But New York also entered a postwar era soon defined by the momentous technological breakthrough the city itself had helped to spawn. Few of those crossing the intersection of Broadway and 120th Street yet gave much thought to the cataclysmic weapon that had had its cradle there or to how that weapon, the bomb that had ended the war, would soon be hanging over their daily lives.
CHAPTER 9
Red Alert
The Cold War Years, 1946–1982
The sirens began wailing at 8:30 AM, at the height of the morning rush hour. Prodded by policemen and civil defense wardens, tens of thousands of New Yorkers abruptly halted their daily commute to crowd into the lobbies of office buildings and down into subway stations. Drivers on the streets and highways pulled over and turned off their ignitions. Nurses escorted patients into hospital recesses, away from windows. Within minutes, the New York Times reported, New Yorkers had “created a ghost city out of a buzzing metropolis.” An eerie silence descended on Times Square and Herald Square, empty but for a few policemen mounted on horses. At 8:45, the sirens sounded the “all clear” signal, and the city’s people resumed their interrupted journeys to work and school. It was December 13, 1952, and New Yorkers had just undergone the “red alert” that officials had prepared them to expect that morning.1
Most New Yorkers took the exercise in stride; they had already proven their ability to clear the streets in a similar drill in 1951. And they would do so again and again, in annual drills christened Operation Alert by President Eisenhower’s Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), the agency founded in 1950 to help civilians prepare for the possibility of nuclear attack. For those remembering the camaraderie of the home front against Germany and Japan, the exercise might even trigger a twinge of nostalgia. The new threat, however, differed in ominous ways from those once posed by Nazi bombers and U-boats.
Waiting for the all-clear siren during an air raid drill, Wall Street, November 28, 1951. © ARTHUR AIDALA, BETTMANN / CORBIS.
The 1952 drill posited a lone Russian bomber hovering over the intersection of Boston Road and Southern Boulevard in the Bronx, dropping a single atomic bomb. As the hypothetical blast and ensuing fires devastated block after block of apartment buildings, schools, factories, and stores, an estimated 203,000 New Yorkers would perish; another 277,000 would be wounded. By the time of Operation Alert 1957, the hydrogen bomb, and a growing awareness of the effects of radioactive fallout, had upped the ante: the casualties inflicted by an H-bomb exploding over Governors Island were projected to be 2,339,012 killed and 2,261,238 severely wounded. No corner of the city would be spared: 294,000 people would perish in Queens and over 88,000 in the distant Bronx.2
New Yorkers were hardly alone in facing the grim realities of the new nuclear age. Atomic weapons were the great equalizer, and America’s erstwhile ally Russia—now the country’s rival and foe—was clearly developing an extensive arsenal of them, after testing its first A-bomb in 1949. Flying over the Arctic from the Soviet Union, new long-range bombers or missiles might hit innumerable American targets before fighter squadrons, alerted by Canadian and US radar stations, could intercept them. In an attempt to meet this threat, Operation Alert cast an ever-wider net, involving forty-three American cities in 1954, sixty-one in 1955, and seventy-five in 1956. In 1955, Eisenhower himself and fifteen thousand federal workers temporarily evacuated Washington for “secret relocation centers” in Maryland. Like other Americans, New Yorkers had to stand tough, the New York Times asserted in the wake of the 1955 drill. There was “no substitute for a just and lasting peace,” an editorial argued, but such a peace could not come “at the price of dishonor, or appeasement, or surrender of principle.” A real breakthrough was unlikely, “unless the Soviets abolish their Iron Curtain and amend their program to permit work for real peace.” Until then, the newspaper told its readers, Operation Alert would be a crucial yearly reminder of the need for urban civil defense in the face of “the deadly menace that hangs over the world today.”3
The nuclear menace did not hang lightly over New York. Yes, the Soviets might try to barrage the entire country, but few doubted that New York would attract more Soviet bombs than, say, Iowa City or Atlanta. In the post-Hiroshima age, the writer E. B. White noted in 1948, New York was “becoming the capital of the world.” The United Nations was located in New York, not Washington or Europe; Wall Street had supplanted the City of London as prime mover of international capitalism; Manhattan’s studios, galleries, and museums, not Paris’s, now set the standards for cultural achievement. Josef Stalin doubtless understood all this. “In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning,” White observed, “New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.” A familiar paradox resurfaced, but with far higher stakes: the city’s very power and fame as industrial hub, corporate headquarters, and symbol of American ascendancy lay it open to obliteration. “A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now,” White explained, “in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.”4
Federal civil defense spokesmen and their copywriters at the Madison Avenue advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn insisted that New Yorkers, like other Americans, prepare to survive a possible Russian attack. “We must have a strong civil defense program . . . ,” Jean Wood Fuller of the FCDA told audiences across the country in 1954, “to help us get up off the floor after a surprise attack, and fight back and win.” The population would have to take measures to survive and restore the government and economy. Indeed, such preparations would deter World War III by persuading the Soviets that a nuclear onslaught could not succeed. Why would the Kremlin risk “mutually assured destruction” if at least some New Yorkers and other Americans would dig themselves out, resurrect the capitalist way of life, and seek vengeance? Civil defense was thus vital.5
Despite their preparations, New Yorkers were haunted by the possibility that civil defense wouldn’t prevent war. It was hard to conceive how one of the world’s most densely populated cities could withstand the blast of atom or hydrogen bombs, or the horror of radioactive fallout. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had prompted an immediate recognition by journalists that a new age had dawned. Three months after the end of World War II, Life magazine ran a vivid piece entitled “The 36 Hour War,” which embodied the future in a drawing of hooded and masked survivors taking radiation readings on an utterly flattened Fifth Avenue, recognizable only from the lion statues still standing before a demolished Public Library. Envisioning the atomic devastation of Gotham would become a commonplace way to measure the deathly power of the bomb in the popular culture of the late 1940s and 1950s. And, as in previous wars, New Yorkers struggled within themselves as well as fought amongst themselves, turning the city itself into a Cold War arena. 6
The Cold War had set New Yorker against New Yorker well before the Russians tested their first atom bomb in 1949. By 1946, the year Winston Churchill coined the phrase “Iron Curtain,” mistrust was beginning to freeze what only a year before had been a warm outpouring of admiration for the Red Army and its role in vanquishing Nazism. In June 1947, a grand jury sitting in the federal courthouse on Foley Square in lower Manhattan began a year of work to determine whether the Communist Party of the USA was a conspiratorial organization dedicated to overthrowing the US government.
