Bomb Shelters, Arks and Ecology

An Act of Congress in 1957 sought to establish a Civil Defense Department to build bomb shelters. The Luce and other publications ardently supported this program. So did foundations, savants and scientists. Every home, the ballyhoo said, must, at the imminent risk of extinction, build a combined bombproof basement shelter, rathskeller and rumpus room to dive or crawl into on the alarm and pray in until the all- clear sounded. The cost, they said, would be thirty billions. It was one of those journalistic crusades into which Harry Luce would throw himself with missionary zeal reminiscent of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland or of Dante’s Inferno.

One would have thought we were in the south of England in 1940 after the retreat from Dunkirk. Sean O’Casey, the great Irish writer, living then in Totnes, near Plymouth, told the story inimitably in Sunset and Evening Star:

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Robert Moses

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An Act of Congress in 1957 sought to establish a Civil Defense Department to build bomb shelters. The Luce and other publications ardently supported this program. So did foundations, savants and scientists. Every home, the ballyhoo said, must, at the imminent risk of extinction, build a combined bombproof basement shelter, rathskeller and rumpus room to dive or crawl into on the alarm and pray in until the all- clear sounded. The cost, they said, would be thirty billions. It was one of those journalistic crusades into which Harry Luce would throw himself with missionary zeal reminiscent of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland or of Dante’s Inferno.

One would have thought we were in the south of England in 1940 after the retreat from Dunkirk. Sean O’Casey, the great Irish writer, living then in Totnes, near Plymouth, told the story inimitably in Sunset and Evening Star: