Civil defense begins at home
Subtitle: militarization meets everyday life in the fifties
By: Laura McEnaney.
Series: Politics and society in twentieth-century America
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Princeton, N.J
Language: eng
Number of pages: 213
ISBN-13: 9780691001388
Subjects: Civil defense -- United States; United States -- Politics and government -- 1945-1989
Description: "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 McEnaney 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, she 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."--BOOK JACKET
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [195]-207) and index.
Table of contents: title: The dilemmas of planning and propaganda; title: Living underground: the public politics of private shelters; title: The nuclear family: militarizing domesticity, domesticating war; title: Raising women's bomb consciousness; title: "Equal in suffering": race, class, and the bomb.