| With the creation of the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) in 1950, the United States government attempted to devise concrete solutions to the nuclear threats of the burgeoning Cold War. As the nuclear arms race heated up between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, peaking with the development of the hydrogen bomb in the early part of the 1950s, the FCDA turned to the family fallout shelter as its recommended solution for protection in the event of an atomic attack. While the family fallout shelter theoretically could save countless lives by protecting against deadly radiation, many Americans found that they were implicitly or financially excluded from acquiring this form of protection. High costs made shelters prohibitively expensive for the working classes. Furthermore, those living in cities, and other regions where attack risk was high or geography did not allow for the construction of shelters, found that they were left without options for protection. Within its civil defense and family fallout shelter propaganda, the FCDA textually and graphically revealed ideas about ideal citizenship in regards to gender roles, sexuality, race, and class in America. Americans who did not fit into or disagreed with these ideal depictions challenged them through activist and protest movements, the cultural representation of non-ideal citizens, and by not buying fallout shelters. By taking a cultural approach to civil defense, this work analyses elements of popular and print culture related to the fallout shelter phenomenon alongside FCDA propaganda. This study ultimately connects civil defense dissent in the 1950s and early 1960s to the activist movements of the mid-1960s and 1970s. |
