Free Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail by Ben Montgomery

rising and the sky began to cloud over most curiously.”
    A few hours later a fine ash began to fall on the crew of the
Lucky Dragon,
eighty miles from the test site, who continued pulling in nets until the hold was full. They returned to Japan two weeks later complaining of burns, nausea, and bleeding from the gums. By then the radioactive catch, some 16,500 pounds of tuna, had been sold to markets across the country, causing mass panic and raising hostile anti-American sentiment among the Japanese. In September, the crew’s radio operator died, becoming the first Japanese victim of a hydrogen bomb.
    The unprecedented destructiveness of the brand-new H-bomb was finally on full display, and it horrified the world. If a hydrogen bomb could do that to fishermen eighty miles away, what could it do to Manhattan? Or London? Or Tokyo?
    Headlines in England cried: CALL OFF THAT BOMB . Winston Churchill foresaw a “peace of mutual terror.” Nikita S. Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, said, “We outstripped the capitalist class and created the hydrogen bomb before them. They think they can intimidate us. But nothing can frighten us, because if they know what a bomb means, so do we.”
    At every turn, the United States, with its new destructive technology, was on the cusp of conflict with worldwide implications.
    By 1955, the government was ramping up efforts to encourage Americans to prepare for fire from the sky. The Atomic Energy Commission built a million-dollar village, called “Survival City, U.S.A.,” in the Nevada desert, and stocked it with the furniture and appliances and mannequins to represent a typical American home. Then, on national television, the village was bombed. The furniturewas splintered and the dummies were burned, but the dogs and mice inside deep, concrete bomb shelters were spared, prompting an official with the Federal Civil Defense Administration to say the only shot at American survival was to “dig in or get out.”
    It wasn’t just the Communist bombs Americans were afraid of. It was Communists themselves. The world had been divided after World War II, with Russia on one side and the United States on the other. And by 1955, the fear of Communism in America was intense. The newspapers were filled with stories of spy rings that stole state secrets and agents who had infiltrated government bureaus. The president had ordered chiefs of government bureaus to fire employees whose loyalty was in reasonable doubt and congressional committees were set up to determine the extent of Communist influence in the military and private industry. Libraries banned Communist literature. Colleges demanded loyalty oaths from professors. Some 20 million Americans, more than a tenth of the 166 million US citizens, were subjected to federal security investigations.
    On Communism’s trail was Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, who had charged in 1950 that the US State Department was a nest of Communists and subversives. By 1954, the strong-necked, emotional politician was the most controversial figure in Washington and a new word had made its debut: McCarthyism. To some he was a fearless patriot, to others a dangerous charlatan. To all observers, he was on the edge of astonishing political power—until he was censured by the US Senate.
    With the country buzzing about Communism, the Supreme Court had set the course for another period of disruption and civil unrest when, in May 1954, it ruled that “Separate education facilities are inherently unequal,” ending racial segregation in public schools. The ruling touched off praise and anguish.
    “Little by little we move toward a more perfect democracy,” read an editorial in the
New York Times.
    “The Court has blatantly ignored all law and precedent,” said Georgia governor Herman Talmadge. “Georgia will not comply.”
    The ruling had the largest impact on the states along the Appalachian Trail, especially in the South. School