Copyright by Matthew David Tribbe 2010 The Dissertation Committee for Matthew David Tribbe certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: The Rocket and the Tarot: The Apollo Moon Landings and American Culture at the Dawn of the Seventies Committee: David M. Oshinsky, Supervisor Mark A. Lawrence Bruce J. Hunt Richard H. Pells Jeffrey L. Meikle The Rocket and the Tarot: The Apollo Moon Landings and American Culture at the Dawn of the Seventies by Matthew David Tribbe, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August, 2010 I’m lost, but I’m making record time. —Apocryphal Test Pilot v Acknowledgements The following people must be thanked: Vicki and her assorted circus of animals, for the patience that allowed me the time to research and write, and the impatience that thankfully forced me to occasionally stop researching and writing. My family, for a lifetime of support and encouragement and general “right raising” that ensured I would be able to eventually do something like write a dissertation. My dissertation committee: David Oshinsky was supportive from my very first semester in the program, and has since helped me slightly (but only slightly) tame my penchant for excess in all areas of life, but mostly in my writing. His enthusiasm for my work was critical at moments when the whole thing seemed pointless. Likewise Mark Lawrence, who took an interest in my work from the beginning, and has been encouraging ever since. Bruce Hunt, in his capacity as Graduate Advisor, History of Science Colloquium coordinator, and careful reader has been immensely helpful both in terms of explaining basic facts and in challenging me to sharpen my arguments. Jeffrey Meikle’s advice was equally insightful, especially his thoughts on the counterculture and on working the space program into Sixties culture more generally. The Department of History Graduate Program at the University of Texas at Austin has been very generous with its funding, allowing me ample time to complete this dissertation as well as offering invaluable teaching opportunities. Marilyn Lehman deserves special thanks for the critical help she offers to students and faculty alike on a daily basis. vi This dissertation would have been much less successful without the support of several outside fellowships. A Guggenheim Fellowship from the National Air and Space Museum allowed for a summer of research in the Washington, D.C. area. At the museum, Roger Launius, Margaret Weitekamp, Martin Collins, Paul Ceruzzi, David DeVorkin, Allan Needell, and Mike Neufeld were all supportive and encouraging, and offered suggestions that helped me begin to shape my ideas at this early stage of research. At the NASA History Office, Colin Fries, Liz Suckow, and John Hargenrader asked which boxes I wanted to look at, and I replied, “all of ‘em!” They were more than helpful and patient with such requests. In Texas, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center awarded me a fellowship to look through the Norman Mailer papers, and Steve Mielke offered valuable advice on what to look at in the Mailer collection. Finally, friends and colleagues played a huge role in this dissertation’s completion. Rob Holmes, Zach Montz, and Christelle Le Faucheur all read chapters, and Paul Rubinson read the whole thing. All of their feedback was massively helpful. The frequent exchanges of verbal abuse with Yuri Campbell, which occasionally touched on relevant historical topics, were critical (as were the vast sums of money he doled out the summer I watched his kid). Andy Bussing, Shawn Sizemore, and Dave Haney supplied me with a much-needed steady stream of new music to write to, and Austin in general supplied me with a steady stream of music to ignore while writing. vii The Rocket and the Tarot: The Apollo Moon Landings and American Culture at the Dawn of the Seventies Publication No._____________ Matthew David Tribbe, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Supervisor: David M. Oshinsky Although the Apollo 11 moon landing was one of the most remarkable events of the twentieth century, it was also among the most abstruse—what did it mean, after all? With implications ranging from the everyday benefits of “spinoff” to the cosmic questions of existence, it seemed like it had to signify something important. But the United States was undergoing a profound cultural shift as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, a transformative moment when the rationalist, technological optimism of the high Space Age began losing traction to the more intuitive, relativistic, neo-romantic cultural aura of the 1970s. This turn left many Americans who reckoned that Apollo should be important—somehow, in some way—unable to adequately integrate the event into their worldviews, their American mythologies. This study examines how Americans attempted to make sense of Apollo in the 1960s and 1970s. This period saw a noticeable retreat from the faith in science and viii rationalism that had driven American thought and culture in the decades following World War II, and which formed the foundation of the successful space program. In its stead emerged a new understanding of “progress” that was divorced from its previous equation with technological advancement for its own sake and reconsidered in terms of its impact on sustainability and personal fulfillment. In this environment, Apollo—an endeavor that that ultimately seemed to offer no deeper meaning that itself—provided bold evidence that the crucial answers to life’s quandaries would not be discovered through technological journeys to the near planets; indeed, that the prolonged emphasis on these sorts of materialist endeavors had only obscured humanity’s quest for true meaning and its continued sustenance on what Apollo made abundantly clear was the only planet it would inhabit for a long time to come. This cultural turn spelled doom for a space program that for all its futuristic trappings was actually firmly rooted in the past, in a mindset that had flourished throughout the middle of the twentieth century but was now falling under wide suspicion. ix Table of Contents List of Significant Apollo Missions.................................................................................. x Prologue............................................................................................................................ 1 Introduction....................................................................................................................... 5 Chapter 1: Talking About Apollo: Initial Reactions....................................................... 31 Chapter 2: On the Nihilism of WASPs: Norman Mailer in NASA-Land....................... 64 Chapter 3: Apollo and the “Human Condition”.............................................................. 99 Chapter 4: The Thunder of Apollo: The Moon and the American Century.................. 143 Chapter 5: A Psychedelic Moon?: Potland vs. Squareland for the Soul of America.... 193 Chapter 6: “God is Alive, Magic is Afoot”: Moon Voyaging in the Neo-Romantic 1970s......................................................................................................... 243 Epilogue........................................................................................................................ 355 Bibliography................................................................................................................. 360 Vita............................................................................................................................... 378 x Significant Apollo missions discussed herein Apollo 7: October 1968. The first manned Apollo test flight, and the first manned space flight at all in nearly two years. Apollo 8: December 1968. The first Apollo flight to the moon. Circled the moon on Christmas Eve, and the astronauts (Frank Borman, William Anders, and Jim Lovell) read the creation story from the book of Genesis. Supplied the world with the first pictures of Earth from the moon, including the now-iconic “Earthrise” image. Apollo 11: July 1969. The first moon landing. Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin walked on the moon, while Michael Collins remained behind in the Command Module. Apollo 13: April 1970. NASA’s closest call with disaster on a moon mission. An oxygen tank ruptured on the way to the moon, and the crew was barely able to make it home alive. Served to momentarily regain the nation’s attention, which was already waning. Has since been memorialized in the popular Tom Hanks movie, Apollo 13. Apollo 17: December 1972. The last Apollo flight, and the last time humans have visited the moon. The only nighttime Apollo launch. Apollos 18, 19, 20: The last three planned Apollo missions, scrapped due to budget cuts and general public disinterest. 1 Prologue In the first clear sign that young Regan MacNeil may have been plagued by something unholy, her body overtaken by a power neither she nor anyone else could understand, the usually sweet, mild-mannered girl was compelled late one night to awaken from her sleep and wander downstairs into the revelry of her mother’s cocktail party. As the boisterous crowd welcomed her, she approached a famous Apollo astronaut, looked him straight in the eye, and told him, “you’re gonna die up there,” before promptly urinating on the floor in front of the startled guests. Here was something new. In the summer of 1969—the summer Americans first walked on the moon— musician and poet Patti Smith recalled strolling down Brooklyn’s Coney Island Pier to a hot-chocolate stand, where “pictures of Jesus, President Kennedy, and the astronauts were taped to the wall behind the register.”1 Such was life during the heyday of Apollo. Yet this holy trinity of midcentury America, as the scene from The Exorcist (1973) that opened this study suggests, would fall apart by the 1970s—would not, in fact, survive intact even through the turn of the decade. Although Jesus and John Kennedy maintained their mystiques, the astronauts’ fall from grace was swift, hard, and disgraceful to those who remembered to care at all. Even as Apollo moon missions continued through the 1 Patti Smith, Just Kids (New York: Ecco Books, 2010), 109. 2 end of 1972, the astronauts would find themselves increasingly the targets of ridicule, abuse or, most common (and perhaps worst of all), utter disinterest. Looking back at the half-decade that followed the Apollo 11 moon landing, author Tom Wolfe could not help but wonder at the program’s precipitous decline: Things were grim. . . . The public had become gloriously bored by space exploration. The fifth anniversary celebration consisted mainly of about 200 souls, mostly NASA people, sitting on folding chairs underneath a camp meeting canopy on the marble prairie outside the old Smithsonian Air Museum in Washington listening to speeches by Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin and watching the caloric waves ripple. Extraordinary rumors had begun to circulate about the astronauts. The most lurid said that trips to the moon, and even into earth orbit, had so traumatized the men, they had fallen victim to religious and spiritualist manias or plain madness. . . . The NASA budget, meanwhile, had been reduced to the light-bill level.2 Wolfe offered no source for these scandalous astronaut rumors, but his readers need not have looked far. Throughout the 1970s, astronauts were portrayed as nothing less than lunatics in movies like The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Ninth Configuration, and books like Robert Lipsyte’s Liberty Two and Barry Malzberg’s “three crazy astronaut novels” of the early 1970s.3 Space executives, meanwhile, appeared as criminals, even murderers, in the movies Fun with Dick and Jane and Capricorn One, and H.E. Francis’s devastating short story “Ballad of the Engineer Carl Feldmann”—in all three cases driven to villainy by the public’s indifference to the space program. If the astronaut in The Exorcist was lucky enough to emerge unscathed from his encounter with evil, Captain Billy Cutshaw was less fortunate. A deranged astronaut 2 New York Times, 20 July 1979, A25. 3 http://baens-universe.com/articles/Master_of_the_Abyss, accessed 31 October 2009. The three novels are The Falling Astronauts, Revelations, and Beyond Apollo. 3 character in the movie The Ninth Configuration, Cutshaw’s life hit rock bottom when he found himself pinned to the ground by two jeering thugs in a biker bar while a third brute slapped him in the face with his penis—a low point not only for Cutshaw personally, but for the astronaut figure more generally in American popular culture. Even death was no longer sacred. When three Apollo astronauts perished in a careless cockpit fire in 1967, the event proved to be both a tragedy and, ironically, a spur for NASA to complete the noble goal for which these brave men gave their lives. When astronauts died in 1960s cultural works, even at the hands of fierce space program critics like Kurt Vonnegut and J.G. Ballard, it was usually a somber affair. By the 1970s, astronaut deaths were a tasteless joke. In the novel and movie The Medusa Touch, a murderous telekinetic with liberal sympathies, upset over the money devoted to space while so many suffered in poverty on Earth, made Regan MacNeil’s Exorcist threat real when he used his powers to crash a NASA mission, leaving three dead astronauts on the moon. By the end of the decade, an obscure Midwestern punk rock group called the Gizmos would feel no qualms about actually celebrating “Dead Astronauts”—“I wanna be a dead astronaut!” they sang, “It’s a really good way to get talked about!”4 Irreverent as the Gizmos may have been, the sad truth was that being an astronaut, dead or alive, was hardly a very good way to be talked about at all by this point—as early as 1970, on the very first anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, various polls revealed that a large majority of Americans could not even remember the name of the first man to step onto the moon, Neil Armstrong. 4 The Gizmos, “Dead Astronauts,” Hoosier Hysteria (Gulcher Records, 1980), Gulcher 101. 4 “I wanted to be a spaceman, that's what I wanted to be,” sang pop star Harry Nilsson in 1972. “But now that I am a spaceman, nobody cares about me.”5 What happened? 5 Harry Nilsson, “Spaceman,” Son of Schmilsson (RCA Victor, 1972), LSP-4717. 5 Introduction When Americans first walked on the moon in the summer of 1969, the meaning of the event seemed clear enough to one U.S. senator: “We are the masters of the universe. We can go anywhere we choose.”1 Helen Cooper might be forgiven for disagreeing. Barricaded inside an isolated farmhouse, her loathsome husband dead of a well-deserved gunshot wound, her hair entangled in the cold grasp of the flesh-eating zombies who have begun to break through the hastily boarded-up front door, and, what’s this? . . . her freshly deceased daughter has joined the ranks of the undead, has begun devouring the corpse of her father and is now hell-bent on goring her very own mother with a cement trowel? No, Helen Cooper must have thought, if she thought about such things at all in her predicament, we most certainly are not masters of the universe. After all, just a few minutes earlier a man on the television had informed her that it was the American penetration into outer space, the very fundament of the enthused senator’s “mastery” pretensions, that had caused the recently dead to rise from their graves with a mad craving for people-meat after an exploratory satellite returning from Venus blanketed the Eastern Seaboard in a mysterious form of space radiation—a force that humanity, in all its presumed mastery of the universe, could not begin to fathom. Released to theaters in October 1968, just days before the United States began its run-up to the moon landing by launching its first manned space flight in nearly two years, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead scandalized audiences with its unprecedented 1 Loren Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), 32. 6 brutality and decidedly grim outlook. Though in many ways consciously reminiscent of 1950s science-fiction and horror B-movies, it did not take long for Night of the Living Dead to establish itself as something altogether new, and not just because of its gruesome visuals—the dismemberment of human limbs, the feasting on disemboweled intestines, the parricidal cannibalism that would make Jerry Rubin’s subsequent exhortation to merely kill your parents seem almost quaint. Beyond this unpitying pummeling of the sensibilities, Romero’s film was recognized for what it symbolized about the state of American society in the late 1960s. Far from a standard monster movie with the eventual triumph of good Americans over the evil other, there were no happy endings in Romero’s world, and reviewers and audiences found all sorts of contemporary social relevance in the movie, reading it variously as an allegory for the Vietnam war, a statement on American racism, a scathing attack on inept authority figures, a depiction of the fractured American family, and more generally a testament to the overall violence and apocalyptic aura of 1968 America. Nowhere did the high promise of the Space Age, embodied in the benevolent, enlightening Venus probe, collide with the despair of the late 1960s as in Night of the Living Dead.2 But surely Apollo was a different story. Wonderful though Romero’s Venus satellite may have seemed (at least in principle), the hopes invested in it paled in comparison to the enthusiasm and optimism that greeted the real-life Apollo 11 moon mission, at least among its many avid supporters. Although the idea that Americans had somehow mastered the universe with this moon landing was clearly exaggerated, the 2 Night of the Living Dead, VHS, directed by George Romero, 1968 (Madacy Music Group Inc., 1993). 7 belief that Apollo offered a profound example of human capability was not absurd at all. In fact, to many Americans this was the ultimate message and meaning of Apollo: proof that the United States, with its unique combination of can-do attitude and science and technology, could accomplish anything to which it committed its energies and resources; that nature—on Earth and now in outer space—was ultimately knowable and conquerable via human rationalism and ingenuity; and that a new era in human history, perhaps even a new step in human evolution, had been inaugurated when Neil Armstrong left his boot- print on the moon. If humanity had not yet quite mastered the vast universe with this tiny first step, the power and grandeur it displayed with Apollo made it clear to the most fervent space fans that it was well on its way to doing so. Like Romero’s symbolic satellite, however, Apollo also revealed a more troubling side to America’s cherished version of technological progress, especially occurring as it did in the increasingly antagonistic cultural atmosphere of the late 1960s and 1970s. For Night of the Living Dead was far from the only cultural work in this period that juxtaposed humanity’s attempts to master the universe with a much bleaker depiction of its utter powerlessness in the face of both nature and its own ill-considered invention. In fact, Apollo’s positivist message ran up against a powerful shift in American culture that was beginning to blow in an opposite direction, and which ultimately undermined the very premise (and promise) of the manned space program in the 1960s and 1970s. Consider the poor souls of Piedmont, Arizona, who suffered the agony of their blood clotting solid in author Michael Crichton’s popular thriller, The Andromeda Strain, published in May 1969, as the final Apollo rehearsal flight was on its way home from 8 orbiting the moon. They, too, might have had a hard time convincing themselves that U.S. space achievements signaled any sort of mastery over the universe, especially since their woes stemmed from the crash of a satellite designed to scour space for exotic organisms to use in novel forms of biological weaponry. It found a deadly substance, alright, but like Night of the Living Dead, the scientists and government officials responsible for the crisis were unable to effectively deal with it (an apocalyptic plague was averted at the last moment only by dumb luck) and readers were confronted with the alarming proposition that human life might be annihilated as a result of a careless space program—a scenario that touched a public nerve at a time when NASA was openly speculating about the odds that a real-life Andromeda-like strain might return with the astronauts from their exposure to the moon.3 The Andromeda Strain was adapted as a hit movie in 1971, and its message of human incompetence and vulnerability meshed nicely with a number of popular film genres during the first half of the 1970s. Disaster movies, tales of satanic possession, technological dystopias, conspiracies, ecological crises, revenge-of-nature films—the extent to which movies from the Apollo era depicted humanity as essentially impotent against both the natural world and its own artifice is striking. Everywhere one looked on the big screen it seemed like the human race was under siege, assaulted by overwhelming forces either natural or human-created but no longer under its control. Crazed rabbits, killer insects and blood-lusting sharks; rampaging robots, murderous supercomputers, disastrous space probes and germ-warfare discoveries gone awry; natural and 3 Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain (New York: Ballantine Books, 1969). 9 technological disasters, child-devouring natural rock formations, even the Devil himself—never before in cinema history had humans seemed so powerless, so absolutely far from being the masters of the universe.4 The themes presented in these contemporaneous movies seemed to run directly counter to the Apollo spirit, which said that humanity was capable of accomplishing (and conquering) anything with hard work, high technology, and a rational, organized approach. In fact, by the early 1970s, at the very moment that NASA should have been basking in celebration over its finest achievement and proudly counseling other ambitious programs and organizations on how to adapt its winning methods to the myriad other causes and concerns that could be addressed via similar means, it instead found American culture shifting beneath its feet, questioning rather than embracing the values it embodied as more and more Americans came to suspect that nature, including outer space, was something that ought to be respected or even feared, not subdued; that technology and the rationalist presumptions upon which it was based were to be adopted carefully and used for modest ends, not pushed to their extremes as rapidly as possible. Apollo, for all its glory, could do little to counter this trend. In fact, though the American space program was unlikely to literally raise the dead, still . . . was there perhaps something inherent to the attempted mastery of the universe, represented nowhere more boldly than in Apollo, that revealed the potential dangers of maintaining this rationalist course? 4 Even during the Cold War 1950s, when the world faced similar challenges from radioactive and extraterrestrial adversaries, humanity almost always triumphed and restored normalcy in the end. By contrast, though the good guys sometimes won in the 1970s, they just as often did not. 10 This certainly did not seem to be the case just before 11PM, EDT, July 20, 1969, when there it was for all Americans (and over a half-billion people worldwide) to see— two human beings finally fulfilling the age-old dream of walking on the moon. Never before had the world witnessed such a stunning culmination of human effort and power, nor a greater affirmation of American ingenuity and technological mastery. “For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people of this earth are one,” President Nixon told the astronauts as they took a break from their moonwalk to receive what Nixon believed was “the most historic phone call ever made,” and indeed much of the world stopped for a brief moment that night, as nearly everyone with access to a television focused their attention on the moon-walking Americans.5 In the U.S., where all three networks broadcast nonstop moon coverage for over thirty hours, it was estimated that 123 million Americans watched the landing on television, as an eerie quiet rushed over the nation. Worldwide, the event was followed nearly everywhere that had access to live television, with the notable exceptions of the Soviet Union, which only briefly mentioned the landing in a news broadcast before finally relenting and showing full clips the next day, and China, North Vietnam, and North Korea, which refused to report it at all. More characteristic was Paris, which had to rely on emergency generators to meet the demands of so many televisions firing at once in the middle of the night, or Germany and Uruguay, which both reported sharp drops in crime throughout the duration of the moonwalk. In the European Communist bloc, Czechoslovakia unveiled two postage stamps memorializing the astronauts, and 5 New York Times, 21 July 1969, 2. 11 Poles in Cracow erected a statue in their honor. Parents worldwide named children born that night “Apollo,” “Luna,” or, in Memphis, in a decision pushed by dad that probably caused his daughter no small amount of grief, “Module.” In the wake of this worldwide celebration, President Nixon declared the eight days of Apollo “the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation,” just before launching his first major overseas presidential trip, code-named “Moonglow,” which took him throughout Asia and ended with a gracious reception in Bucharest—the first time a sitting U.S. president had visited a Communist capital.6 The astronauts followed Nixon with their own world tour a few months later, and were greeted everywhere as heroes. Crowds were huge—so large that after the first few stops in Latin America, the tour party wired the United States Information Agency (USIA), which had organized the tour, and suggested it multiply by five its official crowd estimates on upcoming stops in order to offer a more realistic prediction of the mobs they would likely encounter.7 In Europe, over a million celebrants attended the astronauts’ parade in Madrid; Brussels experienced its largest public crowd since its World War II liberation; and over half a million showed up to watch the motorcade in Yugoslavia—the “biggest welcome in [the] history of Belgrade,” according to one Yugoslav official.8 Clearly the excitement, in the U.S. and the world, was vast and real. 6 Time, 1 August 1969, 19-20; New York Times, 24 July 1969, 20. 7 Memo, Apollo 11 Operations Center to Frank Shakespeare, 3 October 1969, folder “INF 2-3 Weekly Reports to Director,” Box 3, Director’s Subject Files, 1968-72, Records of the United States Information Agency, RG 306, National Archives at College Park, MD (Hereafter USIA). 8 Memo, Apollo 11 Operations Center to Frank Shakespeare, 10 October 1969;17 October, 1969; and 24 October 1969, folder “INF 2-3 Weekly Reports to Director,” Box 3, Director’s Subject Files, 1968-72, USIA. 12 But then something funny happened. While much of the rest of the world remained enamored with the space program, Americans en masse stopped paying attention to Apollo, even as the missions continued into late 1972. Most Americans remained aware that people had been and continued to go to the moon, of course, and the launches themselves remained popular tourist destinations. But a growing number seemed to just no longer care about the whole phenomenon—not only about the moon missions yet to come, which many found increasingly repetitive and boring, but even about the milestone moon landing that had received so much attention in the summer of 1969. Reactions on the first anniversary of Apollo 11 are telling. Though almost every news outlet ran some kind of feature recalling the historic event, the real story in the summer of 1970 was the grim future NASA faced in light of continuing budget cutbacks. More surprising was that a vast majority of Americans could no longer even remember the name of Neil Armstrong, a national (and international) hero just a year prior. Conducting an informal national telephone poll, the New York Times discovered that only one of fifteen respondents in St. Louis could recall his name. The numbers were hardly much better in Portland, Maine (one in twelve), New York City (eight of twenty-two), or Milwaukee (five of twelve). Only Boston mustered a majority of respondents who could correctly identify him. 9 Other, more local polls showed similar numbers, with 70% of Philadelphians, for example, unable to remember his name (or even recall when it 9 New York Times, 19 July 1970, 54. 13 happened, most placing it sometime in 1968).10 There were few (if any) buildings, highways, streets or other monuments renamed in his honor, and by 1971 the World Almanac no longer included his name in its index.11 By 1974, the Chicago Tribune would see fit to wonder, “whatever happened to Neil Whosis?” Declaring that “interest in America’s manned space flights has crashed beyond apathy,” the article offered a simple explanation: “It was a fad.”12 No one recognized the dismal state of the space program in the early 1970s more than Armstrong himself. Though introverted and reticent, he could not help but feel disappointed that nobody seemed to remember who he was, or the enormity of what he had done. “I had hoped, I think, that the impact would be more far-reaching than it has been,” he lamented on the first-year anniversary. “The impact immediately was very great, but I was a little bit disappointed that it didn’t seem to last longer.”13 Buzz Aldrin, the second, even less-remembered man on the moon, agreed. “I’m certainly a little disappointed,” he said of the public disinterest in Apollo and space exploration just a year after the fact.14 Any explanation for why Apollo faded so quickly from the national consciousness needs to start with the fact that Americans were never as keen on the moon program as our current public memory and myth suggest. Indeed, with the exception of the few 10 Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin, 19 July 1970, in NASA Current News (hereafter NCN), 20 July 1970, 4, NASA History Office, Washington, D.C. (hereafter NHO). 11 Baltimore Sun, 16 July 1971, in NCN, 16 July 1971, 1. Armstrong’s story, of course, remained in the Almanac along with other space milestones, but his name disappeared from the index for a number of years in the early 1970s, unlike previous space pioneers such as John Glenn and Alan Shepard, whose index listings had remained without interruption since their own missions in the early 1960s. 12 Chicago Tribune, 22 December 1974, sec. 2, pp. A1. 13 Chicago Tribune, 19 July 1970, in NCN, 20 July 1970, 5. 14 Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin, 19 July 1970, in NCN, 20 July 1970, 12. 14 months surrounding the actual moon landing, when surveys showed a narrow majority of Americans in favor of the endeavor, poll after poll in the years leading up to Apollo revealed a public that was skeptical of the amount of money being spent on the endeavor, the rush to complete the task before 1970, and the misplaced priorities it represented in late-1960s America.15 Even during the height of moon-mania in the summer of 1969, laudatory news articles were often matched by critical pieces (Newsweek general editor Joseph Morgenstern wryly placed the numbers just ahead of the moon landing at “100 million Americans pro-space, 99.9 million anti-space as of midnight Sunday”), and a Harris Poll conducted just after the landing revealed that although a narrow majority (53%) now approved of the decision (and the cost) to land on the moon, a plurality opposed maintaining current levels of spending to continue exploration of the moon and beyond.16 Even this bump in the polls resulting from the furor over Apollo 11 was short- lived, however. By 1970, a solid majority of Americans returned to their pre-Apollo belief that it was not worth the money it had cost.17 This is not, of course, the memory of Apollo most Americans hold today. Looking back, it is usually recalled as a bright spot in a period of turmoil, an amazing finale to a contentious and confusing decade, a sign that America still had a certain vitality in an era when everything else seemed to be going wrong. Space historian Howard McCurdy, for example, recalls Apollo as contributing an “aura of competence” to the nation throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a time when faith in other large-scale 15 See, for example, Harris Polls in Los Angeles Times, 31 July 1967, A5; 17 February 1969, A15. Another Harris Poll in early 1968 (just before the Tet Offensive) showed that public support for the Vietnam War was significantly greater than the space program. See Washington Post, 29 January 1968, 2. 16 Washington Post, 25 August 1969, A2; Morgenstern in Newsweek, 7 July 1969, 64. 17 Chicago Tribune, 25 June 1970, sec. 1A, pp. 1. 15 government and technological initiatives was waning.18 A recent college-level textbook posits that Apollo “bolstered many citizens’ faith in the superiority of the American way of life, giving them another reason to reject the New Left and counterculture critique of American culture,” while The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s confidently asserts that the Apollo program “enjoyed nearly limitless political enthusiasm” and that “Americans alive at the time still recall Neil Armstrong’s first step onto the lunar surface as a bright and proud moment in an otherwise turbulent period.”19 The astronauts themselves are recalled as public heroes, the images of their moonwalks iconic. And they most certainly have not been forgotten—a more recent Gallup poll showed that by 1999, a full 50% of Americans could name Neil Armstrong as the first man to walk on the moon—still not quite a majority, but a far cry from the abysmal numbers of 1970.20 Yet this kinder view of Apollo and the 1960s space program is more of a modern phenomenon than a long-standing legacy of the endeavor. The 1999 Gallup poll, for instance, pointed out that it was, in fact, younger Americans not yet born at the time of the moon landing who were most likely to be familiar with Armstrong—not as a man they remembered seeing walk on the moon, but as a man they read about in history books, where his legend only really began to be built a decade or so after the fact. Indeed, this positive image of the program saw a revival of sorts beginning in the early 1980s, after Tom Wolfe published his tremendously popular account of the early 18 Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 83-107. 19 Jennifer D. Keene, et al., Visions of America: A History of the United States (Boston: Prentice Hall, 2010), 837; David Farber and Beth Bailey, eds., The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 306. 20 http://www.gallup.com/poll/3712/Landing-Man-Moon-Publics-View.aspx, accessed 18 October 2009. 