Nineteen fifty-five was the apex of the Age of Ike, the year that President Dwight Eisenhower, in golfing togs, climbed into an electric cart with the presidents of General Electric and General Motors and rolled down the fairway. Business was good and the country was easy, and the French surrender to the Vietnamese army at Dien Bien Phu was happening half a world away. A retired general was running the country, and that was good, because the United States and the Soviet Union were in the middle of an arms build-up, and the Soviets had just raised the ante by developing their own hydrogen bomb—very likely employing secrets stolen from the U.S.
The dizzying inconsistencies of prosperity and the Cold War made 1955 the nadir of American paranoia. The breathless staccato of the young Baptist evangelist Billy Graham erupted from the airwaves; “Repent!” he urged “time is desperately short. These are the Final Days.” UFO sightings in the United States spiked to an all-time high. On each succeeding cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the doomsday clock hands inched ever closer to midnight. Hipsters put on dark sunglasses to protect their eyes from the nuclear flash. In the movies, these almost incomprehensible fears were embodied by fantastic monsters: In 1954, Godzilla was born in a low-budget Japanese sci-fi flick, summoned from a vanished age by a nuclear explosion. The same year, mutant killer ants the size of school buses crawled out of a hole beneath the Nevada Test Site and invaded the Los Angeles River in the Hollywood low-budget sci-fi flick Them.
Convinced that the gravest threat to national security came not from the enemy’s nuclear weapons but from Americans’ irrational fear of those weapons, the United States Atomic Energy Commission launched an effort aimed at reassurance, invoking the peaceful atom’s limitless potential—“the sunny side of the atom,” as a CBS-TV documentary of the time dubbed it—promising a day when “an aspirinlike tablet of U-235” would power supersonic airplanes and high-speed trains and provide “atomic medicine to all who need it.”
At the same time, though, the Civil Defense Administration undertook a campaign to prepare Americans for nuclear war, distributing 16 million copies of Survival Under Atomic Attack, a pamphlet that depicted a well-adjusted nuclear family huddled cheerfully in their fallout shelter awaiting the all-clear. The California Federation of Republican Women produced Grandma’s Pantry, a how-to manual for stocking the family bomb shelter’s larder. In 1951, the New York City Board of Education issued dog tags to every school kid so that their bodies could be identified after a nuclear holocaust. In 1954, President Eisenhower authorized Operation Alert, a simulated Russian nuclear attack on the United States. Everyone in the entire country was required to take cover for fifteen minutes. New York State made noncompliance with the exercise punishable by a year in prison.
Early on the morning of June 15, 1955, hypothetical wave after hypothetical wave of Russian Tupolev bombers appeared over the North Pole, launching nuclear attacks on sixty major American cities. As the invaders penetrated the Distant Early Warning System (DEW) line, Judith Malina, twenty-six, a fiery, black-eyed beauty in a white lace dress, crossed New York’s City Hall Park looking for one of her actors, Jackson Mac Low. Mac Low was part of an anarchist group called Resistance that was planning a protest against Operation Alert, and he had called the night before to warn her that he might have to miss a rehearsal because he thought he might get arrested.
Malina, cofounder of the Living Theatre with her husband, Julian Beck, was raised in politics. Her Polish rabbi father had dedicated his life to saving European Jews from the Nazis. As a kid, she’d helped him stuff leaflets asking “Do you know what has happened to your Jewish neighbors?” into thousands of shampoo packets being shipped to Germany. Though she’d never been to a demonstration before, she’d subscribed to Resistance, the magazine edited by Mac Low’s political collective, for years. Today, she took action. Leaving her six-year-old son, Garrick, at home with her husband, Malina went downtown to join the demonstration at City Hall.
As President Eisenhower and his top aides were being helicoptered from the White House lawn to a top-secret underground command center in Maryland, Mac Low spotted Malina, “her black hair streaming like a Southern belle,” as he remembered in 1999. Looking back, Malina evokes Mac Low’s “disciple’s beard” and his “thin hands” holding a ski pole with a large hand-printed sign as he walked around the edge of the park so that the workers in City Hall and at police headquarters—the very loci of civil authority—could read his warning against the dangers of atmospheric nuclear testing.
