Americans’ views of the Blitz in England inspired a self-defense movement in the United States—leading to the creation of the nation’s first home-defense agency.^{Footnote 1} The American reaction to air raids on London indicated how a war psychology gained traction in the United States in ways that few historians have grasped. The American reaction to the Blitz helped erode the grip of isolationists on the American people. Americans were more inclined to go to war than the historical literature has long held and the U.S. effort to study the British response to the Blitz led to the creation of an Office of Civilian Defense, which was a precursor to the Department of Homeland Security.^{Footnote 2}

Americans worried that the Blitz would incite class violence, spark riots, maybe even cause a revolution in England. Some Americans lionized British firefighters as defenders of civilization, while others fretted that sustained bombing had endangered democracy’s social foundations. Militaristic liberals led by Fiorello La Guardia drew inspiration from Britain’s home security movement, regarding its leader Herbert Morrison and air raid services as a wake-up call for America’s cities. London became a laboratory, in which America’s leaders could study the city’s failures and achievements and apply these lessons to their own cities. Not only FDR and La Guardia but also the FBI, the War Department, and citizen groups sent trusted teams to England to report on the British system.^{Footnote 3} One of La Guardia’s firefighters in London told British reporters that “the pupil comes to the master to learn.”^{Footnote 4}

London burning made Americans fear that their cities might be next. If the Nazis attacked New York, they would cause mass death and hysteria, unwinding the urban social order that liberals had fought to keep intact from the ravages of the Great Depression. Britain’s home-defense program ultimately stimulated an American effort to alter the relationship between civilians and their government, militarizing the American home front and making home-defense service a vital national concern.

Most scholarship focuses on the Cold War civil defense program, skating past the origins and evolution of home defense in World War II. Historians have examined the idea of self-help in the Cold War program, sifted civil defense’s penetration in mass media and American culture, and highlighted such aspects as its propagandistic, morale-building rationale and its prescriptive shortcomings.^{Footnote 5} Some scholars have treated home defense in World War II in terms of Eleanor Roosevelt’s mangled effort to enact a wartime New Deal and Fiorello La Guardia’s campaign to whip up popular fears about the dire threat facing Americans, dwelling on the program’s most glaring flaws and sensational dimensions.

This article seeks to trace the origins of home defense in World War II in particular and in the twentieth century in general to the British response to the Blitz in 1940 and 1941. The article shows that the conventional wisdom about the overkill, ineptitude, and hyperbole associated with World War II–era civil defense ignores that the program sprang from strong roots in London. The article also shows that security policies were portable across countries, drawing on Daniel Rodgers’s insight that progressives found inspiration and ideas for reform in their transatlantic allies. In this case, American liberals studied the British home-defense program and took their cues from British leaders, proving Rodgers’s point that “the Atlantic functioned . . . less as a barrier than a connective lifeline.” The article also argues that the bombing of London, more than any single event in World War II, planted a psychology of fear in American soil: Americans transported in their minds the terror of bombings seen in England to the U.S. home front, and a robust home-defense program offered the country a means of surviving the dreaded fascist onslaught.^{Footnote 6} While scholars have depicted civil defense in World War II as a pro-war propaganda organ and as the policy result of irrational fears among Americans and their leaders, this article finds that the U.S. program in fact emerged organically out of the Blitz, an event that persuaded U.S. security officials and citizens that defending America in the modern world meant importing key aspects of the British home-defense program to the United States.^{Footnote 7}

England’s devotion to home defense was rooted in the country’s geography, history, and cultural traditions. When France and Spain in 1782 sided with the colonies in the Revolutionary War, the first Secretary of Britain’s Home Office, Lord Shelburne, commanded town leaders to muster their forces in case they had to fight off naval attacks. In the 150-plus years since that war, Britain’s Home Office had taken the lead in defending England from foreign foes. By the start of the Blitz, the Home Office had two decades worth of planning to defend the country from aerial attacks. During World War I, England contended with 103 German air raids. Germany dropped 300 tons of bombs, killing 1,413 civilians. More than 17,000 home-defense volunteers rallied to the cause. Three hundred thousand civilians took shelter in London’s underground subway on any given night, and some of them prayed, in the words of one British Major General, “for deliverance.” An additional 500,000 people slept in their cellars.^{Footnote 8}

In the post–World War I aftermath, British planners had few doubts that civilians would suffer the brunt of the attack. Military experts war-gamed a scenario of French bombers dropping fifteen hundred tons of bombs on England roughly every thirty days. The Air Ministry assigned the Home Office responsibility for anti–air raid planning in 1923; by decade’s end, some planners said air raids could murder more than seventy-five thousand London residents. Other scenarios provided a basis for mass fear: Winston Churchill declared in 1934 that air attacks on London would force three million residents to flee. “Problems of this kind have never been faced before,” he said. The next year, the Home Office set up an Air Raid Precautions Department. The Home Office hired 120 officials by the end of 1938, and one government estimate foresaw six hundred thousand civilian deaths in the first six months of sustained air raids—a clear call for government action. Chamberlain’s aides and European academic experts also argued that something had to be done to avert the calamity of mass panic under the strain of aerial assault. One Danish academic theorized that modern bombing would obliterate the norms of civilization, eroding human discipline and eviscerating law and order so much that wild chaos would reign.^{Footnote 9}

