On 23 March 1964, as local civil defence programmes unravelled across the United States, the House of Representatives Committee on Armed Services held hearings to debate the extension of the Federal Civil Defence Act of 1950. Mary Temple Holmgren, president of Baltimore's chapter of the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy (SANE), credited Baltimore's civil defence block captains with undermining the city's civil defence organization: ‘Some civil defence officials have credited SANE with being at the bottom of this “dire plot” to undermine their program. I wish we could take the credit.’ Holmgren explained to the committee that it was actually Baltimore's civil defence volunteers, those charged with protecting their neighbours from the horrors of nuclear war, who rebelled against the programme. In the wake of their rebellion, city council voted to defund the programme, making Baltimore the first east coast city to reject federal civil defence policy. To understand why, this article analyses federal civil defence policies that were implemented in a major American city and analyses how local officials interpreted those policies. It argues that it was those most invested in the programme's survival, urban civil defence block captains and officers, who rejected the local programme's increasingly militarized and centralized police command and control structure.Footnote 1 As post-attack planning shifted away from community preservation in the early 1950s toward maintenance of law and order by the early 1960s, Baltimore's volunteers were not willing to relinquish their civil defence responsibilities to the police force.
By analysing the actions of urban civil defence volunteers and officers, it becomes easier to isolate the forces of dissent within the civil defence establishment, tracing them down to the neighbourhood level. In doing so, this article adds another dimension to the debate about why civil defence foundered in the early 1960s. Since roughly 2001, historians have grappled with that question. Some have cited the general feeling in the H-bomb era that it was unrealistic for government to plan for such a devastating nuclear attack the same way as conventional attack. Others cite broader protests against civil defence as the reason for the programme's demise. In 2006, Dee Garrison argued that it predominantly concerned women, especially mothers, who banded together to establish activist anti-civil defence coalitions. By 1960, groups like the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom mounted mass protests against civil defence programmes. Such protests certainly did occur and were responsible for turning many citizens against civil defence. However, in Baltimore's case, they were not the central causes behind the city's ultimate rejection of the programme.
The dominant post-9/11 narrative on civil defence argues that the programme was flawed from the start, suffered from a lack of realistic policy-making, was viewed as unrealistic by the majority of Americans and ultimately failed. Scott Knowles has stated, ‘the overwhelming consensus among policy makers, journalists, and scholars who study civil defence is that it failed, unequivocally, to provide anything approaching realistic protection from nuclear war for the average U.S. citizen and his or her property’.Footnote 2 David Krugler suggested similarly that civil defence in the nation's capital ‘met with failure’ and characterized defensive dispersal, volunteer recruitment and federal atomic drills as flawed exercises designed ‘to show that the survival of the local population was just as important as the continuity of government’.Footnote 3 Meanwhile, Kenneth Rose acknowledged the seriousness of nuclear war but credited ordinary Americans with rejecting the federal government's civil defence programmes, particularly its plan to construct massive fallout shelters during the 1960s.Footnote 4 This article, while not minimizing the flaws in civil defence, and while certainly not arguing that civil defence was a success, also builds upon the essential contributions of Guy Oakes, Andrew Grossman, David Monteyne and Laura McEnaney, who all analyse policies that were implemented and how they impacted American and global politics, culture and society.Footnote 5
Early 1950s American civil defence was based upon Britain's World War II civil defence programme. That programme, designed to protect citizens from conventional bombing, emphasized self- and community preservation. It was primarily a civilian effort that employed an all-volunteer organization.Footnote 6 American civil defence departed from the British model as disaster preparedness became fused with law enforcement and urban social control in the early 1960s.
