TOWARD THE GARRISON STATE
Part VI Toward the Garrison State NTations tend to be fashioned and refashioned in the image of their goals; if their goals are militaristic, they emphasize more and more those qualities of hate...
...Or General Mills, which is selling MPF—Multi Purpose Food—to shelter residents for $2.50 a gallon...
...If there is to be fruitful negotiation of differences, extremist images must be moderated...
...In upper New York State, a doctor of philosophy who once served in the , Nazi army had his picture taken in front of his lavish shelter with an Enfield rifle in his hands...
...After World War II, Germany and the Soviet Union were able to rebuild beyond pre-war levels in less than a decade...
...the defense of their country...
...who will give leadership to a hundred people huddled in the safe center of an office building so that they can know when to uncramp themselves, move into adjoining rooms that might or might not be safe...
...But a new force has woven itself into the national fabric, and it threatens to spread...
...To make the necessity seem more urgent, the same lobby, plus the Pentagon, is pouring fuel on the anti-Communism crusade...
...A plan has been charted to train voluntary personnel for 150,000 monitoring stations...
...It's a business venture and there should be a profit...
...As long as you have a Khrushchev, and as long as you have the Communists openly saying they must dominate the world, there's a good chance you will have one...
...If you refuse to belong to this sober-minded organization, you are told that "no commitment in this matter is an open invitation to party-line Communist penetration...
...Their assumptions, even on a superficial level, are unrealistic...
...his shelter would fill with water in no time...
...In Las Vegas, Nevada, a few months ago, the head of the civil defense agency, J. Carlton Adair, urged formation of a local militia of 5,000 men to repel an "invasion" by citizens from Southern California...
...In addition, he is completing a new factory on the West Coast and negotiating for one in the East...
...In still another bulletin the question is asked: "Do you predict a nuclear war...
...To contain the resultant disaffection of Soviet citizens, Stalin perfected his notorious giant police apparatus, which so alienated the Western world...
...The lessons of history indicate that democratic rights are not usually maintained where there is a paucity of consumer goods...
...Hoegh is a "solid citizen," with important connections...
...As an indication of the community of interest between shelters and business, the U. S. Chamber of Commerce is distributing a circular, "Fiction and Fact About Family Fallout Shelters," which is no small boost to the booming new outfits...
...It's 'free enterprise...
...The Office of Emergency Planning is already set to freeze prices, wages, salaries, and rents, as well as to ration essential consumer goods the moment a war emergency arises...
...The South Florida Labor Tribune of September 28, 1961, reported "action taken by building trade unions on the Pacific Coast to explore the idea of financing and constructing nuclear fallout shelters for sale at nominal prices to individual home owners and renters...
...Unhappily, we can expect more of this sort of thing as the civil defense program expands...
...When I spoke to Colonel Mel Mawrence he insisted that the Russians have breached fifty of fifty-two treaties...
...A descriptive circular dis-, tributed by cub scouts reports, among other choice observations: "There no longer can be doubt in anyone's mind that Russian and Chinese Communist aggression » both virulent and brutally planned...
...The emergence of a new lobby for militarism...
...For through civil defense every American citizen would, in effect, be drafted into the military program of the United States...
...It is probably true as well that the Russian form of Communism would not survive either...
...This prediction is based on "scientific comparisons with what they've done in Central Europe...
...Gerard Piel, publisher of Scientific American, spelled out in harsh detail the ultimate results of a wholesale civil defense program: "The down payment on taking the nation underground would be $150 billion...
...Their lobby has friends in Washington and friends in big business circles...
...the front lines could well be found on our front lawns...
...The same approach was evidently in the minds of Florida unions as well...
...His own firm has been in the shelter crusade less than two years, but by mid-October, according to Hoegh, it had sold 7,500 units...
...His regime invested twenty-five to thirty-three per cent of the gross national product in new plant and equipment, while his people had to do without homes, certain foods, and many of the amenities of life...
...A few days after the contractor had packed his tools and stolen away, his client went down into his secret hole and discovered it had water in it...
...Herman Kahn has said, "Even if we won the war, it is conceivable that we might no longer live in a democracy...