Civilians paid attention to these warnings. By November 1938, seven hundred thousand British had registered as air raid volunteers. After England entered the war and France capitulated in June 1940, the British home-defense movement gained credibility.^{Footnote 10} Churchill called the British “the sole champions in arms to defend the world cause,” and the next day bombs fell on Addington, the first air raid on greater London.^{Footnote 11} The Blitz unleashed more chaos than the mottoes (“Keep calm and carry on”) and the lore (the gallant firefighter) have suggested. After the bombs started to fall in June, some shelters became dens of filth known to harbor “improper behaviour.”^{Footnote 12} One London leader told American officials that some residents of English cities had fled the bombing and headed to nearby woods, where it took them eight to ten hours to find some calm.^{Footnote 13} The Blitz spurred efforts to keep people’s spirits from cracking. British author John Langdon-Davies’s book Nerves versus Nazis assured residents that if they counted to sixty after the first bombs and were still alive, they would probably survive the attack. The Home Intelligence Office admitted that there was some nerve cracking and the government took an interest in “the possibilities of panic.”^{Footnote 14}

Americans often thought about the Blitz of London as showing the look and feel of attacks on the cities of the New World. London, one academic at the time observed, had nearly nine million residents living in an area that was roughly one-third the size of New York City. When incendiary bombs pounded London’s center, the American Journal of Sociology called the area “not much larger than Chicago’s Loop.” London’s port was the second largest behind New York City’s and the County of London roughly equaled “the size of Philadelphia.”^{Footnote 15} The U.S. news media expressed its fury at the Nazi’s aerial targeting of Europe’s civilians. The Los Angeles Times said the blitz and destruction of Rotterdam had showed “diseased” German leaders employing “methods of terrorism.” The newspaper warned its readers that “We are in for misery.”^{Footnote 16}

Poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish paid tribute to CBS News radio correspondent Edward R. Murrow for bringing “the city of London in[to] our houses” and making Americans feel “the flames.”^{Footnote 17} Legions of admirers have hailed Murrow’s Johnny-on-the-spot reporting as a paragon of twentieth-century journalism. Murrow lauded Britons for their stoic defiance and Odysseus-like qualities, rising out of their homes to defend their country from barbaric attacks.^{Footnote 18} But Murrow did not restrict his reporting to the theme of British bravery and rectitude. His broadcasts underscored the sense of siege that gripped the British people. The language of his reports communicated civilian terror. He called a bomb’s explosion a “bestial grunt” and described London residents holding “little cheap cardboard suitcases and sometimes bulging paper shopping bags” as “all they had left.”^{Footnote 19} By mid-September a Nazi invasion would likely be under way. Hitler, he said, had a ten-thousand-plane secret air force. Britain would probably have to cope with a chemical gas attack; London was home to horrible sights, and the bombings had imposed “great . . . strain.” He described one explosion as having left “the largest crater I’ve ever seen.”^{Footnote 20}

Murrow did something else: he framed the war in terms Americans could readily grasp, as if the United States were also in harm’s way. He suggested that the bombing of London presaged America’s future. He likened London to “a ghost town in Nevada” and said one policeman who juggled his silver whistle within one hundred feet of an unexploded bomb reminded him of “cops at home” twirling “a night stick on a warm spring day.” He said the firefighting system of London resembled the system he had seen on the West Coast for pinpointing the location of forest fires. On New Year’s Eve, Murrow invoked the familiar argument of liberal internationalists in the States, hinting that America’s fate hinged on Britain’s.^{Footnote 21}

These grim themes seeped into the U.S. media discourse in the fall of 1940 and became features of the popular culture, creating a climate of fear that led to the establishment of the Office of Civilian Defense and its mission of defending Americans from air raids and other foreign threats. The New York Times termed the Nazi Blitz of London “indiscriminate bombing at its zenith.” American correspondent Robert Post reported watching the film All This and Heaven Too in a London theater. Just as the husband in the film was about to murder his wife (“No! No! No!” she screamed), a high-explosive bomb rocked the movie palace where Post was sitting. The Luftwaffe was dropping “tens of thousands of wicked little two-pound incendiaries, either raining them from planes or sending them down in ‘Molotoff breadbaskets’ [a series of incendiaries falling in rapid succession and causing fire over a large section of the city], which broke in the sky and showered fire on the way down.”^{Footnote 22}