Mac Low introduced Malina to Ammon Hennacy, a lean conscientious objector with a snaggletooth grin and a thick crop of wavy gray hair. Hennacy had spent most of World War II in solitary confinement in a federal prison for refusing to register for the draft. Every year on the anniversary of Hiroshima, he went to the New York office of the Internal Revenue Service to repeat his vow to never pay taxes to support the U.S. war machine and fasted in penance for being a citizen of the country that dropped the first atomic bomb. Hennacy handed Malina a bundle of Catholic Worker newspapers to sell and introduced her to Dorothy Day.
Until her death in 1980, Brooklyn-born Dorothy Day was the guiding light of the Catholic Workers, a Depression-born, grassroots network of some forty “hospitality houses” and communal farms across the United States. Fifty-eight years old at the time of Operation Alert, she wore her thick white hair in tightly wound braids. A Hopi cross hung at her throat. She lived on Chrystie Street on the Lower East Side, at a Catholic Worker Hospitality House that served eight hundred free meals a day, slept fifty homeless people a night, and supplied several hundred people a week with donated clothes. She shrugged off widespread calls for her beatification with a cool “Don’t dismiss me so easily.”
Now, in the mid-fifties, as publisher, editor, and writer for The Catholic Worker, the movement’s eight-page tabloid, Day reached nearly forty thousand people a month with arguments and beliefs that repeatedly put her at odds with the Catholic Church hierarchy—though “not in a spirit of defiance and rebellion,” as she always insisted, but in an effort “to obey God rather than man.” Just as World War II was threatening to draw in the United States, Day had journeyed to Washington to testify against the reinstatement of the draft. Under Day’s aegis, The Catholic Worker may have been the only organization to actively defy the wartime law that made it illegal to encourage potential draftees not to register. Now, in the depths of the Cold War, Day and Hennacy were at it again—as Day wrote in the War Resister’s League magazine, Liberation—“setting our faces against the world.”
At 1:45 P.M., Eastern standard time, Civil Defense sirens rent the city air. Traffic inching past City Hall Park on Broadway ground to a halt. Passengers piled out of buses and taxis, and men in white CD helmets herded them past newly minted black-and-yellow “fallout shelter” signs into the bowels of Manhattan. When all the subway platforms were full, stragglers jammed into vestibules and doorways—anywhere to get out of the sun.
At 1:50 P.M., a hypothetical hydrogen bomb exploded with the force of 5 million tons of TNT above the intersection of Kent Avenue and North Seventh Street in Brooklyn. At the moment that 4.5 million New Yorkers were being hypothetically incinerated, Malina, Mac Low, Hennacy, and Day, along with about twenty other religious pacifists, moved quietly to park benches underneath the park’s leafy canopy of London plane trees.
To make it more difficult for any newspaper photographers to distort their message, they held up signs protesting atomic testing and Operation Alert. They also apologized for Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the only reporter present, who happened to be Japanese. Within seconds, Civil Defense wardens swooped in, handcuffed the unresisting protesters together, and threw them into a paddy wagon. In addition to Mac Low, Hennacy, Day, and Malina, the prisoners included the venerable Dutch Reformed minister A. J. Muste, who’d scandalized Christian America on the eve of World War II by announcing that as a Christian pacifist, “If I can’t love Hitler, I can’t love at all”; and the gay African-American Quaker political organizer Bayard Rustin, who only days later would journey to Montgomery, Alabama, to help Martin Luther King Jr. organize the bus boycott that sparked the civil rights movement.
At their arraignment, the magistrate totally lost it, screaming at the prisoners that they were murderers responsible for millions of hypothetical deaths.
When he mispronounced Ammon Hennacy’s name, Malina tittered. He snapped at her: “Have you ever been committed to a mental institution?” “No, have you?” she shot back. The judge exploded. “That’s enough! You are hereby committed to Bellevue for psychiatric observation.” A scuffle broke out in the court; roaring “No! You have no right, no legal, no moral right to do this!” Malina’s husband, Julian Beck, lunged at the judge. In the ensuing turmoil, Beck somehow made his escape, but Malina was carted off to the criminal psychiatric observation ward at Bellevue Hospital.