...The Iron and Steel Institute, the cement manufacturers, and the makers of brick and other clay products are all vying with one another to make a better shelter, and the National Lumber Manufacturers Association has produced a dandy little number [made] out of wood, which, as everybody knows, doesn't burn...
...Otherwise, war is an instrument to be used at the opportune time and when success by this means appears' probable...
...It could hardly be otherwise...
...Insurance firms are asking—and being assured by OEP—that they will not have to pay off on current policies...
...Could we really expect our police, firemen, army, and government units to function efficiently after a nuclear attack on fifty of our cities...
...This reversion to cave-man barbarism is a cause of concern to every thinking American . . ." In a Chicago suburb a shelter builder told Time he intends to mount a machine gun at the entrance and shoot down anyone who attempts to force his way in...
...but then we have never had fifty of our cities nuclear-bombed...
...It would be unfair to exaggerate such incidents...
...The right becomes empty if a misguided charity prompts a pitying householder to crowd his haven to the hatch in the hour of peril...
...Does one Christian have the right to shoot another Christian who seeks to enter his shelter...
...Governor Farris Bryant of Florida has ordered 40,000 state and local employes to take the course...
...perhaps the nation-could recover...
...The burden of recovery is being placed on government...
...None of these developments is total or complete, and the impact of each grows stronger or weaker with the interplay of national forces...
...Unpleasantness, disagreements, and wars are those things which must be endured to gain this 'peace.' "The goal of Russian Communism is world domination...
...Norton expects the group to swell to 200 firms within a short time...
...Recently," said Governor Brown, "the California public has been alarmed by groups and individuals who say they will resort to violence in the event of nuclear war...
...Irrational anti-Communism and shelter-building seem to be compatible...
...Whether it, too, will include the kind of political "education" of the other program, I was unable to determine...
...for this conduct makes sure that no one will survive...
...1 The further impetus for an anti-Communism that is more hysterical than meaningful...
...Whether Western Europe could have recovered on a democratic basis without large doses of American economic aid is open to serious question...
...They are not representative of all America...
...In the end he found that he had installed a reservoir, and, given a good rain...
...Banks are being prodded to microfilm records and place them in caves or other deep shelters far removed from the big cities...
...Edward McDermott, deputy director of OEP, made this abundantly clear recently in a speech delivered in Florida: "The front lines are no longer the trenches of World War I or the foxholes of World War II...
...But history shows that even democracies decay under great economic and political stress...
...Local officials and school principals who are in charge of shelters or other phases of the program will have to assure the FBI of their "loyalty," perhaps sign loyalty oaths...
...Civil defense, as it increasingly involves the private citizen in the cold war, is reshaping the structure of American life, casting it in a new mold...
...This is to be achieved by political and economic means if possible...
...Now the Rand Corporation has charted a similar program for "recovery"—but under a more polite term...
...I. F. Stone asked the pertinent question: "Are we preparing to fight the Russians, or each other...
...Would the military danger be over or would we be open to an attack by a second power—say, Communist China...
...This highly emotional approach gives momentum to arguments such as, "You can't, trust the Russians," and makes nego-, tiation even more difficult than it is...
...Four hundred corporations and governments keep duplicate records in the Western States Atomic Vault...
...The prospect offered by the Rand "experts" is much too simplified and incomplete for thoughtful laymen to accept without serious question...
...Americans in civilian life, living in a climate of emergency, will be increasingly imbued with the basic demand of the military: obedience...
...This disease must be wiped from the face of the earth...
...The social cost would not fall short of total transformation of our way of life, suspension of our civil institutions, habituation of our people to violence, and ultimate militarization of our society...
...In Milwaukee, a shelter builder promised prospective customers his trucks would carry no markings—"for secrecy"— and his workmen would pose as TV repairmen...
...All kinds of worthless and misrepresented civil defense products were being peddled to the public by unscrupulous operators—including plastic suits, shelters made of wood, and salves that purportedly cause radiation to "bounce off...
...The police chief and civil defense coordinator of Bakersfield, California, told the Chamber of Commerce that if war came "the greatest danger to Bakersfield would not be from an atomic bomb or its fallout but from the hundreds of thousands" of survivors fleeing from Los Angeles...
