro Education 25, no. 1 (Winter 1956): 12.
Samuel Spencer to Eisenhower, May 26 and June 7, 1954, box 282, folder “71-U Segregation in District of Columbia,” White House Central Files, Official File, DDEL; Walter Goodman, “The Capital Keeps Calm,” New Republic 131, no. 17 (October 25, 1954): 10–13;
Carl F. Hansen, Miracle of Social Adjustment: Desegregation in The Washington, D.C. Schools (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai Brith, 1957), 45–50; Eugene Davidson, “An Analysis of Desegregation in the District of Columbia,” box A226, folder “Desegregation: Schools Branch Action—District of Columbia 1954–55,” NAACP Records, Group II, LOC, Manuscript Division.
David Lawrence, “Washington’s Worry,” U.S. News & World Report 46, no. 14 (April 6, 1959): 120.
Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Suburban Alchemy: 1960s New Towns and the Transformation of the American Dream (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2001), 17–32.
Joshua Olsen, Better Places, Better Lives: A Biography of James Rouse (Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 2003), 136–94; Bloom, Suburban Alchemy, 33–47 (the quote is on 47).
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© 2006 David F. Krugler
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Krugler, D.F. (2006). Capital Confusion. In: This is only a Test. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403983060_10
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