Read This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War Online
Authors: David F. Krugler
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This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (27 page)
Meanwhile the AEC was encountering widespread employee resistance to its move to Germantown, Md. After construction began in May 1956, personnel director Oscar S. Smith had set up an information center about the move, yet many employees refused to believe “the relocation decision [was] definite and final.” They also doubted “the validity, even the veracity, of the announced reasons for the move.”
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Although dispersal had indeed dictated the Germantown site, AEC employees could hardly be faulted for question
ing the federal government’s commitment to dispersal, since the CIA was building in Langley and the State Department was expanding its building at 21st and C Streets NW.
The National Bureau of Standards (NBS) also struggled to overcome employee opposition to a move. By the early 1950s, the NBS was crammed into a 71-acre campus along Connecticut Avenue in Northwest Washington. More than half of the 89 structures were aged, creaking tempos requiring constant and costly repairs. NBS director Dr. A.V. Astin noted that an atomic bomb “of the small variety, now, so to speak, prehistoric” would obliterate the unique laboratories and instruments that calibrated weights, measures, and the properties of materials. Such standards were indispensable to indus
try and the military, and Astin estimated the loss of this plant and equipment would take more than ten years to replace. The NBS also wanted space to expand its work on fuels and nuclear physics.
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In 1956, the NBS requested $2.75 million to pay for selection of a dispersed building site. The Bureau of the Budget forwarded the request; the House Appropriations Committee denied it; the Senate restored $930,000. So the NBS chose a 550-acre parcel in Gaithersburg, Md., approximately four miles southeast of the AEC’s site. Architects were hired and costs estimated; another tedious round of haggling began. Astin soon became exasperated. The House Appropriations Committee demanded a more detailed budget, but then rejected it because it was 40 percent higher than the original estimate. The NBS went back to the drawing board; but Eisenhower left the revised plan out of his 1959 budget. Meanwhile the NBS realized it needed funds to build a nuclear research reactor at the new site. In 1960, Congress finally approved con
struction funds and ground was broken in Gaithersburg in June 1961.
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All this for less than 3,000 employees, many of whom wanted to stay put. In early 1957, a survey uncovered some of the reasons why: increased commuting times, difficulty in recruiting top-grade personnel, and isolation from the scientific community. Some recommended a complete rebuilding of the Washington site; one jokingly wanted a site “nearer the beach.” Only one of the 425 respondents remarked that the Gaithersburg site diminished the hazards of a nuclear attack. Finding homes also topped the list of concerns. Many wanted the NBS to subsidize housing costs or even build a planned community like Greenbelt. African Americans wondered if the NBS would help them overcome housing and lending discrimination in Montgomery County. “At present it would be nearly impossible for me or any other mem
ber of my race to obtain a suitable site, of my own choosing, for building a home near the new NBS site,” explained one employee. “This would at best
make it difficult for me to move with the Bureau; it may also be true of others. I do not expect the situation to be remedied.” Another person passed on a rumor that an employee group looking for residential building sites in Gaithersburg planned to exclude blacks.
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Whether or not the rumor was true, there was widespread discrimination against African Americans in the suburbs. In 1948, the Supreme Court had ruled racially restrictive housing covenants unconstitutional, but they remained attached to many deeds. These covenants helped keep most suburbs white domains well into the 1960s. A study of housing trends in Washington between 1948 and 1958 concluded: “The most serious obstacle to integra
tion in housing here, as in other localities, is the exclusion of nonwhites from the new housing supplies, developed mainly with Federal assistance [a refer
ence to government-backed mortgages], in suburban areas surrounding the central city.”
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Change was slow to come. In a 20-month period between early 1962 and fall 1963, only about 20 black families moved into all-white enclaves in Montgomery County. In 1964, reporter Haynes Johnson claimed, “there are only about five known examples of integrated housing in all of Northern Virginia.”
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Not all white suburbanites expressed hostility toward African Americans, nor was every suburb community white-only. A black woman who moved to the Montgomery County town of Garrett Park said her white neighbors warmly welcomed her, while Prince Georges County, Md., had a growing black population.