Self-help becomes community help in Baltimore
In Civil Defence Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties, Laura McEnaney argued that the message of ‘self-help’ was a cornerstone of federal civil defence policy in the early 1950s. The Federal Civil Defence Administration (FCDA) tried to convince Americans through public relations efforts that effective civil defence was not a question of national security as much as it was a question of personal responsibility. According to McEnaney, ‘the government's call for self-help popularized preparedness, but it also enabled various citizen groups to interpret and enact its precepts in ways that departed from official FCDA scripts’.Footnote 7 This was certainly the case in Baltimore. Self-help in Baltimore translated into community help, as civil defence volunteers who bought those messages worked with Baltimore's civil defence director between 1952 and 1959 to ensure that their neighbourhoods would be able to help themselves after an attack. Though the FCDA changed its priorities many times between 1950 and 1958, shifting from self- and community preservation to evacuation and, later, to maintenance of law and order, its early self-help messaging made a significant and lasting impact upon Baltimore's civil defence planners and volunteers. Aided by the Advertising Council and executives of the advertising firm BBD&O, the FCDA spent millions of dollars on propaganda designed to convince people that they, their neighbourhoods and their cities would survive a nuclear attack.
Community help prompted civil defence volunteers in Baltimore to recruit and train other volunteers, who developed comprehensive response plans for their individual communities. Some mapped out detailed block plans, which made reference to the location of vulnerable citizens who might have had difficulty trying to escape. From 1952 to 1959, Baltimore's civil defence director Colonel Frank Milani, who served under Democratic Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro Jr, supported community help in lieu of a more coherent national plan. Significantly, Milani and D’Alesandro also rejected the notion that civil defence needed to be administered by people with military experience. They supported civilian volunteers and applauded their efforts, even mentioning some of the most helpful ones in their 1956 testimony to Congressman Chet Holifield's committee on civil defence. When they left office in 1959, federal civil defence policy's prioritization of law and order over self- and community help, combined with new local leadership, radically altered civil defence at the neighbourhood level. While they may have thought they were prepared for nuclear war, civil defence volunteers were not prepared for such an abrupt change in politics and policy.
Federal civil defence policy change and its impact on the city
In 1957, a report titled Deterrence & Survival in the Nuclear Age, released by the Gaither Committee just after the Soviet launch of Sputnik, was used to justify the claim that a ‘missile gap’ had widened between the United States and the Soviet Union.Footnote 8 To President Eisenhower's chagrin, the report echoed Congressman Chet Holifield's 1957 recommendation that a $25 billion shelter programme immediately be authorized, which would indicate Americans’ ‘will to survive, and [their] understanding of [their] responsibilities in a nuclear age’.Footnote 9 The report argued that the ‘(GNP) of the USSR [was]. . .more than one-third that of the United States and [was] increasing half again as fast’,Footnote 10 and that the ‘extraordinary concentration of the Soviet economy on military power and heavy industry. . .[made] available economic resources sufficient to finance both the rapid expansion of their impressive military capability and their politico-economic offensive by which, through diplomacy, propaganda and subversion, they [sought] to extend the Soviet orbit’.Footnote 11 These dramatic pronouncements did not convince Eisenhower to abandon his commitment to financial discipline in favour of massive shelter expenditures. The president ultimately decided to reject all fallout shelter proposals proposed by Holifield and the Gaither report. His decision was economically motivated, but it also reflected his view that such a ‘dramatic action’ would make Americans aware of the ‘human effects of nuclear weapons’, potentially leading to mass panic.Footnote 12
As tensions increased between the US and the Soviet Union, Eisenhower nevertheless determined that he could not simply ignore calls to implement greater federal oversight of civil defence. To placate advocates of a larger civil defence programme, the president mandated civil defence reorganization through Executive Order 10773 and authorized a plan called ‘Reorganization Plan No. 1’. The plan abolished the FCDA, replaced it with the Office of Civil and Defence Mobilization (OCDM) and grounded it firmly into the Executive Office of the president.Footnote 13 In October 1958, the OCDM issued a ‘National Plan for Civil Defence and Defence Mobilization’, which split non-military objectives into two classifications: protection of ‘life and property’, and ‘management of resources and production’.Footnote 14
Significantly for Baltimore, one of the explicit priorities under the National Plan's ‘life and property’ classification was maintenance of law and order. Though the plan assigned greater responsibilities for certain aspects of civil defence to the federal government, it stipulated that ‘local government [be] the basic entity responsible for the emergency maintenance of law and order’. The secretary of defence would only intervene with emergency aid at the explicit request of local authorities and only if those requests did not interfere with primary military operations. OCDM mandated that local civil defence agencies take advantage of existing police departments and personnel and use them to their full potential. It also mandated that local civil defence agencies ‘promote the training of sufficient auxiliary police, and. . .enhance nonmilitary defence by providing guidance, training, and equipment’.Footnote 15 Auxiliary police would regulate traffic after a nuclear attack, monitor radiation and ‘enforce civil defence regulations to prevent subversive action, to maintain law and order, and to protect vital supplies and installations’.Footnote 16
For eight years, Baltimore's civil defence director, Colonel Frank Milani, and his deputy director, Schuyler S. Blackburn, had worked to ensure that the programme remained under civilian control. With Mayor D’Alesandro's approval, the organization built a network of dedicated civilians who served as district, area, sector and post co-ordinators. Milani had always shied away from any suggestion that civil defence be co-ordinated by the military or the police department. As a military man, he possessed the clout to keep opponents of civilian control at bay. In 1959, just as the new National Plan took effect, Milani resigned his post as Baltimore's civil defence director after former FBI agent J. Harold Grady's spectacular upset of D’Alesandro. Shortly after Grady was sworn in on 19 May 1959, work began in earnest to marginalize Milani's volunteer civil defence corps in order to adhere to the new federal guidelines.