16 astronauts, The Right Stuff (1979, followed by a hit movie adaptation in 1983), the long awaited space shuttle took flight after nearly a decade of what seemed like aimlessness on the part of NASA, MTV introduced Apollo footage—every hour, on the hour—to a whole new generation of youth, and the Reagan era spawned a reconsideration of the 1960s that stressed the heroic nature of the era’s space exploration program. The mystique has only grown since, with countless cable television documentaries and movies like 1995’s Apollo 13 that have showcased both the heroism of the astronauts and the amazing skill of the technicians back on Earth who guided the sometimes-troubled missions. What is not often recognized in this public memory is the depths to which the space program sunk in the 1970s, when it found itself as often disparaged (or simply ignored) as it was lauded by a public that had lost interest in moon landings, while NASA, its budget slashed, could not follow Apollo with anything that might inspire continuing public excitement. Even during the Apollo years, the astronauts were viewed as much as personality-less automatons as heroic explorers (a factor that helps explain why those who actually lived through the moon landing are the least likely to remember them). Their inability to adequately express their impressions of walking on the moon was especially ridiculed, as was their almost uniform straight-laced WASPish normalcy in an era when multiculturalism and a general “loosening up” of social norms was on the rise.21 To cap it all off, the moon landing itself, many could not help but notice to their own surprise, turned out to be somewhat anti-climactic—a feeling that was only 21 On the “loosening up” of American society in the 1970s, see Sam Binkley, Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 17 emphasized when each additional trip seemed to offer a repeat of the previous ones. In fact, the last three planned Apollo missions were ultimately scrapped due to budget constraints and public disinterest. Looking at the situation from the perspective of 1975, author J.G. Ballard expressed his surprise at the rapid waning of interest toward space exploration. “The Space Age lasted about ten years,” he argued: Public uninterest became evident in the '70's, really. People weren't even that touched by Armstrong landing on the moon. That was a stupendous event. I thought the psychological reverberations would be enormous, that they'd manifest themselves in every conceivable way— in department store window displays and styles of furnishing, etc. I really did believe that the spin-off from that event, both in obvious terms and in psychological terms, would be gigantic. In fact it was almost nil. It's quite amazing. Clearly, the Space Age is over.22 The author John Updike showcased this declension in two of his “Rabbit” novels that bookended the 1970s. Rabbit Redux, set in the summer of 1969, took place as Apollo 11 was on its way to the moon, and although the protagonist, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, was, like many Americans, ambivalent about the mission, there was no doubt that it was a major accomplishment, and it was widely followed by the public. By the time of its sequel, Rabbit is Rich, set ten years later in the summer of 1979, “nobody was going to the moon much these days.”23 In fact, by 1979 no American had gone into space at all for four years, as NASA shifted emphasis from its Apollo-era Saturn rockets to the development of the reusable space shuttle, which would not debut until 1981. Instead, 22 J.G. Ballard, Interview, 4 January 1974, http://www.solaris-books.co.uk/Ballard/Pages/Miscpages/ interview4c.htm, accessed 18 October 2009. 23 John Updike, Rabbit is Rich (New York: Penguin, 1982), 88. Anyone familiar with Updike need not read Rabbit is Rich to guess that this line also served as a sexual metaphor. 18 the space excitement of this “Rabbit” summer came with trying to predict exactly when and where the 78-ton Skylab space station, NASA’s great mid-'70s project, would prematurely lose its orbit and crash back onto the Earth (NASA’s guesses were little better than anyone else’s). The timing of the debacle could not have been more telling— almost ten years to the day after Apollo 11 ascended toward the heavens, Skylab fell back down, leaving a trail of debris scattered across western Australia. “From Feat to Beat in One Decade,” read the subhead of an article from syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman commemorating the tenth anniversary of the moon landing.24 Indeed, even the nation’s most creative writers could not have invented a better metaphor for the course of the space program over the 1970s than the real life Skylab blunder. II. Speculating on Apollo’s ultimate place in history, NBC news anchor Chet Huntley predicted that “historians looking back over the past decade or century will find it hard to choose a more meaningful period than the last two weeks of July 1969.”25 Yet historians, no less than contemporaries, have failed to find much meaning at all in the moon landings. Rare is the history of the 1960s or 1970s that gives more than casual, shallow mention of the phenomenon, if anything presenting Apollo 11 as a week 24 Los Angeles Times, 16 July 1979, D5. 25 Quoted in Robert Cirino, Don’t Blame the People (New York: Random House, 1971), 260. 19 removed from the rest of the more characteristic chaos of “the Sixties” rather an integral part of this period.26 Rarer still are cultural histories that adequately grapple with its ultimate meaning for modern America.27 26 The more familiar “Sixties” picked right back up again the day after the Apollo 11 splashdown, for example, when Bobby Beausoleil began torturing Gary Hinman for two days before finally killing him and smearing his blood on the walls—the first of the known Manson Family slayings. Although the cover of The Columbia Guide to America in the Sixties is devoted to a picture of Buzz Aldrin standing on the moon, his name does not appear in the entire book, and only a generic, superficial treatment is given to Armstrong and the Apollo 11 mission. Manson, on the other hand, receives his own biographical entry. 27 Those historians writing directly on topics of space exploration are, of course, a different story. Yet even here, for all the countless shelves of books that have been written about the space program (and Apollo more specifically), the cultural aspects of the endeavor have only recently begun to receive meaningful consideration. The most important space history yet written, Walter McDougall’s ...The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, has contributed much to our understanding of the rise of the space program in the early 1960s as well as its influence on fostering the modern technocratic society, but the book’s focus on the first half of the decade precludes much exploration of Apollo itself, and, with his political emphasis, McDougall’s analysis of the space program’s relationship to American culture, while often brilliant, is brief and largely speculative. His failure, for example, to engage Norman Mailer’s own work on Apollo with more than a few sentences, even though both authors (as much as McDougall might be loathe to admit it) explore similar ideas of American technocracy does not necessarily weaken McDougall’s case, but it does reveal the narrowness of his focus as well as the rewarding cultural aspects of the space phenomenon that remain unexamined. Indeed, McDougall’s assertion that, “if there were still lingering doubts about the nature and future of Space Age America, the 1964 election put them forever to rest,” will be challenged here both by extending the time frame into the 1970s and by emphasizing culture over policymaking. See Walter A. McDougall, ...The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1985), 389. Several newer works have explored space exploration from a cultural perspective, but although a number of them are quite good, most have remained largely focused on the space program itself rather than examining the wider cultural world in which it operated. Two of the better works in this field are Howard McCurdy’s Space and the American Imagination, which shows how popular ideas toward space exploration in the twentieth century influenced the course of the actual space program, and Andrew Smith’s more journalistic Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, in which the author uses his personal quest to interview the remaining Apollo astronauts in order to offer insights into these unique men and the Space Age they helped create. See Andrew Smith, Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth (New York: Fourth Estate, 2005). Two other books, William Atwill’s Fire and Power: The American Space Program as Postmodern Narrative and Ronald Weber’s earlier Seeing Earth: Literary Responses to Space Exploration, examine the theme of space exploration in literary works. Weber offers the scholar an impressive array of potential sources, touching on just about every literary response to space exploration prior to his 1985 publication date. Although his breadth is wide, his analysis of individual works is necessarily constricted in this fairly short work. On the other hand, Atwill chooses to focus more deeply on a handful of well- known space-related works of literature. Both books offer much insight, and Weber’s theme of an Apollo- inspired reconsideration of life on Earth will be explored further in this dissertation, but with their exclusive focus on literature neither of these works offers the more encompassing historical exploration of American culture that this dissertation seeks to accomplish. See William D. Atwill, Fire and Power: The American Space Program as Postmodern Narrative (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1994); Ronald Weber, Seeing Earth: Literary Responses to Space Exploration (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985); for a 20 Historians who recognize the decline of the space program after Apollo most often point to the waning of the original Cold War impetus that sparked the moon program to begin with. As Cold War tensions with the Soviets eased by the late 1960s, and the U.S. clearly won the space race with the successful moon landing, there was little incentive to continue to expand or even maintain steady funding for a program that, for all its real contributions to scientific advancement, entertainment, and national esteem, had largely come to be seen as a Cold War goal rather than a continuing, sustained program of space exploration. In this context, which a good number of Americans thorough historiography of recent trends in space history, see Roger Launius, “Interpreting the Moon Landings: Project Apollo and the Historians,” History and Technology, Vol. 22, No. 3 (September 2006), 225-255. Historians have long debated why the space program was so dramatically scaled back even before the final Apollo missions were completed, and have offered numerous legitimate explanations. The most obvious reason is that, as polling throughout the late 1960s reveals, the Apollo program was never all that popular to begin with, and interest in maintaining or expanding it at the cost of additional tax dollars was bound to fade after the landing. In fact, funding began to decrease even before the first Apollo test runs, and since nearly all available funds in the second half of the 1960s went toward achieving a successful Apollo program, any post-Apollo plans suffered from limited financial resources. This explanation is, of course, true. Yet its focus on polling and budgetary concerns does not tell the whole story, for it does little to explain the public’s disinterest in the already-paid-for moon landings so shortly after the fact. Scholars have also cited a growing backlash in the 1960s and 1970s against the kind of big science and technology that Apollo represented, though usually briefly, generally, and only as one factor among many in explaining the post-Apollo contraction. See W.D. Kay, Defining NASA: The Historical Debate Over the Agency’s Mission (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005); Mark E. Byrnes, Politics and Space: Image Making by NASA (Westport: Praeger, 1994); Weber, Seeing Earth. Others have presented more subtle arguments concerning NASA’s mission and public expectations toward the event. Howard McCurdy, in Space and the American Imagination, argues that because space exploration had been anticipated by decades of creative science fiction, the reality could never live up to the public’s romanticized image of heroic explorers cruising the galaxies in their rocket ships. Hence, public attention faded after the initial far-fetched promises of space flight failed to come to fruition. In a similar vein, Bruce Mazlish believes that the public was ultimately disappointed by the barren, lifeless nature of the moon, which sapped some of the interest in exploring new worlds. Finally, Michael Smith points to NASA’s image problem—the unsuccessful attempt of these “Space Van Winkles” to carry a vision of exploration popular in the 1950s into the drastically changed culture of the 1970s. Although this dissertation is indebted to the insights of these last three authors, and their themes will be examined herein, this study will delve much more fully into the wider cultural trends that impacted the public’s understanding of the moon program. See Mazlish in Weber, Seeing Earth, 12-13; Michael L. Smith, “Selling the Moon: The U.S. Manned Space Program and the Triumph of Commodity Scientism,” in Richard Wrightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 177-209. 21 accepted, the moon was not a starting point for a glorious era of exploration, but an endpoint in a Cold War race with the Soviets. And “once a race is won,” Andrew Smith has shrewdly pointed out, “only a fanatic keeps running.”28 The shifting Cold War context as an explanation for the decline of the space program by the late 1960s is convincing, but not complete. Apollo was a product of the Cold War struggle with the Soviets, for sure, but it had equally important roots in American culture, specifically the rationalism that dominated social thought by mid- century. It was this cultural environment which determined that a Cold War contest for international prestige and advantage would ultimately manifest itself in a trip to the moon of all places, and which invested such a contest with cultural meanings that far transcended any Cold War political concerns. This twentieth-century rationalist mindset that characterized the Space Age had by the 1960s fostered a cultural atmosphere infused with the belief that the only valid avenue to knowledge and “truth” was science; that largely equated progress with technological advancement for its own sake; and which viewed life, the world, and the universe as ultimately knowable via science and reason, and therefore free to be manipulated for human benefit. In the rational world to come, argued its most zealous proponents, not only would the sciences, technology, and the economy be perfected, offering material abundance for all, but reason and rationalism would ultimately supplant religion, myth, tradition, even the presumed natural order of the world as the basis of all values, morals, and meaning. 28 Smith, Moondust, 204. 22 Nowhere was this rationalist credo more on display than in the crash program to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade—the next logical step in the rationalist notion of “progress” which insisted that great technological advancements be achieved the moment they became possible. NASA made no such direct claims for the superiority of technocratic approaches to morality and philosophy, of course—its arguments for the necessity of exploring new worlds in space usually concerned vague ideas of humanity’s “destiny” in space or the more concrete benefits the program offered the nation in the form of “spinoff,” i.e. technological gains that emerged thanks to the huge sums of money and effort invested in the program. Nonetheless, the moon program and the urges it represented remain the quintessential expression of the mid-twentieth-century rationalist dictate. If the space race was undeniably compelled by the personality of John Kennedy and the larger Cold War contest of the era, the particular form this contest took in the 1960s—a race to the moon—had far deeper roots in the broader rationalist spirit of the era. Yet by the time the Apollo 11 mission was headed for the moon in 1969, these rationalist values were already beginning to lose their sway in an American culture that was increasingly recognizing that not everything, and most certainly not values, meaning, and other grand questions of life, were susceptible to rational understanding and manipulation. The rationalist attempt to “master” the universe, movies like Night of the Living Dead seemed to be saying, even in the innocuous form of a one-off peaceful space satellite, could prove disastrous to human civilization—worse still to invest all the values of society in a similar approach to understanding and attempting to solve the complexities 23 of existence. In this environment, Apollo—an endeavor that ultimately seemed to offer no deeper meaning than itself—provided bold evidence that the crucial answers to life’s quandaries would not be discovered by technological journeys to the near planets; indeed, that the prolonged emphasis on these sorts of materialist endeavors had only obscured humanity’s quest for true meaning and its continued sustenance on what Apollo made abundantly clear was the only planet it would inhabit for a long time to come. This cultural turn spelled doom for a space program that for all its futuristic trappings was actually firmly rooted in the past, in a mindset that had flourished throughout the middle of the twentieth century but was now falling under wide suspicion. Unlike the vast majority of scholarly works on Apollo, this dissertation is not about the space program (although I hope it will prove valuable to space historians). Rather, it is about the peculiarities of an American society that was shooting men to the moon semi-annually over the four-year period from 1968-1972, and then—as important—stopped. Although the acronym “NASA” appears frequently, it is not because this is a study of the organization that pulled off one of the most incredible achievements of the twentieth century, but because the word “NASA” appeared night after night on television, in newspapers and magazines, and in movies like Night of the Living Dead and The Andromeda Strain to audiences across the country, impacting how Americans at the turn of the 1970s understood their world, their nation, and their own lives. Hence, this story will not follow the missions to the moon, but rather will remain firmly focused on Earth, where all but a very few astronauts experienced the events. 24 Neither is this a study of Space-Age America. As J.G. Ballard indicated, the “Space Age,” at least in cultural terms, lasted only around a decade, from the late 1950s up through the mid- to late 1960s. By the time the Apollo missions actually occurred at the end of the decade, American culture had begun to change dramatically, moving away from the optimism and profound faith in rational progress that had characterized the earlier Space Age. Therefore, this work focuses on what I call the “Apollo era”—the paradoxical period around the turn of the 1970s which saw the space program reach its pinnacle of achievement, but only after the Space Age it once represented had already withered. It is the changes and contradictions of American culture during the Apollo era that are explored here. Although it examines the hopes that Americans invested in the space program, this story focuses more on the reservations many had about the wisdom of shooting for the moon, both in the context of deteriorating American social conditions at the turn of the 1970s, and, more important, as a fundamentally problematic urge toward mastering the universe. That the work emphasizes the complaints of naysayers and skeptics should not necessarily be taken as a sign of its sympathies, but rather as an attempted corrective to the existing historiography, which has not given these perspectives the attention they deserve. Finally, this dissertation considers Apollo to be much less historically important than most commentators at the time, pro or contra, assumed it would (and should) be—at least in the terms in which most considered it, at least not yet. If this seems like unpromising grounds on which to base a lengthy study, it is nonetheless a reality that the 25 serious historian cannot avoid. Apollo hardly sparked a glorious Space Age of planet hopping and space colonies, after all, nor did it extend a deadly Cold War to the stars, bankrupt the nation, significantly impact social problems either positively or negatively, nor inaugurate any new step in human evolution. In fact, the rapid dismissal of Apollo from the public consciousness betrays its lack of concrete impact beyond, perhaps, technological advancements in the form of spinoff—hardly a reason to exert so much energy and money, and a fairly trivial source of significance for such a huge event. But as a powerful symbol of this transformational period in American history, Apollo deserves much more attention than cultural historians have given it. “The mere leap into space by itself does not signify,” philosopher William Barrett recognized. “It is as a symbol that it captures the imagination.”29 The goal of this dissertation is take a step toward unlocking some of the symbolism of Apollo, to begin understanding what it meant to a confused nation entering the decade of the 1970s. Norman Mailer believed it symbolized a great deal. “All the themes of the century are in it,” he believed, and he spent the better portion of a year struggling to unravel them. Paul Goodman agreed. “Space exploration has so far been an epitome of the grandeur and misery of Man in our times,” he wrote after Apollo 11. “It presents us with all the dilemmas.”30 All the themes of the century, all the dilemmas of the times— seen in this light, the moon program emerges as not just an incidental occurrence to be mentioned and forgotten while charting the larger trajectory of post-World War II 29 New York Times, 3 December 1972, E13. 30 Letter, Norman Mailer to Eiichi Yamanishi, 7 January 1970, Folder 602.14 Correspondence: Eiichi Yamanishi, 1970, Box 602, Norman Mailer Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center; Paul Goodman, New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 24. 26 American history, but rather as a central symbol of many prominent themes of the period. By examining how people talked about Apollo, how they found meaning in it, how they attempted (and often failed) to fit it into their existing worldviews—their American mythologies—we can move closer to understanding both the meanings ascribed to it as well as the wider cultural currents in which these meanings were developed and shaped. Apollo did not symbolize one specific thing, of course, but was interpreted very differently by diverse observers. Hippies used the event to comment on the square-ness of squares; squares to lambast hippies. Intellectuals on the Left discussed it in their critiques of American society and culture; intellectuals on the Right discussed it in their critiques of intellectuals on the Left. Those who placed their faith in rationalism praised it as a triumph of rational planning, while the growing numbers of skeptics pointed out the spiritual emptiness of such a rational endeavor. Black musicians wrote songs damning it as yet another indication of white America’s god complex, while other black musicians wrote celebratory paeans. The “man in the street,” of course, had something to say as well, and he or she expressed a wide variety of views in countless newspapers and television interviews. Meanwhile, armchair philosophers of all stripes, from newspaper editorialists to politicians to NASA technocrats, waxed poetically about what it revealed of “the nature of man” and “mankind’s destiny.” All the same, Apollo was hard to talk about in meaningful terms, and those who tried as often as not came off sounding vacuous, petty, ignorant, or hopelessly romantic. It was just too big, too unprecedented, and too unwilling to accommodate narrow ideologies and worldviews to make solid sense out of in the short term. Nonetheless, 27 people tried, and these early attempts at least began to give the event some meaning for contemporary society. Yet the results were often surprising. If countercultural radicals like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman were wont to rail against the system, for example, both nonetheless cautiously praised the technocratic establishment that landed astronauts on the moon. On the other side of the spectrum, though the fiercely individualistic Ayn Rand regularly denounced big, active government, she, too, praised the moon mission in the highest of terms, even though it was a gargantuan state project of the kind she almost universally despised. And if author Philip K. Dick imagined countless nightmare scenarios of the human future in space, he had nothing but praise for the moon landing and what it revealed about human potential. On the other hand, innumerable scientists and humanists seemed to have bridged C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” antagonism on at least this one issue, agreeing that Apollo was a mistake for any number of practical and philosophical reasons (Snow himself could be counted among this camp). As just these few brief examples indicate, Apollo is not only difficult to place within a clear historical context—opinions toward it do not readily “fit” our standard notions of Left and Right, square and hip, scientist and humanist in the 1960s and 1970s—but it is also not easily reduced to any one overarching symbol for this period. Here was something new in the human experience, after all, and reactions to it were as jumbled as one might expect. It remains, alas, nearly as difficult to talk meaningfully about now as it did at the time. How, then, to make any real sense of the event from the perspective of forty-odd years on? Saul Bellow offers one possible approach. Bellow’s National Book Award- 28 winning Mr. Sammler’s Planet, set in the spring before Apollo 11, followed Artur Sammler, an aging holocaust survivor struggling to keep up with the times in late-1960s New York City, through numerous ruminations on the meaning of humanity’s first venture to another celestial body. At one point, on his way to visit his sickly nephew in the hospital, there was in Sammler’s consciousness a red flush. . . . This assumed a curious form, that of a vast crimson envelope, a sky-filling silk fabric, the flap fastened by a black button. He asked himself whether this might not be what mystics meant by seeing a mandala. . . . As for the black button, was it an after-image of the white moon?31 The mandala—an intricate circular design used in numerous Eastern religions to focus one’s attention while meditating, promoted in the West by Carl Jung and suddenly in vogue in the United States with the explosion of New Age spirituality in the late 1960s. To “see” a mandala was to focus intensely on the object, be it an explicitly formed mandala created for meditative purposes or a symbolic mandala found in nature or coincidental design, and come to some revelation about one’s life and world. In Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Bellow used the moon, specifically the upcoming moon landing, as a focus, a mandala of sorts, for many of Artur Sammler’s meditations on his life past and present, and on numerous philosophical issues facing the world and the individual in the year of the moon. In this spirit of the early 1970s, what might we learn if we, like Bellow, treat the moon as a mandala, focusing intensely on it—or at least on the thoughts of those who 31 Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (New York: Penguin, 1970), 116-117. 29 themselves pondered the meaning of visiting it—in order to develop a deeper understanding about this period in American cultural history? A wide variety of commentators, from the famous to the obscure, had something to say about the moon landing, after all—pondered it like a mandala, and drew vastly different conclusions from their meditations. By studying these various responses—by examining how people talked about the moon landings in a wide variety of forums—it is possible to uncover common concerns, common trends that will reveal larger currents of thought at the dawn of the 1970s. Indeed, as Barrett, Mailer, Goodman and so many others indicated, Apollo became a powerful symbol in larger discussions over some of the “big questions” of the twentieth century that were reaching acute status by 1969: was it human nature to continually push outward to explore new worlds, or simply a troubling characteristic of a Faustian Western culture? Was technological progress a la Apollo justifiable as its own end, or was Apollo simply the most egregious example of the “velocity without direction” that seemed to characterize so much of twentieth-century American technological and consumer culture?32 Was technocracy threatening to overtake humanism as the basis of Americans’ value system? Was the universe ultimately knowable, and therefore conquerable via the rational accumulation of knowledge and well-planned endeavors like Apollo, or must a mature human society accept and even embrace mystery, the unknowable, and human limitations? And was the sterility and spiritual emptiness that so many experienced in Apollo all that technology and logical 32 Newsweek, 7 July 1969, 40. 30 positivism could offer? If so, what godly or pagan transcendence had been sacrificed in creating the modern rationalist, disenchanted, technological society? Such issues came to a head in the first half of the 1970s as Americans struggled to make sense of Apollo. At the heart of many of these questions and observations lay the issue of rationalism, specifically the skepticism emerging in the late 1960s toward the idea that life and the world were best approached and understood rationally. The high technology of Apollo stemmed from the Western rationalist tradition, as did the justification of space exploration as valuable for its own sake. Yet this rationalist vision of progress began to ring hollow to a good number of Americans who sought some deeper meaning in the course of events that had been driving American culture and society in the postwar era. Though this study will often veer off in the divergent directions where the muddled discourse surrounding Apollo leads it, it will ultimately return to and find its grand meaning in this reconsideration of rationalist progress that so profoundly altered American culture at the turn of the 1970s—a new understanding of progress that did little to stop the march of ever-more advanced technology, but that nonetheless invested in it new meanings that have reshaped our own world as we begin a new millennium—a millennium, it might be noted, in which space travel—to the moon, to the planets, perhaps even to the stars, according to the optimistic Apollo model—should by now be routine; in which humans truly should stand as the masters of the universe. That this model of progress was derailed in the late 1960s and 1970s should be clear. Now we will turn to explaining why. 31 Chapter 1: Talking About Apollo: Initial Reactions As the nation’s most seasoned and respected television newscaster in the late 1960s, Walter Cronkite was rarely caught off-guard by an event, let alone at a complete loss for words while broadcasting a story. Yet when Neil Armstrong reported to Earth that “the Eagle has landed,” successfully placing two men on the moon after a nail-biting descent, Cronkite found himself dumbstruck. Covering the event with a special guest host, the veteran Apollo astronaut Wally Schirra, tears could be seen in both men’s eyes following the landing. Removing his glasses and trying to compose himself, the choked- up Cronkite could manage only a few “whews” and “oh boys” before finally giving up. “Wally, say something,” he finally turned to Schirra, “I’m speechless.”1 The flustered Cronkite was hardly alone in his inability to give voice to his thoughts and emotions at this moment of humanity’s first contact with its no-longer-alien neighbor. Neil Armstrong experienced his own, more literal loss of words when he stepped out of the lunar lander, knowing full well that the entire world was anxiously awaiting the first remark uttered by a human on the moon. There had been much speculation throughout the spring and summer over what he might say, with cynics convinced that NASA, or worse, the Nixon administration had provided him with a pre- scripted statement. Actually, NASA trusted him to come up with something on his own to capture the moment, and Armstrong later insisted that he had not given the matter 1 Today, 21 July 1969, 6A. Vice President Spiro Agnew would later comment during the same broadcast: “If Cronkite doesn’t know what to say, don’t expect me to come up with anything too good.” 32 much thought until he was safely landed on the moon, after which he had several hours to mull it over while preparing for the moonwalk.2 What he ultimately said—“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”—has endured as one of the most famous quotes of the twentieth century. But it was what he did not say—in fact seemed to have forgotten to say—that conveyed infinitely more excitement than his well-remembered declaration. Because “man” and “mankind” are synonyms, the first phrase that hundreds of millions of Earthlings heard broadcast from the surface of the moon was technically nonsense. In fact, Armstrong had intended to say “That’s one small step for a man,” but he inadvertently left out the “a,” and created weeks of speculation over what, exactly, he meant.3 What was most expressive about Armstrong’s proclamation, however, was not the rather banal sentiment it expressed in either version—that the moon landing was some sort of step forward “for all mankind” was by 1969 a stock phrase of space proponents—but that he seemed to have become so overwhelmed by his experience stepping onto the moon that he flubbed what would be the most important public moment of his entire life, broadcast to the largest live audience in history. Armstrong was famously reticent about expressing emotion in regard to his experiences in space, and 2 Interview, Neil Armstrong with Robert Sherrod, 23 September 1971, Folder “Interviews, Abbey- Callaghan,” Box “Robert Sherrod Apollo Collection, Interviews, Abbey-Newall,” NASA History Office, Washington, D.C. (hereafter NHO). 