But evacuation was complicated by another factor. Governor Thornburgh presumed that it would be accompanied by a panic. He described his dilemma thus: “I had to weigh the potential risks of TMI against the proven hazards of moving people under panic conditions.”87 The movement of the elderly and the sick, the transport of babies in incubators, and the traffic on highways could all lead to deaths and injuries that Thornburgh hoped to avoid.88 He was also worried that it would be impossible to confine an evacuation to a circumscribed area. “It is not a big deal if you can control it to a five mile evacuation,” he later explained, “but if you can look me in the eye and tell me that nobody within the ten mile, twenty mile, or fifty mile area is going to on their own begin to evacuate … I would doubt it.”89 Thornburgh also took no comfort in the region’s prior experience with evacuations. As he saw it, in the case of “flood or hurricane or tornado … you can always look out and say, ‘Well, the river is rising, it’s coming up to 10 feet, and when it gets to 20 feet, we will have to move these folks and those folks.’ ” The TMI accident, in contrast, was “an event that people are not able to see, to hear, to taste, and to smell.”90 He assumed that the invisibility of the accident, coupled with the elusiveness of the radiation danger, would make local residents more rather than less prone to panic.
The governor’s preoccupation with panic can be traced back to the early 1950s, when Cold War civil defense planners predicted that mass panic would ensue in the event of a nuclear attack.91 According to one planner who served under President Eisenhower, panic prevention was the primary goal of 90 percent of all emergency measures developed under the purview of civil defense.92 Thornburgh’s predictions of public panic thus indexed the extent to which the emotional management of the population—indeed, the containment of emotional volatility—had been incorporated into Cold War visions of civil defense. What is more surprising than Thornburgh’s assumption is that state officials pushed back against it. PEMA director Oran Henderson openly disagreed with Thornburgh. “I tried to discourage the Governor in this aspect,” he recalled. “I’ve been able to find no authoritative documentation of any of the surveys that have ever been taken or the studies that have ever been made since the British evacuated over one and a half million of their children on the first, second, and third of May in 1939. And then two million Londoners voluntarily evacuated. I know of no incidents of this kind of mass panic, and I had to sort of take exception to my Governor on this.” An evacuation would be accompanied by frustrations, delays, and accidents, Henderson clarified, but he did not believe there would be a panic.93 Henderson’s skepticism is consistent with disaster research. One of the most robust, consistent findings of the field is that if people are convinced that they can get out of the path of danger, evacuations tend to be orderly, and panic is exceedingly rare. So rare, in fact, that some scholars think the term panic should be dropped as a social science concept altogether.94
Given this lack of evidence, how do we explain Thornburgh’s fears? In part, what has been called the panic myth allowed Thornburgh to reassert the state’s authority at a moment when it had been severely compromised. We may recall how disempowered Thornburgh was during the first two days of the accident. He knew little about nuclear power, had no idea what was going on inside the reactor, possessed no real knowledge about the threat posed by radiation, and was struggling to assess the credibility of conflicting information he was receiving from Met-Ed, the NRC, and the press. In this context, Thornburgh drew a distinction between the “potential” risks posed by the reactor and the “proven” risks associated with evacuation. If he was unsure of how to protect citizens from the reactor, he could at least protect them from themselves. He could serve as a protector at the precise moment that the accident had called into question the state’s capacity to keep citizens out of harm’s way. At a time when the state was increasingly desperate for sound information and the local population was displaying remarkable equanimity, the panic myth created an imaginary dichotomy between a desperate, out-of-control population and a sober-minded state.95
But Thornburgh’s actions also evoked a chivalric ideal of the state as a protector of women, children, and the unborn. Thornburgh insisted that his advisory to pregnant women and preschool-aged children was precautionary and that there was no imminent threat. But if the situation did deteriorate, those citizens most vulnerable to radiation exposure needed to be removed from the path of danger. Thornburgh issued the advisory on the recommendation of NRC chairman Joseph Hendrie, who had reported that morning that conditions on the island remained worryingly unclear. “If my wife were pregnant and I had small children in the area,” he told Thornburgh, “I would get them out because we don’t know what is going to happen.”96
The governor’s advisory, in combination with Sternglass’s warning the day before, incited pregnant women to take action. On Thursday, worried expectant mothers began calling local radio stations, state agencies, and hospitals to find out if their fetuses were endangered. The calls were so persistent that one regional NRC administrator quipped, “We have heard from every pregnant woman in the area.”97 Photojournalists began documenting young mothers and children fleeing their homes. Appearing in newspapers and on television screens throughout the country, these images would soon take on iconic status: mothers holding towels and blankets over their children’s faces in a makeshift effort to protect them from radiation exposure; pregnant women temporarily housed in the mass care centers established by the Red Cross; and mothers loading their children into station wagons and driving away, with the reactor’s towers looming ominously in the distance. Although by all accounts the voluntary evacuation was orderly, there were a few reports of mothers frantically picking up their children from the region’s schools on their way out of town.98 One young mother recalled, “I had seen cars, bumper to bumper, filled with women and children leaving the countryside.”99
Why did the bodies of women, children, and fetuses take on such a freighted symbolic role? The answer lies with the enduring centrality of women, children, and the unborn to the formation of political community and perceived threats to security. Throughout the nation’s history, the policing of community boundaries was justified on the grounds of defending the bodies of women and children. From Puritan captivity narratives that pitted the fates of colonial Christian women and children against hostile native peoples to the displacement of indigenous communities along the Western frontier, and from the white male chivalric ethic of the antebellum South to the breadwinner family ideal of the Cold War, the ostensible protection of white, Anglo-Saxon women and children aimed to establish who belonged (and who did not) to any given community. With its steady preoccupation with the safety of women and children, the accident tapped into these earlier moments of perceived community endangerment. But it modified them by introducing a new threat that could not be so easily projected onto an imagined foreign enemy: the debased, contaminated environment created by the Cold War atomic state itself. At Three Mile Island, then, the bodies of mothers and young children captured what was most deeply at stake in the debate over nuclear power, the question of generational continuity.100 These bodies evoked questions about the destructiveness of the US global order that had surfaced with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that had remained largely suppressed throughout the Cold War.
