One Nation Underground or American Made

One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture

Author: Kenneth Ros

"Kenneth Rose's One Nation Underground explores U.S. nuclear history from the bottom up—literally. . . . Rose deserves credit for not trivializing this period of our history, as so many retrospectives of the Cold War era have tended to do."
—Journal of Cold War Studies

"Important . . . One Nation Underground is an elegant account of the issues involved in the nuclear age."
—Pacific Northwest Quarterly

"This is a fine compilation of a massive amount of research, well founded in the existing literature, and presented in a readable narrative."
—Journal of Illinois History

"A readable short history of the fallout shelters and the broader political debate over civil defense. . . . Mr. Rose is a good storyteller, and One Nation Underground is engagingly writen, with an array of evocative photgraphs."
—The Wall Street Journal

"Rose writes well, with a good eye for the telling phrase and revealing example."—Journal of Social History

For the half-century duration of the Cold War, the fallout shelter was a curiously American preoccupation. Triggered in 1961 by a hawkish speech by John F. Kennedy, the fallout shelter controversy—"to dig or not to dig," as Business Week put it at the time—forced many Americans to grapple with deeply disturbing dilemmas that went to the very heart of their self-image about what it meant to be an American, an upstanding citizen, and a moral human being.

Given the much-touted nuclear threat throughout the 1960s and the fact that 4 out of 5 Americans expressed a preference for nuclear war over living under communism,what's perhaps most striking is how few American actually built backyard shelters. Tracing the ways in which the fallout shelter became an icon of popular culture, Kenneth D. Rose also investigates the troubling issues the shelters raised: Would a post-war world even be worth living in? Would shelter construction send the Soviets a message of national resolve, or rather encourage political and military leaders to think in terms of a "winnable" war?

Investigating the role of schools, television, government bureaucracies, civil defense, and literature, and rich in fascinating detail—including a detailed tour of the vast fallout shelter in Greenbriar, Virginia, built to harbor the entire United States Congress in the event of nuclear armageddon—One Nation, Underground goes to the very heart of America's Cold War experience.

Wall Street Journal, Nov 13, 2001 - Melanie Kirkpatrick

Mr. Rose is a good storyteller, and "One Nation Underground" is engagingly written, with an array of evocative photographs.

Washington Monthly

"A broad-ranging narrative that covers the politics, culture, religion, and even engineering of the Cold War era."

Christian Science Monitor

An interesting and amply illustrate dcommentary on cold war concerns.

Library Journal

Although Rose (history, California State Univ., Chico; American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition) might have wished his popular history of the Cold War to work from below ground on up, his excavation of the great fear of the Fifties reveals a discourse overwhelmingly top-down. Government and civic elites propagandized for shelters built from theoretical funds that mostly were never appropriated; average citizens fretted that their neighbors were building bunkers to exclude them come Armageddon, yet apparently very few private spaces were ever erected. Rose demonstrates that the shelter was the leading if least visible icon of a civil defense debate that questioned whether nuclear wars were confinable, hence survivable, but also whether shelter was more practical or at least not incompatible with mass evacuation. Rose reconstructs Herman Kahn, the pro-limited nuclear war physicist/Dr. Strangelove model, as the most intriguing if possibly insane personage in his account but leaves much possibly fertile soil unturned. (What did history's most famous shelterists, the World War II British, think of their Yankee cousins' official mania only a few years later?) This book fails to live up to the originality promised by the subject but as a first-of-area undertaking should be acquired by academic libraries. Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

Treating the fallout shelter as an American icon, this history discusses its significance in the context of the Cold War. It considers the implications of the fallout shelter<-->and the fact that so few Americans actually built them<-->for the national self-image, the ideals of citizenship, and moral thinking. The book examines the role schools, film, government bureaucracies, civil defense efforts, and literature each played in forming the fallout shelter culture. Rose teaches history at California State University, Chico. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work

Author: Nick Taylor

Seventy-five years after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, here for the first time is the remarkable story of one of its enduring cornerstones, the Works Progress Administration (WPA): its passionate believers, its furious critics, and its amazing accomplishments.

The WPA is American history that could not be more current, from providing economic stimulus to renewing a broken infrastructure. Introduced in 1935 at the height of the Great Depression, when unemployment and desperation ruled the land, this controversial nationwide jobs program would forever change the physical landscape and social policies of the United States. The WPA lasted eight years, spent $11 billion, employed 8½ million men and women, and gave the country not only a renewed spirit but a fresh face. Now this fascinating and informative book chronicles the WPA from its tumultuous beginnings to its lasting presence, and gives us cues for future action.

