| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Laura McEnaney. Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties. (Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2000. Pp. x, 213. $29.95.

It is just as well the Cold War brought no nuclear exchange for, as Laura McEnaney shows, in the realm of civil defense, the needs, the means available, and national values combined awkwardly to produce so "incoherent" a program that the results would have been calamitous. Her book probes the efforts of the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) to "domesticate" nuclear-age defense, framing a policy that deeded to individual householders the chief responsibility for protection against the Bomb. Such a devolution, she suggests, was the only way there would be any civil defense (CD) program at all. 1

The book focuses on the political culture in which CD activists sought to devise a program, pry support from a stingy Congress, and evangelize the public. Its emphasis is on marketing strategies and also on the dual cooptive process by which some sectors of society not only were mobilized by the FCDA but also exerted influence over its programs themselves. As a result, some interest groups were simultaneously influenced by and, on their part, shaped and vernacularized programmatic elements to their own ends. . . .

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