Reckoning Day

Jacqueline Foertsch

Description

Too often lost in our understanding of the American Cold War crisis, with its nuclear brinkmanship and global political chess game, is the simultaneous crisis on the nation's racial front. Reckoning Day is the first book to examine the relationship of African Americans to the atom bomb in postwar America. It tells the wide-ranging story of African Americans' response to the atomic threat in the postwar period. It examines the anti-nuclear writing and activism of major figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Lorraine Hansberry as well as the placement (or absence) of black characters in white-authored doomsday fiction and nonfiction. Author Jacqueline Foertsch analyzes the work of African American thinkers, activists, writers, journalists, filmmakers, and musical performers in the "atomic" decades of 1945 to 1965 and beyond. Her book tells the dynamic story of commitment and interdependence, as these major figures spoke with force and eloquence for nuclear disarmament, just as they argued unassailably for racial equality on numerous other occasions.

Foertsch also examines the placement of African American characters in white-authored doomsday novels, science fiction, and survivalist nonfiction such as government-sponsored forecasts regarding post-nuclear survival. In these, black characters are often displaced or absented entirely: in doomsday narratives they are excluded from executive decision-making and the stories' often triumphant conclusions; in the nonfiction, they are rarely envisioned amongst the "typical American" survivors charged with rebuilding US society. Throughout Reckoning Day, issues of placement and positioning provide the conceptual framework: abandoned at "ground zero" (America's inner cities) during the height of the atomic threat, African Americans were figured in white-authored survival fiction as compliant servants aiding white victory over atomic adversity, while as historical figures they were often perceived as "elsewhere" (indifferent) to the atomic threat. In fact, African Americans' "position" on the bomb was rarely one of silence or indifference. Ranging from appreciation to disdain to vigorous opposition, atomic-era African Americans developed diverse and meaningful positions on the bomb and made essential contributions to a remarkably American dialogue.

Sujets

• Ethnic Studies
• Black Studies
• Social History
• Civil Rights
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Africana studies
• History of the United States
• Civil and political rights
• African American
• American
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 30 août 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826519283
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