Terrified voices of British civilians also pierced America’s collective conscience. America’s newspapers published letters to the editor from civilians from the London front. One social worker wrote in the Christian Science Monitor that shrapnel from bombs had shattered shop windows on his street. Another Londoner said every person in the city was in danger.^{Footnote 23}

How would urban residents handle air raids on America’s cities? The Los Angeles Times wondered if its city could withstand sustained aerial bombing. The paper insisted that while L.A. was “simply too big to be destroyed by aerial attack,” city fathers and ordinary residents had better begin to beef up their air raid defenses even if the chances of raids on the city were remote. Citing Hitler’s romp over Rotterdam because Rotterdam had lacked anti-aircraft guns, the Times, just by raising the question of defense, gave new credibility to the idea that air raids could damage Los Angeles.^{Footnote 24} The Associated Press wondered if citizens of democracies might succumb to “French panic” or “fear itself.” “Englishmen have learned how to restrain their fears and stand up to night after night of aerial punishment,” the Associated Press reported, but whether or not Americans had the same courage and resilience remained unknowable.^{Footnote 25}

U.S. diplomats who studied the Battle of Britain sent a message almost as bleak back to Washington—confirming that Americans must follow the British lead in setting up home defense. Nazi bombing was so intense, the damage so punishing, that England could collapse and give Hitler a clear path to launch air raids against the American people. Diplomats’ eyewitness accounts of the Blitz gave Washington a bird’s-eye view of the terror, spurring America’s leaders to rally behind a home-defense movement. At 7 pm on November 14, diplomat James Wilkinson stood on a hilltop overlooking Coventry and spent hours watching every six minutes as German planes dropped bombs on the city. One bomb shook a house near where Wilkinson stood. If Germany built enough bombers, he predicted, the Nazis would destroy the industrial capacity of the British Midlands and deal a blow to England’s capacity to stay in the fight. At 10 am, he drove his car into the city center; over a five-mile stretch, he saw scenes out of Dante’s Inferno: rubble in the streets, homes in ruins, the homeless, the dazed, and some who somehow had managed to stay calm. “If what happened at Coventry last night keeps on happening for a few weeks,” then Britain would surrender.^{Footnote 26}

London’s mayor and England’s home secretary Herbert Morrison inspired the chief proponent of a militarized home-defense program in the United States, New York’s mayor Fiorello La Guardia. La Guardia, who would rise to become director of the Office of Civilian Defense in May 1941, had a role model in Morrison and used Morrison’s experiences to argue on behalf of an American program. In his early fifties, Morrison was the so-called Lord of London and the home secretary in charge of defending the country against air raids. He drew comparisons to La Guardia; the two men forged an urban, transatlantic, informal security pact. Like La Guardia, Morrison was short, energetic, and aggressive. Leading the struggle to defend London from German bombs, he drew explicit comparisons to New York’s mayor. “Morrison looks like a lean La Guardia, and Fiorello, in turn, like a paunchy ‘Erbert. . . . They run the world’s two biggest cities, respectively; each is entrusted with the civil defense of his country, and both hanker after a place in world affairs,” one biographer later wrote.^{Footnote 27}

Contradictions defined Morrison’s rise to political power. On April 27, 1939, he told a bartender: “Give me a quick drink, and may God forgive me. I’ve just voted for conscription.” He had refused to fight in World War I. But by 1939 he had relinquished his pacifist ideals and become a hardline antifascist. A foe of concentrated wealth, Morrison also cracked down on suspected spies and imprisoned people with few pangs of conscience. He coined a motto, “Go to it,” which became a familiar phrase in besieged British cities.^{Footnote 28} Blind in his left eye, he was most at home with the residents of London, among his tribe in the midst of combat. Shoppers, messengers, policemen, and news salesmen saw him on the street and waved and shouted, “‘Ello, ‘Erbert!”^{Footnote 29}

Like a lot of American liberals, Morrison despised Nazis as threats to democratic government and regarded the struggle against fascism in terms of guns and butter, military force, and social melioration. He helped show American liberals that economic liberalism and international antifascism could be a workable unified philosophy. Morrison’s controversial approach to home security presaged the debates that would roil America in 1941. He sought to graft the national government’s priorities, resources, and coordination onto a healthy respect for local autonomy and community rights.^{Footnote 30} Balancing the two poles proved elusive. He wanted the national government to cover the lion’s share of home-defense costs; under the Air Raid Precautions Act, Britain’s Exchequer would pay 60 percent to 75 percent of civilian defense activities and British leaders would review air raid defense plans in some communities. Morrison consolidated his power, shrinking the number of auxiliary fire brigades from fifteen hundred to forty. He subsidized shelters for the poor, distributed helmets and gas masks to civilians, rallied different classes in the common struggle against Hitler,^{Footnote 31} and proposed more shelter-building, national rules for shelter behavior, greater efforts to keep shelters clean, more aid to the homeless, and help for families building steel shelters. He vowed to “step over [the] heads” of local officials who had refused to tackle these tasks.^{Footnote 32}

