New York at War (46 page)

With the onset of the Cold War, the Soviet spy rings in the United States disintegrated. British authorities arrested Klaus Fuchs in London in January 1950. In Philadelphia, the FBI picked up Harry Gold a few months later. Gold’s confession allowed the arrest of David Greenglass, Julius Rosenberg, and Julius’s wife, Ethel, David’s sister, all living on the Lower East Side. The news made front-page headlines, but the true story behind their apprehension remained a secret until the mid-1990s. During the late 1940s, US Army cryptologists working in a station at Arlington, Virginia, managed to break the code Russian diplomats were using in their cables and radiograms back to Moscow. The breakthrough, kept secret in order to lull the Soviets into thinking their covert operations were still safe, enabled the FBI to identify Gold, Julius Rosenberg, and others as spies.

The trial of the Rosenbergs, and the question of their guilt or innocence, divided New Yorkers. Many were persuaded that the couple were spies and traitors. Others argued that the government was framing two guiltless individuals. With the revelation of the so-called Venona decrypts, even the most ardent defenders of the Rosenbergs’ innocence have, for the most part, conceded Julius’s complicity; historians continue to argue over the nature and extent of Ethel’s role and whether it justified her conviction. Whether the secrets passed on to the Soviets actually accelerated the Russian nuclear program is also the subject of debate. Most experts agree that Stalin’s scientists would soon have produced a bomb on their own, although some also argue that early access to American atomic secrets emboldened Stalin to permit North Korea to invade South Korea in 1950. At the time, the sentence meted out to the Rosenbergs—death in the electric chair—became a rallying point for Communists and many liberals around the world, and a public relations coup for the Kremlin, which charged that the United States was barbarously martyring the couple because they were party members, not spies. Photographs of ten-year-old Michael Rosenberg and six-year-old Robert, soon to be orphaned by the state, stared sadly from placards carried by Communists in Union Square protest rallies.

President Eisenhower refused to commute the death sentences. “By immeasurably increasing the chances of atomic war,” he asserted, “the Rosenbergs may have condemned to death tens of millions of innocent people all over the world.” On the evening of June 19, 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. On West Seventeenth Street, a crowd of five thousand, pushed by police out of Union Square for lack of a permit, held a vigil, many of them lifting signs reading “We Are Innocent” and weeping.
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One dimension of the Rosenberg case lingered uncomfortably over the entire Cold War era in New York, the world’s largest Jewish city: the fact that Jews were the largest and most conspicuous ethnic bloc within the city’s Communist Party, which itself represented at least 40 percent of the party’s national membership. To be sure, the dramas played out in the city’s courtrooms ensnared numerous Gentiles as well, among them accused spy Alger Hiss and his ex-Communist accuser Whittaker Chambers. But the taint of disloyalty possessed a particularly noxious sting for the city’s (and nation’s) Jews, especially among the large majority who were not Communists.

The Mississippi congressman and bigot John Rankin spoke the words other Americans were thinking when, during the HUAC hearings of 1947, he read into the record a list of names from a petition sponsored by a liberal group opposed to blacklisting. Rankin implied that the group was a Communist front. Among the signers was “Danny Kaye. . . . We found out his real name—David Daniel Kaminsky. . . . There is one who calls himself Edward [G.] Robinson. His real name is Emmanuel Goldenberg.” Rankin went on to list the “aliases” and birth names of other performers. In light of such sentiments, the government went to special lengths to ensure that the ferreting out of accused spies could not be denounced as an anti-Semitic witch hunt. Accordingly, when the Rosenbergs came to trial, their judge was Irving Kaufman, who imposed the death sentence; their prosecutor was Irving Saypol, aided by an ambitious young attorney named Roy Cohn who would soon be making headlines assisting Senator Joseph McCarthy in Washington.
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While the two prosecutors and the judge shared the Rosenbergs’ religious heritage, no Jew was among the jurors who decided the Rosenbergs’ guilt or innocence. Many Jews in New York, of varying political outlooks, greeted the conviction and execution of the Rosenbergs with a mixture of embarrassment, anger, and remorse. “My father took my sister and me to the corner of our block in Brooklyn to watch the Rosenberg funeral procession pass,” journalist Sam Roberts later remembered. “Even at the age of six, I was aware that somebody had done something to make us ashamed.” The bitterness spawned by the Rosenberg case would linger across years and generations. After the eulogies at the funeral of Judge Kaufman in 1992, the angry voice of an uninvited guest echoed through the synagogue: “He murdered the Rosenbergs. Let him rot in hell.”
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As the pursuit of domestic spies and subversives crested in the early and mid-1950s, the anxious question lingered: How could the city’s population be protected against Soviet nuclear attack? Across the nation, thousands of homeowners built private shelters, often purchased in prefabricated kits, to shield themselves from bomb blast, flame, and radioactive fallout. In Princeton, New Jersey—midway between New York and Philadelphia, another presumed target city—physicist Eugene Wigner, one of the fathers of the Manhattan Project, built a blast shelter for his family. But elsewhere in the Greater New York area, many suburbanites balked. In New Canaan, Connecticut, Marnie Seymour recalled years later, “our neighbors were going to build a bomb shelter, elaborate, well stocked. They wanted us all to go together. We’d be compatible. Harry [her husband] talked ’em out of it. He said, ‘You’d be sizzled to death. There’d be nothing to come out to. You wouldn’t want to survive. It would be a slow, hideous death.’”
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The beau ideal of the shelter effort, encouraged by the FCDA, was the backyard or basement single-family refuge, an innovation well suited to an increasingly suburban nation of freestanding houses, not to the apartment complexes of a large city. A subtle anti-urban bias underpinned much of this effort; it was as if the government itself was writing off the big cities as hopeless casualties in any nuclear strike, with the nation’s saving remnant of middle-class suburban businessmen, professionals, and their families posited as the most likely—and implicitly, the most desirable—survivors. With Congress unwilling to appropriate large sums for civil defense on top of the Pentagon’s ballooning budget, the FCDA and state agencies encouraged “self-help”—meaning that citizens were left to fund their own private means of survival, a philosophy that defeated the construction of expensive, large-scale urban shelters. In an era that reveled in white-bread conformity, it was Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York—with their ethnic neighborhoods, their unsightly zones of poverty, and their growing populations of blacks and Latinos—that were shortchanged.