3 Though we tend to remember Armstrong’s line as an immediately moving pronouncement, in fact it was confusing from the very moment he said it. “I think that was Neil’s quote,” remarked the expectant Wally Schirra on the CBS News coverage. “I didn’t understand it.” “Well, ‘one small step for man,’ noted Walter Cronkite, “but I didn’t get the second phrase. If one of our monitors here at space headquarters was able to hear that, we’d like to know what it was.” They would finally figure it out a good thirty seconds later. Armstrong believed afterwards that he said “a man,” and that it must have been lost in the transmission. Recordings, however, make it clear that he simply left it out. Many accounts of the moon landing, from 1969 to the present, have added the missing preposition to make a more cohesive statement, and capture what Armstrong obviously meant to say. 33 media voices constantly ridiculed him and the other astronauts for their lack of eloquence. Yet for all the ink spilled over the “meaning” of Apollo 11 during the summer of 1969, it was the verbal stumbling of Neil Armstrong, as well as Walter Cronkite’s rare moment of on-air stupefaction, that best conveyed the immediate, genuine thrill of the first steps on the moon. Their troubles also symbolize a defining characteristic of the wider public discourse on the event: Apollo was difficult for anyone to talk about in meaningful terms, and thus to make any real sense of its importance for the world. From hack blowhards to sober newspaper editorialists to the nation’s most accomplished wordsmiths; whether normally fluent broadcasters, the “man in the street,” or, most notoriously, the astronauts themselves; regardless of one’s feelings about Apollo, pro-, anti-, or ambivalent—few found it easy to grasp and articulate or even intelligently speculate on the potential implications and meanings of Apollo in any consequential way. To attempt to speak of the event in the large, grandiose terms it seemed to call for was more often than not to venture so far into the abstract as to border on irrelevance, for who could even begin to convincingly surmise the future course of humanity now that it had walked on the moon? On the other hand, it was so obviously a huge event that to discuss it in the mundane language of everyday existence could not do it justice, and usually came across as less pointed than petty. The phenomenon was simply too immense, too unprecedented, too alien to easily make sense of in either foggy philosophical or more immediate human terms. 34 Of course the dumb awe that Cronkite and Armstrong displayed simply would not suffice for an event that seemed to demand intense, immediate analysis from the nation’s vast commentator corps. Accordingly, few other observers suffered a similar loss for words, and the verbiage about the significance of the mission flowed freely throughout the summer. What did it mean, many pondered, to step for the first time onto another celestial body? Pundits often looked back to a previous first encounter with a new world—Christopher Columbus’s fifteenth-century journey to the Americas—to draw lessons for the present, and it was difficult to pick up a newspaper in the summer of Apollo without stumbling across this analogy. Yet the point of many of these Columbus comparisons was not necessarily to play up the discovery of a new New World on the moon—in fact, just as many emphasized the clear differences between Columbus’s blind voyage to a lush new terrestrial terrain and the astronauts’ technologized, pre- programmed flight to an already surveyed dead world where they would almost immediately die outside of their spacesuits. Rather the analogy was used to remind the public that the real ramifications of Columbus’s journey did not begin to be understood until hundreds of years after the fact. Over a century elapsed, after all, between Columbus’s initial voyage and the first permanent English settlements, and neither he nor anyone alive in his time could have in their wildest dreams anticipated the future course of North America. The same was true of the Apollo voyage, its farsighted supporters pointed out—it could take a hundred, five hundred, even a thousand years before its true significance could be grasped with any confidence. It was a sage point, and a shrewd way for 35 proponents to promote the program to a nation growing increasingly doubtful by the late 1960s that the “spinoff” and geological knowledge stemming from the mission were worth its $24 billion price tag. Still, the obvious value of proper historical perspective did nothing to stop editorialists, columnists, anchors and analysts in nearly every news outlet across the country from trying to discern its “meaning for humanity” the very next day following the landing. That Apollo was of paramount importance was taken as a given by the nation’s commentators, as well as many of its citizens. It was, quite simply, a self-evidently monumental step in human history. But just why and how it was important was far more difficult to ascertain and express, and Americans struggled to give voice to what they felt about it. Some newspapers, like the Baltimore Sun, recognized the futility of speculating on the meaning of such a huge event the day after it happened. “Mankind’s history has taken a giant turning with the flight of Apollo 11,” it confidently assured readers. “Of that we are all sure.” It was a common enough, if meaningless sentiment, but the Sun’s editorialists also showed a modesty lacking in many other appraisals. “In what direction, and how great and intimately the turning will affect us and every coming generation, we do not know,” they admitted, “and we shall not be able even to guess for an indeterminable time. We shall do well not to deceive ourselves.”4 Such humility was an exception to the more general trend, as commentators (including subsequent Sun editorials) summarily tried to pry some discernable meaning—whether profound, practical, or pedestrian—from the event. 4 Baltimore Sun, 22 July 1969, in NASA Current News (hereafter NCN), “Apollo 11 Special,” July & August, 1969, 197, NHO. 36 The result of this immediate drive to make human sense of the moon landing was a flood of platitudes that tended to express a fairly small number of obvious, often inane themes that nonetheless shaped the parameters for much of the public discourse, both during the Apollo era and ever since. Indeed, if few media outlets suffered from a shortage of words to say about the event, just as few could offer anything truly meaningful that shed much light on its potential impact for America and the world at the dawn of the 1970s. This should come as no surprise. Like the explosion of the first atomic weapons, after which nearly every columnist, editorial board, and intellectual in the nation turned into an armchair philosopher to pontificate about how these events would alter history, Apollo seemed incredibly significant, but it was not readily apparent just what the moon landing had changed or would change.5 Clearly Apollo should be important—that much seemed irrefutable. Human beings were taking their first steps onto another world, after all, expanding their vision and presence into a previously mysterious and inaccessible cosmos. It was the defining moment of the twentieth century, its more zealous supporters enthused: a thousand years in the future, when the urban riots, hippies, Vietnam war, and other issues that seemed so crucial to contemporary observers would be mere footnotes (if they were remembered at all), Apollo would be the most significant development historians would recall of the century. But what, exactly, would these future historians say about it? When the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, the meanings seemed clear. On the one hand, it meant the Soviets were winning the technological Cold War, and, most 5 See Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), esp. 133-77. 37 terrifying, had the capacity to launch missiles into space and fly their payloads over the United States. More optimistically, Sputnik was the opening of a space age, a time of spectacular technological advancement on Earth and the first step toward an eventual human expansion into outer space. By 1969, the moon had finally been reached. But what did it augur, either for the future on Earth or in space? It was great to have beaten the Russians to the moon and won the space race, but the Cold War had eased by 1969, the “missile gap” fear spawned by Sputnik was no longer such a nagging daily concern, and the moon itself held few if any practical benefits, military or otherwise. What next, then, to follow this first step into the solar system? Moon colonies? Or a Mars landing, as Vice President Spiro Agnew began promoting before the Apollo 11 astronauts were even a few hours into their flight? Neither was likely, since a majority of Americans no longer supported continued manned exploration on the expensive, crash schedule of Apollo. What about applying the spirit, lessons, and methods of Apollo to improve life on Earth, as more liberal-minded analysts proposed? It was a nice thought, but by 1969 many Americans were skeptical that Apollo-type technocratic methods would have any impact on vastly more complicated and entrenched social problems. In any case, these were fairly pedestrian reactions to such an awesome event. Loftier voices tried to match the grandeur of Apollo with exaggerated pronouncements of its importance, expressing more abstract feelings that Apollo somehow marked a major turning point in human history. “This event is equivalent to the inventions of fire and the wheel, and the discovery of language,” exclaimed humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz of the Apollo 8 moon flight, in one of the more egregious overstatements of the Apollo era: “it 38 could be a crucial turning point in the history of mankind.”6 But what the world was turning from and where it was headed remained unclear. “A grand gesture,” admitted poet W.H. Auden. “But what does it period? What does it osse?”7 What did it end, and what might it portend? Auden himself was not sure, and he was not alone, as even the most eloquent thinkers, talkers, and writers found themselves frustrated as they tried to make sense of it. As a result, the majority of immediate reactions, from fervent supporters to relentless detractors and most everyone one in between, tended to be flat, empty, even dispiriting in their banality. Such platitudes, attempting to instill meaning in what should have been an epochal moment, served instead to sap some of the very real excitement from the event, and fostered a public debate over its meaning and merits characterized more by hollow rhetoric than valuable insight. This chapter will examine several of the most common ways Americans attempted to talk about Apollo in the immediate moment, and the problems they had in doing so, from those who blew it out of all proportion, to others who mouthed truisms that did little to get at the real nature of the feat, and finally those who simply tried and failed to come up with words sufficient to describe the experience. Some of these reactions were trite, some trenchant; some hopelessly naïve, others justifiably damnatory; some myopically focused on everyday Earthly affairs, others gazing to the vague infinity of the new and future Space Age; most were heartfelt, yet all were expressed to the point of exhaustion during the summer of Apollo 11. 6 Paul Kurtz, “The Year One (A.S.), The Humanist, March-April 1969, 1. 7 W.H. Auden, “Moon Landing,” in New Yorker, 6 September 1969, 38. 39 II. Editorializing just after the moon landing, the Wall Street Journal posed a question that encapsulated much of the immediate debate over the meaning of Apollo 11. “Will historians of the future look back to Sunday’s moon-walk as the single most dramatic and significant achievement of this era?” it asked. “Or will it simply be the first of an indefinite number of pointless extraterrestrial visits, of little benefit to man while his earthly condition deteriorates?”8 These dueling perspectives represented two of the most prevalent viewpoints toward Apollo in the public dialogue, and variations of each were articulated widely in the media. Partisan observers usually stressed one angle or the other—to some it was clearly a magnificent turning point in history; to others, a waste of resources and energy badly needed on Earth. On the other hand, more deliberately fair- minded (and usually moderately liberal) editorialists and columnists tended to acknowledge the merits of both sides of the Journal’s two-part question, as did many liberals of both parties in Congress: some ringing words on the majesty of the event and what it revealed about human capabilities, followed by a few more urging that it not distract from more pressing issues on the troubled Earth. Space enthusiasts had no qualms about speculating on the transformative potential of the moon landing. One of the most common platitudes from supporters—in the media, within NASA, and elsewhere—argued that the moon landing inaugurated the dawning of some vague “new era” or “new age” in human history. Yet few could offer any 8 Wall Street Journal, 22 July 1969, in NCN, “Apollo 11 Special,” 191. 40 satisfying explanation of what this really meant, if they expanded on the idea at all. “The least that can be said is that the touchdown of Eagle marked the close of an era, and the simultaneous establishment of Tranquility Base was the moment of birth of a new age,” wrote the editorialists of the Washington Evening Star. “The first great evolutionary leap took place when some primordial creature fought its way from the sea, the mother of all life on earth, to the hostile land. The second major evolutionary move, it has been argued, took place at 4:17 p.m. EDT, July 20, 1969.” This “next step in evolution” rhetoric tended to go hand in hand with the “new era” platitudes, but exactly what this evolutionary leap entailed was unclear, and the Evening Star editors were at least humble enough to recognize their ignorance. “We know that a collective act of human will has achieved something monumental,” they asserted. But “we have no more real understanding of what has been accomplished than did Columbus when he reached his new and unknown world. . . . we have not yet begun to grasp what it is that lies beyond the newly opened door.”9 Others followed suit, though often without the recognition that it may have been a bit too early to speculate on just what new era Apollo had commenced. Speaking of the earlier Apollo 8 flight, for example, Time declared it the first glimpse of “a new age, one that will inevitably reshape man’s view of himself and his destiny.”10 This kind of overblown rhetoric, delivered in spades after Apollo 8, reached a peak during the summer of Apollo 11. Journalist Flora Lewis, for one, believed that with the moon landing, “a 9 Washington Evening Star, 21 July 1969, A-16. 10 Time, 3 January 1969, 9. 41 new era with a fresh approach to life will begin.”11 For its part, CBS News’s pre-flight advertisements promised its millions of viewers “the dawn of a new age” when Walter Cronkite guided them through the first steps on the moon.12 But it was a random tourist attending the Apollo 11 launch who best displayed the curious mixture of certitude and inadvertent ambiguity so common in these reactions when he explained, “the earth as we know it will somehow never be the same.”13 Few of these commentators could adequately expand on the “somehow” part. Although a number of observers attempted to tie their “new era” talk to more specific results—a more united world, an opening for further expansion into space, or, most relevant, a new perspective from which to look upon an Earth that had never before appeared so fragile—a majority were content to simply declare the dawn of a new age, followed by something about “man’s unlimited capabilities” or “new horizons” and whatnot. That these platitudes were all but devoid of substance seemed obvious to many who gave them a second thought. Watching the television coverage, Hank Malone, writing in the Detroit underground newspaper the Fifth Estate, found all the celebratory rhetoric vacuous and uninspiring. “I watched hundreds of TV interviews (it seemed like hundreds) and nobody (but Nobody) seemed to have any perspective at all,” he complained, “except to put a hype on their emotions: ‘Gee, it’s just super-terrific . . . golly . . . the greatest thing since the Creation!’” Overall, he felt, “there was really nothing going on except a kind of abstract notion that ‘history was being made,’” with no 11 Denver Post, 26 May 1969, in NCN, 2 June 1969, 21. 12 Los Angeles Times, 16 July 1969, 16. 13 New York Times, 15 July 1969, 20. 42 sense at all what this might mean.14 The radical social activist Saul Alinsky put it more succinctly: “As far as statements on the historical significance, it is so obviously epoch- making that the answers are all clichés,” he explained to the New York Times. “The answers sound as stupid as the questions.”15 Of course clichés about the magnificence of Apollo were to be expected, and seemed harmless enough. It is difficult to imagine any scenario in which the landing would not be the dominant topic of newspaper editorials and columns on July 21, 1969. Writers simply had to say something about it, even though most had exhausted their thoughts on the matter during the run-up to the well-anticipated event. Since no clear understanding of its ramifications was possible in the immediate moment (and, in fact, the bulk of most editorials and columns could have been, and likely were, written ahead of time—Newsweek’s Joseph Morgenstern, attending the launch at Cape Kennedy, overheard a reporter three hours before the liftoff dictating into a telephone, “With a teeth-rattling roar heard round the world comma . . .”16), bombast seemed the only appropriate response to an event of such magnitude. But beyond merely peddling dull clichés, some critics complained, the attempts to instantly expose the deeper implications of the event threatened to cheapen what had been, whatever its “meaning,” an intensely moving moment in its own right. “The temptation to look at this happening and see more than is there is almost irresistible,” warned syndicated columnist Max Lerner, who considered himself as guilty of this as anyone else. “Isn’t it a curious commentary on our 14 Fifth Estate, 20 August 1969, 4. 15 New York Times, 21 July 1969, 7. 16 Newsweek, 28 July 1969, 26A. 43 era that we see the moon and all its connections—the moon and sixpence, the moon and $24 billion, the moon and power, the moon and someone’s legislative program, the moon and someone’s election prospects—instead of seeing the event itself?” he asked. “The event is enough. The rest is velvet.”17 Few heeded Lerner’s warning, and the “velvet” came to dominate the rhetoric as countless observers tried to relate the event to more tangible Earthly affairs. Speculating on the hazy idea that a “new era” had begun with Apollo 11 was fine, but surely something of more concrete value could be learned from the massive enterprise that brought an impossible goal from fantasy to reality in less than a decade. If it was not entirely clear what its deeper impact would be for the distant future, its more immediate meaning might be found in the practical lessons it could teach for how to set ambitious goals and achieve them, whether this meant improving efficiency in American management and manufacturing, developing new approaches to social ills left uncured by Great Society programs, or simply ensuring the nation’s airports ran on time. The most commonly expressed and potentially far-reaching “lesson of Apollo” was the notion that a similar approach could be used to more effectively grapple with Earthbound problems of poverty, decaying cities, pollution, and the plethora of other pressing social concerns of the period. If we can land on the moon, the refrain went, we can solve any Earthly problems, so long as we dedicate sufficient energy and resources to the task. It was a message brought home from the moon by the astronauts themselves. “The Apollo lesson is that national goals can be met where there is a strong enough will 17 Washington Evening Star, 19 July 1969, in NCN, 23 July 1969, 29. 44 to do so,” declared Buzz Aldrin in a speech before Congress.18 Neil Armstrong chipped in with a similar interpretation. “In the spirit of Apollo,” he explained a year later with his characteristic clumsy diction, “you can attack a very difficult goal and achieve it if you can all agree on what the goal is. Also that you all work together to achieve that goal. That to me is the message of the spirit of Apollo.”19 Though Aldrin’s and Armstrong’s proclamations were typically vapid and unspecific, they epitomized the Apollo-era outpouring of the “technocratic mentality,” whose development through the prior decade Walter McDougall detailed in ...the Heavens and the Earth. 20 McDougall’s phrase referred not simply to the understandable inspiration many drew from the amazing feat—“if we can go to the moon, we can do anything”—but rather to the more problematic idea that the technocratic methods used to conquer the moon could be adapted to address other, very different social problems. What concerns us here is less the development of this technocratic mentality than its proliferation in the months surrounding Apollo, when, inspired by the success, myriad observers predicted similar triumphs over human problems of poverty and want, if only the political will to tackle these issues could be summoned and sustained. “There are many things to be learned from the mission of Apollo 11,” wrote the Washington Post editorialists in a characteristic example of this argument: but none of them has more immediate relevance to the United States today than the lesson that if we can land men on the moon, we can solve our problems at 18 Space Quotes, September/October 1969, 5, in “Space Quotes 1965-,” “Impact of Space Program” collection, NHO. 19 Christian Science Monitor, 21 July 1970, in NCN, 21 July 1970, 3. 20 Walter A. McDougall, ...the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1985), 8. 45 home. A Nation that, in less than a decade, can overcome the scientific, technological and psychological barriers to a moon landing can also overcome those same barriers when they stand in the way of solving the problems of housing, urban blight, pollution, poverty, unemployment, crowded airways and declining railroads.21 This idea was broadcast ceaselessly by those inspired by Apollo and dedicated to using similar means to attack vastly different problems on Earth. William Hines, who covered the space program for the Washington Star, went so far as to propose, only somewhat facetiously, that NASA change its name to the “National Anything and Space Administration,” so that it could refocus its attention on any and all Earth problems that could benefit from its “celebrated managerial talents.” The overhauled agency’s new motto, Hines suggested, might be “The impossible we do immediately, the inconceivable takes a little longer,” for it would offer an actual manifestation of “the fundamental precept of modern technology that anything which can be imagined can be accomplished. A cure for cancer, and end to poverty, a cleanup of the environment, termination of the Vietnam war, even effective nuclear disarmament? If it is conceivable it is achievable.”22 It was abundantly clear to optimists that social troubles could be solved with such a technocratic approach. The success of Apollo—the massive coordination of resources and personnel, the stunningly low failure rate of Apollo 11’s miles of wire and millions of parts, the very fact that two men walked on the moon a mere eight years after the plan was hatched—seemed to imply that the primary impediment to actually achieving the elusive Great Society lay not in the ability to solve social hardships, but in mustering the 21 Washington Post, 20 July 1969, 40. 22 Washington Star, 21 September 1969, C4. 46 political and public will to do so. Journalist James Clayton, writing in the Washington Post the day after the astronauts safely returned to Earth, was explicit in his belief that the U.S. did not lack the capacity to solve its social problems, only the commitment. The “unique mix of industry-university-government cooperation” highlighted by Apollo “ought to be transferrable to other problems,” he argued. “The techniques of massive problem solving . . . and the men experienced in managing them are now available. Whether they will be used on earth as they have been used in the heavens depends upon how much we really care.”23 This sentiment was aired throughout the summer of Apollo, usually mouthed by liberal space enthusiasts, from Lyndon Johnson to NASA officials to media prognosticators—all big on rhetoric, but short on specifics for exactly how the expertise involved in building rocketry and computers for space flight could be redirected toward combating the entrenched poverty or racial discrimination that remained in the fading Great Society’s wake.24 III. If these paeans to Apollo’s meaning seemed to minimize rather than enhance the grandeur of the event, many of the immediate criticisms also failed to adequately grapple with the larger ramifications of the moon landing. Indeed, many of Apollo’s Left-leaning 23 Washington Post, 25 July 1969, A26. 24 This was not always true, of course. Jet magazine, for example, published a story on a “Space Age” IBM computer that was used to compute demographics to assist in the fight against segregation in Houston public schools. See Jet, 11 September, 1969, 17. 47 detractors were just as guilty of reducing the event to platitudes, and in fact broached many of the same themes, if more often in bitterness than in hope. Although skipping the “new age in history” pablum, they showed no such restraint when it came to pushing for similar technocratic approaches to social problems. Rather than affirming, “if we can go to the moon, we can also solve our social problems,” they posed a slightly different question: If we can go to the moon, why can’t we tackle issues of poverty, urban blight, and other social problems? Liberal news vehicles asked this question regularly throughout the Apollo era. But even outside the generally staid editorial opinions of the nation’s newspapers, otherwise nuanced and eloquent intellects also had a hard time expressing their thoughts on the matter in anything other than commonplaces. Playwright Arthur Miller, for example, asked by the New York Times for his feelings on the moon landing, responded, “I think it’s a great thing for all of us. After the moon we undoubtedly will put men on other planets further and further away from Earth. The climax, which I doubt anyone alive will witness, will come when a scientific expedition finally lands on 125th Street or the North Side of Waterbury, Connecticut.”25 Kurt Vonnegut expressed a similar point of view. “We have spent something like $33 billion on space so far,” he complained. “We should have spent it on cleaning up our filthy colonies here on earth.”26 From this critical perspective, the success of Apollo proved not that humanity would eventually lick its social problems, but rather that its priorities were so distorted that it would sooner send a man to the moon than help its wretched poor and its crumbling cities. Poet Richard 25 New York Times, 21 July 1969, 7. 26 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (Opinions) (New York: Delta, 1974), 80. 48 Brautigan put the case simply in a short poem he composed the day of the landing: “Men are walking on the moon today/ planting their footsteps as if they were/ zucchini on a dead world/ while over 3,000,000 people starve todeath [sic]/ on a living one.”27 This discrepancy between the lavishly funded moonmen and the millions of deprived Earthlings was a primary target of many critics on the Left, and their case was made most trenchantly by black critics. Although public opinion as a whole in the late 1960s consistently disapproved of spending so much money on the moon program, opposition was much more widespread among African Americans—an antagonism widely noted in the media. “Blacks and Apollo: Most Couldn’t Have Cared Less,” announced a post-mission headline in the New York Times.28 “From Harlem to Watts, the first moon landing in July of last year was viewed cynically as one small step for ‘The Man,’” attested an article in Ebony, “and probably a giant step in the wrong direction for mankind.”29 The most visible protest of the Apollo era came at the Apollo 11 launching itself, when Ralph Abernathy, who had ascended to the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and its Poor People’s Campaign following Martin Luther King’s murder, arrived at the launching grounds with a few hundred demonstrators and a small mule train to confront NASA about its misplaced priorities. “We do not oppose the moon shot,” explained SCLC’s Hosea Williams. “We feel the effort is laudable. Our purpose for being here is to protest America’s inability to choose human priorities.” Abernathy’s 27 Richard Brautigan, “Jules Verne Zucchini,” in Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1970). 28 New York Times, 27 July 1969, E6. 29 Quoted in Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 162. 49 protest was widely reported, and was met with predictable approval from the liberal media and scorn from more conservative, often Southern editorialists and columnists. Though the national black-oriented weekly Jet admitted that Abernathy and his delegation “were treated with dignity and respect at the Cape,” the view of NASA among most African Americans remained dim.30 This disconnect between African Americans and the space program was explored in a number of mainstream news articles around the time of the moon landing, nearly all of which highlighted the liberal concern over misplaced priorities. The New York Times and the New Yorker, for example, sent reporters to black bars in Chicago’s South Side and Harlem to gauge reactions to the landing, and both found similar scenes—baseball on the television, conversations revolving around anything but the moon, and seething discontent about the space program when the patrons were asked their feelings. “The whole thing uses money that should be spent right here on earth and I don’t like them saying ‘all good Americans are happy about it,’” complained one man in Harlem. “I damn sure ain’t happy about it.”31 Recognizing the prevalence and strength of such feelings, the Christian Science Monitor concluded that “when spokesmen for varying shades of opinion among America’s black citizenry, stretching all the way from the mild 30 NASA Administrator Thomas Paine, who met with Abernathy’s delegation, handled the situation masterfully. “If it were possible for us not to push that button tomorrow and solve the problems you are talking about,” he sympathized, “we would not push the button.” But solving problems of poverty and hunger were much more daunting than landing men on the moon, explained Paine. However, he suggested, perhaps both the spirit of Apollo and the technologies it spawned could contribute to Abernathy’s goals. “I want you to hitch your wagon to our rocket and tell the people the NASA program is an example of what this country can do,” Paine urged Abernathy, before asking his delegation of poor people to pray for the safety of the three astronauts on their mission. The encounter ended with Abernathy and a number of his group given admission to view the launch from a VIP site within the space center. New York Times, 16 July 1969, 22; Washington Post, 16 July 1969, A7; 20 July 1969, 40; Jet, 31 August, 1969, 6; 14 August 1969, 21. 31 New York Times, 27 July 1969, E6; New Yorker, 26 July 1969, 26. 50 moderation of a Roy Wilkins or a Whitney Young to the bitter and revolutionary outlook of an Eldridge Cleaver and a Stokely Charmichael, draw unflattering contrast between what has been done on the moon and what has not been done at home, then it is well for the country to weigh carefully whether its objectives fully are in balance.”32 While the black press also pointed out similar issues of warped priorities, it focused much of its own criticism on the lack of black representation in NASA’s ranks, from the all-white astronaut corps down through the mostly white scientists and technicians who benefitted from the space buildup. Indeed, for all its talk of ushering in a better future via space exploration, NASA was hardly at the forefront of challenging the status quo in racial affairs. Jet, for example, repeatedly complained about NASA’s poor minority hiring record, and its apparent disinterest in ameliorating this deficiency.33 Singer Harry Belafonte saw “whites only” not just at NASA, but with its fans and supporters as well, including network television. “Look what happened,” he complained of the television coverage. “No black commentators, not one Negro sociologist or scientist. One network did show Duke Ellington playing the song he wrote in honor of Apollo 11. It’s like they were saying, ‘Yeah, there’s a black man playing music for whitey to do his important thing by. Keep him in the rhythm section, boys.’”34 Still, the black press made sure to highlight those inroads blacks were able make into the space venture: “Iowa Black Man Checks Apollo Parts Fittings,” read one typical Jet headline.35 Nonetheless, it seemed clear to Edward Dwight, the first black astronaut-trainee who had 32 Christian Science Monitor, 5 August 1969, in NCN, 5 August 1969, 27. 33 Jet, 31 August 1969, 6; 28 August, 1969, 3. 34 Jet, 4 September 1969, 34. 35 Jet, 9 January 1969, 7. 51 been pushed out of the program in the mid-1960s, that “white people are selfish about their accomplishments.”36 The space program became a particularly inviting target for more radical black voices. Rapping poetry over the occasional minimal conga beats, piano, flute, bass, and various other background accompaniments, for example, the Watts Prophets, a collection of Los Angeles poets recognized today as one of the most important proto-rap groups of the late 1960s, assailed the space program in three songs on their first two albums. “Saint America,” from 1969’s The Black Voices: On the Street in Watts, damned the priorities of white America, which left black babies “crying from the pain of missed-meal cramps, while your astro-nuts [sic] circle Russia, the heavens, and other such places, munching on concentrated bits of specially designed foods.” Their second album, Rappin’ Black in a White World, recorded in 1970, featured two more tracks attacking the space program, complaining of “two little brothers that I know who would someday like to go to a show/ Yeah! Just a plain old fifty-cent show/ How much did you say that last moon shot cost?” and warning that “putting us in a cage was a mistake/ All that did was intensify hate/ Now shackled to our cages you expect us to wait while you fool around on the moon?/ And from there look for another place to conquer?”37 Musician Gil Scott-Heron delivered a similar criticism of the moon venture in very personal terms. “Gil Scott-Heron takes you Inside Black,” promised the cover for his Small Talk at 125th and Lenox album (1970), “Inside, where the black man sorts his 36 Jet, 14 August 1969, 10. 37 Watts Prophets, “Saint America,” “Pain,” and “What is a Man?” Things Gonna Get Greater: The Watts Prophets 1969-1971 (Water, 1995), Water157. 