Searching for survivalist tips at the Prelinger Library
Last week, I had the opportunity to spend some time at the Prelinger Library — a privately funded research library in San Francisco that I had been planning to visit for a while. It is operated by Rick Prelinger, an archivist, filmmaker, and author of The Field Guide to Sponsored Films and his partner Megan Prelinger, who is a writer and cultural historian. The library houses over 60,000 books, periodicals, and pieces of print ephemera.
I wanted to follow up on my recent post about modern doomsday preppers and my zine on bunkers and see what I could find to add more context to my research. The library staff helped me locate some excellent books on survivalism.
Below are some intriguing excerpts and visuals that I discovered in the Prelinger archive. Enjoy!
I came across several books focused on the culture of the Cold War era. During that time, the mass media was instilling fears about the nuclear arms race while simultaneously promoting the idea of individual responsibility for creating shelters. Here is what Kenneth D. Rose, the author of One Nation Underground, writes about "shelter morality":
The fallout shelter issue had an editorial evolution in the pages of the Denver Post that was similar to what we have seen at Life. The initial reaction of the Post to Kennedy's call for a beefed-up civil defense program positive: the Post called it an eminently sensible beginning for a reviyalized civil defense program" The paper chided individuals with a “fatalistic” attitude toward civil defense, condemning them for their “profound irresponsibility” towards family, fellow citizens, and country.
But a little more than a month later, as some of the uglier aspects of shelter morality were beginning to surface, the same Denver Post was considerably less generous toward the federal program, and now called for "some plain talk about the problem of bomb shelters." Especially disturbing to the Post were the gun-thy-neighbor aspects of private shelters. Taking note of the fact that Denver's Jefferson County civil defense director had equipped his personal shelter with an arsenal to keep out unwanted visitors, the Post asked, "Are we, then, to be turned into a nation of animals by the presence of shelters for those who can afford to build them, and the absence of shelters for those who cannot?" Political cartoons in the Post also would reflect this growing unease with the shelter program. In one example titled "The Epic of Man," a cave dweller is shown emerging from his cave above, while below a more modern citizen is shown fleeing back into a cave-like fallout shelter.
Another book, Dancing at Armageddon by Richard G. Mitchell Jr., describes the diverse characters he encountered while conducting research in the late 1990s. In the decades following the Cuban Missile Crisis, a whole new category of commerce emerged and prepping emerged as a subculture with dozens of different approaches:
Retired contractor George Kassner built a $700,000 fortified retreat in the foothills of Montana, replete with bulletproof shutters, alarm sys-tems, and an entry hall that could be flooded with poison gas and destructive sound waves. Tim Constance lived out of the back of his twenty-three-year-old Volvo station wagon, subsisting on food stamps and pigeons snared in public parks while squirreling away rusty guns, tools, and bits of food in abandoned buildings, buried tin cans, and with friends up and down the Atlantic seaboard. Frequently unemployed Nic and Leanne lived in the basement of her parents' suburban Pacific Northwest home, saving money to enlarge their stash of fourteen guns, six thousand rounds of ammunition, five goats, three sheep, a peacock, and five acres of retreat investment property.
[…] Once-wealthy, retired Canadian engineer Thomas Sands wanted five hundred volunteers to join him underground, learn to speak a new language, and breed the next generation. Some had simple wants. Palo Alto resident Tom simply didn't want his income tax audited. Louis was simply wanted — by the FBI.
It's interesting to see that this trend is only accelerating. There are around 3.7 million committed preppers in the U.S., and there are even more smaller subcultures within the movement than there were in the 90s. Today, one can be a survivalist (those who mostly rely on bushcraft skills), a homesteader (a milder version of that is probably those who are interested in cottagecore and rural life as an escape from the dangers of a big city), a self-defense prepper, a rich person with a bunker in New Zealand, etc.
Underground Bases and Tunnels: What is the Government Trying to Hide? by Richard Sauder is another book from the archive that caught my attention. This is a more conspiratorial take on the Cold War legacy, which I am not that interested in, but I loved the visuals because I couldn't tell if they reminded me of the 1960s LIFE magazine illustrations or the 2010s minimalist hardware ads. Delightful!
Also, if you're interested in underground government bunkers, the one I can't stop thinking about is the famous Greenbrier in West Virginia. During the Eisenhower era, the American government focused on protecting a select few (the president wanted to keep the legislative branch up and running even in case of a nuclear attack) and initiated Project Greek Island for 535 members of Congress, members of their families, and their aides. The construction of a huge underground bunker close to the Greenbrier hotel.
Fun fact that I couldn't help but mention: Greenbrier interiors were designed by Dorothy Draper, and she was also a huge inspiration for RuPaul, who asked his decorator to use a similar aesthetic when designing his Beverly Hills mansion. And I can't stop thinking about a celebrity like RuPaul choosing to live in a modern-day version of the famous hotel/bunker.
And finally, I found several survivalist manuals from the 1970s. I love the aesthetic of them — unlike modern tutorials and how-to videos that seem so overproduced and almost baroque, these are really austere, but thoughtfully curated.
Please, send your survivalist manual recommendations, prepper videos, and Cold War propaganda my way. I’ll be back next week with something special (and not prepper-related as I know I’ve been writing about it A LOT).