RECKONING DAY

RECKONING DAY
RACE, PLACE, AND THE ATOM BOMB IN POSTWAR AMERICA
Jacqueline Foertsch
Vanderbilt University Press
NASHVILLE
© 2013 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2013
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
LC control number 2012035734
LC classification number E185.61.F64 2012
Dewey class number 323.1196’073—dc23
ISBN 978-0-8265-1926-9 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8265-1927-6 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-8265-1928-3 (ebook)
Frontispiece from Tomorrow! by Philip Wylie.
© University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
Contents
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
Mapping Ground Zero in Postwar America
CHAPTER ONE
“Extraordinarily Convenient Neighbors”
Servant-Savior-Savants in White-Authored Post-Nuclear Novels
CHAPTER TWO
“Tomorrow’s Children”
Interracial Conflict and Resolution in Atomic-Era Science Fiction and Afro-Futurism
CHAPTER THREE
Sidebar
Covering the Bomb in the African American Press
CHAPTER FOUR
Against the “Starless Midnight of Racism and War”
African American Intellectuals and the Anti-Nuclear Agenda
CHAPTER FIVE
Last Man Standing
Sex and Survival in the Interracial Apocalyptic
CONCLUSION
“Don’t Drop It, Stop It, Bebop It”
Some Final Notes on Race, Place, and the Atom Bomb in Postwar America
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
Long ago, as the story often goes, this book was born through the reading of key texts with a group of engaged and intelligent students. In the case of Reckoning Day , the texts were authored by Pat Frank, Judith Merril, and Philip Wylie, all of whom play featured roles in this book’s second chapter, and the students were members of my “Cold War Literature and Culture” class at the University of North Texas. While my debt to these authors and the many others joining this conversation is, I hope, implicit in each word that follows, this is the place to thank those smart students and the ones who have learned alongside me in succeeding semesters at UNT; their interest in our shared subjects and love of literature of all kinds inspire me daily.
I thank as well the terrific faculty and staff at UNT—the English Department’s American Studies Colloquium, whose great speakers and panels are a constant source of intellectual stimulation; Chair of English David Holdeman, whose support and encouragement means so much; Diana Holt and Andrew Tolle in the English office, who expertly assisted in the provision of essential research and travel support; Kevin Yanowski, also in the office, for serving as my de facto research assistant numberless times; Learning Technologies adjunct faculty member Jonathan Gratch for his valuable technical guidance; and the Circulation and Interlibrary Loan staffs at Willis Library, who have quite simply never let me down. This book was also vitally supported through several Small Grants and two Research and Creativity Enhancement Grants, sponsored by UNT’s Office of Research and Economic Development.
Further afield, I send my thanks to the talented staffs at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at the New York Public Library, the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at NYU, the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, and the University of Texas’s Perry-Castañeda Library and Harry Ransom Center. Thanks also to Martha Campbell in Austin, and special thanks to the late Paul Boyer, who encouraged and inspired me for many years. Special thanks also to Russell Wyland and my helpful readers at the National Endowment for the Humanities, who awarded this project a Summer Stipend in 2010. I am grateful as well to the readers and editors at the Journal of Modern Literature , Philological Quarterly , and Modern Language Studies , which have each published excerpts of this work. Finally, I thank Eli Bortz, the editorial and production staffs, and my helpful anonymous readers at Vanderbilt University Press.
Back at home in Texas, I was encouraged constantly by dear friends and colleagues in UNT English and across campus. Special thanks to Alexander Pettit and Harry Benshoff who kindly read parts of this work; to Walton Muyumba for our long talks about African American literature and culture (and the Mingus reference essential to my conclusion); and to Deborah Needleman Armintor, Ian Finseth, Bonnie Friedman, Stephanie Hawkins, Eileen Hayes, Jennifer Jensen-Wallach, Jack Peters, Robert Upchurch, Kelly Wisecup, and Priscilla Ybarra for their marvelous friendship and ongoing interest in my work.
I thank other dear friends—Kathryn Stasio at St. Leo University and Annette Trefzer at Ole Miss—with whom I’ve shared the academic adventure from the start, and my beloved family, for whom I write always: Mom and Dad in Chicagoland, Christine and Mike in New York, my darling Aurora and Solana, who’ve made me the Happiest Aunt in America since the day they were born, and the amazing Terence Donovan, who has changed my life.
RECKONING DAY
Introduction
Mapping Ground Zero in Postwar America
Since the genre’s inception in August 1945, atomic narrative has located its characters with painstaking precision with respect to the bomb. Most of the footnotes in Michihiko Hachiya’s Hiroshima Diary (1955) record distances from various possible blast sites to the location of wounded friends and narrators; in Hiroshima (1946) John Hersey records the exact yardage between the point of impact and each of his interview subjects, their position behind windows, walls, or other buffers, and the life-saving (later, life-threatening) Ota River and Asano Park. Like many treating this subject, Hachiya and Hersey indicate that the worst position was not necessarily ground zero; the agonizing injuries (leading to permanent disability or eventual death) suffered by many in the mid-range between instant vaporization and the safe distance created the atomic era’s first and most profound dilemma with respect to position: at this devastating moment in world history, who, and where, were the lucky ones? On the American home front, news of the two atomic flashes that ended World War II likely registered with each recipient in specific spatiotemporal detail: Where was I when I found out? What was I “in the middle of”? While the physical location of Hiroshima’s blast victims was in every instance determinant of their survival and well-being, in America and elsewhere, the blast caused only a moment of paralysis, shortly giving way to the gyrations of victory. Yet that moment, for those still alive to remember it, remains powerfully present—“like it was yesterday”—or we might say that the recollectors themselves remain trapped in that particular past. Like the shadows of figures incinerated at Hiroshima’s ground zero, they remain fixed then and there in their places, transfixed by the bomb’s unprecedented horror and significance.
More broadly speaking, one’s location in the American landscape when the bomb exploded—that is, during America’s early atomic/cold war era—intersects with one’s “place” in the American social hierarchy in significant ways. For the bomb presented Americans, especially those who have always enjoyed more freedom of movement, with a series of spatio-ethical dilemmas: where to go if the bombs should fall, who and what to leave behind. While the suburban boom of the immediate postwar period had myriad causes, one significant reason was the strong sense that America’s cities were the easiest and most likely of nuclear targets. Elaine Tyler May has examined the leafy, low-slung, spread-out qualities of American suburbs and has persuasively observed in these a response to atomic fears of urban verticality, congestion, and entrapment. For May it was especially the hunkered down, ranch-style home that “exuded this sense of isolation, privacy, and containment” (94). In atomic fictions of the period, the city is depicted as the site of conflagration; those characters lucky enough to find themselves in the suburbs or on the farm on “X-day” fare better and depend less on which way the wind blows during the fallout period.
While the suburban choice—again, for the white middle-class, for whom such choices were exclusively provided—seemed obvious, the decision with respect to whether or not to go underground, to build a bomb shelter and prepare to survive there in the atomic aftermath, was always a more fraught proposition. In the enmeshed social setting of the suburbs, how would it look to build a shelter when no one else was doing so? Kenneth D. Rose suggests that the lone suburban shelter-digger might seem not only eccentric (violating the cardinal rule of conformity) but also “immoral.” “At issue,” says Rose, “was controlling entry to one’s personal or community shelter . . . to keep out radioactive fallout but also ‘to prevent exceeding the maximum capacity of the shelter’ ” (93). How did one build to suit one’s immediate family but not spaciously enough to include neighbors and passersby, or even parents, in-laws, aunts, and uncles from the “old country” (i.e., the urban birthplace)? The pointlessness of resurfacing in a ruined, depopulated post-nuclear environment may have dissuaded many from taking the plunge in the first place; others sought the furthest reaches of American civilization (and beyond) in their understanding that the key to nuclear survival was location, location, location.
We attach extremist notions like nuclear survivalism to a specific racial, classed position in the US—white (sometimes white-su