Witness to History: “Duck & Cover,” Fear and the Red Scare

When I was in Junior High School in Sunnyside, Queens, our military and soldiers were in Korea, fighting in an undeclared war with what became North Korea, which was supported by China. We were in the middle of the McCarthy era, of the Cold War and the Red Scare, which disrupted many citizens lives through Congressional, and FBI investigations, turning people against each other, and blacklisting people (artists, writers, actors, musicians, university teachers, union organizers and workers). People were encouraged to spy on their neighbors and report them to the FBI.

My father was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and of WWII. During the McCarthy era, the FBI would come by and talk with my father or mother (if he was at work). They knew he was not involved in anything that was against the country. What they wanted was for him to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and spy on them and report to the FBI. They were putting a lot of pressure on him (and had my mother in tears once), but he wouldn’t do it. Eventually, after McCarthy lost his power in the Senate, the pressure tactics of the FBI had ended and their agents stopped coming by.

There was also the fear-instilled in us of the possibility of a nuclear bomb being dropped on us in New York City. As students of New York’s public schools, we were issued dog-tags to be worn, so if a bomb was dropped on us, we would be identified in the aftermath.

There were also air-raid shelters that people were expected to go to when the sirens went off to warn us of impending danger. As students we were trained in “Duck and Cover,” which meant when there was a siren blasting the airways, we had to go down to the floor and crawl under our desks and cover our head and necks till the air-raid drill was over. This made no sense to us. We all knew what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We knew the desks would not protect us from the inevitable.

The Duck and Cover drills, the dog-tags, the blaring, deafening city-wide air-raid drills, made me angry. I couldn’t understand why they were trying to fill us with so much fear and had us doing drills that we knew would not save us from the bomb. I refused to wear the dog-tag and finally got rid of it in a manner which my parents were not happy with, as it required calling a plumber to fix the problem it caused. I also eventually refused to get under my desk (a challenge for me as I was at the time the tallest person in my class).

The teacher would sit at her desk and describe what it would be like. First, we would hear the planes overhead, and then the release of the bomb falling through the air. And then she would say “You must close your eyes, or you will be blinded by the light.” And while she and my fellow students would get under their desks, I would stand up and open my eyes wide, because for me - what difference would it make if the light of the bomb blinded me if I was then incinerated by the blast.

People were accused of being “Pinkos” or “a red Commie- if ever there was one,” with voices and eyes full of hate. I couldn’t understand what was happening here, why people were so hostile and hateful with each other. Eventually that promoted fear faded (replaced by the racial tensions that rose up in the 1960’s), and by then we were in the space race with the USSR, which had us all focused on a unified “cause” to beat Russia (though they were the first to have an artificial spacecraft launched, Sputnik, and the first manned spacecraft launched to circle the earth) in the race with manned space travel and the goal to reach the moon.

The “Commie” fear stayed around for a few decades, still lurking in the back of the American psyche - the word “Commie” and fear in general now seems to be back in the American vernacular.