...So is the type of government the nation might expect, even under the best recovery conditions, in the transition period...
...That is only the fiscal cost...
...The workmen worked in the dead of ru'ght, or disguised as sewer repairmen by day...
...On November 1, 1961, forty shelter companies formed the National Shelters Association with Frank Norton, of the Chicago area, as president...
...Stalin's economy in Russia was also "investment-oriented...
...The opening of the door to military and state controls over the individual...
...They can flare forth with unexpected suddenness so long as the illusion continues...
...This is a distasteful analogy...
...The subject became an issue in religious debate...
...As in war itself, the emphasis is on making the enemy look all black and ourselves all white...
...Hoegh currently employs 125 workers, expects the number to rise rapidly, and he has an arrangement with a feeder plant which employs 300...
...I began to get a humanitarian feeling, which is unlike me...
...Conformity, already a challenge to our democratic values, will become an ever more formidable force...
...In pursuing a civil defense program, we are tampering with the basic values we cherish: democracy and individualism...
...If civil defense expands, the government will be supervising ever wider areas of our lives...
...It encourages "more Americans to build family fallout shelters in their homes"—the precise private enterprise theme of Hoegh when he was OCDM chief...
...But after I got into it, I realized it also would be a good thing for the community...
...The chief reassured his audience that he has plenty of policemen to divert the "invaders" to the desert...
...Realtors, for instance, urge a plan whereby rent controls will not last as long as they did after World War II...
...Hoegh, a pleasant man with a crewcut, is lyrical about the possibilities of the industry...
...The chief adviser to the White House on disarmament, John J. Mc-Cloy, wrote on December 8, 1961: "Whatever may have been earlier Communist philosophies about the inevitability of conflict between the Communist and capitalist societies, the present Soviet leadership is aware of the devastating effects of a nuclear holocaust...
...Pittman's office is already at work preparing to mobilize millions of citizens in a vast civil defense program...
...Other builders, not so optimistic, put the figure at $9 billion a year...
...Sears-Roebuck, I was told by a prominent contractor, now has a full-time shelter buyer...
...In Nutley, New Jersey, a "Nutley Defense and Disaster Control Organization" has been formed, with the approval of the local civil defense officials...
...one is overwhelmed with the evidence that recovery could only be accomplished by the most stringent and controlled allocation of human and natural resources...
...I Want You' has been extended to every citizen of this country . . ." The shelter drive is only one part, though a widely publicized one, of the "I Want You" program...
...Admittedly the Soviets have broken many treaties and may do so in the future...
...Richard D. O'Keef, an Evanston, Illinois, businessman, tojd a reporter that his key-club shelters, in which those participating would pay $300 for a space, are "the only feasible way without Federal assistance...
...President Kennedy: "It is the responsibility of every man to protect his family...
...James Reston of the New York Times pointed out on November 12, 1961: "No group of citizens is showing more solicitude for the future well-being of the nation [than the builders of fallout shelters...
...If we surrendered to the Russians," he said, "we would lose seventy million to purges in the first year...
...An adult education program is now operating in fifteen states...
...But less than two million tons of TNT (one-tenth of the firepower of a single twenty-megaton bomb) fell on Germany in five and a half years of war...
...The Tribune commented: "In addition to providing needed work to union craftsmen, a mass union undertaking of this humanitarian nature would once more attest to the readiness of American Trade Unions to spring to...
...And each will be given the same bitter, intransigent, emotional view of Communism...
...The psychopathic, forced withdrawal of a great people behind an iron curtain at the will and compulsion of a relatively small group of organized, insane, powerhungry bandits cannot be allowed to continue...
...Anyone who feels he would benefit by a major nuclear war today would have to be crazy...
...Even in the face of possible annihilation, the instinct to "make a buck" ran wild...
...With proper government support he hopes it will reach $30 billion in sales during 1962, making it the nation's second or third largest industry...
...but it does not serve our own national interests...
...The Chamber—never one to turn its back on Pentagon philosophy—claims that "civil defense supplements military defense...
