Saving The Elephant
Lamer, Jeremy
TUESDAY, May 3rd, was one of those lovely Spring days in New York: the Yanks were playing Detroit and the trees in City Hall Park were putting out new leaves. Yet before the day was over, Civil...
...He was later identified as Henry George Hearn, assistant chief of the Civil Defense Auxiliary Police, a short stocky man with a big brass star on his shoulder...
...At one point a riot could have broken out, when a woman refused to go along peaceably, and was manhandled by three policemen...
...But there it was, and on a picketer's sign it turned up as, "Peace Will Come from The People—Ike," a contraction entirely fair to the original...
...Magistrate Caiazzo postponed sentencing, but, took the opportunity to give the offenders a lecture...
...The leaflets were well-designed and literate...
...The most conspicuous group in the demonstration was composed of mothers with young children...
...Oh," said the man, "I'm just a reporter...
...On the bottom of the page was a quotation by President Eisenhower, designed, as usual, to make everyone happy, which seemed to indicate about how much was to be expected from him in the way of peace: "I like to believe that the people, in the long run, are going to do more to promote peace than our governments...
...The demonstrators remained mild and disorganized...
...You are undermining the democratic process...
...On the Lower East Side, however, the triangular grassy expanse of City Hall Park was jammed full of people who apparently disagreed with President Eisenhower...
...In the following fifteen minutes, the cops circulated through the crowd arresting at random, handicapped by the fact that only two paddy-wagons were available...
...After the all-clear about 150 of the demonstrators found their way to nearby Adolescents Court, where the arrested twenty-six (though not adolescents) appeared before Magistrate Edward D. Caiazzo...
...The American people were assured by Conelrad that their civil defense headquarters was operating in an impregnable underground location, where the latest casualty reports were instantly collected via special relay network and sorted into categories by electronic computer...
...To fill this cultural gap, Civil Defense provided what is known as the Conelrad emergency broadcast...
...100 men remained 312 in the bar, which is considered a shelter area...
...Not mentioned was the fact that, in event of a Hydrogen Bomb dropping on New York City, the Waldorf Hotel, Yankee Stadium with all its bleachers, City Hall and probably even the elephants in Bronx Zoo, would be instantaneously atomized...
...313...
...It was also reported that several women seeking shelter in the Waldorf-Astoria Men's Bar were directed to other shelter areas in the hotel...
...Although no one got up to speak or direct the crowd, the Committee had provided some leaflet passers...
...The courtroom broke into laughter, and Caiazzo threatened to have it cleared...
...The baby-carriages lined the sidewalks, and the fenced-off lawns were alive with small children illegally playing on the grass...
...The players Took Shelter in the clubhouse, the bleacher fans were herded under the bleachers, while the grandstand and boxseat customers remained in their seats...
...The highlight of the Conelrad broadcast was a canned message from the President of the United States, who announced that "survival cannot be guaranteed merely with a capacity for reprisal...
...Apparently ignoring President Eisenhower's warning that "survival cannot be guaranteed merely with a capacity for reprisal," it ran a long editorial on May 4th urging a crash program for the production of missile-firing atomic submarines and long-range bombers...
...The crowd laughed, whereupon he placed them all under arrest...
...at various times different clusters struck up with "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," "America," and "We Will Not be Moved...
...Here and there a familiar figure would be recognized—Dorothy Day of The Catholic Worker, A. J. Muste of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, David McReynolds of the Socialist Party—and a small swirl of followers would collect...
...Exhilarated by this achievement, the New York Times announced that "8,000,000 in City Go to Shelters...
...These were just the local manifestations of a new game that swept the country that Tuesday...
...At City College, campus police confiscated 100 college identification cards, and Dean James S. Peace announced that the students could conceivably be expelled or have their names turned over to the District Attorney...
...Still, 500 did not budge...
...Both the Times and the HeraldTribune featured front-page photos of an elephant being taken indoors at the Bronx Zoo...
...The New York Times made no editorial comment on either the Alert or the protests...
...Afterwards, Protest Committee leaders said they were encouraged by the turnout, though I couldn't help comparing the thousand people in City Hall Park to the hundred thousand who took part in the Aldermaston-London demonstrations in England...
...Chiefly they sang, though rarely together...
...Major Robert E. Condon, director of the New York office of Civil Defense, was able to mobilize his battalion of 265,000 city employees and volunteers so efficiently that Times Square was cleared of people in one minute and forty-six seconds, breaking the former record by seventeen seconds...
...Irritated, Henry George Hearn shouted, "Are you Americans or not...
...By Virtue of Authority vested in him etc., he ordered everyone to take cover...
...I overheard a reporter approach a group of women sitting by their carriages and ask one of them whether she would refuse to take shelter even under threat of arrest...
...You have disobeyed the law," he told them...
...But a scattering of local writers and theatrical people attracted greater attention...
...Peace's counterpart at Brooklyn College, Dean Herbert S. Stroup, threatened that the school would "take appropriate action...
...The ralliers had been summoned to the park by an impromptu organization called the Civil Defense Protest Committee, assembled by various pacifist and civic leaders...
...The protesters booed, but remained true to the principles of non-violence...
...Although the Times reported that there were only 150 people, there were really well over a thousand people in the park, all of them agreed that "taking shelter" was a meaningless gesture in the face of atomic annihilation...
...from two to two-thirty p.m...
...In all, they took twenty-six people...
...I think people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of their way and let them have it...
...As I wandered about the park, I was struck by the fact that this was not a carefully-organized political pressure group, but rather a collection of people who had come as individuals, each seeking to express the dictates of his conscience...
...Among other details was a straight-faced report of the situation at Yankee Stadium, where the ball game was interrupted for twenty minutes...
...In Wednesday's papers I discovered that we had been joined by 300 students at City College and 150 at Brooklyn College...
...there was very little heckling...
...I had expected to find a center in the crowd, from which a leader might be directing activities, but instead I was absorbed into a restlessly churning mass...
...At this point about half of the crowd moved out of the park and watched further proceedings from across the street...
...Yet before the day was over, Civil Defense officials were to open a sealed envelope revealing that three nuclear bombs had fallen upon New York...
...If," he continued, "despite our efforts toward keeping peace, we should be faced with nuclear attack, a strong Civil Defense, supported by all Americans, offers the best program for the saving of lives...
...neither radio nor TV was available to entertain the American public...
...When the sirens sounded at two-fifteen, one of them clambered onto a park bench...
...AT TWO O'CLOCK a group of twenty policemen entered the park, and struck awkward poses on the fringe of the crowd...
...To coordinate the game, the Civil Defense people commandeered the nation's airwaves...
...How about you...
...Fortunately, the catastrophe was anticipated, and the would-be disaster turned into a triumph for petty officialdom...
...Of course, Eisenhower made this state311 ment in London last August and could hardly have expected it to be quoted in support of civil disobedience...
...I haven't decided yet," the woman replied...
...The game was called "Operation Alert," and featured the dropping of several hundred Hydrogen Bombs from coast to coast...
...In its news columns, the Times gave an enthusiastic account of civil defense efficiency...
...The President was traveling in good company on the picket signs: such notable figures as George Kennan, Robert Meyner and Jesus Christ were represented by lengthy quotations...
Vol. 7 • July 1960 • No. 3
