Friday, February 17, 2012

a special air-conditioned train...

In the early summer of 1955, Chicago was gripped with what we can only describe as nuclear hysteria.  Over the past few years news reports described the development and testing of terrible new weapons on both sides of the IC, and the local cognoscenti of the Chicago Civil Defense Corps had fanned passions to a fever pitch with frequent massive simulations of atomic attacks, weekly tests of the city's 95 air-raid sirens, and anti-communist rhetoric incubated in McCarthy's hen-house. The airwaves crackled and flickered with paranoid ravings of impending doom, for example this short interview with Val Peterson, FCDA Director under Eisenhower, from August 19, 1953:





It was in Chicago during the spring of 1955, speaking before a convention of insurance underwriters, that Peterson had uttered his warning for city residents to "run, dig, or die" in order to ensure their survival from a Soviet attack.
Chicago Daily Tribune, February 17, 1955

 These warnings were amplified in the pages of Colonel McCormick's rabidly anti-communist Chicago Daily Tribune every day.  In June of 1955, the city prepared for the first simulation of attack by hydrogen bomb, scheduled for June 15.  Planned as the largest simulation of the apocalypse in the city since the initiation of these drills around 1950, hundreds of thousands were enlisted to participate in some way.

As the spring unfolded there was something of a changing of the guard.  Robert McCormick, publisher and scion of the most powerful family in Chicago, passed away in early April.  At about the same time Richard J. Daley, a Democratic ward-healer and the Cook County Clerk, was elected mayor of the city for the first time.  Daley would become perhaps the most powerful big-city boss ever seen in an American city, serving through six chaotic terms, and he would create the Chicago Machine that dominates Chicago political life to this day.

On the day of the test, plans were made to temporarily relocate the headquarters of the new mayor's city government to La Grange, a western suburb, before the simulated incineration of hundreds of thousands of unfortunate city residents who were unable to escape, as a way of ensuring the continuity of city services.


During the simulation, which didn't include an actual attempted evacuation of the more than 3 million Chicagoans but did include a hypothetical evacuation of nearly half the city (unrealistic given the two-hour warning), there were over half a million immolated in a simulated instant with tens of thousands of victims succumbing to injuries and radiation sickness (a newly identified malady) in the next 48 hours.  For his part, Hizzoner and the rest of the city council were whisked to the suburbs in a special air-conditioned train.

Unfortunately, a very real (and unusual) northeast wind on the day of the attack carried the radioactive fallout from the simulated bomb to the west and southwest and the mayor and city council were "wiped out as the H-bomb fallout would have been carried over that area [La Grange]", adding to the multitude of simulated dead and dying.  This unusual wind (normally out of the southwest in June) meant that the swath of destruction from the newly identified technological horror "fallout" would have stretched as far as Peoria, whose city government had "refused to take part in the test as it would disrupt normal working hours".

In the report on the test completed by CCDC officials over the next month, city officials demanded that federal civil defense authorities take a stand regarding the recommendations of evacuation in large urban areas, which had been the hallmark of FCDA policy of the Eisenhower administration, replacing the "duck and cover" strategies (with soft industrial dispersion) pursued under Truman.  The 1955 Chicago test was one of over 50 urban simulations: it marked the beginning of a deep realization of the folly of civil defense strategies in the face of a concentrated urban population and the accelerating power of nuclear weapons being produced by the United States and Soviet Union.