Command and control: the militarization of civil defence
Shortly after his election, Mayor Grady recommended that Colonel Arthur L. Shreve be appointed as Baltimore's civil defence director. Shreve took office on 24 August 1959. His first goal was to ‘re-organize’ the Baltimore Civil Defence Organization's (BCDO) police service programme, which Frank Milani had largely de-emphasized in favour of the civilian-controlled volunteer warden network. Shreve envisioned a civil defence organization that would be fully integrated into the city's police organization, which, he argued, would ‘simplify command and control problems in both Organizations’.Footnote 17 In passive voice, he explained that sometime during the month he took over as director, ‘it was realized’ that the police service programme within the BCDO had not been functional for many years. He advocated a ‘highly-trained, tightly knit Special Patrolman Service as an operating adjunct to Civil Defence and the regular Police Department, together with the necessity for far wider and deeper participation in Civil Defence of the regular Police Department, both in area of responsibility and scope of authority’.Footnote 18 Despite his contention that ‘the people’ must learn to ‘take care of themselves’, Shreve set in motion a plan that would take control of civil defence out of their hands.Footnote 19 Community help, in other words, would be replaced with a command and control structure in Baltimore.
In September, Shreve formed a commission to explore the possibility of establishing the special patrolman service to augment the current system of civilian-controlled districts, sectors, areas and posts. The commission advocated the appointment of high-calibre patrolmen.Footnote 20 Its members included Shreve and Baltimore's police commissioner, James M. Hepbron. Called by African-American state delegate Jerome Robinson ‘an SS officer in a Chesterfield coat who is impatient with the Bill of Rights and intolerant of the constitutional liberties and prerogatives of the people’, Hepbron was a cut-throat commander who routinely employed illegal methods of policing to apprehend suspects.Footnote 21 Under his leadership, which began in 1955, white police officers broke the law with impunity. They pummelled defendants for being ‘mouthy’ after questionable arrests, demanded salutes from African-American officers and targeted African-American officers for dismissal from the force.Footnote 22
The commission secretly recommended that the Baltimore police department take a much more active role in civil defence. District police commanders, under the new plan, would give specific duties to patrolmen to perform leading up to and in the wake of nuclear attack. This policy would circumvent the control of civilian volunteer district co-ordinators before an attack and render their control moot in the wake of an attack. After an attack, patrolmen would be extended the power of posse comitatus as ‘conservators of the peace’, police district commanders would direct their actions and the civil defence director along with the police commissioner would oversee it all from police headquarters. The powers of posse comitatus would expire at the end of the assignment.Footnote 23 Basically, that meant that the police commissioner and the civil defence director would deploy hand-picked patrolmen to maintain order after an attack, and decide when their special powers would begin and end.