FIGURE 2.4. Mother with Child. Reprinted from Washington Post Special Report. Courtesy of Dick Thornburgh Papers, University of Pittsburgh Special Collections.
FIGURE 2.5. A Neighbor Helps a Mother and Child Evacuate Three Mile Island Area, March 30, 1979. Courtesy of AP Photo/Paul Vathis.
But the symbolic centrality of women and children at Three Mile Island also captured how working-class identity was dissolving and being displaced by identities along axes of gender, race, and sexuality in the 1970s.101 In rural Pennsylvania, as elsewhere, the New Deal–era category of the industrial working class was melting away in an increasingly globalized, financialized
, and service-based economy. This new economy would require a neoliberal workplace that was at once more inclusive and less equal, one in which, according to historian Thomas Borstelmann, the “clearly artificial hierarchies of race and sex” would be replaced by “a new hierarchy considered more natural: the sorting out of people in what were seen as their natural socioeconomic levels by the operation of the free market.”102 At the same time, new political fault lines appeared that could not be reduced to the struggle between capital and labor: between a “silent majority” that retained a commitment to patriotism and militarism and an antiwar left that demanded a total reappraisal of American power; between feminists and gay liberationists who expanded the bounds of political citizenship and those who sought the restoration of the traditional, heteronormative family; between a black freedom movement that called for political and economic justice and those who fought to maintain their hold on racial power; and between Americans who saw the Roe v. Wade decision as a linchpin of women’s equality and others who saw it as a declaration of war on the innocent. The eviction of class from the political field by the end of the decade helps make sense of why an accident that might have once been interpreted primarily as a crisis of workplace safety instead came to center on women and children.
This shift away from class did not go uncontested, however. On the contrary, after the accident, unionists fought to remind the public that it was nuclear plant workers who were most imperiled by lax safety standards. Both rank-and-file union members and union leaders traveled to an antinuclear demonstration in Washington, DC, in May 1979, where the International Association of Machinists president William Winpisinger reminded the crowd, “Workers slowly die of radiation making nuclear fuel and operating nuclear power plants. Workers transport the fuel. [They] are front-line economic, health, and safety casualties whenever nuclear accidents and mishaps occur.”103 At a New York City rally the following September, David Livingston, speaking on behalf of the United Auto Workers, observed that there were “growing forces in the labor movement ready to join hands in this fight against nuclear power.”104 And on the two-year anniversary of the accident, the Labor Committee for Safe Energy and Full Employment organized a commemorative protest march in Harrisburg that was sponsored by nine international unions.105 The labor movement’s growing opposition to nuclear power was propelled by two forces: concern with workplace safety issues and worry that nuclear power would displace other energy industries, and coal in particular, thus eliminating jobs. Both concerns made unionists key players in the struggle over nuclear power, yet their role was often obscured or overlooked as media outlets identified women and children as the frontline victims of the radiological threat.
The displacement of class by gender placed the latter at the center of a contest between two US nationalisms in the 1970s. The great feminist strides of that decade—heightened awareness of sexism, the growing demand for women’s equality, the democratization of the workplace—were assimilated into a vision of the nation as a land of individual opportunity becoming ever more meritocratic and inclusive. This was a postfeminist adaptation of a long-standing civic nationalist tradition that championed American pluralism. But women, and in particular mothers, also loomed large in an alternative biotic nationalism that figured the nation as a living body (in which soil, land, air, and water functioned as dynamic systems), as possessing a lifecycle, as capable of death and rebirth, and as dependent for its survival on a protected healthy sphere of reproductive continuity. This was an adaptation of an earlier exclusionary ethnonationalism that relied on spatial metaphors of boundaries and borders. Biotic nationalism shared certain features with ethnonationalism, but it relied primarily on a temporal conception of the nation. This conception took hold on the political right in the second half of the 1970s, as conservatives perceived a nation weakened, even existentially threatened, by military defeat, economic recession, energy shortages, and challenges to patriarchal authority. The accident amplified their collective sense that older systems of order were no longer working, while affirming that gender was at the center of the story. At Three Mile Island, women, children, and the unborn emerged as the avatars of a biotic nationalism that imagined the nation as a living, organic entity. The crisis at the plant endowed this nationalism with something new: an ecological dimension.
