“It’s Later Than You Think” (May 20, 1941)
A.W. Mackenzie
15.25″ x 22.25″ ink and crayon on board

a prolific editorial cartoonist who worked for the New York Post and New York Mirror from the early 1930’s to the late 1940’s. Bottom edge is written in pencil “May – Vol. 11, No.5”

Civil defense was kept up in the UK, Germany, and Japan after WW1. It never quite got organized in the US, and what did was soon forgotten. The August 2, 1940 call by FDR told the states to model the defense councils after World War I experience without going into any details. But this ignored two problems: First, not much was recalled of that experience, as noted; and second, the “coherent” integrated World War I organization was never implemented.

On May 20, 1941, the formation of the “Office of Civilian Defense” was announced in Executive Order 8757 with LaGuardia as its volunteer director while still retaining his post as mayor of New York City.

Things got better, but the coordination and coherence was slow to come – the imagined protection afforded the US by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans led to a rather “whatever” attitude.

The attack on Pearl Harbor changed this attitude, as did the U-boats lurking in the North Atlantic.

According to report in 1950, however, a great deal of this civil defense work was local, and also disappeared after the war. A huge reconstruction project started as the Cold War heated up and the Korean War got going. The history is interesting (https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD0637900.pdf).