Under Shreve's plan, police district commanders would select patrolmen based upon their moral character and employ a more rigorous screening process to include fingerprinting and light psychological profiling. Though not armed with guns and, according to Shreve's committee, ‘never [to be] employed in any situation involving labour or racial disturbances’, the police department would assign patrolmen who passed the screening process batons, shields, whistles, a garrison belt, a unique cap piece and a shoulder patch. In addition to their usage after an attack, Shreve's plan indicated that the patrolmen would also be used by the police department ‘at public assemblies such as inaugurations, conventions, sports events, [and for] traffic control at religious meetings’.Footnote 24 In order to execute this plan, Shreve immediately increased the number of civil defence districts from seven to nine to conform directly to changes in the police organization. According to the plan, ‘such consolidation of resources and manpower should overcome to a great degree existing public apathy and add a large measure of prestige to both Civil Defence and the Police Department in Baltimore City, both of which are most desirable toward effectuating an alert, vigorous Civil Defence programme’.Footnote 25
In 1960, Shreve instructed his civil defence advisory committee to investigate ways to institute a functional police reserve system.Footnote 26 He asked retired Army Brigadier General Thomas B. Catron to chair the committee. Catron had spent over 40 years in the Army. He graduated from West Point in 1909 where he became a trailblazer in the field of army intelligence.Footnote 27 In 1953, after his military service, Catron became director of a private intelligence firm called International Services of Information Foundation.Footnote 28 Among other jobs, the foundation provided information to Joseph McCarthy on liberal activities within the CIA.Footnote 29
Catron's sub-committee drafted more detailed plans for the militarization of Baltimore's civil defence apparatus. Shreve was integrally involved in those discussions. He explained to the sub-committee that in a civil defence emergency, he would become the ‘principal agent of the Mayor, charged with the best utilization of all of the operating resources of the City to meet the situation’. In an emergency, Shreve envisioned himself as the dictator of the city's entire command structure, essentially circumventing the mayor's authority in order to carry out post-attack command and control.Footnote 30 The sub-committee backed Shreve's vision and declared that in the wake of a nuclear attack, the
Director of Civil Defence becomes, in effect, the Chief Executive Officer or the Chief of Staff for the Mayor, as Commander of everything [emphasis added], and the appropriate City Departments become the field forces, that is to say, the Police, Fire, Welfare, and Public Health Departments. The other Departments are not vitally concerned or are not affected.Footnote 31
In June, the committee compared its vision of civil defence in an emergency to ‘martial law’. Members made sure to reiterate the fact that martial law was completely legal. After an attack, the police would be the first force to act, while the ‘other people have to wait and can wait until conditions are better or there is less danger’. According to the committee, the police force would first address the ‘preliminaries’ – looting and rioting. In order to do so, the police department would have to be equipped to expand, which could be done effectively only by implementing a strong emergency police reserve system.Footnote 32 The committee specifically referenced Eisenhower's Reorganization Plan #1 to justify marginalizing existing civil defence volunteers in favour of a robust police reserve unit.Footnote 33
In constructing its report to Mayor Grady, Catron's committee relied, in part, upon the advice of New Orleans officials who had already established an auxiliary police unit. New Orleans’ unit was comprised of many former members of the armed forces. Before applicants could be accepted for auxiliary service, they underwent background checks and interviews conducted by a Board of Auxiliary Officers. After screening, applicants were placed on a list of potential candidates. They attended courses on police work, civil defence and first aid at the New Orleans police academy and, if successful, were sworn in by the police superintendent. In New Orleans, auxiliary police patrolled neighbourhoods in teams of two. Each auxiliary officer was armed and wore a patch that read ‘Auxiliary’ on his left arm. Officers were given nightsticks, but were asked to purchase billy clubs, handcuffs, flashlights and whistles.Footnote 34 In the early 1960s, the first priority of urban civil defence was quickly shifting from community help to social control.
