London Burning: The Blitz of England and the Origins of “Home Defense” in Twentieth-Century America

Americans’ views of the Blitz in England inspired a self-defense movement in the United States—leading to the creation of the nation’s first home-defense agency.¹ The American reaction to air raids on London indicated how a war psychology gained traction in the United States in ways that few historians have grasped. The American reaction to the Blitz helped erode the grip of isolationists on the American people. Americans were more inclined to go to war than the historical literature has long held and the U.S. effort to study the British response to the Blitz led to the creation of an Office of Civilian Defense, which was a precursor to the Department of Homeland Security.²

Americans worried that the Blitz would incite class violence, spark riots, maybe even cause a revolution in England. Some Americans lionized British firefighters as defenders of civilization, while others fretted that sustained bombing had endangered democracy’s social foundations. Militaristic liberals led by Fiorello La Guardia drew inspiration from Britain’s home security movement, regarding its leader Herbert Morrison and air raid services as a wake-up call for America’s cities. London became a laboratory, in which America’s leaders could study the city’s failures and achievements and apply these lessons to their own cities. Not only FDR and La Guardia but also the FBI, the War Department, and citizen groups sent trusted teams to England to report on the British system.³ One of La Guardia’s firefighters in London told British reporters that “the pupil comes to the master to learn.”⁴

London burning made Americans fear that their cities might be next. If the Nazis attacked New York, they would cause mass death and hysteria, unwinding the urban social order that liberals had fought to keep intact from the ravages of the Great Depression. Britain’s home-defense program ultimately stimulated an American effort to alter the relationship between civilians and their government, militarizing the American home front and making home-defense service a vital national concern.

Most scholarship focuses on the Cold War civil defense program, skating past the origins and evolution of home defense in World War II. Historians have examined the idea of self-help in the Cold War program, sifted civil defense’s penetration in mass media and American culture, and highlighted such aspects as its propagandistic, morale-building rationale and its prescriptive shortcomings.⁵ Some scholars have treated home defense in World War II in terms of Eleanor Roosevelt’s mangled effort to enact a wartime New Deal and Fiorello La Guardia’s campaign to whip up popular fears about the dire threat facing Americans, dwelling on the program’s most glaring flaws and sensational dimensions.

This article seeks to trace the origins of home defense in World War II in particular and in the twentieth century in general to the British response to the Blitz in 1940 and 1941. The article shows that the conventional wisdom about the overkill, ineptitude, and hyperbole associated with World War II–era civil defense ignores that the program sprang from strong roots in London. The article also shows that security policies were portable across countries, drawing on Daniel Rodgers’s insight that progressives found inspiration and ideas for reform in their transatlantic allies. In this case, American liberals studied the British home-defense program and took their cues from British leaders, proving Rodgers’s point that “the Atlantic functioned … less as a barrier than a connective lifeline.” The article also argues that the bombing of London, more than any single event in World War II, planted a psychology of fear in American soil: Americans transported in their minds the terror of bombings seen in England to the U.S. home front, and a robust home-defense program offered the country a means of surviving the dreaded fascist onslaught.⁶ While scholars have depicted civil defense in World War II as a pro-war propaganda organ and as the policy result of irrational fears among Americans and their leaders, this article finds...