Created in 1950, the FCDA was tasked with readying civilians for nuclear warfare, making of the entire United States one great attenuated battlefield and its populace a nationwide reserve corps. Propaganda material produced by the agency made clear that through preparing for the possibility of attack, civilians were protecting not just themselves but the nation as a whole. The vexing question of how this protection could best be undertaken would receive various answers over the years. What remained constant, however, was the agency’s privileging of white life over the lives of all others.
Throughout the midcentury, the U.S. government’s civil defense propaganda overwhelmingly featured images of white people, especially white nuclear families. Material aimed at American farmworkers, for example, addressed not the many Asian Americans and Latinos working in California’s Central Valley or the farmers in the Black Belt but white midwestern smallholders, who were romanticized as the defenders not merely of the country’s food supply but of its bedrock moral values. Even works explicitly about Japan were not immune from whitewashing: the 1948 edition of John Hersey’s Hiroshima featured on its cover a painting of a white couple fleeing a nuclear blast. Explaining his design, illustrator Geoffrey Biggs stated that he “just drew two perfectly ordinary people—like you or me.” Here and elsewhere, the terror surrounding nuclear weapons seemed to be rooted not in a retrospective look at the damage they had wrought in the past, nor even in a generalized anxiety that they might be used in the future, but very specifically a fear that this time, the target would be American suburbia.
The FCDA’s complicity in white supremacy was brought to national attention in 1950 when President Harry S. Truman nominated Florida governor Millard Caldwell to head the agency. To Truman’s surprise, what he’d meant to be a sinecure appointment quickly became a hot button issue when NAACP members around the country protested his choice, citing Caldwell’s long-held segregationist sympathies. As an editorial in the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, points out, Caldwell had looked the other way after lynchings and supported whites-only primaries as governor; now, he was proposing a multi-billion-dollar national bomb shelter program that would allow for segregated shelters and civil defense corps, effectively extending Jim Crow into the post-apocalyptic age.