Civil defence unravels
As the Berlin Crisis escalated and as Americans became increasingly critical of civil defence preparations, Baltimoreans became aware of Shreve's plan to place civil defence under the control of the police department. On 23 August 1961, 10 days after the erection of the Berlin Wall, an article appeared in the Sun titled ‘Emergency police force to be set up.’ The article described the impending implementation of Shreve's pilot programme to outfit one civil defence district with between 25 and 50 reserve officers, and to relocate that district's civil defence headquarters into the basement of the local police headquarters.Footnote 35
The Sun article made public a vital piece of information – Shreve's plan was illegal. In May 1961, Maryland's attorney general had ruled that under Maryland law, the police commissioner had no authority to implement a police reserve system. Nevertheless, Shreve, along with outgoing police commissioner James Hepbron and incoming police commissioner Bernard J. Schmidt, decided that Maryland's ruling should not deter the training of reserve officers. Citing President Kennedy's further reorganization of civil defence under the defence department, Shreve argued:
This is an important step forward in making our city prepared for attack. We’ve got to have these men trained and ready if the time comes. It will be too late to train them when the missiles are on the way. In addition to its value for civil defence, police officials feel the reserve will provide a deterrent against crime in certain ‘trouble spots’ around the city.Footnote 36
Shortly after the publication of the Sun article, volunteer district co-ordinators expressed their frustration with Arthur Shreve and his leadership of the BCDO. According to the co-ordinators, when they approached Shreve about the organization's failure to provide them with proper plans and advice in a meeting on 19 July, Shreve responded, ‘If anyone doesn't like this organization or the way it is run, there is ample paper and pencils for their resignations, and I will take them right now.’ Western District Volunteer Co-ordinator Charles Perry explained to city councilman William Donald Schaefer that ‘civil defence in Baltimore is in very bad shape and I am in hopes maybe you can help us out if it becomes necessary’. He went on to say that the 19 July meeting was only one of many issues that the co-ordinators wished to discuss with the city council.Footnote 37 The Sun article was the straw that broke the camel's back for many civil defence volunteers. Long-simmering frustrations with BCDO's leadership came to a head when volunteers realized that they were, indeed, being marginalized in favour of a more militaristic civil defence structure. On 29 September, district civil defence co-ordinators requested that the city council launch hearings into the affairs of the civil defence organization. That same day two more volunteers offered to testify. In response, City Councilman Peter G. Angelos announced that he would introduce a resolution calling for a comprehensive inquiry. He explained that the resolution was necessary because ‘these volunteers. . .feel strongly that the Colonel [Shreve] is virtually ignoring the volunteer program and despite lip service to it has not given them the support they need’.Footnote 38
More newspaper articles in October 1961 made Baltimoreans aware of the civil defence organization's dysfunction. On 21 October, the Afro-American reported that Charles Perry had become fed up with Shreve's neglect for his district in particular. The Western District, carved out from the Northwestern and Southwestern Districts in 1959 to conform to a new police district plan, contained one of the most densely populated African-American communities in the country. The district was bounded by Druid Hill Avenue to the east, North Avenue to the north, Gwynns Falls Park to the west and Baltimore Street to the south. In 1959, approximately 100,000 African-Americans lived within those borders (3 miles by 2 miles in area).Footnote 39 Overall, 99 per cent of the district's residents were black. According to Perry, the district's command centre in the basement of Enoch Pratt Free Library's North Avenue branch contained only two working telephones, which would be rendered useless in the event of attack.Footnote 40 He voiced his exasperation to the Afro-American:
We have begged, we have pleaded, to no avail. We are second to none in the city as to training. We have more activity going on. Our a [sic] people are interested. . .Yet, we don't have anything. They [the other districts] certainly have more than the Western District, radios, walkie-talkies, typewriters. We don't have anything. We must have the same facilities as the other districts.Footnote 41
During the 1961 Berlin Crisis, Perry was acutely aware that his district was being deprived of supplies and communications equipment.