Simultaneously, the preoccupation with women and children at Three Mile Island aimed to rehabilitate the state’s authority. Despite the fact that the vast majority of evacuees chose to stay with family and friends during the crisis, widely reproduced photographs of pregnant women and children camping out at a mass care center implied that the state was tending to its most vulnerable citizens.106 As Thornburgh recalled after touring the center, “this was a stark reminder of the responsibility of governing.” Walking through the stadium, he saw “young children, mothers carrying babies, and their bewilderment and confusion over a technology they clearly didn’t understand, seeking reassurance that the situation had been handled.”107 A photograph of an African American toddler sleeping peacefully under a Civil Defense–issued blanket seemed to suggest that the state had risen to the occasion.
Governor Thornburgh lifted the evacuation advisory for pregnant women and preschool children on April 9, twelve days after the start of the accident. By then, the hydrogen bubble had disappeared, temperatures in the core had gone down, and the reactor was in stable condition. By the time the crisis passed, approximately 144,000 people who lived within fifteen miles of the plant had left the area, almost 40 percent of the total population. Thornburgh’s predictions of panic never materialized, but he had been right about one thing: residents who lived beyond the plant’s five-mile ring evacuated along with those who lived within it.108 Women had been more likely to evacuate than men, and a full 90 percent of pregnant women living in the area relocated. On April 6, Governor Thornburgh appeared on television and spoke directly to the people of central Pennsylvania. “We sustained, and we continue to absorb, psychological and financial injuries the extent to which may never be fully identified. They’re the kind of injuries that will live with us for years—perhaps generations.” For Thornburgh, the pregnant woman embodied the community’s suffering. “It’s not easy for a child-bearing young woman to pack up her belongings, in a rush of fear, and move to the floor of a stadium during the most anxious month of her life. Not all the comfort in the world can erase that memory from this woman’s consciousness—nor perhaps even that of her unborn son or daughter.”109
FIGURE 2.6. A Nurse Administers to Women and Children at the Hershey Center, Hershey Park. Reprinted from Three Mile Island: A Report to the Commissioners and to the Public, Volume I.
Beyond his appeal to the pregnant woman as the most apt symbol of the community’s ordeal, Thornburgh’s statement is meaningful in two ways. First, his emphasis on psychological—as opposed to physical—suffering anticipated a claim that local residents would mobilize in the years ahead as they fought to decommission the reactor, namely, that they were the victims of a psychological trauma that could only be overcome by the closing of the plant. As we shall see, this claim built upon and repurposed a Cold War preoccupation with psychology that would live on in the post–Cold War era. Second, Thornburgh implied that the tumultuous experience of evacuation would be forever seared not only into the memory of the expectant mother, but also into the memory of the unborn. This depiction of the unborn as both innocent victim and active subject had powerful roots in the political culture of the local community and would soon reappear.
FIGURE 2.7. A Red Cross Volunteer Feeds Children at the Hershey Center, Hershey Park, April 4, 1979. Courtesy of AP Photo/Rusty Kennedy.
FIGURE 2.8. Child Sleeping Under Civil Defense Blanket, Hershey Center, Hershey Park. Reprinted from Washington Post Special Report. Courtesy of Dick Thornburgh Papers, University of Pittsburgh Special Collections.
COMPETING ASSESSMENTS AND CONSERVATIVE ECOLOGICAL POLITICS
The accident shattered the
trust that had held the community together. In the weeks and months that followed, local men and women described a breach that divided their lives into a before and an after. Previously, they trusted the experts to protect them from harm and believed the claim that there would never be a serious accident at the reactor.110 In the words of one woman, “I was trusting so I stayed. My faith outweighed my fear. I barely knew the plant was there. All I cared about was that it would produce power so cheaply they wouldn’t have to read the meter.”111 The accident tipped the scale in the other direction, with fear outweighing trust. Fear was often accompanied by a sense of betrayal, rooted in the conviction that the utility and the NRC had downplayed the seriousness of the accident during the first forty-eight hours. One father recalled that his children had been playing outside, “sucking up radiation—just because those bastards didn’t tell the truth about releases.”112 Friday, March 30, as one woman stated, was “the last day in my life I’ll ever trust the utility or our government to do the right thing for me.”113
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