"When I go to my grave, my head will be high"
Bob Dylan's little-known protest song against Civil Defense from 1962
As one of the most prolific and impactful songwriters of the 20th century, Bob Dylan has generated a vast catalog of songs covering a wide range of topics and themes. One of his more obscure songs was a protest against fallout shelters and Civil Defense. “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” was written by Dylan in February 1962 and recorded that April, but that version was shelved, only to be formally released in 1991 on an album of outtakes.
In 1963, Dylan (under a pseudonym) sang a duet version of the song with the folk artist Happy Traum, and this version was included on an album of folk protest songs:
The song’s lyrics are haunting and interesting even without knowing that they are about fallout shelters:
I will not go down under the ground
’Cause somebody tells me that death's comin' 'round
An' I will not carry myself down to die
When I go to my grave my head will be high,
Let me die in my footsteps
Before I go down under the ground.There's been rumors of war and wars that have been
The meaning of the life has been lost in the wind
And some people thinkin' that the end is close by
’Stead of learnin' to live they are learning to die.
Let me die in my footsteps
Before I go down under the ground.
The song was written a few months prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which makes it feel particularly topical. But in an interview for the liner notes of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), Dylan said the song was inspired several years earlier by watching the construction of a mass shelter:
I was going through some town and they were making this bomb shelter right outside of town, one of these sort of Coliseum-type things and there were construction workers and everything. I was there for about an hour, just looking at them build, and I just wrote the song in my head back then, but I carried it with me for two years until I finally wrote it down. As I watched them building, it struck me sort of funny that they would concentrate so much on digging a hole underground when there were so many other things they should do in life. If nothing else, they could look at the sky, and walk around and live a little bit, instead of doing this immoral thing.
The quote above, and the song, were ultimately cut from the album. Why? Who can say — perhaps it just didn’t make the cut (and it was one of several dozen songs that didn’t make the cut). In many ways, it is a very traditional sort of folk protest song, at least compared to several of the other “war-related” songs on the same album, like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” “Talkin' World War III Blues,” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” The latter, in my view (again, a subject for a future post), is just a shockingly dark and fascinating work of art. “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” is interesting, but it doesn’t quite rate.
The plans for public blast and fallout shelters had begun during the Eisenhower administration, but it was Kennedy who made the biggest push for specifically fallout shelters. The two main prongs of this were the efforts to encourage suburban homeowners to build their own basement and backyard shelters, and a massive program for identifying and labeling existing spaces in urban areas that met certain structural requirements and could be used as mass shelters in the event of a nuclear war, assuming they were stocked with adequate supplies. This had started in 1961 and was in full-swing by 1962, and was accompanied by a major publicity blitz.
Unlike a lot of Civil Defense planning, the mass shelter identification program, which was coupled with a push for more suburban homeowners to build their own fallout shelters, was the kind of thing that necessarily became part of the public zeitgeist, because it reached out and very visibly modified the everyday world.
Even today one frequently sees remnants of the program when walking around New York City, with signs in various conditions — some perfectly preserved, some which have acquired a thick patina of paint and graffiti after 60 years of service.
The program was instantly controversial, and viewed by many with deep suspicion and cynicism. Who was profiting from this? Would it matter or help? Is this the best we can do?
Dylan’s song makes its own argument very clear. Towards the end of the song, he offers up an alternative, contrasting the concrete tombs with an opposite existence rooted in tropes of nature and life:
Let me drink from the waters where the mountain streams flood
Let me smell of wildflowers flow free through my blood
Let me sleep in your meadows with the green grassy leaves
Let me walk down the highway with my brother in peace.
Let me die in my footsteps
Before I go down under the ground.
Of course, the Civil Defense planners would say, you’ve got it all wrong! Standing out in the field is how you die, in this case! The shelter is for survival, for living! Which gets at the core question: if a nuclear war happens, is it better to be a survivor, or among the dead? (There will be more on the trope of “the living will envy the dead” in a future post.)
