New York at War (44 page)

Yet the efforts of Jewish leaders to elicit government action on behalf of their European brethren seemed fruitless. In October 1943, four hundred rabbis, many from New York, journeyed to Washington to present a petition to Vice President Henry Wallace calling on the United States and the Allies to save Europe’s Jews and ease immigration to British Palestine. Their effort helped convince Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau to press for the creation of the War Refugee Board, an organization that helped save tens of thousands of lives in 1944–1945. But for many New York Jews, especially those with loved ones stuck on the other side of the Atlantic, it was too little, too late. Combating genocide failed to become a priority for the American and Allied war effort.
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Frustration with Washington was matched by trouble at home in New York. The war saw a nationwide upsurge in anti-Semitism as many Gentiles (seemingly forgetting Pearl Harbor) blamed Jews for entangling America in a war against the Axis. “We do not hire Jews,” some New York employers admitted, and Jews outnumbered blacks in lodging FEPC job discrimination reports. Embittered by the social stresses of the war, a minority within the Irish population targeted Jews. In Washington Heights, Fordham, and Tremont, gangs of mostly Irish teens and young men threw stones at families leaving Sabbath services, painted swastikas on synagogue doors, and broke shop windows while yelling “Kill the Jews.” For every group of Irish neighbors disgusted by the attacks, Jewish community spokesmen charged, there seemed to be a policeman looking the other way. “We are damned sick and tired of watching the sick Hitler-like grin” on the face of “Captain McCarthy (or O’Brien) . . . and hearing the usual answer: ‘Ah, the boys are just playing.’” By January 1944, one Brooklyn Jewish periodical asserted that “the streets of New York have become unsafe for Jews and—who knows?—pogroms might be in the making.”
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Adina Bernstein was the young widow of a rabbi, a US Army chaplain killed in North Africa in 1943. One day she sat in a northern Manhattan park near “two Irishwomen” who “were complaining that over in Europe Christian boys were fighting to save the Jews in Germany. It went on and on and on and on, Christian blood being spilled. Finally, I couldn’t take it, and I said ‘Did you lose anybody in the service?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, I did. Do me a favor and just go away so that I don’t have to hear you or see you.’ They got up, but she had the last word. ‘It’s still a goddamn Jewish war.’”
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Around 7 PM on August 14, 1945, the news flashed along the electric ribbon encircling the New York Times Building at Forty-Second Street and Broadway: “Japan Surrenders.” Within minutes, the intersection was jammed with a throng of thousands, bringing traffic to a halt in every direction. Confetti and streamers rained down from office buildings. Within two hours, the
Herald Tribune
reported, “two million yelling, milling celebrants of peace were jammed into the area bounded by Ninth and Sixth Avenues and Fortieth and Fifty-Third Streets.” That spring, New Yorkers had experienced over the course of three weeks the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the execution of Benito Mussolini, and the suicide of Adolf Hitler, followed a week later by Allied victory in Europe. Already the troop ships were disgorging servicemen and women onto the West Side piers by the hundreds of thousands. Now the long war was finally over. In Times Square,
Life
magazine’s Alfred Eisenstaedt, watching as a sailor engulfed a nurse in a rapturous kiss, snapped the moment’s signature photograph. That night, as the citywide party continued, thousands flocked into churches for services of thanks and remembrance.
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Once again, New York had escaped the full brunt of a catastrophic war. True, tens of thousands of its servicemen and merchant seamen had lost their lives or been wounded in Africa, Europe, the Pacific, or the Atlantic. But the city itself was spared, despite the fears of many of its people and the intentions of the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine, the Abwehr, and Hitler himself. The city’s ethnic and political tensions, inflamed as always by global conflicts, erupted in sporadic moments of violence, but the unifying momentum of the war effort and of renewed prosperity had prevented a reprise of anything akin to the Civil War Draft Riot.

The end of the war left New York stronger and more important than ever. With Europe’s great cities in rubble, Manhattan was now definitively the global capital of commerce, finance, and culture; emblematic city of the world’s richest and most powerful country; and a fitting home for the new United Nations (which opened in temporary quarters at a Sperry Gyroscope plant on Long Island in 1946, before moving to its permanent site along the East River five years later). New York lawyers, financiers, and labor leaders—Henry Stimson, John McCloy, Averell Harriman, Bernard Baruch, and Sidney Hillman—had played pivotal roles in mobilizing Roosevelt’s Washington and the nation for global war; Wall Street once more had been crucial to funding the war effort. A distinctive New York style of liberalism, one in which politicians, union heads, and businessmen embraced or at least accepted an expansive vision of government intervention to improve urban conditions, carried the impetus of the New Deal through the war and beyond. With support from Washington and Albany, Fiorello La Guardia had presided over the construction of new public housing for union members and minorities and a health insurance plan that provided medical coverage to thousands of city residents. Federally mandated rent control implemented during the war continued into the postwar years. As veterans availed themselves of GI Bill benefits to go to college and buy homes in the outer boroughs or suburbs, the postwar depression many had feared failed to materialize—even as many women and African Americans lost their wartime factory jobs to returning white veterans deemed to have seniority. Factories that had cranked out mortar shells resumed production of consumer goods; vacationers replaced GIs on the floating hotels steaming in and out of Liner Row.

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

T
he 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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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