World War II Mobilization

Civil defense is most often associated with World War II and the Cold War, but its true origins are earlier if it is defined as the use of bureaucratic means to organize the home front and focus public attention in preparation for war. Civil defense under this definition emerged as part of a military reorganization after the poor performance of militia-style forces during the Spanish-American War.^{Footnote 13} One result of the reorganization was a more professionalized civil defense that was first tested during World War I.^{Footnote 14} These civil defenders watched for invading aircraft, organized blackout drills to darken cities, planned evacuation, and prepared to extinguish fires. The World War I Council of National Defense was charged with “coordinating resources and industries for national defense” and “stimulating civilian morale,” prefiguring Cold War civil defense’s goals of national coordination and mettle rather than tangible defensive machinery.^{Footnote 15} The first civilian defense organizations did not have to address strategic bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles, which framed more familiar debates about Cold War civil defense. They did face organizational challenges posed by a large country and the need to shore up morale, and they accomplished these goals by leaving most of the work of civilian defense to states, localities, and citizens.

Despite or perhaps because of its new importance, civilian defense had ambiguous and multiple goals. The council of national defense coordinated state defense councils, which increased food production through agricultural colleges, organized volunteers to harvest crops, and led snow removal efforts to help ship goods, all in the name of civil defense.^{Footnote 16} Civil defense’s ability to assume diverse missions under a single heading contrasts with homeland security’s top-down narrowing of its missions to those that suit national goals. For example, today even members of Congress repeat the idea that FEMA long had a policy of “no dough for snow.” That ended in 1993 when, after several severe snowstorms, FEMA rescinded the policy of not classifying snowstorms as major disasters.^{Footnote 17} In fact, snow removal and many other tasks outside the scope of FEMA were part of early civilian defense when state councils had wide latitude over their affairs. The councils disbanded after the war, and civilian defense functions receded to become a very small part of military planning.

After the outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939, preparations for war lifted again security concerns to the top of the agenda. President Franklin Roosevelt created the Office of Emergency Management by executive order to coordinate preparations to defend the home front against attack. In August 1940, the president recommended that governors form state and local civil defense councils and develop plans to protect civilians.^{Footnote 18} Some officials opposed mass civil defense out of a concern that mobilization would spark panic, but arguments for being prepared won out over arguments against. ^{Footnote 19} By January 1941, in less than a year’s time, thirty-seven states had formed state councils, and seven hundred localities had created defense councils.^{Footnote 20} Also in 1941, Roosevelt created the Office of Civilian Defense, which included a Division of State and Local Cooperation housed in the executive branch to encourage subnational governments to cooperate with civil defense aims.^{Footnote 21} The OCD’s light hand in guiding civil defense was a relatively new development. In the post–New Deal government, federal authorities had a newly invigorated capacity to coordinate state and local counterparts, but federalism still had sufficient vitality for states to lead implementation.

Today, the Department of Homeland Security struggles to coordinate state and local efforts, but it runs up against heavy-handed federal leadership, a diffuse bureaucracy that is difficult to coordinate even horizontally, and a federal government that issues detailed guidelines prescribing exactly what subnational governments are to do to administer federal programs.^{Footnote 22} While federal officials intended for states and localities to use civil defense programs for their own purposes during the Cold War, today federal officials criticize state homeland security fusion centers if they serve missions such as local law enforcement beyond the terrorism and immigration purposes of the DHS.^{Footnote 23}

Unlike the top-down manner of homeland security that Chertoff warned against, civil defense was not merely federal government aggrandizement. Initially mayors requested federal government and international help.^{Footnote 24} Even before Pearl Harbor, local leaders watched events in Great Britain and worried that the United States might need to undertake similar preparations for war and air raids. In January 1941, New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who served as head of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, submitted a report on civil defense administration that recommended a greater federal government role in civil defense to reduce the financial and planning burdens on municipalities.^{Footnote 25} The International City Managers Association also expressed “concerns about the burden of civil defense on municipal officials” at its 1940 annual meeting in Colorado Springs and welcomed the federal government as a partner in providing plans, guidance, and standards that could be adapted to local needs.^{Footnote 26} While LaGuardia greeted the federal government with open arms, today mayors welcome federal homeland security officials with a cold embrace at best.