Meanwhile, increased scrutiny on the BCDO revealed other problems. In addition to disclosing the loss of $10,000 under Shreve's watch, the News-Post and other newspapers reported throughout 1961 and 1962 that four of the BCDO paid staff members failed merit system tests in their respective areas of expertise.Footnote 42 The News-Post also revealed that the organization had printed ‘a [civil defence] evacuation map which had overlaid escape routes backwards, so that escaping traffic would have come into instead of out of the city’.Footnote 43 After a year of controversy surrounding the BCDO, Arthur Shreve, director for just over two years, resigned in early December 1961.Footnote 44 Sherley Ewing, the director of Maryland's Civil Defence Organization, was also forced to resign when he was convicted of tax evasion one month later.Footnote 45
On 1 January 1962, in the midst of growing critique and cynicism toward civil defence efforts both in Baltimore and nationwide, General Richard Prather took the helm of the BCDO. Prather assumed the role four months after he retired as commanding general of army intelligence headquartered at Fort Holabird, and was ultimately more belligerent than his predecessor toward the volunteers. A graduate of West Point in 1924, Prather had served in the Army for 41 years. At a retirement dinner hosted by the Baltimore Chapter of the Association of the United States Army, General Milton A. Reckord praised Prather for fostering the ‘finest cooperation. . .we have ever experienced in this city’ between a regular army general and local army reserve forces.Footnote 46 Again rejecting the notion of the D’Alesandro era that civil defence remain a civilian endeavour, Mayor Grady characterized Prather as ‘a man [with] demonstrated ability, leadership and wide experience’ and noted that Prather's army career would come in handy after President Kennedy's placement of federal civil defence under the Pentagon.Footnote 47 After Prather's appointment, Schaefer and Angelos tabled their inquiry into the BCDO, conceding that the newly appointed director should ‘be given a chance to solve problems himself’.Footnote 48
Prather's counterintelligence expertise would also come in handy should the need arise to quell domestic disturbances or to collect information on groups deemed subversive. His appointment reflected a growing tendency for the military to become involved in civilian affairs as the 1950s became the 1960s. Under Prather's direction, the Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) at Fort Holabird maintained a consolidated records room where agents assembled and stored information on domestic and international inquiries. The CIC also stored copies of FBI reports on 125,000 individuals. Shortly before Prather became director of Fort Holabird in 1956, the Department of the Army issued a directive reinforcing the Army's peacetime responsibility to monitor and collect information on subversive groups. The Army also began using intelligence officers to monitor civil disturbances until the president deployed troops. Under Prather, the CIC intervened at Little Rock in 1957 when mobs blocked the entry of nine black students into Central High School. CIC officers placed the school under surveillance and catalogued and reported local media coverage. They also monitored the nine students, local Ku Klux Klan members and other potential agitators.Footnote 49 With his counterintelligence experience, Prather felt comfortable with his predecessor's plan to place civil defence under the control of the police department and to establish an emergency police reserve to take the place of civilian volunteers.
Six months after Prather's appointment as director, Western District volunteers continued to protest their treatment by paid BCDO staff and denounced Prather's general attitude toward them. After eight months of complaining publicly about the district's lack of supplies, the Afro-American reported that Charles Perry would cease civil defence operations (in the Western District) until ‘something [was] done’.Footnote 50 Perry went on to say, ‘We’ve reached the point where there is nothing else we can do. I’ve been in civil defence activities since 1942 and the existing situation is the worse [sic] I’ve ever seen.’Footnote 51
He went on to re-emphasize that other districts across the city were equipped with sufficient communications equipment while Western operated with only two telephones. Perry complained that BCDO staff had promised him the equipment for two and a half years and warned, ‘If a nuclear attack came tomorrow, we wouldn't have a chance.’Footnote 52 The Afro-American cast the Western District's problem as the city's problem and echoed Perry's sentiment – ‘If America were the target of a nuclear attack tomorrow Baltimore would be in a bad way.’Footnote 53 Four months later, in October 1962, the world came as close as it has ever come to nuclear war.
In addition to his worries about his district's nuclear preparedness, Perry's complaints spotlighted another aspect of the civil defence volunteer uprising – a general distrust of both Baltimore's police department and a militarized civil defence organization to provide adequate protection and co-ordination in the event of a nuclear attack, especially in African-American neighbourhoods. Such distrust was engrained in Baltimore's genetic code, and was further emphasized in numerous incidents, such as on 25 August 1962 when a white mob attacked 26 black children as they attempted to leave a public swimming pool in South Baltimore's Riverside Park.Footnote 54 Police officers did intervene to break up the melee but only after the children had exited the park itself. On 12 September, a group of integrationists requested that Governor J. Millard Tawes investigate Baltimore Police Commissioner Bernard J. Schmidt because his officers ‘permitted acts of violence and intimidation’ at the pool and that ‘sterner police action would have resulted in the arrest of ringleaders and dispersal of crowds without any violence’.Footnote 55 Two years later, the Washington Post again reported that ‘a major concern among (Baltimore’s) Negroes today is alleged police brutality. Two slayings of Negroes by white policemen this summer and several other incidents that have given rise to brutality charges have brought about a great deal of resentment of the police department.’Footnote 56 Against the backdrop of simmering tension with police, civil defence volunteers began to sense that the programme was becoming a mechanism for social control.