At the same time, Morrison tried to foster a respect for local interests. His program emphasized the importance of volunteers and promoted the idea of self-help.^{Footnote 33} He had a way with symbols, linking himself with the common man and woman in the street. He stood alongside thousands of other Londoners and survived nearby blasts of three bombs while in a shelter in the tube. He opened a fifty-foot-deep shelter for ten thousand East End residents and had 1.5 million British volunteering in his home-defense program. His impassioned cries for home defense and his earnest pleas for aiding the poor earned him the status of a Churchill in the eyes of some Londoners.^{Footnote 34} The Blitz hardened his desire to eradicate “the twin pests of extreme riches and extreme poverty.” He feared that the social order would crack unless ordinary workers felt economically more secure. He believed that the American people would endorse his combined vision of social and military defense.^{Footnote 35}

Morrison’s agenda was almost as controversial in America as it initially was in Britain. He won acclaim as a defender of the common citizen. In November 1940, Secretary of War Henry Stimson said Morrison had remade England into “an unconquerable citadel of freedom,”^{Footnote 36} and British political scientist Harold Laski wrote in the Washington Post that Morrison ranked among England’s “supreme administrators.”^{Footnote 37} America’s critics were as unsparing in their broadsides as his defenders were fulsome in their praise. After one especially bad raid on London, his detractors said he had failed to mobilize a sufficient volunteer response. In January, he required every male between the ages of sixteen and sixty not in the Armed Forces to serve as a firefighter or as a bomb- or fire-spotter, calling it “your duty to yourself, your neighbors and friends, your city and your country.”^{Footnote 38} The Chicago Tribune assailed his actions as harbingers of a “social revolution as far reaching as [England] has ever known,” describing more British “on the government pay rolls than ever before.”^{Footnote 39}

America’s military and political leaders sent missions to draw lessons from Morrison’s experiences on the assumption that those who had refused to prepare long in advance would be destroyed. From Holland to France to Poland, these men reasoned, Hitler’s triumphs were as much the fruits of national complacency as they stemmed from Hitler’s might. Their logic held. FDR, La Guardia, and other leaders also assumed that Britain’s defeat would make America’s cities next on Hitler’s target list. In the minds of these officials, terror attacks on America led by the Luftwaffe were plausible scenarios.

Their overseas missions would cement the U.S. commitment to building its own home-defense program modeled on Morrison’s agenda. La Guardia sent two missions to England in late 1940 and early 1941 with the express purposes of preparing New York for air raids. In the fall and winter, New York Fire Department battalion chiefs Frederic Wedemeyer and Daniel Deasy and fireman George Scott conducted a two-and-a-half-month tour of Britain’s air raid defenses. When La Guardia’s men arrived in London, they visited the city’s firefighting headquarters, where they held a news conference. Correspondents asked the American delegation why they had decided to visit wartime England. One fireman replied that the simple answer was: “The pupil comes to the master to learn.” As students of the Blitz absorbed lessons from their teachers, the Americans donned steel helmets that British firefighters had given them. They toured the war zone. They hailed their colleagues as heroes. When they returned to America, they began drafting a report based on their findings.^{Footnote 40}

The nation’s firefighters in general concluded that they must learn from the British. “The fire fighters of Great Britain are carrying on the defense of that nation,” George Richardson, the secretary-treasurer of the International Association of Fire Fighters, told FDR a few weeks after the Blitz began. He assured the president that “fire defense for New York, Washington, Chicago, or any other city” was a national problem that local officials alone were ill equipped to handle. His association passed a resolution urging FDR to make fire protection a national priority and “protect the citizens under modern warfare.”^{Footnote 41}

America’s police drew inspiration from London’s achievements. As the International Association of Chiefs of Police explained, police wanted to learn how England had kept law and order so that America could avoid “the painful process of trial and error.”^{Footnote 42} FBI officials visited London and studied Scotland Yard’s approach, while Hoover’s National Policy Academy incorporated British lessons into its training program.^{Footnote 43} From October to February, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent two assistant directors to report on Britain’s home-defense setup. His aides wrote more than ten reports based on their findings, addressing such topics as counterespionage, air raid protection, communications, traffic control, and law enforcement. (New York’s police leaders wanted to apply Hoover’s recommendations to their city.)^{Footnote 44}