Cities agreed about the need for a national program of civil defense, but there was less agreement about what exactly civil defense should do. FDR considered many options—from doing nothing, to elaborate air raid drills, to Interior Secretary Harold Ickes’s idea for a program of government-sponsored propaganda to neutralize the isolationist campaign.^{Footnote 27} Florence Kerr, a deputy administrator of the Works Progress Administration, proposed Home Defense programs that would foster volunteers for social services.^{Footnote 28} Roosevelt asked his assistant, Wayne Coy, and budget director, Harold D. Smith, to come up with a plan.

The Coy group’s proposal incorporated disparate proposals for what civil defense was to be—propaganda, patriotism, functional defenses against air raids, and support for mayors and governors—into a single organization. FDR had a tendency to fuse multiple programs and goals into one “new deal” innovation, and some historians criticized this approach for creating overlapping agencies and goal ambiguity.^{Footnote 29} But there was genius in FDR’s approach, too, because he allowed stakeholders to battle among themselves over what tasks an agency might accomplish, which gave civil defense an extraordinary flexibility to meet a protean threat. At the time, no one knew whether the United States faced a serious threat of an air raid, or whether the more urgent task was inspiring Americans to contribute to the war effort before the situation worsened (in Europe, most predicted at the time, rather than in the Pacific).^{Footnote 30}

Roosevelt officially created the Office of Civil Defense by executive order 8757 on May 20 along the lines of the Coy group’s suggestions.^{Footnote 31} The OCD had two divisions, the Board for Civilian Protection and the Volunteer Participation Committee. The OCD had representatives from cabinet departments and from the U.S. conference of mayors, the American Municipal Association, and the Council of State Governments. The Volunteer Participation Committee had civilian representatives appointed by the president.^{Footnote 32} LaGuardia appointed Eleanor Roosevelt to head the committee and create volunteer programs to support public health, nutrition, and recreation. The level of state and local participation and the prominence given to volunteers stands in contrast to today’s professionalized Department of Homeland Security with two hundred thousand federal employees.

The OCD gave civil defense a home at the national level, but it was largely an advisory organization. Local authorities were responsible for carrying out protective activities, and for developing what those activities would be, whether training volunteer firefighters, rehearsing evacuations, or conducting blackout drills. In contrast, states and localities today are told in no uncertain terms precisely what they need to do to receive homeland security grant dollars, even if the detailed instructions result in purchases of questionable utility, such as a new $256,643 armored truck, complete with a rotating turret, for the police department in Fargo, North Dakota.^{Footnote 33}

In contrast to concern over federal oversight and imperfect accountability in today’s homeland security programs, early civil defense pioneered a shared state-federal government regionalism.^{Footnote 34} LaGuardia created nine regional OCD offices that corresponded to the Army Corps of Engineers’ regions, and the War Department and Army Corps assigned officers to each region.^{Footnote 35} LaGuardia’s biographer reports that he spent three days per week at OCD’s headquarters, and two days in New York as mayor.^{Footnote 36} In addition, he toured the country to draw the attention of state and local officials and the public to civil defense.^{Footnote 37} Compared with what would have happened without an OCD, LaGuardia succeeded. Historian Robert Miller found in the archives hundreds of letters from governors, mayors, and other officials offering support for OCD initiatives, and testifying to the influence of the office.^{Footnote 38}