52 miseries ‘while white men walk on stars.’” The album delivered as promised with the caustic “Whitey on the Moon.” “A rat done bit my sister Nell,” Scott-Heron coolly intoned, “with Whitey on the moon/ Her face and arms began to swell (and Whitey’s on the moon)/ I can’t pay no doctor bill (but Whitey’s on the moon)/ Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still (while Whitey’s on the moon).”38 Both the Watts Prophets and Gil Scott-Heron gave vitriolic voice to a common complaint, both among African Americans and Left-leaning Americans more generally. It went beyond the simplistic argument that Apollo’s $24 billion should have been diverted toward social programs—countless voices pointed out that had Apollo been cancelled, the odds that a single dime of its funding would go toward anti-poverty legislation were minimal. Rather, the problem with Apollo was one of perception: the juxtaposition of the extravagant space program with the everyday deprivations of many inner-city African Americans showcased uncomfortable truths about the persistence of poverty and racism in the United States, and the troubling inability or unwillingness of such an advanced nation to adequately confront these problems. Although African-American reactions were by no means monolithic, and black newspapers like the Chicago Defender could be found on any given day commending Apollo, the hypocrisy of a nation pouring its resources into quixotic quests to conquer the stars rather than confronting its long-simmering self-imposed social ills was abundantly clear to a majority of African Americans, and their criticisms of Apollo were among the 38 Gil Scott-Heron, “Whitey on the Moon,” Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (RCA Victor, 2001), 74321851622; poem version published in Small Talk at 125th and Lenox: A Collection of Black Poems by Gil Scott-Heron (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1970), 27. 53 most convincing of the era.39 But as sound as they may have been, like other Leftist criticisms they failed to transcend the standard political discourse and offered little consideration of the implications of the event on its own terms. IV. Like the “new era” talk, the widespread clamor about solving the problems of Earth before jumping into space also had its detractors, both from the Right and the Left. Despite their disparate ideologies, these critics tended to agree that the massive government-industry-university collaboration on display with Apollo could not simply be diverted to the more messy social problems that confronted the United States at the turn of the 1970s. For example, the Wall Street Journal editorialists, for all their conservative tendencies, actually agreed that more attention should be paid to social problems than future space missions. Nevertheless, they pointed out that “it is particularly foolish to assume that if man can go to the moon he ought to be able to solve his problems on earth.”40 Apollo was a comparatively easy technical challenge, after all, and was nothing compared to the human struggles against racism, poverty, war, or even pollution— perennial problems against which humanity’s track record had been less than inspiring. Conservative author George N. Crocker more aggressively castigated the hogwash he was hearing about Apollo siphoning money away from more deserving 39 On more positive coverage of Apollo in the black press, see Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse, 154- 55. 40 Wall Street Journal, 25 July 1969, in NCN, 25 July 1969, 57. 54 social programs. Because of this liberal rhetoric, he believed, “we now have a generation of young people so long misled by such language that they think it must be malevolence and hypocrisy that have kept us from creating a utopia on earth. . . . There is a monstrous confusion here. Technology is one thing, human behavior another. Man is not a mechanism, to be engineered.”41 Ayn Rand was even blunter. “Those who suggest that we substitute a war on poverty for the space program,” she wrote, “should ask themselves whether the premises and values that form the character of an astronaut would be satisfied by a lifetime of carrying bedpans and teaching the alphabet to the mentally retarded. . . . Slums are not a substitute for stars.”42 If these criticisms from the Right may have been expected, a number of Left- leaning voices were no less critical of arguments that America’s domestic problems should be solved before setting off for the moon, or that NASA-style tactics could be directed toward social issues. “It is strange how often radicals lose their common sense when they talk politics,” wrote Paul Goodman. “To tell a child or a man that he can’t have ice cream or whiskey because there are starving Armenians is to be so serious as to deserve not to be taken seriously.” Of using NASA-style approaches on social programs, Goodman was equally skeptical. “There is nothing ironical in the fact that we can land on the moon but can’t make traffic move or feed the hungry,” he argued. “NASA can’t make an epigram or a metaphor either. All the resources of society can’t educate a child or give a poor man freedom or me happiness. All these take different kinds of soul.”43 41 San Francisco Examiner, 28 July 1969, in NCN, 6 August 1969, 34. 42 Ayn Rand, “Apollo 11,” The Objectivist, September 1969, 11, 13. 43 Paul Goodman, New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), 25-26; Liberation, August-September, 1969, 60. 55 Looking back from the perspective of the mid-1980s, Ellen Willis, a radical feminist who in 1969 was so alienated from NASA and the Apollo program that she did not even watch the moon landing, nonetheless recalled with disdain those who argued that space exploration had to wait for social justice on Earth. “It’s one more version of the bread-before-roses, keep-our-noses-to-the-grindstone mentality” of 1960s radicals, she wrote: “we shouldn’t go to rock and roll concerts while a war is going on; we shouldn’t worry about sexual happiness till we’ve gotten rid of capitalism. . . . There’s something laughable in the grim notion that we should work through our global dilemmas in some predetermined, commonsense order, as if nothing we might learn from going into space (or listening to rock and roll, or thinking about sex) could make hash of our ideas about poverty and how to abolish it.”44 Though Goodman and Willis held varying views of both the space program and America’s late 1960s social problems, they shared an anti-authoritarian streak that made them leery of calls for technocratic state enterprises designed to address complicated social issues. More important, they were also irreverent intellectuals with little patience for facile platitudes about solving social problems before going into space, regardless of how sympathetic they were to the underlying sentiments. 44 Ellen Willis, No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 241-42. 56 V. If pundits of all varieties were guilty of peddling banalities about Apollo, most could at least feel superior to an even more linguistically challenged group of commentators: the astronauts themselves. Nobody had more trouble talking about Apollo than the astronauts, the very men who went into space and encountered unprecedented sights and sensations—and were then expected to offer rousing portrayals of the experience back to the rest of humanity. Poetry not being high on the list of prerequisites for astronaut training, few of these first spacemen were able to adequately convey their feelings in any language grandiose enough to satisfy eager audiences. As a result, they often found themselves ridiculed for their empty statements, not just among critics of Apollo, but even from disappointed supporters. Just before Apollo 11, Esquire magazine devoted a cover story to the history of the astronauts’ descriptions of outer space, and reached the depressing conclusion that no matter how awe-inspiring and transcendent their experiences on the moon, the astronauts would inevitably describe it as “beautiful,” and “fantastic”—their fallback adjectives of choice throughout the decade. The article was one of the most biting attacks on the failure of past astronauts to convey anything close to the splendor of what they experienced in space. “Never, in all those hours they have bobbed around up there, have they managed to convey what space really looks like or feels like,” the article complained. “All they 57 ever tell us is that it is ‘beautiful.’ They use that word, like a Boy Scout jackknife, for every imaginable task.”45 That the astronauts tended to speak of the space endeavor in less than inspiring terms was widely recognized, and not just by condescending intellectuals. After the Apollo 10 practice mission around the moon, for example, a Kansas City Times editorial accused the astronauts of suffering from “infectious adjectivitis,” causing them to overindulge in catchall adjectives like “fantastic” to describe their experiences.46 The Chicago Daily News, on the other hand, forgave the crew for its overuse of that word, acknowledging that “as rich as our language may be it is still poor when it comes to describing the new vistas opened up by this phase of space exploration.”47 The astronauts themselves recognized their own verbal limitations. “We weren’t trained to emote, we were trained to repress emotions,” grumbled Apollo 11’s Michael Collins about expectations for their public statements. “If they wanted an emotional press conference, for Christ’s sake, they should have put together an Apollo crew of a philosopher, a priest, and a poet—not three test pilots.”48 Outspoken critics of Apollo were less sparing in their attacks. In a 1972 PBS production, Kurt Vonnegut teamed up with a group of actors, writers, and public television enthusiasts to produce Between Time and Timbuktu, a mish-mash of scenes from several of Vonnegut’s works arranged together to tell the story of Stony Stevenson, the first poet sent into outer space. Vonnegut promised the viewing public “a space shot 45 Esquire, July 1969, 139-140. 46 Kansas City Times, 21 May 1969, in NCN, 26 May 1969, 6. 47 Chicago Daily News, 20 May 1969, in NCN, 26 May 1969, 19. 48 Collins quoted in Laurence Goldstein, “‘The End of All Our Exploring’: The Moon Landing and Modern Poetry,” Michigan Quarterly Review 18, no. 2 (Spring 1979): 198. 58 which will be more exciting and educational than anything NASA has done, and which will cost one billionth as much.”49 In the movie, Stony, a young amateur poet who lived with his mother in Indianapolis, was announced as the winner of the “Blast-off Space Food Jingle Contest,” which earned him a solo trip into space. Stony’s flight was narrated by network anchor Walter Gesundheit and ex- astronaut Bud Williams, Jr.—an obvious parody of the real life Walter Cronkite and Wally Schirra team at CBS. As a former astronaut, Williams had some misgivings over the wisdom of sending a poet into space rather than a traditional astronaut—“Maybe he can give us some fancy descriptions of things,” he warned, but if things got too hairy, there was a high danger that Stony the poet would react too emotionally, and disaster would result. Yet it was Williams’s own past performance in space that made the need for a poet like Stony abundantly clear. On a prior trip to Mars, Williams had struggled to come up with a meaningful way to communicate what the planet looked like, eventually falling back on a description that seemed appropriate to the no-nonsense astronaut: Mars, he told hundreds of millions of Earth-dwellers listening eagerly, looked like his driveway back in Dallas.50 It was this kind of banter between astronauts—a satire that came uncomfortably close to their real-life descriptions of their experiences—which led political scientist and futurologist Victor Ferkiss to borrow a page from Hannah Arendt’s study of Adolf Eichmann and wonder how it could be that “these thoroughly conventional and middle-class and essentially dull people” were “the supermen whom the 49 TV Guide, 11 March 1972, 24. 50 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Between Time and Timbuktu, or Prometheus-5 (New York: Delta, 1972), 15. 59 race had struggled for a million years to produce. . . . One cannot but be struck that not only is evil often banal but glory also.”51 Much of the criticism of the astronauts’ language was not necessarily unwarranted—there was something a bit abnormal about their speech patterns, none more so than Neil Armstrong. Take, for example, a typical Armstrong statement from one pre- flight interview. Asked how it felt to be the first human being who would set foot on the moon, Armstrong responded, “I’m certainly not going to say I’m without emotion at the thought, because that wouldn’t be factual.” The moment he nearly died on an earlier space flight was “a non-trivial situation,” he explained in another interview.52 This was the man who would be responsible for describing the feeling of experiencing humanity’s first direct encounter with another celestial body? Still, the criticisms were too much for Tom Wolfe. These astronauts were at the helm of the greatest feat of the twentieth century, perhaps ever, and the likes of Esquire would waste words criticizing them for not being poets? Wolfe reacted with exasperation to what he described as “the phenomenon of the intellectuals’ amazing hostility to NASA’s success in reaching and exploring the moon.” By “intellectuals” he meant, of course, the Left-leaning crowd he was so fond of lampooning in the 1960s and 1970s. Wolfe detected a strong element of snobbery in their disdain for the space program and the astronauts, their view that the astronauts, “these Americans, these nonintellectuals, rustauds, goyim . . . may have accomplished a feat—but the feat was worthless.” 51 Victor Ferkiss, Technological Man: The Myth and the Reality (New York: George Braziller, 1969), 4-5, 9. 52 Philadelphia Inquirer, 22 June 1969, in NCN, 30 June 1969; Interview, Neil Armstrong with Robert Sherrod, 23 September 1971, Folder “Interviews, Abbey-Callaghan,” Box “Robert Sherrod Apollo Collection, Interviews, Abbey-Newall,” NHO, 10. 60 Wolfe pointed out that although Buzz Aldrin carried a doctorate in astronautics from MIT, he would never be accepted by the intellectuals as anything more than a glorified chimpanzee, unless, Wolfe thought, he were to: acquire a Volkswagen, some brown bread in the bread box, a set of Thonet ‘Corbu’ bentwoods, muttonchops, a few new friends, all the Beatle albums from Revolver on, a lapsed pledge card from CORE, a kitchen full of recyclable bottles that nobody ever gets around to taking to the Safeway, a stack of unread New York Review of Books piling up in a mount of subscription guilt, and utter a few words on the subject of, say, war, or the higher priority of things here on Terra— in which case you can be sure it would be observed that his quiet reluctance to conform to the Astronaut stereotype, as well as his smoldering brilliance, had been apparent all along.53 Wolfe, in all his sarcasm, was onto something. “I have the impression that writers and intellectuals—men of the left—are turning their backs on the event,” agreed playwright Eugene Ionesco in the New York Times.54 This point was widely noted in the aftermath of Apollo 11, especially by those with more conservative viewpoints, regardless of their own feelings about Apollo. The conservative historian John Lukacs, for example, who shared some of Tom Wolfe’s distaste for Left-intellectuals but little of his enthusiasm for Apollo, noted in a similar vein that the intelligentsia “played numb and dumb” when it came to the moon landings, “perhaps because they could not identify themselves with the enormous governmental machinery and the kind of technicians who perfected it: had Fidel Castro landed on the moon instead of Neil Armstrong their attitude might have been different.”55 53 Tom Wolfe, foreword to Arnold Beichman, Nine Lies About America (New York: The Library Press, 1972), xv-xvi, xxv. 54 New York Times, 21 July 1969, 7. 55 John Lukacs, The Passing of the Modern Age (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1970), 150. 61 President Nixon even joined the fray in his well-publicized greeting to the Apollo 11 astronauts upon their return to Earth, slipping in a sly populist message to counter the criticisms from the effete intellectuals he so resented. After inviting Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins to a state dinner to celebrate their achievement, Nixon promised them “the speeches that you have to make at this dinner can be short. And if you want to say ‘fantastic’ or ‘beautiful,’ that’s alright with us.”56 Most Americans seemed to agree with their president on this one. Few expected much in the way of lyricism from the astronauts. They did their job masterfully, and Armstrong’s words upon stepping onto the moon, whatever he meant to say, were quite enough. VI. In the end, initial reactions to Apollo and appreciations of its meaning tended to fall largely in line with the prejudices of the commentators. To supporters, Apollo was well worth the $24 billion and then some, for it clearly inaugurated a new era in human history, both on the troubled Earth of the present and for the newly opened future in space. To opponents, regardless of how amazing it was to watch two Americans walking on the moon, Apollo was ultimately a waste of money, a diversion of energy and resources from much more pressing earthly problems. These two viewpoints—or, perhaps most often, a concession from moderates that both points had some validity— 56 New York Times, 25 July 1969, 29. 62 dominated the public dialogue in the Apollo era, and produced the platitudes that have constrained our understanding of the event ever since. To refer to these surface reactions as platitudinous should not be taken as an attempt to undermine their importance to American society at the turn of the 1970s—the nation especially could not avoid a discussion over its priorities in the shadow of Apollo. Still, this public discussion failed to offer much meaningful perspective on the event itself for those who had been genuinely moved or disturbed by it, but who were grasping for some understanding of its import beyond the clichés. John L. Ferguson, for one, arrived to watch the launch at Cape Kennedy uncertain how he felt about the whole thing. “I haven’t quite decided why I came here,” the twenty-seven year old Marylander explained. “I’m trying to figure out whether it’s a giant make-work project out there, like the Pyramids, or something meaningful. I’m just not too sure.”57 Ferguson was searching for some way to fit Apollo into his understanding of the continuously developing American mythology, to determine what it could reveal about his present world and its likely role in facilitating the future. It is doubtful he found any answers to this conundrum in the dominant platitudes about budgetary priorities or the hazy “new age” he was now apparently entering. Yet beneath this surface dialogue there did, in fact, exist a good deal of ambivalence over the ultimate value and meaning of the endeavor. Although Tom Wolfe was characteristically on target when he accused Left-leaning intellectuals of too easily dismissing Apollo, his blasts were also a bit simplistic, for a number of intellectuals did 57 New York Times, 15 July 1969, 20. 63 attempt to move beyond the clichés to consider the deeper implications of Apollo for human society and for the future, both on Earth and potentially in space. These commentators, like nearly everyone else, believed that Apollo should be important, but would not content themselves with the mundanity of the prevalent discussions. That these thinkers found its meaning no less difficult to comprehend than the clichémongers troubled them greatly, for if the enterprise could not be adequately understood, indeed could hardly even be talked about in coherent terms—as the overwhelming public discourse seemed to indicate—then the prospect that humanity would ultimately be able to control its ramifications for humane ends seemed questionable. No one confronted the potentially troubling consequences of Apollo with more vehemence and ambivalence than its most unlikely chronicler, Norman Mailer. 64 Chapter 2: On the Nihilism of WASPs: Norman Mailer in NASA-Land Standing in a line of over a hundred, his progress limited to the few steps gained when those ahead dropped out in frustration, Norman Mailer was growing irritated. It was hot—high summer in coastal Florida—and he wanted something to drink, as did everyone else in the drove of reporters who, like Mailer, had descended upon Cape Kennedy to cover the Apollo 11 moon launch. He had chosen to view the liftoff from the press section rather than take yet another bus ride to the VIP section to mingle with the likes of Barry Goldwater and Johnny Carson, Lyndon Johnson and Spiro Agnew, Jack Benny and William Westmoreland and thousands more celebrities, business leaders, members of Congress, and U.S. and foreign dignitaries. Besides, he was there to cover a rocket launch, not to hobnob with “some of the world’s clowns, handmaidens, and sycophants and some of the most ambitious and some of the very worst people in the world,” as he saw them. Yet surely the VIPs were faring better than Mailer with his interminable wait for a cold drink. For all the hundred-plus media trailers crammed into the press area, NASA had supplied only one food trailer, and, as Mailer would soon learn, the sole drink machine had broken down. “It was pure American lunacy,” he railed. “Shoddy technology, the worst kind of shoddy, was replacing men with machines which did not do the work as well as the men.” With nothing better to do while mechanics fiddled with the jammed device, and by now worked into a rage, Mailer turned his anger once again toward the elites, “those smug and complacent VIPs in their stands a half mile away; this 65 was the world they had created, not the spaceship. . . . The food vending trailer was their true product.”1 Pity the poor man or woman stuck near Mailer in the refreshment line, for given his temper, the eruption of profanities from his mouth must have been near par with the deluge of flames from the moon rocket he would come to depict so eloquently in his story of Apollo 11. All of his unease over technology and the increasing mechanization of American society was unleashed at this ridiculous breakdown in the heart of America’s technological complex. This was not to Mailer’s mind some simple, routine, forgivable malfunction of an otherwise handy machine. It was rather the very epitome of the disease of a technological society that was intent on replacing humans with machines, with trampling wonder and awe in the name of predictability and rote mechanization but which actually blundered to such an extent that the disabled drink machine and the future it augured were neither wonderful nor predictable but just plain wrongheaded. Yet if Mailer’s irritation at the dysfunctional NASA food system was palpable, it was nothing next to the agonies he would go through over the next nine months as he attempted to translate his experiences with NASA and the Apollo launch into a masterful account of the moon landing and its meaning for Americans—not just another story of Apollo but the story of Apollo and the civilization that pulled it off, the final word on the matter, the one that would outlast all the fluff pieces by lesser writers which were certain to flood the market following the event, the book that could very well be the finest work of Mailer’s career and that just might bring him his long-deserved Nobel Prize. 1 Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970), 90-92. 66 At least that was what his agent told angry foreign publishers demanding their advances back after the bloated book fell far behind schedule. In reality, unlike the previous year’s The Armies of the Night, which found an inspired Mailer quickly turning out page after page of groundbreaking novelistic journalism, he did not enjoy writing his lengthy exploration of Apollo 11, the nearly five-hundred paged Of a Fire on the Moon. Composed over one of the most trying years of his life, as he struggled to come to terms with his crumbling marriage, his ballooning weight, his overwhelming sense of directionlessness at the dawn of an unfathomable new decade, and, hanging over it all, his inability to penetrate the inscrutable surface of NASA and the moon trip, Of a Fire on the Moon would finally hit bookstores nearly a year and a half after the fact to mixed reviews and general public disinterest. It was his longest work since he burst into the public consciousness with The Naked and the Dead over two decades prior, and today among the least remembered of his major books. Still, frustrating as it was to write, Mailer’s struggle to make sense of the moon landing, to gauge its import, and to integrate it into larger American mythologies make Of a Fire on the Moon as historically relevant as his more celebrated late sixties works, and a worthwhile indicator of how the larger American culture attempted to tackle these very same issues. To Mailer’s mind, Apollo was not the unqualified good that supporters deemed it—not because it displaced money from more worthy causes on Earth, nor for any of the other widely voiced practical objections, but for the much larger and potentially more disastrous reason that humanity did not really understand what it was doing as it sent its representatives to another celestial body for the first time, and thus was 67 unprepared to satisfactorily answer the crucial question of whether the leap to the moon was good or evil, beneficent to human civilization or pernicious, majestic or maniacal. “God or Devil at the helm,” believed Mailer, “that was the question behind the trip.”2 Until this core question was adequately addressed, Americans would have no grounds on which to truly judge the moon landing, and until supporters could convincingly explain why it was so important to go to the moon so quickly—to what end was this endeavor directed? what were its potential consequences?— it would remain, Mailer believed, “the deepest of nihilistic acts—because we don’t know why we did it.”3 At the same time, exploring Mailer’s tribulations in writing Of a Fire on the Moon is of equal value to considering his conclusions. After all, as critic Alfred Kazin pointed out in a review essay, “the performance is not of the moon but of the effort to talk about it.”4 Not only was Mailer’s book the only major work on the subject by a writer of his caliber, but he more than anyone was attempting to compose an instant history and philosophy of an event that few could easily wrap their minds around. Given his proneness toward overanalyzing (philosopher William Barrett spoke for many when he accused him of “turn[ing] himself frantically inside out to find some ultraprofound significance in man’s first landing on the moon”), he would not be satisfied until he unlocked the deepest cosmic implications of the event.5 He failed, as did most Americans who tried to find a larger meaning that the event in all likelihood simply did 2 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 456. 3 Vogue, 1 February 1971, 134-35. 4 New York Review of Books, 8 April 1971, 30. 5 William Barrett, Time of Need: Forms of Imagination in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1973), 359. 68 not possess—not yet, at least, not within a few weeks, a few months, nor even the first few years after its occurrence. Still, if Mailer had no more idea what to make of the event’s real significance than most other Americans, he was nonetheless being paid an enormous sum of money to offer interpretations that went beyond the common platitudes. He therefore gave it his all, and ultimately found his meaning not in the grand metaphysical questions on which so many stumbled, but in the more familiar human terms of a hyper-rationalist technological society run amuck. Although more than a few readers found Fire egotistical (a common and deliberate trait of much of Mailer’s late 1960s work), this very egotism, manifested in his conspicuous struggle to write coherently and incisively about Apollo, reveals the mental strains faced by the many commentators who wanted to take the unprecedented event seriously, but who likewise could not quite figure out how to approach it or make sense of it. II. Torturous though it may have been, Norman Mailer had to write about the moon landing. Or at least he believed he ought to. There were certain responsibilities that came with being America’s preeminent writer—its 1969 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning enfant terrible of letters—and interpreting the greatest event of the twentieth century seemed a fitting assignment. “Somehow the moon voyage will not be complete until Mailer digests it and spits it out,” enthused one commentator in the Detroit 69 underground newspaper the Fifth Estate, and Mailer himself did not entirely disagree.6 “This is the first time in my life I’ve ever put things this way,” he explained to his friend and Japanese translator, Eiichi Yamanishi, “[but] I think it is perhaps my duty to write about the subject, for although it does not appeal to me directly, it seems as if there will be important things to say about the secret life or disease of technology itself in this endeavor.”7 Though Mailer’s corpus is most often associated with themes of sex, death, violence, masculinity, and God, a profound distrust of technology also runs through much of his work, and the Apollo 11 moon landing offered him the opportunity to expound upon his concerns directly and at length—to root out the true meaning of the moon landing for an American public which desperately needed to understand that Apollo and the technological values it represented were of far more consequence than the benign marvel it was depicted as in NASA literature and on the nightly network news. Thus he accepted an offer from Life magazine (an unlikely partnership, given that the Time-Life empire, champion of WASP Middle America, was his longtime nemesis) to write a series of articles on the moon landing. The result was three long articles that appeared in Life over the half-year after the moon landing, followed at the end of 1970 by the greatly expanded book, Of a Fire on the Moon. Mailer had initially been approached to write about the moon landing at the beginning of 1969 by Willie Morris, the editor of Harper’s. “There is a tremendous story 6 Hank Malone, “The Ultimate Phallic Journey,” Fifth Estate, 20 August 1969, 4. 7 Letter, Norman Mailer to Eiichi Yamanishi, 17 March 1969, Folder 593.12 Correspondence: Eiichi Yamanishi, 1969, Box 593, Norman Mailer Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. 70 here,” Morris wrote him, “and you could make it a classic.”8 Mailer did not bite. Although he had dropped mentions of the space program here and there throughout his recent writings, he did not have any sustained interest in the actual moon program—at least not enough to devote his energy to turning out a major work on the subject.9 At the end of 1968, for example, shortly before Morris’s proposal, Eiichi Yamanishi asked Mailer whether he might write something on the significance of Apollo 8’s Christmastime journey around the moon. “I don’t feel inclined yet to write about Apollo- 8,” Mailer responded. “Frankly it depresses me.” Yet even at this early point it is clear he was already contemplating some of the major themes that would dominate the eventual moon book: “All the hospitals and all the police forces and all the military men of the world will rejoice. . . . Engineering will rejoice and nature will give a low moan because the rocket program ultimately means more disfoliation of every resource,” he replied to Yamanishi. “One of these days I’ll get into all that,” he promised.10 Still, Mailer did not spend the first half of 1969 with the moon much on his mind. He had more immediate concerns, trying to finish post-production and find a distributor for his money-hog of a movie, Maidstone, and launching his quixotic campaign for the New York City Democratic mayoral nomination. Regardless of his specific interest or disinterest in the space program, however, Mailer was a hot commodity, in the news throughout the spring due to his major book awards and the mayoral primary, and landing 8 Letter, Willie Morris to Norman Mailer, 17 January 1969, Folder 587.2 Correspondence: Friends, G-M, 3 of 3, 1969, Box 587, Mailer Papers. 9 For previous references to the space program, see Norman Mailer, Why Are We in Vietnam? (New York: G.P Putnam’s Sons, 1968); and Norman Mailer, “Looking for the Meat and Potatoes—Thoughts on Black Power,” in Existential Errands (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 287- 304. 10 Letter, Norman Mailer to Eiichi Yamanishi, 6 January 1969, Folder 593.12 Correspondence: Eiichi Yamanishi, 1969, Box 593, Mailer Papers. 71 him for a moon story would be a major coup for any publisher. Harper’s, which had published the original articles that would turn into The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, hoped Mailer would do something similar for the moon landing—open up whole new vistas of thought on a subject that was ripe for interpretation, and spark a surge of magazine sales in the process. But Harper’s could not compete with Life, which had the resources to pay Mailer “handsomely,” as he tactfully described the arrangement ($100,000 for three moon articles, or ten times the $10,000 Harper’s had paid him for the original Armies of the Night article11), and which wanted to “get away from the stereotype picture of the astronauts” it had been presenting over the prior decade.12 So when Life approached Mailer with its own proposal at the end of February, a time when his personal finances were growing precarious, he found the offer too good to pass up. Yet it is clear that Mailer was not doing it solely for the money. Like many Americans, from ardent NASA supporters to those more wont to merely appreciate the good show when it was on television, he came to believe that the moon landing should be a very important milestone in human history—not only were humans stepping onto another world for the first time, but the technological civilization they were building to facilitate the launch was equally unprecedented. Thus he was disturbed when it seemed to be having very little actual impact on the minds of Americans. “The horror of the 11 Life contract, signed by Mailer on 12 April 1969, Folder 762.11 Moonshot- Little Brown, 1969-1971, Box 762, Mailer Papers; Harper’s payment in Peter Manso, Norman Mailer: His Life and Times (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 462; “Handsomely” quote from Mailer to Yamanishi, 17 March 1969. 12 Interview, Life editor Thomas Griffith with Robert Sherrod, 7 October 1971, Folder “Interviews, Cate- Holmes,” Box “Robert Sherrod Apollo Collection, Interviews, Abbey-Newall,” NASA History Office, Washington, D.C. (hereafter NHO). 