The Lessons of Civil Defense Federalism for the Homeland Security Era

The era of civil defense from World War II through the 1970s was a period of anxious preparation for attack from abroad by airplanes and missiles, yet the drills, techniques, and agencies that this mission spawned also had secondary purposes, namely, responding to domestic emergencies such as flood, fire, and hurricanes.¹ Scholars investigating civil defense during this period generally focus on where it fell short of protecting the nation against attack.² But civil defense in the United States was more than backyard shelters and sham “duck and cover” defenses against nuclear war. Civil defenders trained volunteers, organized state and local associations, educated citizens about fire and flood safety, and generally engaged the public to a greater degree than do today’s homeland security programs. They also took important steps to prepare communities for natural hazards that today’s homeland security programs would do well to emulate.

From the point of view of American government, homeland security could learn from civil defense’s success in using federalism to meet diverse needs across geographic regions and mission areas. Contemporary homeland security programs have drawn criticism for developing procedures that prioritize the terrorist threat and marginalize efforts to prepare for natural hazards such as fires and floods.³ Homeland security policies have also been shown to lack coordination and accountability, and reformers have proposed greater centralization and federal government oversight to bring coherence to the field.⁴ In contrast to this recommendation, the decentralized federalism of the early civil defense period offers advantages over the more heriarchical and centralized approach to today’s homeland security.

This article analyzes three areas in which civil defenders achieved purposes that ought to be of interest to today’s homeland security officials: public involvement, state and local implementation of a national program, and preparation for natural disasters. Homeland security agencies have achieved mixed results at best in these areas. One of the primary achievements of civil defense, in contrast, was the substantial level of public involvement in and awareness of the program in its World War II and Cold War varieties. To be fair, Americans during that period were more likely to belong to voluntary associations such as the PTA or church groups than to participate in formal civil defense programs.⁵ Nevertheless, the point of civil defense was to build awareness of the collective national effort to prepare for attack, and many Americans did volunteer. During World War II, a small number of civil servants recruited citizen volunteers to plan evacuation routes and blackout drills and monitor the skies for enemy aircraft. The collective national effort continued on a smaller scale during the Cold War.

In addition to public involvement in a national project, civil defenders at the state and local level succeeded in using a national and largely military program to prepare for natural disasters. For example, North Carolina’s governor created programs to involve citizens in military-style planning for air attacks as well as planning for floods and hurricanes. When disasters did occur, civil defense agencies and volunteers used their managerial and technical skills to aid in the response. State and local civil defenders went beyond the militaristic national aims of civil defense in implementing the programs in their districts. National leaders knew that this flexibility helped to make civil defense more palatable; a national-level program to prepare for attack from overseas was a hard sell unless the program could have some day-to-day utility for states and localities. Since then, American federalism has transformed from a division of labor among separate spheres to greater cooperation among levels of government to a situation where federal authorities presume to take the lead in all domains. The collapse of an earlier federalism of shared responsibilities has been costly for today’s homeland security programs.⁶

One obvious basis for comparison is the shared federal character of both Cold War civil defense and contemporary homeland security. Cold War civil defense was arguably a more successful case of subnational governments using federalism to suit their needs, whereas homeland security policies have spawned complaints about an...