To strengthen ties between the federal government and local efforts, LaGuardia appointed former mayors to posts in regional offices.^{Footnote 39} Regional directors worked with state and local defense councils to develop civilian protection plans, fill sandbags, and mobilize spotters who watched for air invasions. Local councils organized volunteer efforts such as scrap drives, collecting metal that would ostensibly be used in a war effort, if war ever came to the United States.^{Footnote 40} Local blackout drills drew widespread attention—and how could they not, with pitch-black skies in cities that usually glistened at night. News reports show that more than ten thousand people in East St. Louis left their homes one night 1941 to observe a dark sky.^{Footnote 41} Some cities recruited auxiliary police forces, ostensibly to help protect critical infrastructure and provide emergency services. These police forces connected citizen volunteers to police professionals, and they provided capacity that could be used for other purposes. One enterprising local defense council in Bridgeport, Connecticut, created a “bomb taxi,” a metal protected vehicle that helped to remove unexploded ordinance. Meanwhile, the federal government civil defenders and congressional advocates did not assume that they could direct all civil defense activity, and they did not assume that local officials were so amateurish as to be unreliable partners. Whether because of a lack of resources for civil defense in the federal government or respect for federalism, national authorities kept their distance.

At the same time, however, national political figures did try to define civil defense according to their own worldview. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt viewed civil defense as an opportunity to expand government’s social welfare programs, and she was concerned that the OCD was not taking advantage of opportunities to improve health, education, the arts, and help for the poor.^{Footnote 42} She joined the agency as LaGuardia’s assistant and led its civilian participation branch.^{Footnote 43} She clashed with LaGuardia, who criticized social welfare programs as “sissy stuff,” and wanted civil defense to retain a military focus.^{Footnote 44} Nevertheless, Roosevelt’s efforts were no small thing in a country with an isolationist tradition and active antiwar factions.^{Footnote 45} The Chicago Tribune, an isolationist paper, charged that the OCD was created by “a war minded administration to whip up war fever.”^{Footnote 46}

The public’s interest in shoring up defenses at home spiked after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7. By the end of 1941, more than seven hundred and fifty thousand men and women had volunteered. In addition, the Red Cross issued nearly two hundred thousand first-aid certificates as part of a civil defense drive from June to November 1941. LaGuardia believed in volunteers as the backbone of civil defense for principled and practical reasons. The OCD had fewer than one hundred staff members during his time there, and local offices were similarly bare-bones. Civil defense tasks far outstripped the number of professionals available to carry them out.^{Footnote 47}

After the United States entered the war, the debate shifted from whether to mobilize to how, and the OCD prepared for an influx of new volunteers. In the eight months since his appointment, LaGuardia created thousands of local defense councils and programs to involve citizens as auxiliary police, air-raid wardens, and medical staff. There was even a program for messengers sixteen to twenty-one years of age to deliver news among civil defense organizations.^{Footnote 48} Total participation when LaGuardia departed was 5,601,920 volunteers through 8,500 civil defense councils by one estimate, but critics in the Roosevelt administration thought participation was not high enough and that LaGuardia neglected the social welfare function of civil defense promoted by Eleanor Roosevelt.^{Footnote 49} “Little Flower,” as he was known, both because Fiorello is Italian for Little Flower and because he stood only five feet tall, also drew criticism for dealing directly with mayors and city governments and bypassing state offices.^{Footnote 50} The brunt of the criticism was that volunteer programs were too small, and that LaGuardia was too brusque in style and too willing to approach localities in his management practice. These criticisms are in sharp contrast with today’s focus on accountability, which usually means accountability to federal guidelines. Today’s criticism of the DHS is also notable for the relative absence of concern about volunteers and local improvisation, both of which characterized civil defense.^{Footnote 51}

After Pearl Harbor, FDR elevated regional director and Harvard law professor James Landis to become the full-time head of the OCD in 1942, while LaGuardia returned to his mayoral duties.^{Footnote 52} To address the surge in interest in the war effort, Landis created the Civilian Defense Corps, which recruited 10 million volunteers by the end of 1943.^{Footnote 53} Over the next two years, volunteers covered streetlights for blackout drills, learned basic emergency techniques, and practiced cleaning up chemical spills. Public support for civil defense grew as the war continued, along with the number of volunteers. Between May 1941 and July 1942, the agency developed air raid procedures that state and local councils implemented. The threat of an enemy invasion receded as the war was fought in Europe and Asia, but the OCD did not close its doors. It sent its volunteers to health, welfare, and community service activities such as community fitness programs. The OCD also continued its morale-boosting efforts, shoring up support for a war in which the United States was now officially involved. FDR underlined the importance of civil defense to the war effort in a 1942 fireside chat, claiming that civil defense volunteers “are helping to fortify our national unity and our real understanding of the fact that we are all involved in this war.”^{Footnote 54}