La Guardia’s second mission, led by Police Captain Donald Leonard, also included New York Police Inspector Arthur Wallander. The team sought to study England’s approach to maintaining social order during the Blitz and hoped to satisfy U.S. police officials, who were clamoring for details from London’s wartime program.^{Footnote 45} Leonard was affronted by the horrors of the Blitz. During a tour of the city of Southampton, he heard about a British seaman who had had zero communications with his family during his time at sea. After a six-month voyage, the sailor returned to Southampton, disembarked, and headed straight for his home. His neighborhood had been destroyed. German bombs had killed his entire family. Leonard concluded that “the burden has fallen squarely on the shoulders of those in the civilian defense organisations.” Touring London with Wallander, he found that almost half of every building in old London had suffered significant damage, and that despite Morrison’s leadership, London’s home-defense program had its share of woes. Agencies vied with one another for power, officials engaged in jurisdictional disputes, and the program lacked cohesion. Leonard vowed that his analysis of the London setup would assist La Guardia’s civilian defense agenda in 1941 and beyond.^{Footnote 46}

FDR’s national security advisers sent their own fact-finding expeditions to study civil defense in London. In September, U.S. military officials visited. In October, Secretary of War Stimson sent officials to study air raid precautions.^{Footnote 47} In January, the secretary of state approved the American Legion’s request to visit and gain a firsthand analysis of the British home-defense program.^{Footnote 48} America’s fire officials and law enforcement leaders thought hard about the implications of London for their cities. California’s fire marshal Lydell Peck instructed his staff to use London’s experience to figure out the best water pumps and tanks for fighting fires.^{Footnote 49} In early 1941, Massachusetts governor Leverett Saltonstall sent an aide on a six-week tour of England to study that country’s Home Guards, and the aide asked Britain’s guard leader to help Massachusetts with the setup of its own forces.^{Footnote 50}

In the first months of 1941, FDR’s focus on diplomacy, winning Lend-Lease, and accelerating the pace of military production meant that other national leaders had to mount the campaign for home defense. By early 1941, La Guardia filled that role, fashioning himself into the nation’s leading advocate for militarizing home defense and preparing civilians to endure war in their own communities. He argued that despite their distance from Europe and Asia, New York nonetheless represented a new front in modern combat, and he assured his constituents that if war came Hitler would attack their city. On January 8, La Guardia delivered a hundred-minute stem-winder, appraising New York City’s readiness for war. Nazis had New York in their sights, he warned, and the time had come for the city to enact a home-defense program. If “we . . . are attacked,” he declared, he would need every police and firefighter ready to go to war. He proposed exempting them from the draft so they would be available to him in emergencies. New York urgently needed “a great deal more equipment in the Fire Department and the Police Department, in hospitals and in the health service.” The Roosevelt administration must send emergency equipment to all coastal cities. He assured that City Hall had made plans for its own defense. He praised a tenfold expansion of London’s fire forces, and he described London’s home-defense program as New York’s model and its guide.^{Footnote 51}

Behind the scenes, La Guardia lobbied FDR during the Battle of Britain. On January 31, he told the president that Hitler’s bombing of London had shown how “essential” a home security strategy was for the United States. He urged the White House to find the funds to organize air raid warning signals, a shelter-building campaign, improvements to communications systems, and make plans for mutual aid during national emergencies. La Guardia pointed out that in wartime injuries to one part of America had the effect of harming every part of America. “The loss of a city is not local but involves and injures the entire country,” he argued.^{Footnote 52}

On February 1, La Guardia delivered to FDR a preliminary analysis with recommendations for setting up a national home-defense agency—the first national home-defense agency in twentieth- century America. The plan, endorsed by La Guardia’s U.S. Conference of Mayors, reflected the thinking of the nation’s urban leaders. La Guardia’s report painted an Orson Welles vision; just as civilians had fled in fright after hearing the War of the Worlds radio broadcast in October 1938, they would similarly panic (and die) when the first air raid came. High-explosive bombs, each one weighing more than one hundred pounds, La Guardia predicted, would incinerate New York’s buildings and “small and light” incendiary bombs would torch people’s homes and offices in uncontrollable infernos. The Germans would rain bombs of mustard gas, chlorine, and “arsenical compounds” and these toxic agents would turn into “a shower of liquid” that would asphyxiate or kill by other means city residents living in tightly packed quarters.^{Footnote 53}

La Guardia wanted a federal civil defense board to organize the defense of urban America. The mayor told FDR that his intention was not to “alarm” Americans by calling their attention to the prospect of air raids. But waiting any longer just wasn’t prudent. Montreal, located “just a few minutes by air from the border of New York State,” had begun to build shelters along with other cities in Canada; Americans would be foolish if they refused to set up a national plan to defend the cities that were most “vulnerable to attack.” La Guardia distinguished home defense from military offense by calling it a form of “passive” military defense with civilians playing key roles. He implied that the social order would crumble if the United States refused to prepare civilians to cope with the terror of bombing.^{Footnote 54}