So what were apartment-dwelling New Yorkers supposed to do? Duck and cover. Pamphlets distributed by the FCDA, such as
Survival Under Atomic Attack
(1951), drew no distinction between city dwellers and others but encouraged all to think that the bomb could be survived. With the bomb exploding nearby, pedestrians should huddle next to the foundation of a “good substantial building” or “jump in any handy ditch or gutter.” Even radiation was survivable; once back indoors, “you can get rid of all the radioactive dirt you’ve picked up if you keep scrubbing” during an ordinary bath or shower.
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In the city’s schools, air raid drills became routine. New York’s children, like others across the country, followed the Atomic Age adventures of Bert the Turtle in FCDA animated filmstrips and comic books: “
BERT DUCKS AND COVERS
. HE’S SMART, BUT
HE
HAS HIS SHELTER ON HIS BACK.
YOU MUST LEARN TO FIND SHELTER
.” Growing up in the Bronx, Todd Gitlin learned to expect the unexpected: “Every so often, out of the blue, a teacher would pause in the middle of class and call out, ‘Take Cover!’ We knew, then, to scramble under our miniature desks and to stay there, cramped, heads folded under our arms, until the teacher called out, ‘All clear!’” As Gitlin later reflected, the experience bonded an entire generation together—“the first American generation compelled from infancy to fear not only war but the end of days.” Across town in Spanish Harlem, kindergartener Mickey Melendez learned a similar lesson: he and his classmates “were meticulously trained to go under our desks to protect us from the bombs that were expected to fall all over the city.” In 1951–1952, the Board of Education spent $159,000 to issue metal dog tags to every student attending public, private, or parochial schools in New York. The tags, to be worn around the neck, would ostensibly prevent children from getting lost in the chaos of a nuclear attack. That such tags might also serve to identify charred remains was usually left unsaid.
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Some planners proposed jumbo-sized urban versions of the suburban shelters. In the city, such sanctuaries would have to sacrifice individuality and privacy for the collective needs of thousands of apartment dwellers. Civil engineer Robert Panero, a contractor to the US Army Corps of Engineers, revived a World War II idea and seriously advocated drilling vast tunnels into the hard schist eight hundred feet below Manhattan’s streets, a feat he argued would permit the island’s entire population to get underground in twenty minutes’ time. The softer rock beneath Brooklyn and Staten Island posed challenges Panero never solved, and the whole idea was shelved as impractical.
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Architect Hugh Ferriss’s vision of air raid shelters for New York during World War II, shown here, foreshadowed similar plans during the early Nuclear Age. Hugh Ferriss,
Shelter Equipped for Occupancy,
1942. CHARCOAL AND CHARCOAL PENCIL, 180 3 250. MILDRED LANE KEMPER ART MUSEUM, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY, ST. LOUIS. GIFT OF MRS. HUGH FERRISS, 1963.

The city’s efforts to create shelters lagged through the 1950s. When federal, state, and city officials asked owners of public buildings to provide basement shelters, they were largely ignored. Civil Defense spokesmen criticized such “apathy,” which seemed to reflect the attitude the
New Yorker
magazine had detected as early as 1946, when it described many Americans as dealing with the possibility of nuclear war “by simply refusing to think about it.”
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It would take the US-Soviet confrontation over Berlin in 1961 to reenergize the urban shelter initiative. Addressing the nation live on television on July 25, 1961, President Kennedy called on Congress to identify fallout shelters and “to stock those shelters with food, water, first-aid kits, tools, sanitation facilities, and other minimum essentials for survival.” (Privately, Kennedy told his aide Ted Sorensen, “I don’t want the survivors, if there are any . . . to say we never warned them or never did anything to save at least some of their families while there was still time.” ) An army of civil engineers soon fanned out from federal arsenals and navy yards to identify and mark fallout shelters in public and private buildings across the country. This time, many property owners complied by providing at least token space in basements and storerooms for sanctuary and supplies. Ultimately, over fifteen thousand buildings in New York City would be adorned with yellow and black “Fallout Shelter” signs; landlords stocked basements with thousands of kits, provided by the federal Office of Civil Defense, containing two-week supplies of penicillin, the sedative phenobarbital, an appetite suppressant in candy form, crackers, water drums, portable toilets, a radiation detector, and other items deemed survival essentials.
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Although federal inspectors returned regularly until the early 1970s to certify the fallout supplies, many tenants remained ignorant or indifferent. Realism as well as denial undermined New Yorkers’ enthusiasm for the program. As early as 1954, many New Yorkers knew that basement storage rooms were unlikely to withstand the new hydrogen bomb, five hundred times more powerful than the Hiroshima blast, or the toxic radiation it would spread. Jim Hulme, a bank teller living on Second Avenue, was typical of those the
Times
interviewed in 1961: “I live in an apartment house. Where could I go? The only thing I could do would be to run to the basement or run under the bomb when it falls. Get it over with quickly.”
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