By the war’s end, more than 5 million Americans had registered for various kinds of volunteer activities, training, and certifications through some fourteen thousand local defense councils.^{Footnote 55} Other estimates placed the number of volunteers at 11 million, or one out of every thirteen Americans.^{Footnote 56} Either number dwarfs the size of OCD’s paid staff, which was under one hundred people during the LaGuardia years, and which never exceeded fifteen hundred until Truman closed the office at the end of the war.^{Footnote 57}

The OCD and World War II civil defense succeeded because of the sheer number of participants and because of their strong sense of solidarity—we’re all in this together, they thought. Even if the volunteers’ contribution to the offensive and defensive purposes of the war were negligible, their participation was not. Their involvement—however small—required some level of consent and sacrifice of time and attention, which are not small matters from the perspective of democratic theory. Civil defense participation comes closer to the civic ideal of participatory democracy than many contemporary forms of political participation such as occasional voting or checkbook activism.^{Footnote 58} It is certainly closer to the ideal than contemporary Americans’ interaction with Transportation Security Administration officials at airports or the disbursement of disaster relief aid. In civil defense, citizens in local communities volunteered to be the eyes and ears of the state and shaped the implementation of the law. In the TSA, by contrast, federal civil servants and their technological accouterments question, irradiate, and monitor relatively passive citizens.

In recent years, federal officials have asked the DHS to develop a “culture of preparedness,” but studies show that citizens remain woefully underprepared, failing to stock enough food, water, batteries, and medical supplies to be able to remain in their homes for several days, the recommended course of action during many disasters.^{Footnote 59} Citizens also remain unengaged in defining the purposes of homeland security, which are usually administered by federal civil servants and contractors. The culture of preparedness standard is below the wartime civil defense ideal of community volunteers staffing civil defense programs and adapting them to their own, local purposes, but even this standard has proven difficult to meet. Perhaps civil defense’s cooperative federalism was key to its modest but real successes. Federal, state, and local officials made policies jointly, often at the request of localities, even as national figures such as Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt or LaGuardia used civil defense to fulfill their political agendas.

The fate of civil defense in Portland, Oregon, is typical of many other cities, and its malleability contrasts with the more static history of DHS programs. During the war, Portland created food and water stockpiles and recruited volunteers who learned how to put out small fires. For example, by 1942 Portland had trained twenty-five hundred volunteer firefighters.^{Footnote 60} In 1956, Portland became the first city in the United States to build a second government operations center outside of the city, a practice that has become standard for emergency management in large cities.^{Footnote 61} The city’s civil defense teams conducted practice evacuations and mock air raids, and sometimes responded to floods. In 1963, however, Portland withdrew from the Federal Civil Defense System and the Los Angeles Times declared civil defense in the city “dead” after its poor performance in the Columbus Day Storm of October 12, 1962, which killed forty people and caused damages estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The state legislature and city council asked “Where was civil defense when the storm struck?” and civil defense’s communications and warning procedures were found lacking.^{Footnote 62} An outspoken city commissioner led the charge against civil defense, and the council voted to terminate the city’s program in full, eliminating eleven full-time jobs and millions in equipment.^{Footnote 63} Civil defense did not really disappear in Oregon, however, even though the formal agency in Portland did. Instead, as fire and police agencies took over the underground command center, evacuation routing, and other tasks, civil defense transformed into emergency management. In contrast, homeland security programs today are driven by federal government financing and thus federal government priorities. One wonders whether the DHS and its grant programs or local homeland security offices will have the same capacity for adaptation as Portland’s civil defense programs.