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Still, such examples were the exception, not the rule. In 1950, the District’s population (802,178) was 64.5 percent white and 35.5 percent nonwhite. (More than 98 percent of the nonwhite population was African American.) By 1957, the city’s estimated population was 56 percent white and 44 percent nonwhite. In just two years, 1955–56, approximately 38,000 white residents left the District for the suburbs. Between 1950 and 1957, Montgomery County added more than 130,000 whites to its 1950 population of 164,401, while Fairfax County and Falls Church, Va., more than doubled their white populations. White families moving to the area usually opted for suburban residency, whereas African Americans settled in the District. By 1965, 60 percent of the District’s residents were black.
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White flight was a national trend, but in Washington it overlapped with postwar desegregation. For a democratic nation committed to fighting communism, a segregated capital often proved embarrassing. Foreign visitors and diplomats of color held out their passports to get lunch counter service, a State Department official implored a hotel to honor the reservation of the foreign minister of an African nation.
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In response, both Presidents Truman and Eisenhower publicly committed themselves to desegregating Washington, but as historian Constance McLaughlin Green noted: “The battle for Washington was not to be won merely by a message from the White House.” Indeed, the persistent initiatives of black Washingtonians, aided by white allies and national organizations, won the “battle.” Petitions and peaceful protests, lawsuits and lobbying—such activism prodded recalcitrant bureau
crats, put cases in courts, and forced change. In 1949, for example, a biracial
coordinating committee supported by 61 organizations dusted off two antidiscrimination laws dating to the early 1870s. The next year, a citizens group sent all-black or racially mixed teams into 99 downtown restaurants. Refusal of service at a cafeteria owned by the John R. Thompson Restaurant Company led to a lawsuit. A series of contradictory rulings eventually brought the case to the Supreme Court, which upheld the antidiscrimination laws in June 1953. During this same period, committed citizens pressured individual facilities to open their doors to blacks and distributed a list of “eating places which serve all well-behaved people.”
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The most prominent example of desegregation occurred in public educa
tion. Following the Supreme Court’s May 1954 ruling against segregated schools, D.C. Superintendent of Schools Hobart Corning proposed partial integration by September.
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The so-called Corning Plan displeased both opponents and proponents of segregation. Black parents and the American Friends Service Committee sharply criticized the provision allowing students to remain at their current schools until they graduated, while the white Federation of Citizens Associations unsuccessfully petitioned the courts for an injunction against any integration. When school began on September 14, most of the District’s 100,000 pupils were in familiar settings. None of the five vocational high schools had integrated the student bodies or teaching staffs. At many white high schools, the number of black students numbered 12 or less. McKinley High School, in Northeast Washington, was a notable exception; its enrollment included 588 white and 345 black pupils.
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Still, the District complied more diligently than most public school systems. In a 1957 essay, Associate Superintendent Carl F. Hansen lauded the principal who persuaded a white mother to keep her child in a class with a black teacher and related examples of black and white teachers and parents cooperating with one another. Hansen didn’t overlook instances of racial conflict, but he had high hopes for integration, even dubbing it a “miracle of social adjustment.” For every white parent willing to adjust, however, many more preferred to move. By September 1957, the District had lost an estimated 8,000 white pupils, while black enrollment had grown by almost 13,000, making the public school system 70 percent black. McKinley High School itself lost 273 white pupils and added 477 black students.
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White flight was already underway when the schools desegregated, but the transition led more white families to leave the District for the suburbs.
U.S. News & World Report
used warlike language to describe the changes. Whites were “fleeing the city as Negro neighborhoods crowd up against them” and “[p]ublic parks are, in large measure, being deserted by whites and taken over by Negroes.”
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Hansen himself admitted that “adjustment by change of address” was the choice of many whites.
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Another observer was blunter: “Parents unwilling to send their children to integrated schools have been steadily moving their homes to nearby Maryland and Virginia.”
