“We must be ready every day, all the time”: Mid‐Twentieth‐Century Nuclear Anxiety and Fear of Death in American Life

Abstract

am scattered in times whose order I do not understand, prayed Saint Augustine. storms of incoherent events tear to pieces my thoughts (244). He is not unlike the French street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who observed in an interview twenty centuries later, develops a great anxiety... Cause you are always waiting, what's going to happen, what, what, what, what! It's what? ... It's all the time (The Decisive Moment). What they describe is the jumble of confusions-often exciting but equally often unnerving-that characterizes the experience of being alive.Precisely what it means to alive is a question that has sparked centuries of philosophical debate. A deliberately vague phrase, it is intended here to encompass a range of human experience, but most particularly the life of the mind. As Cartier-Bresson continues, Life changes every minute. The world is being created every minute and the world is falling to pieces every minute. Death is present everywhere, as soon as we are born. It is a dynamic, characterized by uncertainty about the future, that influences and shapes the stories we tell, the culture we produce, and the ways in which we respond to events within our lives and within our world. It is problematic, then, that uncertainty is so often drained out of historical accounts of lives, which are written with what the novelist and critic William H. Gass labeled a stubborn externality (263). The historian, Gass observed, follows the course of human behavior as the eye might follow sliding rocks, and never feels the avalanche, never gains admission to events, in the belief... that they have no inner life.In his work, American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety, Peter N. Stearns offers a compelling historiography of the place of fear in twentieth-century American life. As Stearns acknowledges, the connections he illuminates are possible, but they cannot be proved (89); however, his work is provocative, particularly in regards to what Stearns identifies as the role has to play... in explaining to ourselves (8-9). In American Fear, Stearns argues that fear is an urgent American policy and personal issue (9), and he advocates the important role that behavioral history and emotional history play in our understanding of significant (and probably distinctive) (8). Through the book as a whole, he explores how national reactions to the dread emotion [of fear], both in personal and in public life, have exhibited crucial distinctive features (3), which have made Americans more anxious and fearful than they were in the past. Within this broader argument, Stearns hypothesizes that Cold War fears and changes in responses to death heightened anxieties around mortality and grief, thus contributing to a climate wherein fear emerged as the dominant emotion (75). The nuances of the cultural changes Stearns identifies are further illuminated when considered through a life-writing lens and they grow particularly evident when viewed across the narrative of a celebrity life.As the most visible American life narrative of the mid-twentieth century, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's life is an excellent source from which to draw out support for Stearns' claims. Examining how her image was connected to nuclear fears in the early 1960s and exploring the ways in which her life narrative intersected with contemporary American attitudes toward death demonstrate how celebrity life narratives act as repositories of cultural anxiety, wherein emotional phenomena such as fear play out. As such, they offer compelling evidence of those phenomena and a rich means of contextualizing them within American life.Life Writing and American CelebrityStearns attributes the rise in publicly expressed fear to changes in cultural attitudes toward the specialness of children, as well as attitudes toward grief and death, all of which had an impact at the level of everyday American life (82-87). …