From Defending Against Attack to Defending Against Disaster

Civil defense served multiple goals even in wartime, but its legacy for cooperative federalism was put to the test when wartime fervor waned. Portland publicly severed ties with civil defense, but behind the scenes emergency and fire services personnel adapted civil defense’s plans, routines, and operations center to prepare for natural disasters. After the war, many more states and localities transformed their wartime civil defense programs into efforts to prepare for natural disasters. Civil defense succeeded in strengthening national-subnational ties in American federalism by providing a policy area in which states could implement national concerns. Civil defense’s shelter program is often criticized for never coming close to the goal of providing adequate shelter from nuclear attack. It may be precisely because the federal program never came to fruition, however, that key decisions shaping civil defense were made at the state and local level, even in areas such as disaster preparedness that had a limited tradition of public action.^{Footnote 64}

Whether because of federal inaction or a genuine commitment to cooperative federalism, the early Cold War showed the potential for states and localities to direct federal programs to regionally-specific needs. The 1960s were a pivotal time in American federalism according to Martha Derthick, as the divisions of power and prerogative between states and the federal government were tilting toward the latter.^{Footnote 65} Civil defense was both a cause and effect of this shift in federalism. The postwar American federal government assumed new powers, which affected civil defense as well as many other fields. But civil defense after the war also created new, permanent state and local level agencies that initially implemented an ineffectual shelter program. These same organizations, however, would later implement other policies, including natural and industrial disaster management described in the third case in this article. The shelter program is associated with the much-lampooned Bert the Turtle character, who “knew just what to do” during an atomic bomb attack—duck and cover.^{Footnote 66} Yet the organizational routines it spawned, such as evacuation and warning procedures and the connections between national and state programs, were a success, measured by the wide adoption of civil defense at the state and local levels in the 1950s and 1960s and the durability of these organizations, which persist in new forms to the present day.^{Footnote 67}

The shift to natural-disasters work is striking because of the distinctly military origins of Cold War civil defense. The Soviet Union detonated an atomic device in August 1949, and soon after Truman signed the Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950, creating the Federal Civil Defense Administration.^{Footnote 68} The FCDA consolidated functions of wartime agencies and developed programs to provide structural protection from attack, including shelters. It also developed posters and brochures to warn Americans about the dangers of Communism and the Soviet military threat.^{Footnote 69} Without financial incentives for states and localities, it only loosely coordinated subnational agencies. Section 201(i) of the law required that federal government funds could not be used for state and local equipment or personnel.^{Footnote 70} Therefore, state and localities were left to foot the bill.

The act encouraged states to form interstate compacts if they needed additional resources, rather than rely on the federal government. The FCDA’s 1955 Annual Statistical Report concluded that “the interstate compact was considered necessary by the Congress to avoid Federal centralization of civil defense operations which might result if each State could operate in civil defense matters only as a separate entity.”^{Footnote 71} The report’s self-assured language belies the shifting attitudes toward federalism and the prerogatives of states during the period. Congress created the First Hoover Commission in 1947 ostensibly to dismantle the New Deal, but Democratic electoral gains and the commission’s work produced recommendations that helped to ratify the New Deal’s administrative structure, reorganizing some government agencies around hierarchical lines and recommending the creation of larger departments.^{Footnote 72} Civil defense largely escaped these recommendations, perhaps because no one quite knew what to do with a national civil defense program. The Department of Defense was reluctant to claim it, preferring to focus on offensive strategies.^{Footnote 73}

What explains why civil defense was not swallowed up by the federal government?⁷⁴ National politicians of the 1950s were divided about the value of Cold War civil defense, and they had not yet discovered the electoral benefits that came with bureaucratizing and claiming credit for disaster relief.^{Footnote 75} Meanwhile, Val Peterson, who led the Federal Civil Administration, justified the centralized but relatively light hand of the agency as the “most efficient” way to provide disaster aid to states.^{Footnote 76} The Federal Disaster Act of 1950 authorized federal agencies to fill “gaps” in assistance after disasters. The governor of a state would apply directly to the president for assistance in events where the damage outstripped state and local capacity to respond and recover, and the president could certify an event as a “major disaster” eligible for federal assistance. Even so, the bulk of the aid was to be provided by subnational governments and private and quasi-governmental organizations such as the Red Cross.^{Footnote 77}