72 Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation,” he complained in Fire. Certainly there were few events in the century—perhaps in all of history—more remarkable than the moon landing. But while interest was high in the weeks surrounding the event, it quickly faded—a fact confirmed to Mailer when his book flopped. This would not do, not just because it impacted book sales, but because something potentially terrifying was occurring in the United States, something all the protest and uproar of the late 1960s had failed to halt: the imminence of a dehumanizing technological society that was surging forward with the seemingly benign space program at its spearhead. Yes, thought Mailer, the moon landing should be important, was important, but its true significance had been obscured amid the superficial celebratory pap and shortsighted liberal venom spewed forth in the heat of the moment. To be content with the platitudes mouthed by both space boosters and opponents was to miss the point, or worse, to utterly trivialize an event with potentially enormous ramifications for both life in the twentieth century and into the future. It would take a concerted effort from someone with the intelligence, creativity, and vision of a Norman Mailer to penetrate the fog surrounding NASA and the moon venture and unearth its real significance for humankind. But the tortures of cracking through the abstruseness of it all and teasing out the meaning! “I dived into doing the moonshot book and I might just as well have set out to fuck a bull,” he admitted to his aunt Moos, apologizing for his lax correspondence after his writing dragged on unexpectedly into the spring of 1970. “God, what a strong, tough, 73 unwilling subject to get one’s teeth into—excuse me, I think I mean another instrument.”13 Scores of proponents had tried and failed to convincingly explain why the moon landing, which they all knew to be inherently important, was in fact a critical historic moment, usually falling back on the clichés that Mailer hoped to rise above. But when it came down to it, even Mailer had a hard time breaking through the surface of an event that he discovered to his chagrin was “obdurate on the surface and a mystery beneath. . . . not at all easy to comprehend.” 14 From the start Mailer realized he might be in over his head. “I am taking on a project which almost frightens me,” he admitted to Yamanishi in March, shortly after accepting the assignment. “I finally decided to do it because I do not know what I feel about it.”15 It was, after all, a most unlikely topic for him to tackle. Again, how was a writer obsessed with sex, violence, transgression, psychology, masculinity, and, most recently in the pathbreaking novelistic journalism of The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, an intimate involvement with the events he was studying, supposed to have anything meaningful to say about the cold, closed, mechanized world of NASA, about a journey he could no more participate in directly than any other hack journalist, and about subjects, astronauts, who seemed to have no distinct personalities for him to investigate? “He might have blundered in accepting the hardest story of them all,” he conceded at the end of Fire, using his by-then characteristic third-person 13 Letter, Norman Mailer to Moos, 13 August 1970, Folder 595.13 Correspondence: Family (Misc.), 1970, Box 595, Mailer Papers. 14 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 130. 15 Letter, Norman Mailer to Eiichi Yamanishi, 17 March 1969. 74 reference to himself as narrator, “for it was a sex-stripped mystery of machines which might have a mind, and mysterious men who managed to live like machines.”16 Mailer was not alone in his bewilderment over translating the highly technologized moon venture into relatable human terms. Many of his fellow wordsmiths, whether poets, litterateurs or creative reporters who attempted to grapple with Apollo also struggled to process the alienating world of technology and machinery that pervaded the space program. “Whatever else my imagination gropes for, it is neither easily familiar with nor easily insulated from structural steel, violent combustions and printed- circuit electronics,” remarked novelist Joseph McElroy upon witnessing an Apollo launch. “But in fiction—and I don’t mean science fiction,” he wondered, “how does one write about technology and its relation to people?”17 Dick Allen, surveying contemporary poetry, concluded that most of his fellow poets, especially older ones, faced “a difficulty with the language of space.” Serious poets wanted to “avoid terms which allow humorous Buck Rogers connotations,” he believed. “Words such as ‘spaceship,’ ‘blast-off,’ and ‘planetfall’ conjure up unwanted associations with what they were trained to consider unreachable and juvenile fantasies.”18 Likewise with novelists and essayists, whose humanistic tendencies often prevented them from adapting easily to the technological novelty at the heart of the space program. Could one really speak seriously to the human condition with terms like 16 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 467. 17 New York Times Book Review, 28 January 1969, 27. 18 Dick Allen, “The Poet Looks at Space—Inner and Outer,” Arts in Society 6, no. 2 (1969): 185. 75 “telemetry,” “equigravisphere,” or any of the “gee whiz,” “A-OK” language favored by the astronauts, other than occasionally milking them for bad metaphors? Mailer encountered this problem during his visits to what he called “NASA-land.” Watching the astronauts give a press conference, for example, he marveled at the idea that “they were here to answer questions about a phenomenon which even ten years ago would have been considered material unfit for serious discussion. Grown men, perfectly normal-looking, were now going to talk about their trip to the moon. It made everyone uncomfortable.”19 As Mailer implied, the hurdle for those writers trying to make sense of Apollo was larger than just an unfamiliar and puerile-sounding vocabulary more fit for vulgar science fiction than the serious literature that should be confronting the event. It went beyond the inevitable difficulties of working this new element of the human experience into the canon, or injecting technology into the flesh- and spirit-oriented focus of contemporary literature. Authors like Mailer stumbled less over the issue of alien language than the same problem faced by most Americans in the Apollo era—that of integrating this colossal yet largely cryptic event into existing philosophies, or if need be, developing a new philosophy that could accommodate the reality of a space-faring civilization. Confronted with this difficulty, Mailer came to the depressing conclusion that the story was “a cancer bud for a journalist to cover.” He explained: “Usually when one did a journalistic piece, the events fit in advance into some part of one’s picture of the world. Most interesting about such events was the way they obliged you to make modest 19 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 21. 76 or delightful adjustments in the picture. Or even grim adjustments. But you did not have to contemplate throwing the picture away.” Apollo changed this. “This emergence of a ship to travel the ether was no event he could measure by any philosophy he had been able to put together in his brain.”20 Mailer was being a bit overdramatic here, for an entirely new philosophy was not needed to approach at least some understanding of the event—Apollo did not simply happen out of the blue, after all, but was a product of decades of technological and intellectual development, and could be fruitfully considered in such terms. But if it did not necessarily call for new philosophies, it could, if properly explored, alter the picture of the previous twentieth century, and be broadened into a comprehensive panorama of contemporary America as it entered the final decades of the century. This possibility was much on Mailer’s mind as he wrote his account. “It’s a difficult book and the subject is so important and so elusive that I don’t want to rush it,” he told Yamanishi at the beginning of 1970, long after he had initially believed he would be finished. “All the themes of the century are in it but they are so hidden.”21 All the themes of the century—in an early draft of the book, Mailer compared his daunting task of unlocking the hidden perplexities and ramifications of the moon landing to Karl Marx’s feat of untangling the intricacies of capitalism in Das Kapital. Marx’s genius was to focus on the production of a single commodity—Mailer mentioned a tin can of meat—and from it draw an entire new philosophy that encompassed themes of “greed and gold, factories and suffering and slavery, patriotism, empire, history, 20 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 105, 55. 21 Letter, Norman Mailer to Eiichi Yamanishi, 7 January 1970, Folder 602.14 Correspondence: Eiichi Yamanishi, 1970, Box 602, Mailer Papers. 77 exploration, profit, alienation, misery and the march of futures unborn,” such that in the hands of Marx, “a tin can of meat had become the embodiment of nothing less than the passions and the agony of the world.”22 Mailer believed his task was similar to Marx’s, only in reverse. Whereas Marx brilliantly derived from a simple object all the complexities of his nineteenth-century world, Mailer would have to analyze the most byzantine and opaque system ever devised, the technological complex that sent men to the moon, and simplify it into a digestible theory of contemporary society in order to answer the fundamental question that drove his analysis of Apollo: “was the venture worthwhile or unappeased in its evil?” But if the direction of the analysis was reversed, the scope and consequence of the task was equal to Marx’s: “To make sense of Apollo 11 on her way to the moon, to rise above the verbiage (like extinguishers of foam) which covered the event,” wrote Mailer of his burden, “was to embark on a project which could not satisfy his own eye unless it were equal in grandeur to the imagination of Das Kapital, Volume 1.”23 Mailer recognized fairly quickly that a work on Apollo as monumental as Das Kapital was not just unlikely, but impossible. All the themes of the twentieth century were on display with Apollo, Mailer believed, just as all the themes of the nineteenth century had been there for Marx in his tin can. But they were so hidden, as he wrote to Yamanishi, and he knew he would not be able to crack them, not in his depressed state of mind, not in one book written under contract in nine months. Although he cut most of his ambitious Marx comparisons from the final draft of Fire, he revisited the idea after its 22 Chapter draft, Folder 96.5- The Psychology of Astronauts 1st ts. draft, Box 96, Mailer Papers, 10-11. 23 Ibid. 78 publication in a letter to critic Grace Kennan Warnecke: “It was a bitch to write because I kept having the feeling there was an absolutely great and major work in it somewhere, something which could be as relevant to technology as Das Kapital was once to economics, yet I knew I wasn’t the man for it. I simply don’t have the nerve to start climbing that kind of mountain.”24 If Mailer stopped well short of using Apollo to paint a sweeping portrait of the twentieth century, he could at least content himself with taking on the equally crucial question of what it represented about the current and future course of the United States and the world. If, as supporters enthused, the triumph of Apollo proved that humans could accomplish anything they set their minds to, then NASA and its effort would undoubtedly emerge as a model for future achievements—a thought that terrified Mailer, who saw in NASA not primarily a hopeful story of human potential, but rather a dehumanizing world of technology and mechanization, a society encumbered with defective drink machines and dull concrete buildings and techno-babble in place of meaningful communication—themes he had been pondering his whole life, and was thus well-prepared to confront head-on by 1969. Yet even this task proved to give Mailer fits, for the very nature of NASA made it difficult to integrate its workings into the style of writing he was fond of producing in the late 1960s. Of a Fire on the Moon was his third consecutive work in which he presented an event as he experienced it, with himself as the third-person protagonist, living the history and interpreting it for his readers. In The Armies of the Night he was the star, 24 Letter, Norman Mailer to Grace Kennan Warnecke, 9 April 1971, Folder 605.6 Correspondence: Friends, S-Z, 1 of 2, 1971, Box 605, Mailer Papers. 79 “Mailer,” beginning with his drunken antics on the first night and then on through his participation in the 1967 Pentagon protest and his subsequent arrest and incarceration. In Miami and the Siege of Chicago he was again the hero, “the reporter,” although this time he was more wary of stepping over the line between observer and participant that he had crossed to such great effect in The Armies of the Night. Still, in both cases Mailer wrestled with moral decisions over how much he should involve himself in the events he was covering—should he allow himself to be arrested? Should he avoid a plea agreement and stay in jail as an act of conscience? Did he have the courage to subject himself to a potential beating at the hands of the police or National Guard for a cause he sympathized with, or were his rationalizations of being a reporter rather than a demonstrator convincing? In Of a Fire on the Moon he was once again both the third-person narrator (“Aquarius,” this time) and the reader’s guide through the mysteries of NASA-land. But if he had in Miami and the Siege of Chicago taken tentative steps away from the starring role he had developed in The Armies of the Night, in Of a Fire on the Moon this retreat was almost complete—although his presence dominated several sections, when confronted with the complexities of the technological society that NASA was pioneering he was forced to shed his ego, and for the first time in his trilogy of late 1960s “New Journalism” books, he removed himself from large chunks of the story. There were grand questions of morality to be dealt with, for sure—Mailer’s whole purpose was to confront the basic but paramount question of whether Apollo was ultimately for good or evil—but the setting allowed for none of the personal moral quandaries he had presented 80 so remarkably in the previous two works. He could hardly participate in the moon landing itself, after all, and the well-structured world of NASA, a world in which anything spontaneous or unplanned was not only frowned upon but potentially disastrous to the mission, was a far cry from the turmoil at the Pentagon or in downtown Chicago. There is little doubt Mailer could have gotten himself arrested in Houston or Cape Kennedy had he set his mind to it, but doing so would hardly have the same moral resonance as it did in Washington or Chicago. This situation left Mailer cold, and made his job of penetrating the alienating world of NASA all the more difficult. “It’s been a curious experience writing it for it’s the first thing I’ve done in years where I haven’t felt close to the material and had to work my way into some kind of intimacy with it,” he wrote to journalist Leticia Kent.25 Since no direct intimacy with the event was possible, Mailer found himself approaching the story from a vantage point little different from any of the hundreds of other journalists covering it. Though Mailer’s Life connections should have made it possible to interview the astronauts about the mission, they wanted nothing to do with him. “Do I have to see him?” NASA public affairs official Julian Scheer recalled being asked by Neil Armstrong. “If you want me to, I’ll do it, but I know he wants to be a psychologist.”26 Armstrong never met with him, nor did either of the other two Apollo 11 astronauts. Mailer, for his part, rationalized even before he arrived to a chilly reception in Houston 25 Letter, Norman Mailer to Leticia Kent, 11 May 1970, Folder 599.2 Correspondence: Kent, Leticia, 1970, Box 599, Mailer Papers. 26 Interview, Julian Scheer with Robert Sherrod, 26 April 1973, Folder “Interviews, Piland-Shea,” Box “Robert Sherrod Apollo Collection, Interviews, O’Donnell thru Young,” NHO. 81 that he could offer a more penetrating account of Apollo by observing and interpreting rather than peppering the already jaded astronauts with yet more questions they would invariably answer with stock responses. Mailer’s editor agreed with this approach, writing to him in April that it “is going to give you the freedom to react inimitably to the principle as well as the actuality of a lunar landing—a flexibility which might have been vitiated, however subtly, by personal exposure to Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins et al.”27 That said, early 1970 would see Mailer trying in vain to interview Armstrong and Aldrin as he struggled to complete the book. Although it would ultimately be written with or without their input, he wrote them, he thought they might like to meet over a drink and discuss their perspectives a half-year removed from the event. Promising not to “analyze” them as Armstrong had feared, Mailer proposed that “just as in the sense that each of you could say that you are among the best pilots in America, so am I one of the best writers in America, and just as no man smaller in ability than yourselves could or should have been entrusted with the landing on the moon, so I present to you gentlemen, that your exploits shouldn’t be written about by any work-a-day journalist nor even by the best of journalists but, in fact, should be approached by writers who have given as much to their professions as you have to yours.” The astronauts, already familiar with Mailer’s unflattering Life pieces, were not impressed with his plea. “I have received, 27 Letter, Ned Bradford to Norman Mailer, 7 April 1969, Folder 594.5 Correspondence: Little, Brown & Co., 1969-70, Box 594, Mailer Papers. 82 read and think I understand your persuasive letter,” Armstrong wryly replied. “My decision, however, is firm. Best wishes for a successful and accurate book.”28 If he could not participate directly in the event, then, nor interact personally with the astronauts, he could still, through the powers of his intellect and perception, tease out the essential nature of the enterprise. “Since Aquarius had long built his philosophical world on the firm conviction that nothing was finally knowable”—a notion that from the start put him at odds with NASA’s rationalist endeavor to unlock the secrets of the universe—“he had almost no interest in the small secret behind a small event. . . . He preferred to divine an event through his senses . . . he tended to sniff out the center of a situation from a distance.” Rather than playing an active role in the event, he would simply poke around, experience the workings of the NASA complex, observe the mission, read the literature, and at the end of the day he would come away with a fundamental understanding of the space endeavor.29 Imagine his horror, then, when he arrived in Houston and realized immediately that “there were no smells coming out of NASA” by which to sniff out its essence. The Manned Spacecraft Center, situated outside Houston, was sterile, the buildings “severe, ascetic, without ornament.” Mailer had complained throughout the 1960s about the bland monotony of modern architecture, of which, he wrote in The Armies of the Night, “one could not tell the new colleges from the new prisons from the new hospitals from the new 28 Letter, Norman Mailer to Neil Armstrong, 26 February, 1969; Letter Neil Armstrong to Norman Mailer, 14 March 1970, Folder 594.8 Correspondence: Of a Fire on the Moon, 1 of 3, 1969-1970, Box 594, Mailer Papers. 29 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 7. 83 factories from the new airports.”30 Here, in the space center—the heart of the nation’s most futuristic enterprise—stood the epitome of the soulless architecture he feared was overtaking the nation. The housing built to accommodate NASA workers was just as bad—overplanned, cookie-cutter neighborhoods “without flavor or odor.” The workers themselves offered no more clues. They were WASPs, whom to Mailer’s mind were “the most Faustian, barbaric, draconian, progress-oriented, and root-destroying people on earth.” They appeared in Mailer’s book as not only odorless, but almost without souls. He found it difficult, for example, to engage them in human conversation, for such discussions “could only voyage through predetermined patterns. They would do their best to answer any technical questions in the world. . . . It was just that there was no way to suggest any philosophical meanderings,” for they could only communicate in “technological code.” The problem, Mailer recognized to his dismay, was that while “the machine seemed a functional object to the artist, an instrument whose significance was that it was there to be used—as a typewriter was used for typing a manuscript—so to the engineer it was the communication itself which was functional. The machine was the art.”31 It was in the WASPs at NASA that Mailer began to find something to latch onto, some meaning for Apollo—not the workers, technicians and administrators themselves, most of whom were perfectly nice, if a bit dry, but in what they represented, and the world they were creating with this profound technological leap into the heavens. The 30 Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (New York: Plume, 1994; orig. 1968), 176. See also Norman Mailer, “Cities Higher Than Mountains,” The New York Times Magazine, 31 January 1965, 16. 31 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 8-13. 84 more he pondered it, the more he came to believe it was possible that the WASPs, with their “laser of concentration and lack of focus on consequence” had “emerged from human history in order to take us to the stars.”32 Who else would ever be so bold as to pour their energy and resources into developing the most rational and logical of approaches and techniques that were nonetheless directed toward an essentially irrational endeavor, with little to no contemplation of its real aims or ends beyond simply accomplishing it with minimal loss of life and before the imposed deadline? And what better location to house their cold-blooded ambitions than within the windowless walls of the ominous Manned Spacecraft Center buildings? These monoliths appeared “sinister” to Mailer, “the architectural skull case for a new kind of brain,” impenetrable to his queries and speculations. “Recognize,” he imagined the austere walls saying to him, “that something is taking over from you, kid.”33 What Mailer believed was taking over was clear—corporative, technological, technocratic rationalism, the logical positivism that pervaded NASA’s mission, its method, its very being, and that would serve as a model for the inevitable large-scale state-industry-university collaborative initiatives to come. Yet if Apollo represented the future Mailer feared, it was also a culmination of the dominant forces of the modern past, the ultimate expression of the larger disease of the twentieth century—a notion of progress that elevated humanity and its inventions over nature and awe, a hyper- rationalism that promoted the idea that the universe was ultimately knowable, and therefore domitable via human knowledge and technology. 32 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 440, 316. 33 Ibid., 13-14. 85 Sitting in the Manned Spacecraft Center’s movie theater, listening to the squawk box as the Apollo capsule readied itself to fire the crucial ignition that would place it in orbit around the moon—knowing full-well that it would function according to plan and that any tension derived from thinking otherwise was forced—Mailer recalled something Neil Armstrong’s wife Jan had said in recent days: “What we can’t understand, we fear.” Although he couldn’t resist a jab at the banality of the assertion (“Even the ladies of brave men spoke like corporation executives on this job”), it was the larger sentiment behind the words that most disturbed him, for it could have been taken as a credo of the NASA mindset—its ultimate goal, the ultimate goal of all modern science and technology, was to replace the fear of the unknown with knowledge, so that it might then be conquered. “His heart went dull at the thought of the total takeover implicit in the remark, so neat, so ambitious, so world-vaulting in its assumption that sooner or later everything would be understood,” Mailer groused. “It was in the complacent assumption that the universe was no majestic mansion of architectonics out there between evil and nobility, or strife on a darkling plain, but rather an ultimately benign field of investigation which left Aquarius in the worst of temper.”34 He did not want—and believed a spiritually healthy society could not afford—to live in a world where everything, all the mysteries of the universe, were reducible to facts, where imagination and unpredictability were quashed except insofar as they allowed for the envisioning and creation of new technologies with which to further violate the mysteries of the cosmos. So Mailer, who considered himself “a poor 34 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 108-109. 86 alchemist in the age of technology” (the New York Times had recently referred to him as a “laureate of irrationalism,” and he did not seem inclined to argue the point), in Of a Fire on the Moon took on the role of the Romantic, hoping to counter the technological rationalism that he believed was NASA’s dictate and to urge his readers to recognize that the universe could not be understood solely through the rational, fact-based approach that had prevailed in postwar American culture.35 Rather, it was high time “to regard the world once again as poets, behold it as savages who knew that if the universe was a lock, its key was metaphor rather than measure.”36 His task, then, was not necessarily to oppose the exploration of space, which could turn out to be ennobling if carried out under the aegis of more enlightened explorers, but rather “to make a first reconnaissance into the possibility of restoring magic, psyche, and the spirits of the underworld to the spookiest venture in history, a landing on the moon, an event whose technologese had been so complete that the word ‘spook’ probably did not appear in twenty million words of NASA prose.”37 Only then, when the moon landing was treated as a sacred event rather than merely a grand technological display, could the mission be ascribed human meaning. Indeed, the major fault Mailer found with NASA was that its logic-based approach inhibited it from understanding the true gravity of what it was doing. For all its lofty talk of humanity’s destiny in space, when it came down to it NASA could conceive of the moon landing as little more than a technological goal that was well planned, and 35 Chapter Draft, Folder 100.3 Of a Fire on the Moon ts. draft section+ draft fragment, Box 100, Mailer Papers, 105; New York Times, 4 March 1969, 52. 36 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 471. 37 Ibid., 131. 87 then accomplished rationally, efficiently, more or less according to the plan. The lesson of Apollo, echoed by countless supporters, was that humanity was capable of achieving anything it set its mind to—a meaning that left unaddressed the question of why men, American men, felt compelled to fly to the moon in the first place. To Mailer there had to be much more. If not, Apollo was, as many a liberal naysayer argued, the most pointless waste of energy and resources in human history. When Mailer watched the Apollo 11 liftoff, he saw a “ship of flames.” Whether fulfilling God’s mission or violating it Mailer could not be sure, but apocalyptic or affirming, it was epochal either way. After all, what was this fire on the moon? For all the modern world’s scientific sophistications, its pretensions of mastery over nature, “we didn’t even know what a flame was,” he complained: When it came to ultimate scientific knowledge we were no further along than the primitive who thought light came from God. Perhaps it did. No physicist could begin to prove it didn’t. . . . We had forgotten the majesty of fire, the impenetrable mystery. What indeed was a flame? . . . Savages had once looked at fire and knew. God was in the wood of the trees and in the core of everything which burned, but now one could hardly remember that to look into a fire hot as the manifest of immanence might be equal to staring into the fires of Apollo 11 as the ship of flames began its way to the moon. What confidence was in that fire.38 And what arrogance, he might have added. If Mailer marveled at the fire that humans had tamed and taken to the moon, when NASA looked at Apollo, it saw the magnificence of 15 miles of wire, 2 million parts, and 6 millions pounds of fuel all working according to design—not the miracle of fire, but the predictable results of rational planning. How 38 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 166. 88 could NASA, let alone the rest of America, hope to come to terms with the potential meanings and consequences of Apollo when it was considered in such limiting terms? Mailer was not so much reacting against Apollo as he was expressing a more general romantic backlash against the centuries-old ascent of Western rationalism that had only reached new extremes by the middle of the twentieth century. Writing 130 years prior to humanity’s first walk on the moon, Ralph Waldo Emerson reacted with similar dismay to another celestial event, a particularly vivid display of the northern lights. “Now so bad we are that the world is stripped of love and of terror,” he lamented: Here came the other night an Aurora so wonderful, a curtain of red and blue and silver glory, that in any other age or nation it would have moved the awe and wonder of men and mingled with the profoundest sentiments of religion and love, and we all saw it with cold, arithmetical eyes, we knew how many colors shone, how many degrees it extended, how many hours it lasted, and of this heavenly flower we beheld nothing more: a primrose by the brim of the river of time. Shall we not wish back again the Seven Whistlers, the Flying Dutchman, the lucky and unlucky days, and the terrors of the Day of Doom?39 If Mailer could not hope to match the scope of Marx’s nineteenth-century achievements (and was perhaps best off not trying, Marx being even more of a rationalist than NASA), he could at least try to reinstill some of the wonder of the cosmos that was already being lost in Emerson’s time and that had been left for dead when NASA’s men set first foot on the moon. But it was when Mailer the Romantic joined forces with Mailer the self-described “Left Conservative” (he believed firmly in social progress, but had little faith that 39 Quoted in David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), Epigraph. 89 technocratic government planning could ever achieve it) that he revealed the most disturbing aspect of what Apollo represented about American culture in the twentieth century: its view of “progress” that was too often reduced to blind technological development without any sense of ends, its unceasing movement toward ever-newer and more advanced gadgetry with built-in obsolescences that all but assured these once cutting-edge products would soon be replaced by even more complex designs that grew ever more removed from human understanding. This notion of progress—that Americans must continue to push the frontiers of human knowledge, must maintain the course that had brought them to such an advanced technological state by the mid-twentieth century, must continue for the sustained welfare of the nation and the entire world, which looked to the United States for leadership in such matters—was at the core of the arguments presented by space supporters as to why space exploration must continue unabated. “A nation that turns down a challenge like this is a nation that’s on its way out,” asserted NASA Administrator Thomas Paine.40 “The challenge of the great spaces between the worlds is a stupendous one; but if we fail to meet it, the story of our race will be drawing to its close,” the tireless space advocate Arthur C. Clarke warned even more vividly.41 Mailer was more skeptical about the redemptive promises of this urge toward aimless acceleration into unknown futures. Was this indeed the essence of progress? “To believe in God and to believe in progress,” he pondered: “what could that mean but that the desire for progress existed in the very creation of man, as if man were designed from the outset to labor as God’s agent, to carry God’s vision of existence across the 40 The New York Times Magazine, 8 June 1969, 63. 41 Arthur C. Clarke, The Promise of Space (New York: Pyramid Books, 1970), 354. 90 stars.” The conjecture was a common one among NASA supporters. Wernher von Braun, who was as much a spokesman for NASA as anyone in the 1960s, believed “men must always travel farther and farther afield, they must always widen their horizons and their interests: this is the will of God.”42 The Rev. Bob Parrott, a Houston-area minister popular among the astronauts, added his theological seal of approval to the argument when he announced, “If God gave us the capability for doing such a great thing, he must have wanted us to go.”43 If this notion were convincing, if one accepted that there was a God who created humans to spread his vision throughout the universe, then the space proponents were surely correct that humanity must continue its expansion into outer space, and “Apollo 11 was a first revelation of the real intent of History.” Such a thought was immensely disturbing to Mailer, for if human progress “was now to be considered in the light of God’s need for supermen to negotiate His passage quickly through the heavens, then how much more value might He give to courage than to charity . . . yes if speed were the essence then Hell’s Angels were possibly nearer to God than the war against poverty.”44 Mailer could not accept this. Not only was it offensive to him personally, but “the idea was as disruptive to a liberal philosophical system as tartar emetic and mustard to a glutton.” Still, the United States in the twentieth century had been acting on this expansionist impulse, and the idea helped explain “why the heroes of the time were technologists, not poets.”45 With Apollo, humanity had taken the ultimate step toward 42 Von Braun quoted in Oriana Fallaci, If the Sun Dies (London: Collins, St. James Place, 1967), 243. 43 Boston Evening Globe, 22 July 1969, in NASA Current News (hereafter NCN), 25 July 1969, 25, NHO. 44 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 150-51. 45 Ibid. 91 committing an act that “might yet dislocate eternity,” and yet it had no clear understanding of what it was doing or what the potential consequences might be, could hardly even talk about them, all its energies having been funneled toward achieving its outrageous goal rather than considering whether it was a worthwhile endeavor to begin with. “Yes the century was a giant and a cretin,” believed Mailer. “Man had become a Herculean embodiment of the Vision, but the brain on top of the head was as small as a transistorized fist, and the chambers of the heart had shrunk to the dry hard seeds of some hybrid future.”46 Like many intellectuals who favored contemplation over praxis when it came to reckoning with the mysteries of existence, Mailer believed that Apollo needed to be understood not in terms of technological advancements but via metaphor in order to determine whether, at its core, it represented good or evil. This theme—whether Apollo was good or evil, the work of God or the Devil—ran throughout Fire and revealed how Mailer chose to approach the feat. If, as he recognized, Apollo marked an important stage in humanity’s conquest over nature—no longer content to dominate the natural Earth with its plastics, pesticides and pollutions, it would now take its arrogance and destructive ways to the moon and beyond—then it was not at all clear that this dominance was good, that it was God’s work. In fact, if humanity’s increasing abuse of nature was an evil—an idea gaining currency as environmentalism grew during the Apollo era—then it was entirely possible that Apollo was more in line with the Devil’s than God’s will after all. 46 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 150, 130. 