His idea was militarily more ambitious than anything his predecessors had dreamed up during World War I. Established in 1916, the Council of National Defense’s initial goal was to strengthen relations between business and the federal government in order to bolster wartime industrial production. But the council failed in its mission because, as historian David Kennedy argues, its “organizational formula proved spectacularly irrelevant to the economic character of an industrial nation such as America was in 1917.” The council next assumed a different mission, helping establish approximately 180,000 local defense councils nationwide. The broad goals of these local councils were to give citizens roles in the defense program, and indeed they engaged in pro-war propaganda, harassed antiwar dissenters, rationed food, planted home gardens, and did other jobs deemed beneficial to war mobilization.^{Footnote 55}

The World War I experience inspired some World War II–era leaders to dwell on the threat of sabotage. California fire marshals and Army and Navy intelligence officers attended a conference in July 1940 in which organizers urged delegates to read books by World War II–era German agents such as The Dark Invader (about Germany’s attempts to disrupt U.S. shipments of goods to Europe) and My Adventures as a German Secret Agent (describing the enemy’s attempt to “incite revolution and conduct invasion through Mexico”). Conference-goers also discussed such threats as jerry-rigged explosives involving lead pipes, copper, picric and sulfuric acid, wax plugs, and timers, producing bombs that caused “a sheet of intense flame,” destroying ship holds and docks, to name two domestic targets.^{Footnote 56} Despite their use of some precedents, home-defense leaders in World War II settled on a far more militarized approach to home defense than defense councils had adopted in World War I. Defending civilians from air raids now became their top priority.

Working arm in arm, the mayors and the Roosevelt administration would use La Guardia’s Civil Defense Board to launch blackout drills, start a shelter-building program, station guards at defense factories, refine evacuation planning, practice firefighting and gas defense, learn how to repair buildings damaged in air strikes, and safeguard the nation’s water, food, phones, mail, electric grids, and transportation systems. La Guardia embedded in his report the idea of experimentation, suggesting that while New Dealers had crafted an effective response to the Great Depression, they now needed to improvise and mobilize the federal government and the public to defend democracy from fascism. The problem required a national solution, not a series of local Band-Aids.

He declared that Americans must turn to England for its model policy, telling reporters that “we had the benefit of British experience.” Britons taught them that the national government was responsible in peacetime for social welfare and law and order—and in wartime its duties expanded to include defense of lives, property, and freedom from their enemies. In peace, governments lit street lamps, demolished aging buildings, enrolled students in school, and provided other services (heat, potable water, sanitation) that made the cities more inhabitable. In times of war, the modern government had to rethink its role in the lives of citizens. Officials would need to keep city streets dark, rescue civilians “buried beneath masses of debris,” keep students out of school, and help people survive for weeks straight with no access to heat, electricity, running water, or sanitation. The Battle of Britain had transformed London into a city from the early industrial age. La Guardia’s report dismissed any “eleventh-hour improvisation,” echoing FDR’s argument that modern war had given lightning speed to military attacks. The United States would have no warning that fascists were about to attack it. Echoing FDR’s rhetoric, La Guardia pointed out that modern “aircraft do not recognize State political boundaries any more than microbes do; and neither do bombs for that matter.” The nation’s forty-eight states had become “archaic geographical boundaries” and ceding too much power to the states invited a national calamity if war came. The cities would be the target; the federal government had the resources and clout. Working together, the cities and Washington had to expand their authority and defend the country militarily.^{Footnote 57}

La Guardia nodded toward the New Deal, arguing that in addition to appointing military and police officials to the board, FDR should appoint health and welfare advocates, giving it a multidimensional purpose. The board would have morale and human security in its portfolio; assist the White House in its aid of Britain, provide Americans with information on the Allies’ war progress, and expand social services.^{Footnote 58} Isolationists lambasted La Guardia’s vision of “hostile bombers, scattering gas and high explosives from the Atlantic to the Pacific,” as the Chicago Tribune scoffed. “Omaha, Little Rock, and Reno take notice,” it joked. Echoing the handwringing after the Orson Welles’s–induced panic, isolationists castigated home-defense acolytes as “gophers” cowering in their shelters when they heard the blast of a horn or a cloud happened to darken the sun. La Guardia’s “poison gas . . . pronunciamento” was calculated to “alarm the citizenry.”^{Footnote 59}

The mayor brushed off his critics and depicted civilian defense as a rational step squarely within the national interest. In February, he told Midwestern mayors meeting in St. Louis that the odds of an enemy strike on America’s cities stood at 3 percent. He warned them to avoid feeling as if they were safe. “Neither the United States Government nor any Mayor can take that 3 percent chance,” he insisted. Fascists would launch an invasion of America by softening the cities with incendiary bombs, incinerating homes, businesses, and civilians. Based on his careful analysis of air raids on other cities, La Guardia reported that each U.S. mayor must spend roughly $43,000 to ensure that its fire companies had enough water-pumping equipment and other supplies. New York City actually needed $16 million and Philadelphia $3 million to build their forces. The job required funding and national leadership from the White House.^{Footnote 60}