While the federal government wanted to avoid federalizing civil defense, the states were allowing civil defense to be used for natural disasters and other emergencies beyond foreign attack. The federal government transferred responsibility for natural-disasters programs to the FCDA in 1953, and most states followed suit, moving their natural-disaster functions under the supervision of the state civil defense director.^{Footnote 78} Large cities had similar systems, and they relied on a small civil defense professional staff supplemented by trained civil defense and Red Cross volunteers.^{Footnote 79} By 1955, thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia permitted civil defense programs to be used for a range of hazards, including natural disasters.

Given the genuine concern about nuclear war during the early Cold War, the ability of states to fuse natural disasters and traditional military civil defense missions was remarkable. To take one example, North Carolina governor William Kerr Scott created the North Carolina Council of Civil Defense on July 24, 1950, which provided for a civil defense director “subject to the direction and control of the Governor.”^{Footnote 80} The agency was modeled after national-level civil defense plans, but it was technically a creature of the governor. The organization’s primary tool was the ability to focus citizens’ attention on preparing for emergencies through volunteer campaigns and educational programs. The North Carolina agency was to address an expansive category of emergencies; its mission was to “promote and direct thorough and extensive community organization for common protection and orderly action . . . in disaster.”^{Footnote 81}

The agency’s most influential early director was Major General Edward F. Griffen, who served from 1954 to 1967. Like many civil defense leaders, he made the transition from military service in Europe to engaging volunteers on the home front. He had also been a lawyer and state legislator, which provided experience for the political part of his job, rallying groups around the state behind his civil defense programs.^{Footnote 82} Civil defense in the immediate postwar period had a distinctly military tone. Former military leaders like Griffen took the helm of agencies that focused on the threat of attack from abroad, both nuclear and conventional, assuming that these were threats that could be defended against with enough preparation on the home front. The government’s preparations for war reflected the anxiety of the broader society.^{Footnote 83}

One of the most enduring legacies of federal government involvement in civil defense against attack was the shelter program. The federal government provided encouragement and guidance, but most shelters were privately financed. The earliest shelters protected against bombs, but by the 1950s attention shifted to the newly discovered dangers of fire and fallout.^{Footnote 84} To some degree, new knowledge about fallout made shelter construction easier. Fallout shelters were less expensive to build than the bomb shelters of the early days of civil defense because they only needed to provide protection from radiation fallout rather than the pressure and fire of a nuclear blast.^{Footnote 85} The National Fallout Shelter Survey, which lasted from 1948 until 1986, was designed to identify shelters and regulate their conditions. The survey highlighted the relatively small number of shelters compared to the population.^{Footnote 86} In March 1960, Congress held hearings on civil defense, and learned that in the thirty-five states and sixty-six cities that provided reports, only 1,565 home fallout shelters had been built. North Carolina civil defense reported on March 7, 1960, that only twenty-five private homes had constructed shelters and just two public buildings had shelters.^{Footnote 87} Historian Frank Blazich reports that “by October 1962, the survey had located and licensed public fallout shelter spaces for only 2.8 percent of the state’s resident population, and it had determined that adequate space was available for an additional 4.9 percent of the population.”^{Footnote 88} While shelter construction did not reach the levels its advocates had hoped for in any state, North Carolina’s shelter population was especially sparse. The practice of constructing shelters for defense against foreign attack stemmed from federal government and defense planners, but Raleigh and local communities led its implementation. ^{Footnote 89}

In implementing the program, state civil defense offices built connections to a number of agencies beyond those with civil defense in the name. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) provided civil defense information to rural areas through cooperative extension offices. The USDA informed rural counties about “inexpensive shelters” and “methods for protecting livestock and crops against fallout.”^{Footnote 90} The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers participated in the shelter survey, inspecting and registering spaces deemed shelters. Experts from federal agencies participated in state initiatives as genuine partners, not as the sanctimonious big brother that contemporary homeland security officials in states and localities complain about.^{Footnote 91}