...An enterprising entrepreneur in another Chicago suburb told me he planned to build community shelters on a "key club" basis and would hire a policeman for each entrance...
...Often they are successful architects or construction men who are pushing shelters as a new line...
...Hitler did...
...and the answer: "No, but I'm not predicting that there will not be one...
...Some day they might try it...
...Part VI Toward the Garrison State NTations tend to be fashioned and refashioned in the image of their goals...
...Who will guide people' out of their shelters...
...Governor Edmund G. Brown of California, distressed by reports of some of these developments, issued a statement warning that communities or individuals trying to monopolize bomb shelters would have them opened by the National Guard...
...We may be robbing America of individual will and making robots of its citizens...
...To insist that the Soviets believe inflexibly in war as a fundamental principle fits the propaganda needs of the shelter builders eager to persuade the public that war may be imminent...
...Representative Holifield feels that "there will be martial law almost inevitably...
...In an "investment-oriented" economy following the nuclear bombing of fifty cities, we would certainly have to expect far more restrictive controls and discipline...
...Khrushchev is far from that...
...Hallock Hbffman, an official of the Fund for the Republic, tells the story of/ a man in Santa Barbara, California, who had a shelter built secretly by an out-of-town contractor...
...who will know how to make radiation meters serve as the eyes of the blind emerging into the declining but still virulent radiation, deadly when blown against the backyard fence and negligible in the lee of the house...
...An advertisement of a Chicago shelter company prominently displays two quotations...
...Since there are to be four persons in each station, 600,000 people will be required...
...Yet it seems fair to ask, to what degree would an "investment-oriented" society differ from Stalinist Russia or Soviet military Communism from 1918 to 1921...
...Every two or three months the Communist leaders threaten to bury us...
...The executive vice-president of the Wonder Building Corporation in Chicago, for instance, is Leo A. Hoegh, former national director of OCDM under President Eisenhower, and once governor of Iowa...
...Another brochure says: "The enemy cannot bury a prepared people...
...These guerrilla bands have announced that they will not hesitate to shoot down citizens entering areas designated by the selfish as their own...
...Would the military—assuming it could enforce martial law— yield soon to civilian control, or would it continue, perhaps for decades, a military dictatorship...
...Even the labor movement, particularly the building trades unions, has been swept into the act...
...and Soviet Premier Khrushchev: "We will bury you...
...Certainly American tradition is more firmly rooted in democracy than was Czarist Russia...
...we project Mawrence's "scientific: comparisons" to the seven Communist countries of Central Europe, the Soviets would have slaughtered thirty-six million of a ninety-six million population in a single year...
...To stress the urgency, Hoegh's company is distributing mimeographed fliers to prospective buyers in which the Marxist Dimitri Manuilski is quoted as saying that "war to the hilt between Communism and the free world is inevitable...
...Yet they illustrate the problems with which the public must wrestle...
...But the shelter builders reject this thesis...
...what was intolerable yesterday is today accepted without protest...
...Even if the civil defense system were never used, it would change enormously the way American society operates...
...Therefore, I believe both he and the Russian people want to avoid war...
...These neo-Darwinians boasted that the industrious, forward-looking men—like themselves—would build shelters and survive, while the slothful and stupid would do nothing and perish...
...But what nation or group of nations would be equipped to give the United States such help after a nuclear war...
...I doubt that any Catholic moralist would condemn the man who used available violence to repel panicky aggressors plying crowbars at the shelter door, or who took strong measures to evict trespassers who locked themselves in the family shelter before his own family had a chance to find sanctuary therein...
...And both received considerable outside help—Germany from the United States, and the Soviets from the billions of dollars worth of goods seized from conquered lands...
...As each industry draws its plans for the day after the holocaust, traditional views and self-interest come to the fore...
...Corporations such as Kelsey-Hayes, United States Steel, and similar goliaths are entering the shelter competition at an accelerating tempo...
...Even before the blow falls, we may be converting our society to the antithesis of what we think we are defending...
...But the embryonic changes in American opinion, spurred by the continuing illusion of civil defense, are disturbing nonetheless...