Undaunted by the rising tide of anti-“red” sentiment and policy, twenty thousand New York Communists gathered on May 1, 1948, to parade down Broadway to Union Square in their annual May Day parade. On a midtown block, the novelist Howard Fast stood with “teachers, lawyers, doctors, dentists, actors, writers, editors, publishers—an unbelievable crowd,” stretching from Eighth Avenue to Broadway, waiting their turn to join the procession. Fast watched for at least half an hour as “each block, starting at the most uptown bloc
k, had been emptying in turn, moving out into the avenue, trade union groups carrying their colorful old banners.” For many, faith in a progressive and harmonious postwar world, a world of industrial unionism, racial justice, and friendship between the United States and the USSR, remained fervent. Most May Day participants counted on the peculiar good-humored tolerance that characterized daily life in the city that was headquarters to the American left. When Freedom House, a conservative group, challenged the party’s legal parade permit as “an insult to America,” Fast observed “a large, wise old Polish cop” explaining the situation to the Freedom House emissary: “‘Look . . . on May Day, the left wing of labor marches. On Labor Day, the right wing of labor marches. Why do you want to make trouble?’”7
Suddenly, at noon, with Fast’s throng still waiting their turn to parade, the doors of a Catholic parochial school on the block swung open, and as Fast later recalled, “about a hundred screaming, cursing, teenage students, armed with everything from brass knuckles to pens, poured into the middle of our huge crowd, their fists flying, shouting their war cry: ‘Kill a commie for Christ!’” Chaos ensued as police poured in to separate the two groups and to order Fast and his comrades to start marching. The parade proceeded more or less as planned, although two union functionaries were briefly jailed for resisting arrest, and Fast himself narrowly escaped arrest for arguing with the police. “There’s always a next time,” one policeman told him.
The remark proved prescient. In July, the federal grand jury in Foley Square would indict twelve members of the Communist Party’s national board for conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the US government. Two years later, Fast himself would spend three months in federal prison for refusing to hand over papers of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, an identified “Communist front” group, to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). “Don’t you see how fast things are changing?” his wife, Bette, had warned him before the parade.8
With the onset of the Cold War, New York’s Communists felt the full brunt of what would eventually be labeled McCarthyism. Many New Yorkers, and not just high school rowdies, took part eagerly. Local Republicans charged that President Harry Truman was “soft” on Communism; Tammany Democrats responded by lauding Truman’s 1947 Loyalty Program and the president’s full cooperation with FBI investigations of subversives. The wartime truce between the city’s Socialists and Communists, common foes of Nazism, unraveled as Socialists and others purged known Communists from the governing boards of local labor unions. A 1949 New York State law led to the interrogation and dismissal of over four hundred of the city’s public school and college teachers as suspected Communists. The American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Catholic War Veterans, and American Jewish League Against Communism picketed performances by “red” actors.