To be sure, the rhetoric and debate about civil defense and the flurry of new government organizations in North Carolina far outstripped the state’s ability to provide tangible protection to citizens. In this, North Carolina was typical of many places in the United States.^{Footnote 92} The bulk of the financial responsibility for building shelters and organizing air-raid watches and auxiliary emergency services fell on individual citizens rather than the state and federal government.^{Footnote 93} The governor and mayors like LaGuardia before them occupied the bully pulpit, exhorting citizens to do their part. State offices did provide lasting peacetime programs to spur citizen involvement, however. Women’s and rotary clubs held discussions about fallout dangers. The state agency delivered Office of Civil Defense publications Fallout Protection and Family Shelter Designs to localities that requested them, and sometimes the agency sponsored fallout shelter construction workshops. An Office of Civil Defense regional director wrote a sober memo reminding local directors of the morale-boosting purpose of their work, noting that the workshops “will not impart knowledge in depth. They will help dispel misinformation and build support for the shelter program within the construction industry.”^{Footnote 94} Civil defense maintained its propaganda mission even at the state level. Historian Frank Blazich’s survey of news and editorial opinion in North Carolina newspapers in the 1960s finds that “citizens did not focus on the lack of fallout shelters. Instead, they appeared to accept that North Carolina’s civil defense strength was in the ability to maintain communication and a centralized oversight over the local civil defense offices. Citizens seem to have valued the fact that the state could react to the crisis in an efficient and collected, orderly fashion, far more than they bemoaned the dearth of shelters.”^{Footnote 95} The shelter program may have had little functional effect on protection or even on the Cold War, but it did mark a period of state institutionalization of a federal government program in which a region not in the Soviet bull’s-eye, North Carolina, mimicked national priorities.

Local Civil Defense for Managing Natural Disasters

While civil defense began as a federal government effort to defend the home front against military attack from abroad, the federal structure of the United States allowed states and localities to use civil defense organizations at the subnational level to prepare for the natural disasters that threatened them more than the war that never came. In the United States, governors do not work for the president, and mayors really do not work for governors. States have authorities separate from the national government, and mayors and local officials have different electoral bases than state politicians. While the national government focused citizens’ attention on civil defense as part of national defense and provided templates and programs that state and local officials could use, subnational government implementation showed the dynamic character of American federalism. If an enduring national program of peacetime civil defense was part of a transformation in American federalism in which the national government’s priorities prevailed over those of the states, the subsequent use of civil defense to prepare for and respond to local disasters marked a flexibility in the cooperative federalism of the era. In this, the civil defense approach to federalism could be a model for contemporary homeland security programs.

The best evidence for the flexibility of the cooperative federalism of the era is the existence of defense goals for civil defense at the national level and other disaster and emergency preparedness goals at the state and local level.^{Footnote 96} For instance, states and localities used the concept of civil defense as a way to address the quotidian but deadly danger of house fires. The Negro Star of Wichita, Kansas, ran an editorial titled, “Fire prevention is an important part of civil defense.”^{Footnote 97} The newspaper began with the assumption that civil defense was first and foremost about defending against military attack, noting that the fires caused by bombing raids can cause more damage than the blast, but that people can take precautions to reduce the damage of firebombing.

The Wichita newspaper advised readers to clean out “trashpiles, rubbish, or stored odds and ends,” clear vacant lots, not store flammable fluids, and sweep chimneys. A chimneysweep is not usually thought of as a frontline civil defender, but the newspaper and many others like it recognized that broad civil defense purposes could inspire people to act to prevent more routine dangers. In this case, a newspaper, as a private, local organization not yet part of national conglomerates, used civil defense for a purpose that was not part of national-level goals. One could imagine a DHS-like federal organization sanctioning local civil defenders for using federal resources for non-homeland security goals or, worse, providing grant guidance requiring that local authorities purchase expensive fire trucks rather than simply working with the media and private organizations to spread the word about the dangers of fire hazards.