...Rand representatives and Pentagon spokesmen refuse to look at this prospect squarely...
...But it is clear that a giant apparatus is being forged...
...Donald N. Michael, "The Threat of Thermonuclear War and the Assessment of Reality," address delivered at the American Psychological Association Annual Meeting, September 4, 1961 put out of action, that country will no longer function as a rational and coherent social organization...
...Who, indeed, if not the Pentagon...
...So are many of the other shelter businessmen...
...In New Jersey, a group of young, middle-class intellectuals hailed fallout shelters as a means of ridding the world of the lazy and inefficient...
...Its office and factory in Chicago have the flavor and appearance that typified the automobile industry a half century ago...
...Activity in the peace movement also acts as a countervailing force...
...Questions of this depth are underplayed...
...Representative William Fitts Ryan, New York Democrat, foresees this impact: "Civil defense would have an effect upon individual American homes, businesses, and local government even more far-reaching than the effect of the draft program at the height of World War II...
...Dismayed, he called a local contractor...
...It gives this picture of Soviet thinking: " 'Peace' means the final rule of Communism...
...The Office of Emergency Planning is calling together various interest groups and urging them to "prepare...
...Hanson Baldwin, military affairs editor of the New York Times, reported: "Studies show that if about thirty per cent of the population of any country is killed, wounded, or No Stockpiling Democracy "It's been argued that under a nominal—i.e., 2,000 megaton—attack, we could recover a high level of Gross National Product in a decade or two...
...In the Rand assumption only fifteen per cent are casualties...
...if their goals are militaristic, they emphasize more and more those qualities of hate and conformity which are so inconsistent with and repugnant to a democratic society...
...In the current shelter campaign we have already witnessed four gravely disturbing phenomena: f The evolution of an ugly mood that would set neighbor against neighbor and enshrine the concept of "devil take the hindmost...
...who will know whether a short necessary trip from the shelter carries radioactive particles back to those who dare not leave...
...An OCDM student manual has a section on the "conflict of ideologies...
...Given likely situations following a major thermonuclear attack, it is clear that democracy is not among those items that survive or can be stockpiled for the post-attack period...
...Left alone, these ugly manifestations of selfishness and greed would probably die quickly...
...In community shelters the choice of "leaders" and the assignment of tasks will inevitably fall on the military...
...Norton feels that the business has a $200 billion potential and that it will attract 1,000 new companies...
...In a widely-publicized statement, Father L. C. McHugh, S.J., associate editor of the Catholic magazine, America, gave this opinion: "If a man builds a shelter for his family, then it is the family that has the first right to use it...
...In case of nuclear war, he said, they "would come into Nevada like a swarm of locusts...
...If Florida is a fair example, said a Pentagon official, "millions will be trained...
...Slowly, but inexorably, we are being mobilized...
...The medical self-help program, assigned to the Department of Health, Welfare and Education, will give courses to 300,000 people this fiscal year and probably millions in future years...
...President Kennedy's speeches in November, 1961 attacking the radical Right helped blunt the edge of some excesses...
...But no nation is all evil, just as no nation is all good...
...certainly the military will have veto power...
...Nor are the officials of large corporations, such as U. S. Steel, which is marketing an $1,800 prefabricated shelter for six persons...
...Values are being gradually transformed or warped...
...Nor is the government itself immune to this type of distortion...
...In the attempt to harden the nation's will—and to sell shelters—people are being indoctrinated to believe that war is all but inevitable...
...In Hartford, Connecticut, citizens were advised that firearms were essential equipment to repel those who might be running around "like madmen" after an attack...
...Shelters," said Steuart Pittman recently, "are only the beginning of the problem, a large and formidable hurdle...
...But if one looks at the studies on which these arguments are based...
...These men are not "crackpots" on the fringe of national life...
...Even during World War II, when not a single American city was bombed, there were rationing, manpower controls, material allotment, price controls, and a trade union pledge not to strike for the duration of the war...
...As it gives money to schools and industries and other institutions to build shelters, it will be making demands on them as well...
...Patriotism, it seems, has a thousand faces...
Vol. 26 • February 1962 • No. 2