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Of course, African Americans weren’t “invaders,” and not all whites “retreated” to the sub
urbs. In the District’s Manor Park neighborhood, for example, white journalist Mortan Kaplan helped found Neighbors, Inc., in 1958. The volunteer group
used meetings and personal visits to dissuade white homeowners from leav
ing the integrated neighborhood.
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White flight and suburbanization offer an interesting perspective on dispersal. In 1950, Tracy Augur had urged that long-term dispersal include the creation of new communities for federal workers within the dispersal zone (20–40 miles from the zero milestone marker) that would be “entirely outside and physically separate from the developed urban area of Washington and its contiguous suburbs.”
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By the mid-1960s, two such self-contained communities were being developed from the ground up: Reston, Va., approximately 20 miles west of the zero milestone marker; and Columbia, Md., about 30 miles northwest of the marker. These “new towns” weren’t built as residential anchors for dispersed federal campuses or to escape thermonuclear blasts, but rather, as alternatives to both urban and suburban living. Like Augur, the new town planners wanted to build model communities.
In 1961, developer Robert Simon bought 6,800 acres in northwest Fairfax County, Va. Simon, who was familiar with Ebenezer Howard’s garden city concept, hired two experienced planners, Julian Whittlesey and William Conklin. Whittlesey had once collaborated with dispersal advocate Clarence Stein and relished the opportunity to apply new town principles to Simon’s project. Reston, the resulting community, closely resembled Augur’s ideal cluster city: it was approximately 20 miles from the center of Washington; had ample parks and open spaces; and, by 1987, its population was 50,000. Reston’s signature feature, the five village centers, offered plazas, shops, and community centers, helping create the organic community prized by Augur and Stein.
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Beginning in 1965, visionary developer James Rouse built a second new town on almost 14,000 acres of Howard County, Md., about halfway between Washington and Baltimore. Loftily named Columbia, the meticu
lously planned community had villages connected by paths and parkways. Like Reston, Columbia had approximately 50,000 residents by the mid
1980s. Rouse actively participated in the planning and development of Columbia, and he insisted that builders and realtors abjure racial discrimina
tion. He proudly located his company’s headquarters in the town center and commissioned architect Frank Gehry to design an exhibition building. Galleria, the shopping mall, had a glass ceiling, trees, and fountains. Columbia soon enticed people looking for a community that blended the best features of urban, suburban, and small town living. Historian Nicholas Dagen Bloom: “by the late 1960s and early 1970s, Columbia was poised as an attractive alternative to surrounding suburbs.”
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Augur and Stein could hardly have wanted more for their own imagined cluster cities.
Except dispersed federal buildings. But it was the 1960s, not the late 1940s, and hydrogen weapons had rendered dispersal obsolete. How ironic, then, that a wartime essential agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, moved to Reston in 1973. In the mid-1950s, the Survey had been slated for dispersal to Gaithersburg, but Congress had blocked the move.
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9
Land of the Blind
Government which goes on with some kind of continuity will be like a one-eyed man in the land of the blind. Dwight D. Eisenhower, as recorded by Cabinet Secretary Maxwell Rabb
1
I
magine
...a turn as a FCDA Attack Warning Officer, circa 1956. Perhaps you were hired because you served four years in the U.S. Navy as an opera
tions officer, or because you once worked as an air traffic controller. You can operate communications systems and exemplify “personal characteristics of initiative, decisiveness, adaptability, poise, stability under great stress, cooper
ativeness.” You work at one of the 16 Air Division Control Centers in the continental United States. Your desk is on a dais in a well-lit room, an array of telephones and consoles surrounds you. There is the Civil Air Defense Warning System, composed of four-wire private circuits connecting the Air Division Control Center to your area’s Key Points, located in police or fire station communication rooms. It’s your job to send Air Defense Warnings to these Key Points. Should these circuits fail, you have a long-distance handset telephone. If a Key Point calls you, a beehive lamp on the dais lights up.