The demise of civil defence in Baltimore
By the time anti-nuclear anti-civil defence sentiment trickled into Baltimore's streets in April 1962, civil defence volunteers had been voicing their objections to the programme for almost a year. The city council, at the behest of Schaefer and Angelos, had already initiated an investigation into the BCDO and the Sun had already revealed Shreve's plan to place civil defence under police control. Though anti-nuclear anti-civil defence voices certainly played a part in Baltimore's civil defence revolt, it was actually civil defence volunteers who ultimately convinced the city council to investigate the BCDO. Their protest from within spotlights the centrality of issues of policy implementation and community autonomy to Baltimore's civil defence revolt.
Volunteers capitalized on increasing media attention on the anti-nuclear movement to express more of their grievances. Those most dedicated to the idea of volunteer-based civil defence turned against the BCDO as it attempted to align its policies with the command and control aspect of new federal guidelines. Meanwhile, BCDO officials, steeped in military dogma, backed by the mayor's office and allied with the police department, implemented federal policy in the way occupiers might implement law and order after an invasion. They perceived volunteers not as integral partners but as obstacles to a more militarized urban civil defence policy.
On 23 November 1962, in the wake of Prather's admission that civil defence preparations were far from adequate prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and in the midst of Perry's public criticisms, scores of disgruntled civil defence volunteers pressed the city council for another hearing into the affairs of the BCDO. At the council meeting, Perry said that he ‘would go before the City Council on Tuesday, Taxpayers’ Day, to request an investigation of the organization’.Footnote 57 He demanded that Prather and other paid civil defence staff recognize that ‘volunteers are civic-minded citizens interested in national defence’ and recommended that the BCDO ‘establish an advisory board to work out differences between the paid staff and volunteers’.Footnote 58 The rift between volunteers and the city's civil defence leadership was about to go public.
The Taxpayers’ Day hearing tore off the veil that had shrouded the BCDO since the beginning of Arthur Shreve's tenure in 1959. Throughout December 1962, the media spotlight on civil defence intensified. No longer were the complaints of Charles Perry and other volunteers in vain – city taxpayers, council members and activists learned daily about the ineptitude, the disorganization, the graft and, perhaps most importantly, the disrespect that BCDO staff had for their volunteers. They also learned more about the police and military background of the paid staff. On 23 December, the Sunday American published a feature article on the issues plaguing Baltimore's civil defence. Titled ‘Civil Defence on the Defensive’, the round table brought together Jerry Adler, the Sunday American's City Hall correspondent, anti-nuclear activist Caroline Ramsay, pro-civil defence state senator Paul Dorf and Prather. In response to Prather's assertion that civil defence volunteers should merely be assistants of paid staff and aides (presumably, police and fire commanders), Senator Dorf replied that he was greatly concerned about the effect Prather's conception of civil defence had upon the city's volunteers:
I am more alarmed than the General. I feel there is definite unrest in Baltimore City. Not only Mr. Perry, but other volunteer leaders, have objections. The main complaint is that they have not been able to talk to anyone. They have been shoved around and are complaining about it. They work hard at their task. A joint meeting of City Council and Legislative committees is going to become a reality.Footnote 59
Immediately following the Taxpayers’ Day hearing, the city council re-launched an investigation into the entire civil defence apparatus, a revival of the plans that the council had shelved a year earlier. According to the Sun, city council President William D. Schaefer declared ‘that if he [was] returned to his Council seat he would look into the situation to determine “how the volunteers are being treated by the paid civil defence staff”’. If there had been no improvement, he said, ‘I will certainly act to cut the appropriation for a highly paid staff, or to reorganize the entire civil defence operation.’Footnote 60 Schaefer explained that the volunteers were more qualified and ‘[had] more civil defence training than members of the staff’.
