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How We Embraced Fear and Abandoned Democracy
by Elaine Tyler May
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There has been some pushback. Some citizens and leaders have objected, resisted, dissented, organized, or simply refused to allow misplaced fear and security concerns to affect the way they live. They have participated in a wide variety of social and political movements to dismantle the apparatus of security and strengthen the democracy. But the security obsession endures.
As large numbers of Americans came to believe that their personal safety was more important than the common good, and that safety could be achieved by living life at a distance from public spaces, a thriving democracy and a vibrant, healthy society became increasingly unattainable. As in the realm of foreign policy, where the effort to achieve national security led to questionable results, in the realm of personal security there is no evidence that the relentless quest has made Americans any safer or better off. In fact, the obsession with security over the past half-century has only made Americans less safe and less secure, and the country less democratic.
Our security obsession is unnecessary and counterproductive. The vast majority of Americans have no desire to cause physical harm to others. We do not need to be so frightened of each other. But we have become a paranoid, armed, militarized, racially divided, and vastly unequal vigilante nation. The pursuit of security has damaged our public as well as our private lives and hindered our ability to trust each other and our government. In other words, we face a serious risk that our democracy could be totally destroyed. In order to understand how we arrived at our current situation and where our nation might be headed, we need to look back to the moment when fear began to shape how we live.
Chapter 1
GIMME SHELTER: SECURITY IN THE ATOMIC AGE
Every Home a Fortress!
—Leo Hoegh, head of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, 1958
In January 1945, the cover of House Beautiful magazine featured a photograph of a World War II veteran returning to his family at their modest but cheerful home in Beverly Hills, California. As he opens the gate of his white picket fence, his smiling wife waves to him from the front door, and his young daughter bounds gleefully down the path through the garden toward him. The cover asks, "Will you be ready when Johnny comes marching home?" While the photo is idyllic, the question reveals uncertainty about the domestic world to which the veteran is returning. "Will you be ready" to properly welcome him back to a well-appointed private home, in an uncertain postwar world, where he can find comfort and security as the master of his house, with a devoted wife and well-behaved children? This vision of domestic bliss, appropriately set in the postwar paradise of Southern California, offers "the American ideal of good living—one of the ideals these veterans have fought for, and which they can now look forward to attaining."
The photo of the returning veteran, carefully posed and staged by photographer Maynard Parker, captures the postwar American dream in all of its aesthetic and ideological dimensions. But it was not a real family. Parker had constructed the scene, and the "family members" were models. Parker's photographs, mostly taken in Southern California, often reflected the ideal, though not the reality, of suburban domesticity. The photo is benign and optimistic, depicting a private vision of security, self-sufficiency, affluence, and family solidarity behind the picket fence.
The real-life homecomings of American war veterans were rarely picture-perfect. Hidden from this view were the countless men suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (then known as "shell shock"), along with their fears of unemployment, their disconnection with family members after the long separation, the grief endured by those who lost loved ones, shrinking opportunities for women—who had enjoyed lucrative home-front jobs during the war—and the violence inflicted on the men of color who had risked their lives for their country. The joy of victory was dampened by the realization of the horrors coming to light in the wake of the war: the ghastly images of the Holocaust, in which the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews, and the horrifying aftermath of the United States' decision to drop atomic bombs on two once-thriving Japanese cities and their inhabitants. What would the postwar world look like, and how would Americans adapt to it?
Excerpted from Fortress America by Elaine Tyler May. Copyright © 2017 by Elaine Tyler May. Excerpted by permission of Basic Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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