The Washington Post - H. W. Brands

Taylor's American-Made is bigger than its title suggests; he provides a succinct survey of the Great Depression and particularly its consequences for workers…he interweaves personal stories with explanations of policy. His manner is brisk; chapters of four and five pages fly by. He treats Roosevelt sympathetically, but his hero is Harry Hopkins, the WPA's founding director.

Publishers Weekly

Launched in 1935, at the bottom of the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) served as a linchpin of FDR's "New Deal." Through the WPA, Roosevelt put millions of unemployed Americans to work on public construction projects, from dams and courthouses to parks and roads. The WPA's Federal Writers Project employed a host of artists and writers (among them Jackson Pollock, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston and Studs Terkel); theater and musical artists also received funding. Taylor (Ordinary Miracles: Life in a Small Church) vividly and painstakingly paints the full story of the WPA from its inception to its shutdown by Congress in 1943, at which point the war boom in manufacturing had made it unnecessary. In an eloquent and balanced appraisal, Taylor not only chronicles the WPA's numerous triumphs (including New York's LaGuardia Airport) but also its failures, most notably graft and other chicanery at the local level. Taylor details as well the dicey intramural politics in Congress over which states and districts would get the largest slice of the WPA pie. All told, Taylor's volume makes for a splendid appreciation of the WPA with which to celebrate the upcoming 75th anniversary of the New Deal's beginnings in 1933. (Mar. 4)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Frederick J. Augustyn Jr. - Library Journal

Taylor (coauthor, John Glenn: A Memoir) acknowledges 2008's 75th anniversary of the New Deal (dated to FDR's first inaugural), followed in 2010 by that of the Works Progress Administration (1935-42)-later called the Work Projects Administration (WPA). His is a balanced summary of one of FDR's most prolific agencies. Although introductive for general readers and younger scholars on the subject of what a government can accomplish in a time of need, it is also informative for professional historians. The WPA's famous first commissioner, Harry Hopkins, was reassigned from the Civil Works Administration, later to move to the Commerce Department and then to become a presidential adviser. Taylor shows that the WPA also evolved from diverse programs to those focused on construction. The post office murals; the Federal Writers, Theater, and Music programs; what is now known as Camp David; and numerous parks, zoos, recreational areas, and airports are iconic products of the WPA. It also did work in the library field and offered a pavilion at the 1939-40 New York World's Fair. Its follies and triumphs are praised and critiqued here in a readable, often investigative, and apparently first full retrospective. Lavishly illustrated, the book also has a list of New Deal organizations, a partial list of construction projects, a New Deal chronology, and endnotes. It will be a boon to all 20th-century history collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ11/1/07.]

Kirkus Reviews

Breezy but well-considered account of the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal's signature jobs program. Taylor (Laser: The Inventor, the Nobel Laureate, and the Thirty-Year Patent War, 2000, etc.) writes popular history, which means that academics may find his fast-paced narrative lacking in complex ideas. He peppers descriptions of major policy clashes with profiles of destitute people whose lives were literally saved by going on the workforce program. The book is filled with plucky, fast-talking characters who by dint of charm and grit pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to participate in the nationwide effort to put the jobless to work. Taylor's principal hero is Harry Hopkins, the tireless, charismatic FDR aide who steamrolled bureaucratic opposition to get the WPA up and running, then saw it through to the end, at the expense of his health and personal political ambitions, until it was ultimately derailed by the onset of World War II. The author paints a colorful, compelling picture of how miserable life was for most Americans after the stock market crash of 1929; his portrait of government competence and visionary goals contrasts pointedly with the radically restricted ambitions of today's politicians. He gives airtime to critics who found the WPA anti-business and anti-American, who invented the term "boondoggle" to describe the government's sometimes wasteful methods for getting people back to work. He also shows those voices drowned out by the concerns of starving citizens and reminds us that the WPA built some of the nation's most beloved pieces of infrastructure, from San Francisco's Cow Palace to New York's LaGuardia Airport. Readable and vividly rendered-anear-definitive account of one of the most massive government interventions into domestic affairs in American history. Agent: Lynn Nesbit/Janklow & Nesbit Associates