On 28 July 1963, reacting to the volunteer crisis and multiple city council hearings, the Sun formally came out against the 1964 budget appropriation for civil defence.Footnote 61 One month later, Hyman A. Pressman, Baltimore's city comptroller, also called for the complete elimination of the civil defence organization.Footnote 62 Calling the entire organization a ‘boondoggle’, the comptroller added his voice to a chorus of city officials who desired a total eradication of Baltimore's civil defence apparatus in the 1964 budget. Charles Perry responded in a letter to the editor of the News-Post: ‘I wholeheartedly agree with Comptroller Pressman, also Councilman Henry G. Parks Jr. and William D. Schaefer, that elimination of local civil defence program is the only successful means of accomplishing a sound program under state and federal authority.’Footnote 63 Helen Hollingsworth, a member of Women Strike for Peace, agreed with both Parks and Pressman: ‘I should like to publicly commend Mr. Parks and Mr. Pressman for their stand on civil defence appropriations. In our present age of thermonuclear weapons I feel that a civil defence program mocks the intelligence of the American public. Our only defence, our only hope, is peace.’Footnote 64 With city council members, senators and anti-nuclear activists now in the fray, Baltimore's civil defence volunteer crisis became the lynchpin for Baltimore's greater civil defence revolt, fuelled by questions about the effectiveness of civil defence and the need for nuclear weapons. An unlikely alliance materialized between volunteers, who were incensed at the increasingly militant organization's contempt for their hard work and dedication, and Baltimore's most prominent anti-civil defence and anti-nuclear activists.
In response to the Sun editorial and all of the political debates, Baltimoreans sent a flood of letters to newly elected Mayor Theodore McKeldin (Republican) urging the abolition of civil defence on both moral and fiscal grounds.Footnote 65 Denny R. Colbert of Green Meadow Parkway charged the mayor, ‘Now when the moment of decision about whether or not to defund civil defence is about here, it would be to your everlasting credit to exert your positive leadership in ridding Baltimore of this pox once and for all. I would be very proud to say that Baltimore was the first East Coast city to do so.’Footnote 66
Indeed, Baltimore did become the first east coast city to defund civil defence. Influenced by the barrage of letters, and amidst sustained protest from anti-nuclear groups, city councillors and other civic leaders, Mayor McKeldin announced on 26 October that the 1964 civil defence budget would be cut by 60 per cent.Footnote 67 According to McKeldin, if it was his decision alone, he would have completely abolished the organization because ‘citizen sentiment (was) “overwhelmingly” for eliminating “one of the nation's greatest boondoggles”’.Footnote 68 He proposed that responsibility for civil defence be divided between the city's fire department, health department, traffic department and public works division. With the stroke of a pen on 26 October 1963, McKeldin effectively eliminated the BCDO. On 5 November, Baltimore's Board of Estimates adopted its budget for 1964, authorizing only $60,000 for civil defence activities.Footnote 69 It was only a matter of time before Richard Prather and other civil defence paid staff lost their jobs.
Conclusion
Recent scholarship does not generally discuss the role that active civil defence volunteers played in civil defence revolts of the early 1960s. By doing so, and by viewing civil defence through the lens of urban history, historians can better understand the aspects of the programme that were successful along with the reasons why it ultimately failed. Volunteers in Baltimore, who found in early FCDA self-help messaging a call to aid their communities and help their neighbours in the event of nuclear attack, became disillusioned with the programme and aired all of its dirty laundry once they realized that it was being militarized. They rejected the notion that the programme should be governed by a cadre of officials who resided outside of their neighbourhoods. By 1964, civil defence in Baltimore had abandoned community help in favour of police control. Volunteers, in turn, abandoned civil defence. The centrality of community organization at the beginning of the 1950s gave way to policies that were hostile to those communities. Those policies became fixated on maintaining law and order in the wake of a nuclear attack at the expense of citizens’ survival and well-being. If being a Cold War city meant a militarized civil defence organization patrolling their neighbourhoods, Baltimoreans would not take on that mantle.