The association between fallout shelters and death was, and still remains, a common popular critique. The official fallout shelter messaging of the 1960s tried to make them look less grim. The graphics developed by New York State and the Department of Defense for their various pamphlets justifying the suburban shelter program make it look like it would be barely an inconvenience to wait out the aftermath of a nuclear war. White, middle-class nuclear families lounge around in their immaculate homemade shelters, reading books and engaging in thoughtful conversation, while they wait for the outdoor levels of radioactivity to drop from acutely dangerous to merely a chronic hazard. Sure, millions of people may have just been killed, but that’s nothing to panic about.
The absurdity of such imagery, juxtaposed as they must be with the lurking horror of the possible realities of the war that would require such a shelter, is obvious on its face. It is so absurd, I suspect, that the rest of the message gets completely lost. These are not shelters for living in for years and centuries, as many then and today imagine them; they are meant for a maximum occupancy of 2 weeks. Which, while a lot less than a century, is still a lot of time to imagine being crammed into the “prefab backyard shelter for four” shown above. (Do note the lack of a toilet.)
Mass shelter imagery is a bit more grim — even if you depict a large number of people massing in tight underground barracks getting along reasonably well, it still takes on an instantly dystopian, disturbing vibe. It is distinctly subterranean, and it is hard to put a good face on that. This is survival, perhaps — but is it living? We know what Dylan thinks.
Protests against Civil Defense stretch back a bit prior to the fallout shelter program. In the 1950s, many American cities were the subject of annual Civil Defense exercises under the heading of “Operation Alert,” in which citizens were required to simulate and practice what they would do in the event of a nuclear attack. One can understand the practical rationale for these exercises — if people acting in the right way en masse during a nuclear attack would save millions of lives, then you’d want to make sure that they already knew what the “right way” was before the attack, and would want to make sure that in a city of millions, you had some idea of how well it might work and unanticipated problems — while also appreciating how polarizing this would be, to suddenly have millions of people “practice” for nuclear war.
One can also understand why many people, especially those opposed to nuclear weapons and militarism in general, saw this as a dubious activity — “learnin’ to die,” as Dylan put it. Over time, these events began to become the focus of protest activity and civil disobedience by people who believed them to be masking the grim realities about nuclear destruction.
In Dylan’s New York City, the first Operation Alert exercise, in 1954, had occurred without obvious incident. But the 1955 exercise provoked a protest by Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers outside of City Hall. They refused to take shelter, and instead handed out leaflets which read:
We will not obey this order to pretend, to evacuate, to hide. In view of the certain knowledge the administration of this country has that there is no defense in atomic warfare, we know this drill to be a military act in a cold war to instill fear, to prepare the collective mind for war. We refuse to cooperate.
Nearly 30 people were arrested as a part of these protests. Bill Geerhart, who has maintained the blog CONELRAD Adjacent for over a decade, described the entire incident very vividly in a post from 2010, including the outcomes fro the protesters.
I find the protests against Civil Defense quite fascinating. It is easy to see how the Civil Defense planners would respond to the particular complaints and charges by the protesters, which are based less on a detailed technical analysis of the viability or futility of the specific countermeasures proposed, but on the sense that at its heart, these kinds of preparations for nuclear war are darkly absurd at their very core, so absurd that they are impossible to take seriously as anything other than propaganda.
The historical reality of that is, I think, a bit more complicated — they were not quite so cynical or sinister as they were charged to be, and their technical feasibility depends on a lot of assumptions and factors — but this strong, almost instinctual rejection of Civil Defense, which started with relatively “fringe” figures like pacifists in the 1950s and gradually became the “standard” public sentiment by the 1980s is an extremely interesting case study in the difficulties of communicating effectively about a large-scale existential risk.
Opposing civil defence and preparedness is such an odd thing. Especially if you're worried about nuclear weapons and the possibilty of war, I'd expect people to push for shelters in every new building, massive government stockpiles of food and such things. Instead, they are going like "Hey, there's this huge threat that might kill most of us. Let's make ourselves even more vulnerable to show we don't like this!"
> an extremely interesting case study in difficulties of communicating effectively about a large-scale existential risk.
I would hasten to add that, to me, the protestors understood the existential risk extremely well - and were protesting precisely because they believed the war planners and political leadership did not, in fact, appreciate the existential nature of the risk of nuclear war.