The new Red Scare, like that of 1919, reached beyond the limits of the Communist Party to intimidate and harass countless liberals, civil libertarians, pacifists, non-Communist leftists, and ex-Communists whose real “crime” was commitment to progressive causes that could be denounced as subversive and pro-Soviet. More than any other city in the country, New York remained the hub for a wide spectrum of liberal and leftist organizations. But non-Communist admirers of the Soviet Union and enthusiasts for racial integration, labor unionism, Roosevelt’s New Deal, and international disarmament also aroused the ire of many New Yorkers, just as surely as they raised the hackles of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
Many Americans believed that, like Hollywood, New York City—with its domination of the performing arts, journalism, publishing, and radio and television broadcasting—was a potential threat to national security, a Trojan horse for seducing and lulling the nation’s unsuspecting millions with subtle, red messages. As Hoover put it in 1947, leftist subversives were “termites gnawing at the very foundation of American society,” and New York was a city perceived as being particularly infested. From an office on West Forty-Second Street in 1950, an anti-Communist organization called the American Business Consultants issued Red Channels, a pamphlet listing 151 mostly New York–and Hollywood-based performers, writers, and directors allegedly responsible for “Communist influence in radio and television.” AWARE, Inc., an outgrowth of the American Business Consultants, advised networks, sponsors, theaters, and schools to drop tainted employees, who then endured a shadowy blacklist that few employers admitted existed. The climate of fear, of having to watch what one said and to wonder who might be an informer, seeped in everywhere. Greenwich Villager Morris Jaffe was not the only New Yorker who wrapped books about Marxism in brown paper to conceal their titles from prying eyes—this on the bookshelf in his own apartment.9
New Yorkers had more to fear than being blacklisted. To win the Cold War, the government took measures that exceeded the bounds of all but the most paranoid imaginations, using New Yorkers and other Americans as guinea pigs. During the early 1950s, the CIA and military intelligence may have sprayed unknowing New York subway riders with aerosol LSD, a drug being tested as a possible “truth serum” for extracting secrets from Soviet spies; other “vulnerability tests,” some performed as late as 1966, entailed releasing airborne bacteria in subway stations to gauge the viability of biological warfare. Such experiments remained top secret until congressional investigations unearthed them during the 1970s.10
With the start of the Korean War in 1950, and with thousands of young New Yorkers filing through the army’s Induction Station at 39 Whitehall Street and the navy and marine corps recruiting offices at 346 Broadway on their way to basic training and shipment across the Pacific, dissent seemed doubly unpatriotic to many in the city. Those who stayed home donated blood and sent packages to the troops. For most New Yorkers, the Korean War differed in essential ways from World War II. Where the earlier war had rescued the economy, New York’s prosperous manufacturing base now sailed along on domestic consumption. True, the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s civilian workforce jumped from 9,600 to 20,000 during the Korean War; jobs also opened up in other shipyards around the harbor and on the twenty piers shipping military cargo. In the nearby suburbs, Nassau County’s aviation factories churned out F-84 jets that dropped bombs and napalm on the enemy and F-9 Cougars that outshot Soviet-built MIGs over Korea. At least 966 young New Yorkers would lose their lives fighting Communists in the fields and mountains of Korea or in the skies above it. Others came back with wounds; Norman Dworkowitz, who had scanned the skies of Brooklyn for Luftwaffe bombers as a young teenager, returned home from a Korean trench with a fragment of grenade shrapnel lodged in his face and a Purple Heart. Yet, except for those anxiously awaiting the return of loved ones serving overseas, the contained scale of the war compared to the all-out effort of the early 1940s made the new conflict seem more remote. At the same time, the queasy possibility that the war might escalate into a direct confrontation with Red China, and into a nuclear World War III, infused the early Operation Alert drills—and the campaign against domestic Communists—with their own particular tensions.11
For all the damage that the anti-Communist witch hunt did to individual lives and to freedom of thought and expression, the city was a base for clandestine Soviet activities. Even before World War II or the Cold War, the city’s centrality, its leftist sympathies, and the anonymity it afforded made New York fertile turf for Soviet moles—or worse. In the late thirties, as Stalin’s purges in Russia sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths, agents of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, were active in New York. After Walter Krivitsky, Red Army chief of intelligence for Western Europe, defected to New York in 1938, he charged that “Red Judases”—Soviet assassins or kidnappers—were trailing him around the city. Krivitsky died in a Washington hotel room in 1941, an apparent suicide, but friends persisted in raising questions about his death. Even more alarming was the fate of Juliet Poyntz, a founding member of the American Communist Party who had also become alienated from Stalin. Poyntz disappeared into thin air after leaving her West Fifty-Seventh Street apartment i
n June 1937. She was never heard from again. Anti-Soviet observers—including the anarchist Carlo Tresca, who had rallied fellow leftists against Fascism in the 1930s—charged that the Kremlin was sending forth its Great Purge to snatch victims from the very streets of Manhattan.12
But it was as a meeting place and recruiting ground for spies that New York would play its most important role for the Soviet Union. By 1932, Max Bedacht, a leading figure at Communist Party headquarters in New York, was acting as liaison between the OGPU, Stalin’s intelligence service, and the party’s “underground” in the United States. In an apartment tucked away on Gay Street in Greenwich Village, Aleksandr Ulanovsky, an officer of the Red Army’s military intelligence division, deciphered instructions from the Comintern by dipping letters written in invisible ink into a solution of potassium crystals. Native-born New Yorkers also took part. In 1934, Whittaker Chambers, former editor of the party magazine New Masses, became a courier shuttling regularly between Washington and Manhattan, driving back to the city with microfilm and stolen documents collected by secret Communists working in the State Department and other federal agencies.13
New York at War Page 32