92 III. Mailer completed Of a Fire on the Moon in the spring of 1970 unsure of the answers to his questions of good and evil. One thing he was certain of, however, was that with Apollo the WASPs had won—that the WASP values which had driven the twentieth century technological culture would now be even further boosted, might in fact become unstoppable, and if these values turned out to be the work of the Devil, then Americans and the world were in for a dismal future. Mailer’s entire adult life had been a crusade against WASP values—a battle he conceded he would probably end up losing, for the WASPs were just too advantaged, had too much power for even the word, as wielded by Mailer, to defeat. But with Apollo, Mailer fell into a depression at the thought that the WASPs might have legitimately earned their dominance of the world. “After the moonshot,” he admitted to the Village Voice, “this was the first time I thought that maybe they were gonna win because they deserved to win, because they had been working harder at their end of the war than we have.”47 Something is taking over from you, the windowless walls had warned Mailer in Houston, and now the takeover seemed imminent. “For years, the forces of irrationality had been mounting into a protective war against the ravages of corporate rationality run amuck,” Mailer believed. “Now corporate rationality to save itself would commit the grand, stupendous, and irrational act (since no rational reasons of health, security, wisdom, prudence or profit could be given) of 47 Village Voice, 21 January 1971, 48. 93 sending a ship with three men to the moon.”48 So it did, and it did not need Norman Mailer or any of his kind to pull it off. NASA needed only its rationalism, its technology, and its concerted effort to win whatever contest Mailer imagined he and it were engaged in. Yet if Mailer was certain that the WASPs would be emboldened by the moon venture, he also admitted on numerous occasions that, for the first time in many years, he had no idea what the near future would bring. When he tried to look ahead to the oncoming decade of the 1970s, he conceded, “a blank like the windowless walls of the computer city came over his vision.” As was his wont, Mailer extended his own fears to the culture as a whole, arguing that because of its blind investment in advanced technologies like Apollo, the nation could not have “the remotest notion of whether we are rushing on into the most adventurous period in the history of man and suffering a few scrapes and suffocations en route, or whether we are in the last twenty years of life on this earth.”49 What Mailer could not see in his despair was that the WASPs were not necessarily on the ascent because of Apollo; that Apollo might not represent the future direction of American culture and society after all. The most blatant sign to this effect was the rapid decline of the space program itself. Americans by and large cared fairly little about moon landings following the initial excitement of Apollo 11, something Mailer would realize by the end of 1970, when he began to worry that the mass apathy 48 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 189. 49 Ibid., 141; Norman Mailer, “Reflections on the Form of the Coming Revolution,” speech transcript, 1970, Folder 102.8 “Reflections on the Forms of the Coming Revolution” Speech Transcript, Box 102, Mailer Papers. 94 toward the Apollo program would harm his book sales. He even fired off a letter to his publisher suggesting they turn this public disinterest to their advantage. “Could we advertise the book by hitting hard on the fact that there was extraordinary interest in the moonshot just a little more than a year ago and now there is close to total indifference on the subject?” he asked his editor. “It is a phenomenon! One interpretation which occurs is that the event was not accessible to the comprehension of intelligent and sophisticated people. . . . OF A FIRE ON THE MOON, however, opens our comprehension of the event and may have the effect of awakening many literate Americans to the heroic, monumental and conceivably sinister implications of man’s first exploration of the moon.”50 It was not to be. Though reviews were split, the public never bit, and Mailer’s book suffered the same indifference that was baffling NASA itself in the aftermath of its finest moment. After all, the book “is about the flight of Apollo 11, about which no one has cared for some time,” as one prominent reviewer wrote dismissively.51 In fact, in the time period between Mailer’s last article in Life at the beginning of 1970 and the book publication at the end of the year, the last three planned Apollo missions were abandoned, and few seemed to care. The decline of the space program itself was just one sign of a larger cultural shift—one that Mailer, in his inability to see into the oncoming 1970s, largely missed. Not for nothing did Peter Schrag see fit to declare the “Decline of the WASP” not long 50 Letter, Norman Mailer to Ned Bradford, 10 August 1970, Folder 594.5 Correspondence: Little, Brown & Co., 1969-70, Box 594, Mailer Papers. 51 New York Review of Books, 6 May 1971, 13. 95 after Mailer’s moon book was published.52 This decline was not simply due to the expansion of political power to other ethnic and racial groups in the 1970s. In addition, the “WASP values” that Mailer so decried—the work ethic, rationalism, the investment in technological progress without aim, the very “nihilism” that he declared was the essence of WASP notions of progress—were beginning to come under fire by the wider culture during the Apollo era. Throughout Fire, Mailer recognized that there was a cultural war in the works between all those he lumped in with the WASPs—an umbrella term for anyone who adopted the rationalist credo, regardless of social class or political orientation—and a younger, dissenting generation growing distrustful of the rationalism of the postwar era. He wrote of “the schizophrenia of the land growing more Faustian and more Oriental each season with ABM and million-footed folk-rock festivals at the poles,” of the cultural battles between the technology worshipers pushing the anti-ballistic missile system (ABM), supersonic jet travel (the SST), and the moon landings, and the younger romantics who looked to Mailer as something of a forefather—those behind Woodstock, the burgeoning ecological sensibility, and the growing influence of Eastern religions. But with the moon landing, it seemed clear to Mailer that the nihilism of the WASPs had won the day. The only hope, he thought, was that the total triumph of WASP values would prove so alienating, so inhuman, that at some point in the future humanity would rebel and would once again begin to look upon the universe in awe rather than with thoughts of subjugation. 52 Peter Schrag, The Decline of the WASP (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971). 96 Mailer could not foresee that several of the technologies at the forefront of his feared technocratic ascension would fall victim to public disinterest or hostility—not in decades or centuries, but even before the last Apollo moon mission returned to Earth in 1972. The military-industrial complex was struck a blow when the ABM, which promoters argued was inevitable after the moon landing proved that any and all technological feats were possible, was derided as unworkable and scuttled by a treaty with the Soviets. Shortly thereafter, the SST became perhaps the first major large-scale technological advancement to be rejected at such a late stage in development and after so much government investment, in no small part due to a growing ecological consciousness that began to challenge the postwar technological imperative. Most relevant, the space program itself fell prey to massive disinterest, as the culture as a whole began to develop a new sense of “progress” in which shooting men ever farther into space was no longer a crucial component. IV. Mailer came into his study of Apollo predisposed against applauding the mission. So did many others of his milieu. “I’m sorry, Norman, I just can’t take that moon stuff,” one fan confided to him, “not if the Almighty himself came down to write about it, and I can’t see why you’re squandering your skills there.”53 It just seemed too far removed from the concerns of anyone likely to read a Norman Mailer book in the late 1960s. 53 Letter, Chris Connell to Norman Mailer, 18 January 1970, Folder 596.1 Correspondence: Fans, A-F, 1970, Box 596, Mailer Papers. 97 Mailer himself had been railing for decades against the very technology that was peaking with Apollo, and his long-standing prejudices against WASPs were even more pronounced. Although he claimed with his characteristic overblown rhetoric that he was unable to fit Apollo into any philosophy with which he was familiar, he actually seemed to fit it quite easily into the technological reactionism he had been preaching throughout the 1960s. And although he lambasted the “nihilism” of NASA and its WASPs for having no clear understanding of why they were urgently pushing into space, he often seemed more forgiving of the nihilisms of the younger rebellious generation, whose often-aimless actions he heartily approved of in his previous works as a strike against the technocracy. In other words, within the confines of Of a Fire on the Moon, NASA and Apollo did not stand a chance. All the same, Mailer put more effort than anyone into untangling the implications of Apollo. He wrote by far the most exhaustive (and exhausting) meditation on the event, and, his many excesses aside, he gave an honest reckoning of Apollo and its place in the United States at the dawn of the 1970s. “I’ve worked as assiduously as any writer I know to portray the space program in its largest not its smallest dimension,” he asserted, and indeed, his story was deeper and more encompassing than any other contemporary take on the moon landing.54 Although the book was unmistakably a Mailer work, it also contained long passages of fairly straightforward reportage on the mission, to the extent that it often confused reviewers: space buffs found Mailer’s philosophical ruminations insufferable, while readers expecting the Mailer of The Armies of the Night were baffled 54 Letter, Norman Mailer to Neil Armstrong, 26 February, 1969. 98 by the hundreds of pages he devoted to technical descriptions of the moon flight. This blend of reportage and interpretation was intentional, for Mailer ambitiously believed the work would survive as the most important book on Apollo precisely because it explored both the event and its implications in greater depth than most any other work. Indeed, he thought, it “may prove the first work to undertake that marriage of the two cultures, science and literature, about which C.P. Snow talked for so many years.”55 If the book ended up being more of a chronicle of the clash between the two cultures than a reconciliation, this does not take away from the fact that Mailer nonetheless introduced and explored a number of meaningful issues simmering below the dominant public dialogue, and, from the perspective of forty years later, Of a Fire on the Moon actually remains one of the few contemporary works critical to understanding Apollo in its late 1960s cultural context. That said, Mailer was far from alone in seriously pondering the human impact of both the event and the process it took to achieve it, as a slew of other commentators also looked beyond the common platitudes and attempted to consider the event with a wider scope. Though lacking many of Mailer’s idiosyncrasies—his brazen WASP-bashing, his mysticism, the candid depiction of his personal struggle to write the story—a wide array of intellectuals tackled some of the major ideas that appeared in Of a Fire on the Moon from their own unique perspectives. The next section will examine a few of the more common themes, including Apollo’s relation to the “human condition,” and its place in the larger arc of the twentieth century. 55 Letter, Norman Mailer to Ned Bradford, 10 August 1970. 99 Chapter 3: Apollo and the “Human Condition” Among the most popular of the stock phrases bandied about by space enthusiasts in the summer of 1969 was some variation of: “It is the nature of man to explore.” When all was said and done, when all of the rhetoric on spin-off, moon rock analysis, and the staggering ramifications of ultra-precision ball bearings manufactured in zero-gravity had worn thin, after the arguments about beating the Russians and flaunting American know- how and achieving world unity grew stale and threatened to diminish rather than enhance the grandeur of the event, the one justification for the entire moon program that seemed unassailable was the notion that there is something inherent in the human species, an element of its DNA or its soul, that yearns to explore. The refrain could be heard everywhere, from newspaper editorials to NASA public relations statements to television news commentaries. “It’s in the nature of man to explore new areas,” proclaimed NASA Administrator Thomas Paine.1 “Man simply had to go,” added Wall Street Journal staff reporter William Burrows, “It was in the very nature of his being to do so.”2 Even Philip K. Dick, whose novels most often projected terrifying images of the future in space, could be found that summer asserting, “it was essential that we send a man to the moon; exploration is natural to man; it is virtually an instinct.”3 When pressured, the notoriously reticent Neil Armstrong tended to argue along similar lines. Norman Mailer recounted a pre-flight press conference at which reporters 1 Newport News Daily Press, 24 July 1969, collected in NASA Current News (hereafter NCN),1 August 1969, 31, NASA History Office, Washington, D.C. (hereafter NHO). 2 Wall Street Journal, 18 July 1969, in NCN, 18 July 1969, 13. Emphasis in original 3 Donald A, Wollheim, ed., Men on the Moon (New York: Ace Publishing Corporation, 1969), 172. 100 eventually grew tired of the hackneyed comments offered by the astronauts, and began pushing them to reveal their deeper thoughts on the significance of the mission. “Do you see any philosophical reason why we might be going?” Mailer recalled the reporters pressing the increasingly uncomfortable astronauts. The press had not had much luck with similar questions earlier in the interview—asked at one point if he ever had any dreams about the moon, Armstrong would only admit that “after twenty hours in a simulator, I guess I sometimes have dreams of computers”—but with this one, about whether he understood there to be any philosophical element to the mission, Mailer recognized Armstrong had been backed into a corner, forced to either offer some sort of thoughtful response “or claim that he was spiritually neuter.” Armstrong complied, falling back on the seemingly infallible justification of, “I think we’re going to the moon because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul. . . . Yes, we’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.”4 How could anyone other than ill-spirited, misinformed, misanthropic cranks argue against such logic? Even Mailer himself, never one to shy away from belittling the unsophisticated pronouncements of the astronauts, came to more or less echo Armstrong’s statement a few years later as he watched the final Apollo launch. “It’s always been part of the human condition that we push forward without knowing what 4 Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970) 41-42. Emphasis in original. 101 we’re doing,” he explained. “If I have any single belief it is probably that it’s in our nature always to go forward.”5 Looking back at human history, as many tended to do in the heady days of Apollo, the sentiment certainly seemed to be true. Citing the narrative of human development from caveman to spaceman, with special mention of the mental and physical explorations of the Galileos, the Columbuses, the Lindberghs and other seminal pioneers along the way, proponents (and even many opponents) of space exploration took it for granted that there was something almost primal in human nature that pushed the species to explore and overcome the challenges of the unknown. Some even went so far as to trace the urge back beyond Homo sapiens, all the way to “when the first amphibian came from the sea up onto the land and began to conquer a new domain for life,” as the ever-enthusiastic Thomas Paine would have it.6 Loren Eiseley was tempted to accept this natural human urge to explore outer space. A respected anthropologist and popular essayist, Eiseley, like Mailer, had been approached by a publisher to write a book pondering the human meanings of Apollo.7 Eiseley accepted, but rather than delve into the specifics of the moon flight a la Mailer, he instead stuck to his usual format of a series of contemplative essays on humanity’s place on Earth and in the universe, and explored the significance of Apollo in these terms. In contrast to popular sentiment, Eiseley concluded that the itch to explore ever farther across the world and now beyond, into outer space, was not an ingrained biological urge, 5 Christian Science Monitor, 3 January 1973, 13. 6 Washington Sunday Star, 20 July 1969, in NCN, 24 July 1969, 17. 7 Gale Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge: A Biography of Loren Eiseley (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990), 402-405. 102 but rather a compulsion driven by culture—specifically modern Western culture—and he believed it was crucial to examine the motivations of this culture as it headed toward the stars. Eiseley’s Apollo work, then, offers a fine avenue into a consideration of how a good number of intellectuals pondered the potential human impact of Apollo. Many intellectuals and critics, like Eiseley, were not prepared to simply accept “it is man’s nature to explore” as the final word on Apollo, and believed instead that the cultural motivations behind the jump into space, as well as what it might augur for the future, needed to be critically examined. In these analyses, Apollo became a prime symbol of a twentieth-century technocratic culture with which many were growing uneasy, and their critiques of Apollo and the space program often extended into much more encompassing probes of postwar American culture and its effects on the human condition. II. “It came to me in the night,” wrote Loren Eiseley in his Apollo-inspired book, The Invisible Pyramid, “in the midst of a bad dream, that perhaps man, like the blight descending on a fruit, is by nature a parasite, a spore bearer, a world eater.” Eiseley’s dream recalled a recent experience of flying over an expanse of land that he remembered as essentially virgin wilderness during his childhood. Now, looking down upon it a half- century later, in the thick of the Apollo era, he could see that “suburbia was spreading. Below, like the fungus upon a fruit, I could see the radiating lines of transport gouged through the naked earth. . . . They led to cities clothed in an unmoving haze of smog.” 103 Here was man the world-eater seen clearly from the bird’s eye view, spreading ceaselessly across the globe, parasitically devouring nature and its finite resources along the way until soon, disturbingly soon it seemed to Eiseley and a growing number of Cassandras in the Apollo era, the forests that sustained human life would be depleted and the species would either have to move on to new worlds—as many a Space Age prophet urged—or ultimately face extinction.8 Disturbed by his dream, Eiseley was struck by the parallels he saw between human behavior and that of slime molds, specifically how the amoebas that make up slime molds share with humans a tendency to venture to the edges of their territories and the limits of their resources, and then when there is nowhere else to go and nothing left to consume, to gather together into concentrated formations that eventually rupture and launch a few spores on to new pastures, “as far away proportionately as man’s journey to the moon,” where they might thrive and begin the process all over again. As in the visions of those space dreamers who looked forward to colonizing the universe, only a few hearty spores escape, while those that remain behind eventually perish. Eiseley was particularly fascinated by one fungus in particular, the Pilobolus, which in its ability to form a spore tower, aim toward the areas that offer the greatest hope for survival with a light-sensitive primitive “eye,” and then fire its spores several feet away, Eiseley saw a natural anticipation of human rocketry. Could it be, he wondered, that there is indeed something intrinsic in human nature that sparks an urge to explore and escape, something with roots far deeper than even Thomas Paine’s curious and brave amphibian or Neil 8 Loren Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), 53, 151. 104 Armstrong’s salmon, something that dates back to these primeval single-celled organisms and that has survived through the hundreds of millions of years of evolution that eventually gave rise to spaceman? “Perhaps man,” wrote Eiseley, “has evolved as a creature whose centrifugal tendencies are intended to drive it as a blight is lifted and driven, outward across the night.” Perhaps, in man, “some incalculable and ancient urge lies hidden beneath the seeming rationality of institutionalized science.”9 However intriguing these similarities between the activities of humans and slime molds may have been to Eiseley the poetic philosopher, it was Eiseley the anthropologist who ultimately concluded that the urge of modern humans to explore the Earth and beyond was rooted in culture, not biology. To come to this conclusion it was necessary for Eiseley to put aside the intriguing parallels between humans and slime molds and move his analysis much higher up the evolutionary tree to one specific branch, that of Homo sapiens itself. For as much as NASA attempted to spread goodwill by claiming the Apollo triumph in the name of “all mankind,” few stopped to consider that the exploratory urge so gloriously manifested in the moon missions might not, in fact, be an urge of “all mankind.” After all, if there is a biological urge inherent in human nature to explore and expand to new horizons, how could the “primitive” societies familiar to Eiseley the anthropologist be explained—societies that he believed remained content to live within their well-defined territories, to continue using the simple tools that had been passed down to them through countless generations, and that regarded any change to their lifestyles with suspicion, as an undesirable disruptive force? Eiseley cited numerous 9 Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid, 53-54, 75-76. 105 examples of still-surviving indigenous societies that appeared to live both in harmony with their environments and “ignorant of . . . the technological necessity to advance. Until the intrusion of whites, their technology had been long frozen upon a barely adequate subsistence level. ‘Progress’ in Western terms was an unknown word.”10 The existence of human societies whose members did not differ biologically from the Americans who went to the moon (both shared the same amount of whatever genetic impulses remained from the time when the human evolutionary line split from that of the slime mold) but who seemed to lack any ingrained desire to do the same convinced Eiseley that the itch to explore was a cultural trait characteristic of the modern scientific society, not an inherent biological urge shared by all humanity. Though Eiseley traced Western culture’s separation from and domination of nature—the rise of human as “world eater”—through many millennia, from the development of agriculture through the medieval era of cathedral-building and the rise of the Faust myth, he traced the scientific civilization of the twentieth century—the one that ultimately sent explorers to the moon—to the more immediate seventeenth century of Francis Bacon and the rise of the scientific method, when it began to place its faith in the objective study of nature and the development of scientific institutions, and turned its eye away from the traditions of the past and toward the potentialities of the future, ultimately giving rise to “anticipatory analytical man, enraptured by novelty.”11 10 Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid, 59. Eiseley’s somewhat romantic view of “primitive” cultures living in harmony with nature was characteristic of a wider trend in both anthropology and the larger American culture of the 1960s and 1970s, and will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. 11 Ibid., 68. 106 To Eiseley’s mind, the humanistic, inner-directed worldviews that emerged in the axial age had been replaced in the modern era by the dominance of science, which “has opened to man the prospect of limitless power over exterior nature,” and in which “the common man, after brief days of enlightenment, turned once again to escape, propelled outward first by the world voyagers, and then by the atom breakers,” and who now set his sights on conquering outer space. So it was, according to Eiseley, that it would be Western men going to the moon—not by virtue of nature, for their nature was shared by plenty of human cultures content to travel to the moon via magic and metaphor rather than rocketry, but as a result of a culture that devalued any attempts at harmony with nature and gave rise to a technological civilization that from its start was headed for the stars.12 Lewis Mumford—a major influence on Eiseley and, although in his mid-'70s by the time of Apollo, more popular than ever—also laid the urge to explore and conquer at the foot of culture rather than nature, devoting significant chunks of his major Apollo-era volume, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power, to the cultural impetuses that spurred Western explorers onward to the far reaches of Earth, and now to the moon.13 Mumford believed the expansion of the West into the New World had been driven by two competing forces: a utilitarian impulse invested in ever-advancing processes of 12 Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid, 61-69, 84-85. Eiseley explained Karl Jaspers’ notion of the “axial age” as the first millennium or so BCE which saw a seemingly unrelated “intellectual transformation” among the major religions and philosophies across the civilizations of Eurasia, from Buddhism and Confucianism to Judaism and Platonism (and eventually Christianity), a transcontinental revolution in philosophy that Eiseley believed ushered in a retreat from the conquest and materialism of the Neolithic period and “encouraged the common man toward charity and humility” and “a rejection of purely material goods, a turning toward some inner light.” Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid, 146-148. 13 On Mumford’s popularity in the 1960s, see Paul Forman, “How Lewis Mumford Saw Science, and Art, and Himself,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 37, no. 2 (March 2007): 272. 107 mechanical invention and production, and a Rousseauian romanticism that urged a retreat from the corruptions of Old World civilization and, like the axial religions, promoted “a return to the village, the bamboo grove, the desert, seeking detachment from the compulsions and harsh regimentations demanded by the megamachine as the price of wealth, ‘peace,’ and victory in war.” Though it appeared in small pockets during the early to mid-nineteenth century that the two impulses might beneficially coexist (Mumford saw in men like Thoreau, Emerson, and George Perkins Marsh a healthy combination of both ideas, they being men who “did not recoil from science, mechanical invention, or industrial organization,” but rather “embraced all these new potentialities within the framework of a larger life that included man’s natural and his humanistic inheritance”), Mumford traced the immediate roots of what he saw as the mid-twentieth century’s near-complete technological civilization—that society which is not “limited by any human interests and values other than those of technology itself”—to the industrialization and modernization of the nineteenth century, when “the mechanical New World displaced the ‘romantic’ New World in men’s’ minds.”14 It was clear to Mumford, as it was to Eiseley, that the current urge to extend the realm of human conquest to the moon was rooted not in biology, but in the technocratic civilization that blossomed in the West in the modern era. And this very civilization, this modern, Western, Faustian, scientific, technetronic, technocratic culture (its critics had numerous names for it) that seemed to have reached its apotheosis in the post-World War II United States, was coming under increasing attack by the late 1960s as a system that 14 Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1970), 22-24. 108 valued technological gains over moral and spiritual development. Whether they believed the urge toward the moon to be cultural or biological—and unlike Eiseley and Mumford, many critics tended to at least tacitly accept that there was a biological element, even if this element was only able to reach its fruition in the modern West—intellectual critics looked apprehensively at a culture that accepted “progress” for its own sake as a justification for any and all technological innovations, and questioned the impact of this insatiable drive on human well-being. As the pinnacle of twentieth-century advanced technology, Apollo represented to these critics a powerful symbol of the dangers of continuing along such a dehumanizing path, and offered an opportunity to critique the wider technocratic nature of modern society. “Two successful moon landings are an enormous intellectual achievement,” admitted Eiseley. “But what we must try to understand is more difficult than the mathematics of a moon shot—namely, the nature of the scientific civilization we are in the process of creating.”15 The focus of this chapter, begun with a discussion of human nature, will continue along this path to examine how prominent dissenting voices of the period used Apollo to discuss larger issues of America’s scientific culture, the relationship of humanity to the Earth from which it arose, and the potential human consequences of the leap into outer space. 15 Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid, 90. 109 III. At the very beginning of the Space Age, in the year after Sputnik when the United States finally succeeded in placing its own satellite into orbit, Hannah Arendt presented a series of issues, which she expanded upon in a second piece a half-decade later, that would set the basic parameters for a large portion of the critical discourse over the value and human impact of space exploration well into the Apollo era. Arendt believed that Sputnik was an event “second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom,” and demanded intense deliberation over the wisdom and potential ramifications of the jump into space. Her goal with these writings was stated succinctly in the first piece, the prologue to her 1958 treatise The Human Condition. “What I propose,” she wrote, “is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”16 Arendt, like many intellectuals, was uneasy with the headlong rush toward the moon based (Cold War considerations notwithstanding) on little more justification than that it was the inevitable result of the human urge to explore. She wanted more than anything for Americans to pause for a moment and consider the possible adverse effects of leaping into space, to stop investing an almost religious reverence in technological advancement and expend a bit of energy pondering what she believed to be the fundamental question of the Space Age: “has man’s conquest of space increased or diminished his stature?”17 Concerns over perverted national priorities aside, most intellectuals tended to see the Apollo mission in itself as relatively harmless—a $24 billion Cold War sporting event 16 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 5. 17 Hannah Arendt, “Man’s Conquest of Space,” American Scholar 32, no. 4 (Autumn 1963): 536. 110 that was irrelevant to the real problems the nation faced; a childish relic of an earlier era of high tension with the Russians, but ultimately less dangerous than other possible Cold War contests the competitive John Kennedy might have cooked up in its stead. Yet Apollo was obviously more than just an event, and critics invested it with a great deal of meaning as a symbol of what was wrong with an increasingly technocratic and scientistic American society in the postwar era. At the core of this modern America was the notion of “progress.” To optimists, it was a self-referencing justification: the idea of “progress” was essential to the American story, to the human story—had been from the beginning—and the goal itself justified further “progress,” which by the twentieth century had come to be largely associated with technological gadgetry, whether small-scale or, in the case of Apollo, immense. “Progress, like evolution, is its own end,” argued MIT historian and Apollo supporter Bruce Mazlish in direct response to the concerns of Hannah Arendt.18 To the increasing number of pessimists in the Apollo era however, watching their society move rapidly in directions it could not hope to understand before the next technological revolution moved it even further away from any possible human comprehension, this was a tragedy well in the making. Writing of Apollo, Arendt lamented the tendency of modern scientific society to advance so rapidly “that man can do, and successfully do, what he cannot comprehend and cannot express in everyday human language.”19 Such complaints had been a staple of American intellectual life since at least the beginning of industrialization in the 18 Bruce Mazlish, “The Idea of Progress,” Daedalus 92, no. 3 (Summer 1963): 447-461. 19 Arendt, “Man’s Conquest of Space,” 531. Emphasis in original. 