The Afterlives of Duck-and-Cover

Abstract

Wars on drugs and crime, stand your ground, Hummers, security moms, “take back the night,” AMBER alerts, gated communities, “preppers,” and “safe rooms”—all descended from the duck-and-cover years of the Cold War, according to historian Elaine May Tyler. The first chapter of May’s solidly researched and elegantly written Fortress America: How We Embraced Fear and Abandoned Democracy recalls the post-World War Two years when the country shifted from a war footing onto a path to peace and prosperity. With its men home from war and its women home from factory work that kept the men armed and outfitted, America began remaking itself with the family as the institutional building block. Distaining the state-led national defense strategy appropriated for the World Wars, the nation welcomed a localized approach that imagined the family as the guarantor of security. If the Russians really came, it would be dad, mom, and their security-smart children, not an Army platoon, which would rise to the occasion.