The source of many a sleepless night in the 1950s.
For all the waxing nostalgic for the 1950s, it was also a decade of paralyzing fear and paranoia – fear we would be burned to a crisp or vaporized in an atomic attack – paranoia that it was going to happen at any moment. It was the reason for many a sleepless night and it most likely contributed to increased consumption of alcohol and a growing dependency on pharmaceuticals. And it most likely was a contributing factor in the loosening of morals and a rebelliousness of youth in general.
So it really came as no surprise that places like Las Vegas boomed in popularity, as did Psychiatry – phrases like “Who am I? What am I doing? Where am I going?” started creeping into our emotional dialogue. Most people felt there might not be a tomorrow so why not make the most of it today.
And when you consider the Cold War and all its ramifications it’s no wonder the pressure cooker buildup of the 1950s eventually gave way to the social explosion of the 1960s.
But at the time, it was common to hear broadcast appeals like this one: a paid commercial that capitalized on our collective un-ease with living under threat of annihilation and offered, for a price, a guide to surviving an Atomic Attack.
A record with the title Survive! was being sold as the answer to pending doom – and the answer was “prepare yourself” – along with build-it-yourself bomb shelters, construction companies who specialized in building bomb shelters – companies that provided survival kits and everything from canned water to powdered rations. A cottage industry in Paranoia flourished in the 1950s. Fear sells – it always has.
And the pitch was heavy handed – the announcer, whose voice fairly cracked with concern that “some will survive . . . and some won’t” was enough to scare the crap out of anyone within earshot of these paid commercial announcements. They ran on just about every radio station in America and usually on the weekends where people were looking for a respite from the day to day.
Some seventy years later, old bomb shelters are uncovered under overgrown lawns – packaged food items, guaranteed to last indefinitely are rotting on shelves and useless – the Cold War is a distant memory – the paranoia comes from different places now and radio is all but forgotten. Still the overpowering desire to force-feed fear is as strong as ever because Fear is big business and no one ever got broke terrifying people.
To get an idea of what America was coping with during the Cold War, here is one of the paid-commercial programs called Survive! – just as you might have heard it on any given weekend during the 1950s.
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