As faith in the value of civil defense in war declined, cities seized on natural-disasters missions as a replacement. When a 1963 fire destroyed more than six hundred homes in Los Angeles, the city’s civil defense command posts were activated to lead the response, and civil defense professionals and volunteers used their knowledge of the grant process to access federal funds to help with the cleanup. Los Angeles Civil Defense director Joseph Quinn said that “it was the disastrous Bel-Air fire, the second greatest fire from the point of loss in our history, that we feel civil defense passed its stiffest test.”^{Footnote 98} The measure of the civil defense agency was its performance in a natural disaster, not its preparations for war.

Even during large-scale regional disasters, local civil defense offices often led the response. Hurricane Betsy in 1965 provides a telling example.^{Footnote 99} Betsy first made landfall in the Caribbean, then continued across the Florida peninsula, strengthened in the Gulf Coast, and came ashore through Louisiana on September 9, wrecking havoc along the coast. Known as “Billion-Dollar Betsy,” the hurricane was the first in the United States estimated to cause a billion dollars in damages.^{Footnote 100} Much like Hurricane Katrina in 2006, Betsy carried a storm surge that overtopped the levees in the city’s Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish, flooding the city and many of its homes with soupy water.^{Footnote 101}

Nuclear weapons scientist Edward Teller made waves after the hurricane when he said that if New Orleans’ civil defense organization “had been on its toes” a faster evacuation would have saved lives. At least seventy-five deaths were attributed to the storm, most of these in Louisiana. “It is incredible that people had only twenty minutes between the time they first knew water was rising and the time it reached a height over their heads,” Teller alleged. “Then it’s too late.”^{Footnote 102} Teller was a staunch advocate of the protective and deterrent value of military civil defense, but he worried that New Orleans was not prepared for a nuclear attack because it “was not even prepared for the tragic, but relatively smaller force of superstorm Betsy.” Teller was not alone in his criticism of Betsy as an object lesson in the failures of civil defense. Secretary of Commerce John T. Conner said that the storm pointed out the need to develop fail-safe communications systems through improved technology and redundancy.^{Footnote 103} New Orleans’ power and telephone systems failed two hours after the storm began. Though civil defense underperformed according to some, the criticism assumes that preparing for and responding to natural disasters is part of civil defense.

Placed in context, civil defense did not perform badly given very limited resources. The death toll of seventy-five pales in comparison to the devastation of the Camille and Katrina storms that later struck New Orleans. After Betsy, New Orleans officials denounced Teller’s claims, and mayor Victor Schiro said that New Orleans has “the best there is” in civil defense. To city officials, civil defense was disaster preparedness, and the mayor turned to city civil defense director Charles W. Erdman to detail the city’s efforts. Erdman told the press: “We were prepared, even two days before. The people did have adequate warning.”^{Footnote 104} Civil defense officials manned shelters housing tens of thousands of people in New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish. In St. Bernard, thirty thousand of the parish’s forty thousand people were forced out of their homes by floods. The local civil defense agency found shelters in schools, gyms, and other cavernous buildings. The military pitched in, too, hosting a dozen evacuees at the naval air station in Algiers, Louisiana. Local civil officials assumed the difficult job of deciding when people could return to their homes—or barring them from doing so. “You can’t keep 40,000 people cooped up without feelings becoming a little strained,” St. Bernard parish assistant civil defense director Arwyn Corne told reporters.^{Footnote 105}

With obvious suffering all around, finger pointing among federal, state, and local officials usually accompanies catastrophic disasters.^{Footnote 106} National figures criticized Betsy’s devastation as evidence that civil defense failed. Local officials, however, pointed to the crucial functions performed by civil defenders in responding to a catastrophic hurricane, and by 1965 both national and local figures assumed that civil defense included natural-disaster management at its core. Federal authorities were partners in the response, filling in the “gaps” mentioned in the 1950 Federal Disaster Act rather than directing the subnational effort.