111 nineteenth century, when Ralph Waldo Emerson warned that “‘Tis too plain that with the material power the moral progress has not kept pace.”20 But the mechanization that Emerson viewed with suspicion was mild compared to the rate and complexity of change that confronted Americans in the Space Age, nor did Emerson face technologies that had the capability of ending human life on the planet, nor those so advanced that the vast majority of Americans could no longer understand the workings of most of the devices that were increasingly shaping their lives. It was this drastic gap between knowledge (or “know-how”) and thought that Arendt believed to be a fundamental problem of postwar American society. Given its public visibility, its exorbitant cost, and what many believed to be the flimsy rationales behind its development, critics latched onto Apollo as a powerful example of one of the more disturbing trends of post-World War II American society: its Faustian predilection to go forward with any and all technological advancements the moment they became possible, regardless of the consequences. C.P. Snow, best remembered for his exposition on the “two cultures,”21 looked ambivalently upon the first moon landing and recognized, “once the project was technically feasible at all . . . then it was bound to be attempted.” Snow, like many others, assumed there was an innate urge in human beings to explore, to set foot in places where no human had gone before. “The answer of [English mountaineer] George Mallory,” wrote Snow, reciting one of the favorite quotations of President Kennedy and other space proponents, “has become a 20 Emerson quoted in Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 26. 21 The idea that scientists and humanists are increasingly unable to understand the bodies of knowledge created by each other. 112 tedious cliché, but like a lot of clichés, it is true. Why do you want to climb Mount Everest? Because it is there.” Snow accepted this urge, and even admitted a certain satisfaction in the successful moon landing, a pride in belonging to the same species as those men brave enough to venture out into the void and explore the moon simply “because it is there.” But he also was troubled by what Apollo represented about the modern technological civilization: the fact that such a mission was inevitable, since to Snow’s mind, “there is no known example in which technology has been stopped being pushed to the limit. . . . it would be reassuring to find one case in which technology was called off: when human sense and will said, yes, that feat could certainly be done, but it isn’t worth doing.”22 In a society that embraced what prominent theologian Paul Tillich criticized as “forwardism”—“The aim is to go forward for the sake of going forward, endlessly without a concrete focus”—putting the brakes on technology to allow time for meaningful deliberation seemed unlikely.23 Erich Fromm, the left-wing psychologist and social critic, likewise decried the guiding principle of the current “technetronic” society: “the maxim that something ought to be done because it is technically possible to do it. If it is possible to build nuclear weapons, they must be built even if they might destroy us all. If it is possible to travel to the moon or to the planets, it must be done, even if at the expense of many unfulfilled needs here on earth.” It was this equation of progress with ever more access to technological products that Fromm believed was most dangerous about the technetronic 22 C.P. Snow, “The Moon Landing,” Look, 26 August 1969, 69. Emphasis in original. Snow wrote this before the anti-ballistic missile system (ABM) and supersonic jet travel (SST) were both called off in he early 1970s. 23 Paul Tillich, The Future of Religions (New York: Harper& Row, 1966), 45. 113 mindset, which if not drastically altered would soon lead to “the negation of all values which the humanist tradition has developed. . . . Once the principle is accepted that something ought to be done because it is technically possible to do it, all other values are dethroned, and technological development becomes the foundation of ethics.”24 In terms of Apollo, it meant going to the moon “because it is there,” and because “it is man’s nature to explore,” without any consideration of whether it would contribute to or retard the moral and spiritual development of humanity. Arendt herself resuscitated the nuclear issue in her own argument that the scientist in modern man—an intricate part, whether by nature or culture (and Arendt seemed to see a role for both)—would continue to push forward with scientific and technological advances regardless of the possible negative impact. “Man, insofar as he is a scientist, does not care about his own stature in the universe or about his position on the evolutionary ladder of animal life,” she wrote. “This ‘carelessness’ is his pride and his glory. The simple fact that physicists split the atom without any hesitations the very moment they knew how to do it, although they realized full well the enormous destructive potentialities of their operation, demonstrates that the scientist qua scientist does not even care about the survival of the human race on earth or, for that matter, about the survival of the planet itself.”25 This was, in fact, the very goal of science: to remove humanistic concerns and to place oneself in an objective position to observe phenomena; to strive, Arendt argued, toward the “Archimedean point” from which the observer (the 24 Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1968), 33-34, 44-45. Emphasis in original. 25 Arendt, “Man’s Conquest of Space,” 536. 114 scientist) is completely removed from the observed, and can thus study it objectively without her own influence—her feelings, prejudices, and other human weaknesses that can stand in the way of scientific understanding—clouding her perspective. It was for this reason—that man as scientist will by the very nature of his curiosity know no restraint in the effort to expand his knowledge of science and its transformation into material technologies—that Arendt believed the question of whether the jump into space would diminish or increase the stature of man and was therefore worthwhile or best avoided—whether, as Norman Mailer wondered, it was God or the Devil at the helm of the venture—was a question that could not be left to the judgment of the scientist qua scientist, whose very method forced the inevitable response, “Who cares about the stature of man when he can go to the moon?” or split the atom, or perform heart transplants or create human life in a test tube or even someday create artificial mechanical bodies for the human brain, but rather must necessarily be addressed in humanistic terms, based not on current scientific knowledge, which Arendt feared was becoming so advanced that it could not even be discussed in comprehensible human language, but rather considered in terms of common sense and long-held philosophic concerns with life, humanity, and knowledge. It was only by standing in judgment over advances in science and technology that the humanist could assure that such developments were not outpacing humanity’s ability to understand them and thus have a reasonable chance of controlling them. Otherwise, “if it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as 115 of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technologically possible, no matter how murderous it is.”26 Numerous critics came to echo Arendt’s concerns during the Apollo era. “Where were we going in such a hurry, and to do what?” Milton Mayer asked in The Progressive. “We were going to the moon to learn and to know. To learn and to know what? Why, whatever there is to learn and to know.” The Apollo 8 mission was undoubtedly one of the most remarkable human exploits of all time, recognized Loren Eiseley, “but was it a search for knowledge only,” he wondered, “and not wisdom?” If that was the case—and Eiseley, Mayer, and many other skeptics believed it was—then the moon flights were not merely evasions from the real problems that urgently needed attention on Earth, but, to answer Arendt’s fundamental question, did in fact threaten the stature of humanity by elevating technological and scientific knowledge over humanistic wisdom, and by insisting on doing whatever was technically possible without considering its potential impact, positive or negative, for life on Earth.27 René Dubos, like Loren Eiseley a scientist (biology) whose writings resonated with the general public—he shared the 1969 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction with Norman Mailer—believed that “to accept as a fact of life that a certain technology will be used for the simple reason that we know how to use it . . . is tantamount to an abdication of intellectual and social responsibility.” It was this abdication of intellectual responsibility, particularly, that Arendt was fighting, for she believed the stakes were not 26 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 456; Arendt, The Human Condition, 3. 27 Milton Mayer, “Ill Met By Moonlight,” The Progressive, September 1969, 17; Eiseley in Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge, 404. 116 trivial, not limited to apprehensions over misplaced priorities, but rather could impact humanity’s entire conception of itself. In terms of space exploration specifically, Arendt was concerned that the leap into space would cause spacemen to look upon Earth and all its inhabitants from a coldly clinical point of view, to “view the activities of men . . . as no more than ‘overt behavior,’ which we can study with the same methods we use to study the behavior of rats.”28 Every major scientific breakthrough of the Modern Era, from Copernicus to Darwin to Freud, had of course reduced humanity’s stature in the universe, but man’s perspective still remained for the most part earthbound, anthropocentric, with the sciences able to be discussed in human terms. Although the physics revolution of the early twentieth century began to change this, as scientists learned to harness unearthly powers previously confined to the inside of the sun, Arendt feared the jump into space could make real for the first time what had up to that point only been accessible via the sharp imagination of the most talented scientists—the Archimedean point in space that offers a perspective of Earth not as the cradle of humanity, but as simply one entity among many in a vast universe to be studied objectively, and that just coincidentally happens to be host to a number of living organisms, including an advanced species called Homo sapiens. If this were the case, that man was approaching an Archimedean point where he could look upon earthly goings-on disinterestedly, purely scientifically, so much so that his observations would make sense only in abstract mathematical terms and could not be understood or even verbalized, even by scientists, in everyday human- 28 René Dubos, A God Within (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 215. 117 oriented terms—and Arendt warned that “The conquest of space and the science that made it possible have come perilously close to this point,” the point where know-how will have so far outstripped knowledge that human language becomes meaningless—then “the stature of man would not simply be lowered by all standards we know of, it would have been destroyed.”29 Paul Tillich offered a similar warning about the potential dangers of space exploration shortly before his death in 1965. Also considering the perspective offered by looking at Earth from outer space, Tillich feared that “one of the results of the flight into space and the possibility of looking down at the earth is a kind of estrangement between man and earth, an ‘objectification’ of the earth for man, the depriving ‘her’ of her ‘motherly’ character, her power of giving birth, of nourishing, of embracing, of keeping for herself, of calling back to herself.” Here was an extension of Arendt’s fears, not just of an objectification of human doings on Earth, but a radical separation of humanity from the Earth that spawned it and continued to nurture it.30 Arendt herself had been taken aback when, after Sputnik, she perceived the reaction from the public to be less a feeling of pride (Cold War feelings aside) in such a remarkable achievement of human rationality than a sense of relief that humanity had finally taken the first step toward escaping its imprisonment on Earth. To Arendt’s mind, this was a remarkable sentiment, for she believed “nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the earth as a prison for men’s bodies or shown such eagerness to go literally from here to the moon.” A decade later Loren Eiseley was similarly troubled 29 Arendt, “Man’s Conquest of Space,” 539-40. 30 Tillich, The Future of Religions, 45. 118 when he read a NASA official’s dire prediction that “should man fall back from his destiny . . . the confines of the planet will destroy him.” “It was a strange way to consider our planet,” replied Eiseley. “No, I thought, this planet nourished man. . . . It is not fair to say this planet will destroy us.”31 Ironically, at least concerning Arendt’s and Tillich’s warnings that the new perspective from outer space would lead to an objectification of the Earth and its inhabitants, just the opposite seems to have occurred. As was apparent almost immediately after the first photographs from Apollo 8 were published, revealing a lush blue Earth floating alone in the cold, dark universe, the view from space actually lent credence to the concerns of a burgeoning environmental movement that the Earth’s resources were limited, were becoming endangered, and thus humans needed to protect it by developing lifestyles more harmonious with nature. As revealed by Arendt’s and Tillich’s mispredictions, written well before the first trip to the moon, few foresaw that this new appreciation of Earth would be a major, perhaps the major, legacy of the Apollo program. On this nearly everyone, Apollo supporter and opponent alike, tended to agree. “The ‘Earth Age’ Begins” pronounced the New Left’s largest underground newspaper, the Los Angeles Free Press, over a large illustration of the Earth rising above the moon.32 “All the love songs that have been written about the moon should have been written about the Earth,” remarked astronaut Frank Borman after his Apollo 8 mission offered the first shots of the Earth from afar.33 31 Arendt, The Human Condition, 1; Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid, 153. 32 Los Angeles Free Press, 1 August 1969, 2. 33 Chicago Tribune, 20 February 1969 in NCN, 20 February 1969, 5. 119 With a remarkable suddenness, what had been a fairly abstract conception of an Earth without borders became startlingly clear. Far from alienating humanity from the Earth, the actual achievement of Arendt’s Archimedean point of view instead focused more attention than ever on the Earth and its inhabitants, many of whom began to recognize their duties to tend to their home. Artists throughout the twentieth century, from Jean Renoir’s The Grand Illusion to John Lennon’s post-Apollo “Imagine,” had urged humans to consider their world without borders as a necessary starting point on the road to peace. Yet it was an unplanned, almost accidental picture of the planet from a distance, courtesy of a flight into space that had been born out of most un-peaceful circumstances and that many peaceniks viewed with some hostility, which made the case most strongly. Among the most famous and influential reactions to Apollo was Archibald MacLeish’s reflection on the Apollo 8 flight, printed on the front page of the New York Times on Christmas day, 1968. MacLeish was stunned by the images of Earth offered by Apollo 8, and immediately took to pen to express his feelings. He believed that the experience of seeing Earth as a whole from the distance of the moon might fundamentally alter how humans viewed the world and themselves. “To see the Earth as it truly is,” he wrote in his most famous passage, which would be reprinted endlessly through the summer of 1969, “small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.” Far from having an alienating effect, MacLeish believed this new conception of Earth could only serve to 120 bring humanity closer together, and to appreciate its home planet as never before. Contrary to those crying foul over Apollo’s enormous budget while American cities crumbled, in the aftermath of Apollo 8 as well as in the celebratory period surrounding Apollo 11, proponents argued that the space program had given the world a gift that no amount of money spent on social programs could ever hope to offer: a reflection of itself from a perspective that had hardly before been imagined possible, let alone achieved; a timely reminder that all humans were, indeed, “riders on the earth together,” and had better start acting like it too, for the sake of the seemingly never-so-fragile Earth as well as themselves. Yet, irony upon irony, the successful flights of Apollos 8 and 11 did little to convince critics of the value of space exploration. In fact, by making clear how barren, ugly, and hostile the moon was compared to the Earth—in the words of the Apollo 8 astronauts themselves, the moon up-close appeared a “vast, lonely, forbidding . . . expanse of nothing”; Earth a “grand oasis in the big vastness of space”—the moon missions tended to support the arguments of those who complained that the United States was wasting its time exploring the emptiness of space when it would be better off tending to its own home planet. Looking back, Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders put it aptly: “We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the earth.”34 Critics could not have agreed more. To supporters of continued space exploration, of course, such logic was nonsense. Considering the gift that just these first few trips to the moon offered the world, the 34 Robert Zimmerman, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (New York: Dell, 1998), 242; Andrew Chaikin, A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 119. 121 possibilities for improving life on Earth through an expanded understanding of space seemed nearly endless. “America’s space program benefits all mankind,” read the placemats slipped under meals at restaurants across Cape Kennedy during the days of Apollo 11, emphasizing the overarching theme of the entire space program and the best reason to continue onward.35 Though many of the more zealous supporters had their sights firmly on the stars, most also sincerely believed that the benefits Apollos 8 and 11 bestowed on Earth, whether in “spin-off,” the lift in spirit, or more important still, the new understanding of the Earth in the universe, were only the beginning of what space exploration had to offer humanity in its quest to improve conditions down home. “What we are seeking in tomorrow’s trip,” explained Wernher von Braun to a banquet on the eve of the Apollo 11 launch, “is indeed [the] key to our future on earth.” Avid proponents like von Braun were not content to simply call it a day after a few moon landings and refocus attention and resources on mundane earthly concerns, as was the majority of the public. To von Braun, a continuing exploration of space, not merely a moon landing, did more than just “benefit all mankind,” as the Cape placemats argued. It was in fact “the key to our future on Earth,” for “the Apollo 11 moon trip even from its inception was not intended as a one-time trip that would rest alone on the merits of a single journey.” Instead, “what we will have attained when Neil Armstrong steps down onto the moon,” von Braun predicted, “is a completely new step in the evolution of man”—an evolution that will “expand the mind of man” and stretch “this God-given brain and these God-given hands to their outermost limits and in doing so all mankind 35 Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 17 July 1969, in NCN, 25 July 1969, 17. 122 will benefit,” for only by pushing forth into the challenges of space would the United States, and all humanity, achieve a greatness that could radically improve life on Earth.36 Buckminster Fuller could not have agreed more. A divisive figure, as most Space Age gurus tended to be—considered a visionary by some, an “ancient New England faker” by others—Fuller argued that continued exploration in space was vital to sustaining life on Earth. 37 The title of one typical Fuller piece, “Vertical Is to Live— Horizontal Is to Die,” adequately summed up his view toward space exploration. Like many supporters, Fuller had little time for those who opposed space exploration because they believed the money would be better spent to address poverty, the urban crisis, education, and other liberal causes. In fact, to Fuller’s mind, the only way such Earth- bound problems could ever be conquered would be for the United States to drastically increase its efforts in outer space, to such an extent that the space program be prioritized “above all other officially sponsored and financed activity.” In the first place, Fuller’s idea of “spin-off” from the space program stretched far beyond the “Tang and Teflon” so often derided by critics. More important were the technological advancements that would allow for more efficient production and better use of Earth’s limited resources. Fuller, best remembered for his advocacy of geodesic domes, was particularly interested in solving the problem of housing across the globe, and he believed the only cure for this earthly crisis was an aggressive effort to advance the technology necessary for surviving in space—the creation of lighter, more durable materials that could withstand the harsh space environment at a low cost. Such 36 Von Braun quoted in Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 76-77. 37 John Lukacs, The Passing of the Modern Age (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1970), 151. 123 technologies could then be used in terrestrial construction, the only hope for housing the Earth’s rapidly growing human population. “If on the other hand,” argued Fuller, “we were to heed the tax-itchy ‘down to earther’ and confine ourselves to trying to ‘house the Chinese,’ as he puts it, we would soon find that his idea of housing couldn’t be stretched to take care of the ill-housed balance of humanity. . . . The kinds of pipes and sewers he now thinks of as constituting adequate housing can’t be stretched to accommodate fifty percent of humanity, let alone his disdainfully referred to ‘Chinese.’” But Fuller’s was not the everyday “spin-off” argument. In his more complicated view, the Earth itself was a type of spaceship, a “Spaceship Earth.” Like the artificial ships the United States and the Soviet Union had been launching into space, the Spaceship Earth was a self-contained vessel floating alone in the hostile void of outer space, drawing its energy from the sun but otherwise encapsulated. What better way to learn to live within the resource limitations on Earth than to learn how to live in the much more daunting conditions of outer space? “In order to have humans live for any protracted period of time in space where there are no streams or sewers in which to flush,” wrote Fuller, “nor air to be breathed, nor gardens, nor fish, nor fruit to be eaten, the problems to be solved are far greater than those already frustrating our Earthbound living. To maintain men in space . . . we are going to have to learn, for the first time, all about the chemistry, physics, ecology and metabolics of the total life-regenerating system of our space vehicle earth.” The internal environments of NASA space capsules were nothing short of miraculous—not only did they allow an astronaut to survive in the deadly vacuum of 124 outer space, they also minimized waste and maximized the efficient use of extremely limited resources. If NASA could design a plumbing system for the astronauts whereby waste was efficiently discarded, even recycled, why did it take humans five gallons of water to flush a toilet on Earth? It was only when the public recognized that “All of us are, always have been, and so long as we exist, always will be—nothing else but— astronauts” on the Spaceship Earth that humanity would realize it must start living as if the Earth itself were a finite resource, and that if its resources were used carelessly and allowed to run dry, then, like an astronaut in a space capsule without oxygen or water or a protective barrier from the harshness of the void, or whose cabin became filled with smoke or toxins that could not be jettisoned, humanity would be doomed. The only hope, then, was to continue with space development and learn from it, for “when and if humanity learns how to support human life successfully anywhere in Universe, the logistical economics of doing so will become so inherently efficient and satisfactory that then, and then alone, we may for the first time make all humanity a success back here aboard our space-vehicle Earth.”38 Fuller and Von Braun offer but two of the more prominent examples of those who believed continued space exploration was crucial to the task of improving the lot of all on Earth. If most critics were unwilling to accept this thesis they were taken even more aback by those who pressed for space colonization as a beginning to the conquest of the universe, so that when the Earth finally met its doom—and there was no doubt that at some point, sooner or later, life would no longer be sustainable on Earth, whether due to 38 Buckminster Fuller, “Vertical Is to Live—Horizontal Is to Die,” American Scholar 39, no. 1 (Winter 1969-70): 45-46. 125 human causes or the inevitable expiration of the sun—the human species could live on elsewhere in the vast universe. Freeman Dyson, a theoretical physicist and earnest supporter of space colonization, believed that while space exploration might offer practical solutions to some of the minor problems facing humanity—he mentioned garbage disposal specifically—not even an aggressive space colonization would solve the most pressing problem on Earth: overpopulation. Rather, like Loren Eiseley’s spore theory, Dyson believed that only a few explorers would go permanently into space, but these few pioneers represented the only chance for the human species to live on in perpetuity. Dyson had little hope that humanity would survive on Earth much longer. “We can hope to survive in a world bristling with hydrogen bombs for a few centuries, if we are lucky,” he argued. “But I believe we have small chance of surviving 10,000 years if we stay stuck to this planet. We are too many eggs in too small a basket.” Dyson’s species-centric rather than individual-oriented approach led him to believe that human expansion into the universe was crucial, and was the only way to ensure the species would be invulnerable. “A nuclear holocaust on Earth would still be an unspeakable tragedy, and might still wipe out 99 per cent of our numbers,” he admitted. “But the one percent who had dispersed themselves could not be wiped out simultaneously by any man-made catastrophe, and they would remain to carry on the promise of our destiny.” Dyson’s was a highly romantic vision, and he embraced the metaphor of the frontier to appeal to the countercultural sentiments of the Apollo era by offering a number of “isolated city-states floating in the void, perhaps attached to asteroids or comets,” 126 which would “provide an open frontier, a place to hide and to disappear without trace, beyond the reach of snooping policemen and bureaucrats,” a frontier paradise for “rebels and outlaws” to be “safe from prying eyes, free to experiment undisturbed with the creation of radically new types of human beings, surpassing us in mental capacities as we surpass the apes.” Dyson’s vision was somewhat confused—along with his romantic “outlaws and rebels” seeking freedom would go racists and other undesirable miscreants, so that the “timid and law-abiding citizens who choose to stay quietly down here on Earth will find it easier to live together in peace,” and he never offered a convincing explanation for how the necessarily constrained environment of any space colony would offer these pioneers the opportunity “to get lost and be on their own” in the sense that vast terrestrial frontiers were imagined to have offered in the past—but he represents well the hopes of many space supporters who saw an expansion of space exploration as not necessarily a benefit to life on Earth—though it may be such as well—but as a critical necessity to ensure the invincibility of the human species.39 Freeman Dyson believed he was speaking as a humanist, not a scientist, as Arendt urged, when he made his calls for the colonization of space. “I shall put forward a point of view about the social problems of our time,” he explained, “problems which have little to do with science or with space. . . . my argument will remain on the level of literature rather than science.” Yet Dyson’s propositions—the use of controlled nuclear explosions to propel spaceships; biological engineering to redesign leaves so trees could grow on comets; even, in the longer term, “disassembling” Jupiter to create “an artificial biosphere 39 Freeman Dyson, “Human Consequences of the Exploration of Space,” in David L. Bicknell and Richard L. Brengle, eds., Image and Event: America Now (New York: Appleton-Century-Crafts, 1971), 282-284. 127 which completely surrounds” the sun—were horrifying to the growing number of skeptics in the Apollo era who believed that blind technological progress (“I believe it natural and right that we shall continue to stumble ahead into space without really knowing why,” Dyson admitted) had already gotten out of hand and needed to be curtailed.40 Loren Eiseley recalled a conversation with an aerospace technician: “We have got to spend everything we have, if necessary, to get off this planet,” the man warned. “Why?” asked Eiseley, perplexed by his urgency. “Because of the ice,” the technician replied, “the ice is coming back, that’s why.” 41 Here was all of the fear of Dyson, but stripped of any of the optimism of his vision. Eiseley recalled another conversation he had with a cab driver, who “thinks the stars are just ‘up there,’ and that as soon as our vehicles are perfected we can all take off like crowds of summer tourists to Cape Cod. This man expects, and I fear has been encouraged to expect, that such flights will solve the population problem.”42 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. voiced similar concerns. “I think many people are encouraged to believe that we can use up this planet and dispose of it like a Kleenex because we are going to wonderful new planets which are green and moist and nourishing—and that we can continue to do this indefinitely,” said Vonnegut. “Well,” he continued, “that isn’t the case. . . . we’re really earth-bound no matter how much we may expend on getting the hell away from earth.”43 40 Dyson, “Human Consequences of the Exploration of Space,” 273-74; On Dyson’s propositions, see Kenneth Brower, The Starship and the Canoe (New York: Perennial Library, 1978), 3-4, 7-8, 174. 41 Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid, 152-153. 42 Loren Eiseley, “The Inner Galaxy,” in Bicknell and Brengle, eds., Image and Event, 286. 43 TV Guide, 11 March 1972, 25. 128 To Vonnegut, Eiseley, and many others skeptical of expanded exploration beyond the moon, the public was being misled if it believed humans were going to travel, and especially settle, anywhere beyond Mars anytime soon, if ever. Vonnegut recommended that those with any illusions of exporting human life outside Earth “look at any big picture book on the universe where the distances between heavenly bodies are indicated, and the natures of the atmospheres of some of the other planets. One must conclude that exploration is not a particularly hopeful enterprise.”44 René Dubos likewise made it clear that population pressures would have to be dealt with on Earth, for he saw virtually no possibility for escape to other worlds given the vast distances and the realities of the human body. “Despite the irresponsible assertions of a few scientists and the imaginings of science fiction writers,” he wrote, “the world population is therefore bound to the earth by the exigencies of man’s biological nature.”45 As the arguments of both Vonnegut and Dubos indicate, critics believed the overenthusiastic promotion of a human future in space amounted to little more than an imaginary escape from more immediate problems to be dealt with on Earth. All the miracles of human development resulting from space exploration offered by the Wernher von Brauns and Buckminster Fullers of the world, no matter how sincere, could not whitewash a reality that many people recognized even before the successful Apollo flights—that the world was in trouble, that sustained manned space exploration was almost prohibitively expensive, and it offered little real hope of improving conditions for the vast majority of Earthlings. “Space flight is a brave venture,” conceded Loren 44 TV Guide, 11 March 1972, 25. 45 René Dubos, Reason Awake: Science for Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 175. 129 Eiseley, “but upon the soaring rockets are projected all the fears and evasions of mankind.” Indeed, its most vehement supporters seemed to “have proffered us the power of the void as though flight were the most important value on earth”—an irresponsible prescription for the troubles of the world by any sober measure.46 Many of the arguments against investing so much money and energy into Apollo were, as we have seen, simple attacks on the space program as a misplacement of priorities. Why is so much money being spent on space, liberal critics asked, when there are so many unfulfilled needs right here on Earth? Apollo supporters, as well as more thoughtful critics, dismissed these criticisms by pointing out that money for the space program was spent on Earth, creating jobs and developing technologies that could ease the plights of the unfortunate. And in any case, funds taken away from the space program were unlikely to be redirected toward the social programs liberals promoted. The space program might not offer the redemption for the troubled world that its boosters promised, but cancelling it would not make the faintest dent in these problems either. But if not money, what about the energy that was directed toward the moon goal? Critics like Loren Eiseley, Lewis Mumford, and others who considered themselves humanists argued that humanity would benefit much more from exploring itself and its interrelations with one another than from expending so much energy on jumping outward into space. On the surface, this seems like a fairly inane criticism. Was it impossible to do both? Could humanity not study philosophy as well as science? In fact, was it not possible that the effort and achievement of exploring outer space might lead to an even 46 Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid, 152. 