La Guardia’s home-defense proposal received a serious airing at the highest levels. FDR’s trusted aide Harry Hopkins, who on January 1, 1941, arrived in Britain to report on its war needs for FDR; Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, and FDR’s fixer Thomas “the Cork” Corcoran (“the liberals,” one internal White House document dubbed them) held talks about a “LaGuardia committee,” but their views of its purpose were so conflicted “that there isn’t much chance of having them work together unless there is some kind of pressure from ON HIGH.” FDR advised Ickes to find somebody to handle publicity for La Guardia’s committee, but whether that pressure was applied was unclear.^{Footnote 61}

FDR’s aides launched a robust debate about the “home defense thing.” FDR worried that the policy lacked “ideal programs” and specific goals. His concern had some basis in fact. His aides clashed about the shape of home defense—and which lessons they should draw from London. Ickes endorsed morale building as a crucial aspect of any home-defense initiative, and he urged that any new agency track the activities of the administration’s antiwar critics. Director of the Office of Government Reports Lowell Mellett wanted the home-defense setup to build popular support for FDR’s national security strategy, while La Guardia lobbied for the abolition of the Division of State and Local Cooperation, led by director Frank Bane, in favor of setting up a home-security agency to defend the cities.^{Footnote 62} Clearly all of this activity and the lobbying from his allies put FDR in a quandary. When would he establish a federal home-defense committee? Who would run it? What would its mission be? How much power would it wield? How would it coordinate with other agencies, states, cities, and millions of Americans?

The White House was taking the debate about an attack on America with the utmost seriousness. When Bane and Administrative Assistant William McReynolds sought a meeting with FDR on home defense, an official scribbled on February 28 that “McReynolds + Bane OK” and underneath it wrote “(a) Development in city of fire apparatus; (b) gas attacks; (c) Bomb shelter.” Budget Director Harold Smith suggested to FDR that Bane’s Division be put in charge of mass mobilization of volunteers and community assistance, writing that “we are preparing a draft of an order . . . for your consideration.”^{Footnote 63} If La Guardia’s role in the setup and the purpose of home defense remained in dispute, the number of officials involved, and the pace at which they worked that February, revealed an issue requiring action and gaining traction.^{Footnote 64} Although enacting Lend-Lease remained FDR’s highest priority, the home-defense question assumed a new urgency.

The Blitz also provided the context for home-defense efforts within communities across the United States; civic groups pressed local governments to adopt a home-defense program. On January 4, Washington’s Federation of Citizens’ Associations adopted a resolution urging the District to acquire “steel helmets, asbestos suits and gas masks” and prepare for air raids.^{Footnote 65} On January 21, the American Legion and the Army launched four days of air raid drills in four East Coast states with ten thousand volunteer air raid observers. Popular support for the drills showed the intensifying interest in home defense among veterans and other constituencies. In one simulation, enemy planes dropped-four thousand-pound bombs on New York City, destroying the foundations of skyscrapers and blasting the upper floors with “aerial torpedoes.” Members of the American Legion working as air raid watchers stood on the roof of the Empire State Building and other New York landmarks and brought a taste of military life to the nation’s most populous city.^{Footnote 66} In mid-February, another quasi-military civic group, American Defenders of Freedom, started training volunteers in air raid defense, holding widely attended classes free of charge on Manhattan’s West Forty-fifth Street.^{Footnote 67} Popular opinion gradually began to favor greater preparations to handle air raids on American soil. In New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, 50 percent of residents said they supported having blackout drills for every town and city in their states. In the West, some 46 percent of the people endorsed air raid drills, and even in the isolationist Midwest approximately one-third of residents supported drills. The country was clearly divided, but to millions of Americans the prospect of German or Japanese attack was becoming more realistic all the time. Those living in rural communities and small towns often reported that they felt “too far away” from the front; they feared, instead, that blackout and air raid drills would cause “hysteria.”^{Footnote 68} But millions of Americans felt vulnerable.

On January 15, La Guardia held a private meeting with one hundred members of his City Defense Council. He had begun to mobilize New York City in the face of federal inaction. He made plans to handle enemy air raids. The meeting had a wartime aura. Held in City Hall’s Council Chamber, some of its members had to circumnavigate police barricades to enter the hall. New York’s assistant fire chief described the lessons his colleagues had gleaned on their home-defense tours of London, and the mayor and other officials debated use of the city’s subways as shelters along the lines of London’s Underground. But the War Department’s engineers had discovered that some stations were too close to the surface to protect New Yorkers from bombs. La Guardia had other pressing problems—namely, mobilizing seven million residents for war defense. As if to mark the official start of home defense in the city, the New York Tunnel Authority also issued its pamphlet “If It Comes,” which described New York as the nation’s “nerve center” and “a tempting target.” Lest New York repeat the chaos that Welles’s radio show had wrought, “If It Comes” urged New Yorkers to follow their British counterparts: “keep calm”; “walk, never run”; “do not become panicky, and above all, do not permit any one to cause fear.” While the pamphlet tried to reassure residents that their lives were almost surely safe, the cover art sent an altogether different message—showing nineteen bombers screaming toward the Empire State Building.^{Footnote 69} Meantime, the War Department drafted a pamphlet instructing civilians in basic defense techniques. Military leaders asked Bane’s Division to publish the pamphlet as soon as possible to sate a public desperate for details about home defense. They wanted three thousand copies for themselves so their staff could learn the issues, and the department declared that a “study of recent events in Europe shows the dangers to which a civilian population is subjected during war.”^{Footnote 70} The pamphlet was based largely on the lessons gleaned from England.^{Footnote 71}

The Blitz also set in motion a little-known debate about the best means of defending Americans from land invasion and other emergencies. Roosevelt administration officials examined whether the United States needed a special police force that would defend Americans from fifth columnists. One official from the Public Works Administration endorsed a special home police force to uproot Axis agents and stop revolutions from within America. The plan revealed the hysteria that now gripped some New Deal leaders. The plan called on working-class recruits to wear boots, badges, “rubber coats,” and “trench hats” and carry pistols, “blackjacks,” and “handcuffs” in an emergency.^{Footnote 72} Milwaukee mayor Daniel Hoan argued that the plan contained “political dynamite” that would stir “a tremendous reaction throughout the country which will wind up disastrously to the Administration.” Nazi fascists had put a “centralized government . . . [in] control of the constabulary forces,” and Hoan called it “nonsensical to wage war against Hitler, if we are to adopt his system of government.”^{Footnote 73}

The month of April saw the final push from the mayors lobbying Washington to create a home security agency. On April 21, La Guardia phoned the White House. He told Edwin “Pa” Watson that he wanted to talk to the president about the mayor’s upcoming visit to Canada. At 2:10 pm the next day, he saw FDR. Beyond asking if Roosevelt had a message to the Canadians, La Guardia said he had a few revisions to his home-defense plan and asked FDR to include these changes before releasing it to the public.^{Footnote 74} In April, La Guardia’s long-awaited firefighting report appeared in print. Published by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the eighty-page book featured maps, photos, and drawings and advertised its use as an aid to mayors seeking to protect people’s lives when the United States became a combatant. Home-defense plans aimed at American cities would remain confidential because only those responsible for public safety (not the enemy) deserved access to the report, the book stated.^{Footnote 75} “Aerial warfare has placed a tremendous responsibility on the cities and their civilian populations,” the report argued, citing the British experience.^{Footnote 76} Other mayors agreed with La Guardia that “the fate of Europe can be the fate of America.” Chicago mayor Edward Kelly recounted a British officer who described how on the eve of Hitler’s invasion, Parisians partied in nightclubs “oblivious of the fate that awaited them.” Americans had to avoid that mistake.^{Footnote 77}

April also saw the proliferation of theories about how fascists could attack America. An Army Colonel wrote in the New York Times that fewer than ten enemy agents had the power to infiltrate a city and “seize a radio station,” destroy a subway, disable a power plant, or assassinate city leaders. The colonel had another theory: enemy planes would drop leaflets on Boston and New York before seeking to destroy these cities. He admitted that his ideas elicited “a great laugh . . . in the exuberant security of a cocktail tea anywhere in Manhattan.” But Americans who dismissed such theories risked their lives because “stranger things have happened in this war.”^{Footnote 78} Time magazine acknowledged that an attack on America might appear to some readers “as remote and unreal as an invasion from Mars.” But the nation’s military leaders knew that foreign attacks were no fantasy and concluded that “even a minor raid might cause catastrophic mass hysteria.” Lest Americans forget, “sixty minutes of hokum in an Orson Welles broadcast three years ago” had given the American people “a rough idea of what could happen.”^{Footnote 79} By May, FDR had concluded that he needed a national agency, run by La Guardia, based on the British model, to protect lives, property, and defend against the threat of mass hysteria.

The Blitz inaugurated an era of vulnerability for the United States, when the nation’s ocean barriers offered scant protection against new aviation technologies and the Nazis’ “total war” strategies. In response, Americans adopted a war psychology, the isolationist argument came under duress, and calls to set up a robust, national home-defense agenda spiked. The Roosevelt administration established the Office of Civilian Defense in May 1941 in reaction to the U.S. analysis of the Blitz and a concerted lobbying effort by America’s mayors, police, and fire chiefs—creating for the first time in the twentieth century a federal agency responsible for protecting lives and property from foreign attacks.