130 greater understanding of humanity and the human condition, as many believed to be the case in the aftermath of Apollo 8? “Although I agree with Eiseley that we must get to know ourselves better,” wrote one reviewer in an otherwise positive appraisal, “we’ve tried for over 2,000 years but with little effect.”47 Apollo, whether canceled or expanded, would not likely change this fact. Perhaps, but consider Eiseley’s case a little more closely. In Eiseley’s mind human energy, like money, is limited. Unlike the money spent on Apollo, which if taken from the space program would not likely have been reallocated in a particularly inspiring manner, the directions in which human energy and thought proceeded were entirely open. In this view, the one-dimensional focus on escaping Earth and jumping into space constricted human thought and energy into an endeavor that was ultimately self- defeating, since it was unlikely humanity was going anywhere very far in space or that it would discover much of anything other than its isolation on a beautiful planet coasting alone through the void. Scientists, who as a whole were more critical of Apollo than the wider public, were known to complain that the rush to the moon had diverted resources and talented minds away from more fruitful scientific pursuits. More generally, what of the directions in thought that were not taken due to the mad rush into space? Where might they have led? Many space proponents argued (and some critics hoped) that the exploration of space might serve as a substitute for war—a way for the superpowers to direct their energies and technologies into the benevolent competition of space rather than more 47 Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge, 411. 131 confrontational contests that might spell doom. Hugh Dryden, a former deputy administrator of NASA, hoped that “the absorption of energies, resources, imagination and aggressiveness in the exploration of space might contribute to the maintenance of peace” by averting these tendencies away from more harmful confrontations with the Soviets.48 Maybe. But what else might the intense focus on space have drawn American energy and imagination away from? Might there have been even more beneficent targets for all this energy and brainpower that could have led to even greater improvements in the human condition than all the potential discoveries of the outer universe combined? After all, Eiseley pointed out, “The Maya had calculated the drifting eons like gods but they did not devise a single wheeled vehicle.”49 To other critics, the issue was not simply a zero-sum game between space gains and more earthbound social or intellectual advancements. Rather, the possible impact of space exploration needed to be considered apart from the resources it may have diverted. To these critics, not only were the Space Age prophets offering a false hope of human salvation via space travel, but, to answer Arendt’s original question, space exploration had an unarguably negative impact on humanity’s stature in the universe. C.P. Snow, like others, was critical of the space boosters who promised to kickstart a new wave of human progress with an accelerated space program. “As for being . . . a giant step for all mankind,” he wrote of Apollo 11, “no one likes saying it, but that is nonsense.”50 Of the idea that expanding into outer space would significantly benefit life on Earth, Snow 48 The Futurist, October 1969, 120. 49 Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid, 132. 50 C.P. Snow, review of Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, in Financial Times, 4 December 1970, copy in Folder 610.3 Correspondence: Of a Fire on the Moon, 1971, Box 610, Norman Mailer Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. 132 declared: “I flatly disagree with the space enthusiasts. They speak as though reaching the moon (and the other possible spots in the solar system) is going to liberate the human imagination as the discovery of America did. I believe the exact opposite, that the human imagination is going to be restricted.” Snow actually shared Freeman Dyson’s faith in the frontier thesis, the idea espoused so often throughout the Space Age that the availability of new frontiers to conquer was crucial to human (or, more specifically, American) development and cultural evolution. But unlike Dyson, who saw an almost unlimited frontier in outer space, Snow believed that with the Apollo moon landings the public would soon come to realize what responsible scientists already accepted—that beyond possible missions to Mars and maybe, maybe, the moons of Jupiter, none of which would be settled or colonized, “we come to an end. That is the frontier. There is nowhere else in the entire universe where man can ever land, for so long as the human species lasts.” Snow likewise eschewed the optimism of those who hoped that the shocking perspective of Earth offered from the moon would spark a new understanding of humankind’s place in the cosmos. Instead, he found the whole thing potentially demoralizing, believing that once the realization had sunk in that human beings were going nowhere in space, that they would encounter no life in the universe other than their own, ever, the result would not be a new appreciation of the Earth, but rather “disappointment, the sense of confinement, a kind of cosmic claustrophobia will set in.”51 51 Snow, “The Moon Landing,” 72. On the frontier thesis as it was applied to space exploration, see Walter A. McDougall, …the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1985), 386-387; Susan Mangus, Conestoga Wagons on the Moon: The Frontier, the American Space Program, and National Identity (Ph.D. Dissertation, Ohio State University, 1999). 133 Paul Tillich foresaw a similar spiritual danger in the mass realization of the immensity of the universe, a furthering of the alienation and meaninglessness that the existentialist theologian was concerned with. “The dizziness felt by people in Pascal’s time facing the empty spaces between the stars has been increased in a period in which man has pushed not only cognitively but also bodily into these spaces,” he wrote, in some ways echoing Arendt’s claim that actually, as opposed to imaginatively, going into space would have profound effects on humanity’s conception of itself. “His anxiety of lostness in a small corner of the universe, which has balanced pride in his controlling power since the time of the eighth Psalm, has grown with the growth of the controlling power.”52 The fears expressed by Tillich and Snow, and in a different way by Arendt, went far beyond the common complaints—that the intense focus on the moon was an evasion of responsibility for more immediate problems on Earth—to propose that the very phenomenon of space travel was directly harmful to humanity’s conception of itself in the cosmos. In their minds space exploration offered not liberation but claustrophobia, with a corresponding impact on the human mind and spirit. This claustrophobia was nowhere more pronounced than in the astronauts’ living quarters on their space missions—the cramped, entirely mechanized space capsules that many techno-critics worried were symbolic of the direction in which humanity was headed on Earth, where everyday environments were growing increasingly artificial with every new technological gain. Arendt feared that as science and technology continued to advance and intrude ever more into the daily lives of the masses, it was becoming “more 52 Tillich, The Future of Religions, 44. 134 unlikely every day that man will encounter anything in the world around him that is not man-made and hence is not, in the last analysis, he himself in a different disguise.” She saw the apotheosis of this trend in the astronaut, whose very survival in space depended on never encountering any elements that had not been created by humans—the completely artificial environment. Arendt feared that the same tendencies which drove Americans into space would also drive them toward an astronaut-like existence on Earth, for “it is the same desire to escape from imprisonment to the earth that is manifest in the attempt to create life in the test tube, in the desire to mix ‘frozen germ plasm from people of demonstrated ability under the microscope to produce superior human beings’ and ‘to alter [their] size, shape and function’; and the wish to escape the human condition, I suspect, also underlies the hope to extend man’s life-span far beyond the hundred-year limit.” It was this desire for artificiality that Arendt feared would cut “the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature.”53 Lewis Mumford also believed the astronaut augured something sinister for the future. In the space-suited astronaut, sealed in an artificial environment, his very survival dependent on mechanical surroundings to which he was umbilically connected via wires and tubes, Mumford saw “the archetypal proto-model of Post-Historic Man, whose existence from birth to death would be conditioned by the megamachine, and made to conform, as in a space capsule, to the minimal functional requirements by an equally minimal environment—all under remote control.” Mumford feared that, not just in space but also in the wider American society, “the astronaut’s space suit will be, figuratively 53 Arendt, “Man’s Conquest of Space,” 537; Arendt, The Human Condition, 2. 135 speaking, the only garment that machine-processed and machine-conditioned man will wear in comfort. . . . This is a return to the womb, without the embryo’s prospect of a natal delivery.” This trend, he concluded sadly, “presents a definitely pathological syndrome.”54 Erich Fromm, too, worried about the rise of a completely mechanized technetronic society, and expanded on the idea of its pathology. Explicitly aligning himself with Mumford, Fromm warned, “A specter is stalking in our midst whom only a few see with clarity. It is not the old ghost of communism or fascism. It is a new specter: a completely mechanized society,” with the human “transformed into a part of the total machine, well fed and entertained, yet passive, unalive, and with little feeling.” How could this have happened? asked Fromm. “How did man,” he wondered, “at the very height of his victory over nature, become the prisoner of his own creation and in serious danger of destroying himself?” Speaking as a psychologist, Fromm believed the drive to prioritize technological progress over more humanistic values revealed a disturbing attraction to the non-alive that he likened to a kind of necrophilia, and that ultimately led to an indifference toward the living world. It was this attraction to the artificial which needed to be resisted, lest humanity end up, like the astronaut, trapped in a fully mechanized environment from which it could not escape. In a blast against middle America that might have made even Norman Mailer blush, Fromm went on to argue that “Those who are attracted to the non-alive”—the necrophiliacs—“are the people who prefer ‘law and order’ to living structure, bureaucratic to spontaneous methods, gadgets 54 Mumford, The Pentagon of Power, Illustration 14-15. 136 to living beings, repetition to originality, neatness to exuberance, hoarding to spending.” In other words, with the possible exception of preferring hoarding to spending, the very characteristics of the WASPish NASA that Mailer presented.55 The stakes in this drift toward the technetronic society were far from trivial, and its relation to the debate over Apollo far from academic, as historian Theodore Roszak pointed out. “The astronautical image of man—and it is nothing but the quintessence of urban-industrial society’s pursuit of the wholly controlled, wholly artificial environment—amounts to a spiritual revolution,” he believed. “This is man as he has never lived before; it draws a line through human history that almost assumes the dimensions of an evolutionary turning point.”56 Here were the words of Wernher von Braun turned on their head, for Roszak’s evolutionary turning point was not a blessing but a horror. Would such an artificial world have any role for the soul that made humans human? Indeed, could the evolved human of the future who would know nothing of the natural world, but only his or her artificial surroundings, even be considered “human” any longer? IV. The successful moon landing drew a flood of praise as an achievement of humankind at its best. As an anarchist, Paul Goodman was naturally wary of the 55 Fromm, The Revolution of Hope, 1-2, 44-45. 56 Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1972), 19. 137 “overwhelming collectivity of the enterprise.” But he still saw in it an affirmation of all that humankind was capable of once it set its mind to a goal. “People do beat all!” he was inspired to write just after the moonwalk. “Surely this is mankind being great at several of our best things, exploring the unknown, making ingenious contraptions, cooperating with the will to do it, drawing on the accumulation of culture and history.” Though, like Eiseley and Mumford, Goodman was aware that “this combination of itching exploration and complicated machinery is, of course, a particularly Western mask of man, Faustian man,” he also believed that “in our times it is a worldwide way,” and it spoke highly of human potential.57 Ayn Rand, who shared Goodman’s distrust of collectivity and then some, also had nothing but praise for what this triumph revealed about the grandeur of which rational humanity was capable: “What we had seen . . . was the concentrated abstraction of man’s greatness,” she wrote in her newsletter, The Objectivist. “It is not of enormous importance to most people that man lands on the moon; but that man can do it, is.”58 But what was “man” who achieved these triumphs? Was not “man” defined by his very attachment to the Earth from which he sprouted and that sustained him—most likely the only place in the accessible universe he could ever live freely without the support of a completely and all-encompassing artificial environment? Was then spaceman still a man at all? Or would he, as many of the most enthusiastic proponents hoped and the most vociferous critics feared, actually take a new step in evolution, 57 Paul Goodman, New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), 24-25, 29. 58 Ayn Rand, “Apollo 11,” The Objectivist, September 1969, 5, 11. 138 toward some sort of “post-human” being, or Mumford’s “Post-Historic” man who has reached the point where his future evolution is left not up to chance, but rather is consciously guided via technology and science? This was the logical extension of Arendt’s fears that spaceman would in time come to see the world as nothing more than an object to be studied, would develop a new scientific mathematical language that would be meaningless in human (or old human) terms, would break the connection forever to Earth, and would thus cease to be human as the term had previously been known. “Pain appeared at the thought of a new species of men born in lunar gravity,” brooded Norman Mailer, and he was far from alone with this lament. Italian author Alberto Moravia, best known for his postwar novel The Conformist, attended the Apollo 11 launch, had at least one dinner with Mailer where they discussed the philosophical implications of Apollo, and wrote about his experience in McCall’s.59 He took a similar slant as Arendt when it came to the humanity of the astronauts: “One does not travel, survive, or dwell in space without surrendering one’s humanity, first and foremost renouncing the one characteristic that distinguishes man—that is, speech.” Like Arendt, Moravia distinguished between speech as an expression of feeling and thus meaningful in human terms, and the communication of astronauts, which consisted largely of the transmission of technical information stripped of any relation to human emotion. “Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins communicated but they did not express themselves,” wrote Moravia. This did not necessarily mean they were insensitive men—rather, “The 59 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 465. Mailer briefly mentioned a meal with Moravia the night before the launch in one of his notebooks. “Moravia: It is all philosophy,” he wrote of the meeting. See Red-Brown notebook, Folder 95.1 Of a Fire on the Moon Handwritten Notes, Box 95, Mailer Papers. 139 astronauts spoke in figures, formulas, abbreviations, and acronyms precisely because they were not men shut up in a spaceship speeding toward the moon,” he believed, “but astronauts.” To his thinking, it was the artificial environment and the necessity of a techno-jargon language that stripped the astronauts of their humanity. And Moravia, like nearly all of the critics discussed so far, extended this analysis of the spacemen to the larger American society that sent them into space. “With the excuse of greater comfort,” he wrote of the people he encountered during his visit to Florida, “the American tends increasingly to live in an artificial world, which, to use technical jargon, is a sort of simulation chamber of that supreme and absolute artifice that is life in outer space.”60 Other critics expanded Moravia’s concerns to more directly address the humanness of long-term space travelers. Even if humans were able to colonize the moon or Mars, argued René Dubos, the settlers “would not long retain their humanness, because they would be deprived of those stimuli which only earth can provide.” This was especially true for longer journeys into space. Considering the hopes of some space dreamers to ultimately fly to Alpha Centauri, the next closest solar system to our own, Oriana Fallaci pointed out that even under the most hopeful of circumstances the trip would still take ten thousand years, or three hundred generations. Though it might be possible to build a ship that would last ten thousand years, “who can be sure that the three-hundredth generation will have souls like ours?” she wondered. “Who can be sure that they will have souls at all, any kind of soul? Here was the paradox: we knew a heap 60 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 465; Alberto Moravia, “Reflections on the Moon,” McCall’s, January 1970, 43, 109. 140 of things about the cosmos, about the distant worlds, and we knew nothing about that little world at our elbow, that world called mind.”61 For those who believed in the frontier narrative of American history, that the confrontation with nature (and Indians) built character, fostered opportunity, and shaped the American identity, space might have offered a new frontier of sorts, but it was fundamentally different than the terrestrial frontier. In this celestial frontier, given the overwhelming hostility of space outside of artificial capsules, the explorer was unlikely to ever encounter anything directly that was not of his or her own making. That is, the artificial environment necessary for space exploration that so many feared was dehumanizing life even on Earth would in fact become all-encompassing for the space traveler, in that he or she could never leave it without ultimately (or more likely, instantly) dying. In this case, the space traveler’s whole experience would be shaped entirely by an artificial mechanized environment crafted by human (or mechanical) hands. If, as Arendt argued, “the earth is the very quintessence of the human condition,” would these space travelers then still remain human? This was the end result of the technological society that Arendt and so many others feared, and it was symbolized nowhere better than in the exploration of space. If, as the proponents of technology argued, cultural values would have to continually adjust to scientific and technological realities, then culture itself would become meaningless. Since culture is a primary factor in what makes humans human, then their very humanity might be threatened by technology, a future that many already feared was coming true via the space program. 61 Dubos, The God Within, 38; Fallaci, If the Sun Dies, 269-70. 141 Given the limited nature of space exploration in the Apollo era and for the foreseeable future, the evolution of a new form of human being in space was not a likely occurrence. But then again, the meaning of Apollo was not about humanity’s future in space, but its future on Earth, and in this sense the meaning of Apollo for the future of humanity was important, for it symbolized like nothing else the direction in which America’s technological society seemed to be heading. Just as optimists like Buckminster Fuller and Wernher von Braun looked to space technology for improving life on Earth, critics saw in these same technologies clear signs of a potential catastrophe for the human condition, and sought to spark debate over whether such advancements should be blindly adopted without seriously considering their possible downsides in terms both material and spiritual. Ultimately, one’s view of space exploration’s impact on the nature of humanity depended on which aspect of space flight one chose to focus on, the artificial environment and the overwhelming mechanization required to survive in space, or the human being in the midst of it all; whether one saw the astronauts like New Left radical Peter Collier, who when looking at their mirrored visors could see only the reflections of the desolate moon and the high technology of the lunar lander, or whether one could see beneath the mask to empathize with the human being inside.62 The most vociferous critics could not see beyond the mechanization, while the most ardent supporters and technological visionaries refused to distinguish between the human and the machine he was now a part of at all. 62 Peter Collier, “Apollo 11: The Time Machine,” Ramparts, October 1969, 56. 142 The vast majority of the public had little problem recognizing the human aspect and reveling in the human achievement, including even many of those who were critical of the warped priorities that led to Apollo in the first place. But that does not mean their perspectives were not affected by the artificial environments and high technology of Apollo. As we will see, many Americans had begun to look somewhat warily on their increasingly technologized world by the end of the Apollo era—perhaps not so cynically and apocalyptically as the space critics discussed here, but with a clearly growing unease about the dangers of rampant technology, and the beginnings of a new understanding of “progress” in which hurling people into space was neither the pinnacle of achievement promoted by space advocates nor the dire threat seen by the Mumfords of the world, but rather something of an irrelevance to the new values emerging in the larger culture of the 1970s. Indeed, the questions introduced in this chapter—is it human nature to literally explore new physical terrains? What is the relationship between humans and the Earth? How might these explorations and the technology that made them possible affect American culture and even the human being itself?—were not just limited to conversations among intellectuals, but would come to profoundly affect the course of American culture in the 1970s. 143 Chapter 4 The Thunder of Apollo: The Moon and the American Century It was a basic law of earthly physics that made the greatest impression on those who gathered at Cape Kennedy to watch Apollo rocket launches. It was not so much the advanced science behind the feat, the abstract theories made concrete through engineering that allowed a rocket the length of a football field to escape Earth’s gravity and deliver three men to the moon. That was impressive, of course, but what struck the people congregated around the launching grounds most forcibly was the simple discrepancy between the speeds of light and sound on the Earth’s surface. Because of the torrent of flame that erupted from the base of a Saturn V rocket as its six million pounds struggled to defeat the tug of gravity—and because if things went terribly wrong the rocket could explode with a force equivalent to a million pounds of TNT—no human being could be within three and a half miles of the rocket at lift off, whether flight control, the press, or the hundreds of thousands of tourists and VIPs that attended every Apollo launching. At this distance, observers were able to see the launch a full fifteen seconds before they heard, and felt, the massive roar, giving them an almost surreal view of the most explosive burst of fire this side of an atomic blast propelling the sluggish rise of the behemoth, all in silence for a good quarter-minute. It was the moment the force hit them, not just in their ears but through their entire body, that observers tended to recall most vividly. Covering the first Saturn V test run in 1967 from his brand new mobile broadcast studio, Walter Cronkite, a veteran space chronicler, was unprepared for the force 144 generated by the new rocket. Startled by the onslaught of boom and rumbling, and believing his booth was on the verge of imploding from the vibration, Cronkite and his crew jumped up to grab the plate-glass window that threatened to fall from its frame, holding it in place as he continued to broadcast, while in another nearby building flight control technicians found themselves coated with a fine layer of plaster dust that had been jarred loose from the ceiling.1 Watching the Apollo 8 liftoff a year later, author Anne Morrow Lindbergh was even less prepared for the impact than was Cronkite. She marveled as the rocket began its rise in a silence punctuated only by sporadic flight control updates from the P.A. system and nearby car radios and the astonished “ooohs” and “ahhhs” of the crowd. Then the sound struck her, interrupting her dreamlike appreciation of the wafting rocket with “a shattering roar of explosions, a trip hammer over one’s head, under one’s feet, through one’s body”: The earth shakes; cars rattle; vibrations beat in the chest. A roll of thunder, prolonged, prolonged, prolonged. I drop the binoculars and put my hands to my ears, holding my head to keep it steady. My throat tightens—am I going to cry?—my eyes are fixed on the rocket, mesmerized by its slow ascent. The foreground is now full of birds; a great flock of ducks, herons, small birds, rise pell-mell from the marshes at the noise. Fluttering in alarm and confusion, they scatter in all directions as if it were the end of the world.2 Norman Mailer described similar sensations upon witnessing the Apollo 11 liftoff. He, too, had been entranced by the soundless deluge of fire that began to slowly lift the rocket into the air. Then the full force of the eruption hit him, and he found himself exclaiming, “Oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God!” as his viscera continued to tremble from the 1 New York Times, 10 November 1967, 32. 2 Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Earth Shine (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1969), 21-22. 145 sustained blast that washed over the land for miles around the launch pad. Although Mailer had been skeptical that the launch would live up to all the hype, from the moment the first shot of flame erupted from the base of the rocket he understood that he “never had to worry again about whether the experience would be appropriate to his measure.” He duly recounted his experience to the readers of Life, reaching the remarkable conclusion that with Apollo, “man now had something with which to speak to God.”3 Lindbergh and Mailer—and in his own way, Cronkite—conveyed well the powerful experience of attending an Apollo launch, an intensely emotional moment for those lucky enough to witness it firsthand, and an encounter that rarely failed to earn NASA praise for the beauty and nobility of its enterprise. Indeed, NASA had no better public relations tool than its launchings. No one who witnessed an Apollo launch, not even the most hardened cynics who had had nary a good word for the endeavor since its inception, walked away unimpressed and without reconsidering the value of moon exploration. Even Kurt Vonnegut, among the fiercest critics of the space program, found himself in the VIP section at the Cape to watch the final Apollo launch. He had been convinced to attend by his brother, who believed seeing it in person—and more important, hearing and feeling it—might persuade him that it was worth all the money, and by “a Swedish journalist at a cocktail party in New York [who] told us he cried at every launch.” Vonnegut described the spectacle, the only nighttime Apollo launch, as “a thunderingly beautiful experience—voluptuous, sexual, dangerous.” Like everyone else, 3 Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970), 99-100. Mailer’s description originally appeared in Life, 29 August 1969, 25-40. 146 previous televised launches had left him unprepared for the sheer power of the liftoff. He compared the live experience to a mass orgasm felt by those within the radius of the rocket’s thunder: “And it’s an extremely satisfying orgasm. I mean, you are shaking and you do take leave of your senses. And there’s something about that sound that comes shuddering across the water. . . . it does get you in the guts.” In fact, Vonnegut came to believe that the launches themselves were the only redeeming aspect of the Apollo program. Riding home from the airport afterwards, he fell into conversation with his cab driver, who agreed that the exploration of space could wait until it was more affordable. “He was no fool,” wrote Vonnegut, “he knew there was nothing on the moon. If NASA were to give him a trip to Cape Kennedy and a pass to the VIP section or the press section for the next launch, he’d find out where the real goodies are.”4 What power these technicians had harnessed with their rockets! Norman Mailer was far from alone in wondering whether Apollo represented the grandest step humanity had yet taken toward a confrontation with the divine. “God, we’ve caught you by the coat tails!” exclaimed an excited Ray Bradbury to journalist Oriana Fallaci as he admitted the blasphemies a sublime rocket launch inspired; “For one minute it seemed as if I saw men gambling with God,” Fallaci wrote after witnessing a launch of her own.5 But to what end was humanity developing this technology that would allow it to venture into a realm that previously had been the terrain of the gods? 4 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (Opinions) (New York: Delta, 1974), 77-78, 269- 71. 5 Oriana Fallaci, If the Sun Dies (London: Collins, St. James Place, 1967), 25, 358. 147 A quarter-century prior to Apollo, the United States had unlocked the power of the atom to unleash the most enormous explosions ever generated by human hands. As a spectacle, an Apollo liftoff was on par with an atomic blast—if not in kilotons of force, at least in terms of the awe it inspired among witnesses. Indeed, with atomic testing well out of sight by the late 1960s (if not necessarily fully out of mind), the widely accessible Saturn rocket launches were by far the most powerful exhibition of force the vast majority of Americans could ever witness firsthand. And since space launches were generally considered a peaceable endeavor, they allowed for a much less troubling appreciation of the technology, skill, and ambition involved than did nuclear weapons. In fact, the ingenuity on display in Apollo and its ostensibly peaceful intentions sparked a wave of optimism among its backers who believed it could have profound effects on human affairs—morally, spiritually, and geopolitically. If we can go to the moon, supporters enthused, we can do anything. Might then this remarkable achievement initiate a new period of international goodwill and cooperation? Did it, as humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz argued, “clearly herald the beginning of a new stage in human history: the transformation of the calendar of time from an era of B.C. (before Christ) and A.C. (after Christ) to an era of B.S. (before space) and A.S. (after space)”? Was 1969 the new “Year One (A.S.)”?6 Though even the most avid of supporters tended to recognize that Apollo alone could not deliver such drastic changes in world affairs, enthusiasts showed a pronounced 6 Paul Kurtz, “The Year One (A.S.), The Humanist, Vol. xxix, No. 2 (March-April, 1969), 1-2. It is unclear whether anyone other than Kurtz regularly used the phrase “A.C.” to describe the era more commonly known as “A.D.” 148 tendency to shift their attention away from the sins of the past to focus on the more hopeful future they believed could be created by an aggressive program of space exploration, and to present the venture as a primary means toward avoiding the violent conflicts that had dogged humanity since time immemorial and that had reached unprecedented ferocity in the twentieth century. The influential space booster Arthur C. Clarke expressed such hopes when he argued that the leap into space “may do much to reduce the tensions of our age by turning men’s minds outward and away from their tribal conflicts. It may well be that only [by] acquiring this new sense of boundless frontiers will the world break free from the ancient cycle of war and peace.”7 Perhaps. But looking across the rubble of the twentieth century—the profound developments in technological killing, the gas warfare, icily efficient death camps, firebombings, atomic and hydrogen weapons, napalm, technocratic totalitarianisms—a number of critics could not help but wonder whether it really was a good thing for humanity to hold in its grasp the power and advanced technology that could take it to the moon and back. After all, earlier enthusiasts had invested similar utopian hopes in both the airplane and the splitting of the atom—dreams that the Second World War and subsequent arms race dashed forever.8 As a result, beneath the public revelry ran currents of unease over what the launch, initiated under chauvinistic Cold War aegis and flaunting the dizzying heights to which technological power had ascended in the twentieth century, augured for the world. 7 Arthur C. Clarke, The Promise of Space (New York: Pyramid Books, 1970), 352. 8 On Americans’ utopian hopes for the airplane, see Joseph J. Corn, The Winged Gospel: America’s Love Affair with the Airplane, 1900-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); on the promise of atomic energy, see Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 149 Paul Goodman, for one, actually shared Arthur C. Clarke’s enthusiasm. “I myself believe that space exploration is a great human adventure,” he wrote, “with immense esthetic and moral benefits, whatever the scientific or utilitarian uses.” But Goodman was much more conflicted about the ramifications of this large state-sponsored display of industrial and technological might, refusing to ignore the militaristic and technocratic underpinnings of Apollo, and unwilling to simply accept the idea that the ability to launch unprecedented tonnage into space could have only positive results. Yes, exploration “must be pursued,” Goodman truly believed. “Yet the context and auspices have been such that perhaps it would be better if it were not pursued.”9 Although Goodman ultimately supported Apollo, his concerns were widely echoed among critics who refused to accept the accomplishment as a significant break from the past, and who looked instead to the lessons of the twentieth century—especially the three decades since the outbreak of World War II—to offer some clues about what Apollo might mean for the future of the United States and the world. Supporters believed the moon represented the future—a positive outlet toward which to direct human energy and creativity, a new frontier that would inspire the next great renaissance in human thought and culture, and the first concrete step toward the good space-faring civilization of the future. Critics, on the other hand, offered a very different take on the same theme. Given humanity’s recent track record with violence and advanced technology, they argued, the moon might very well represent a literal future for the Earth—a dead ball of rock floating in space, an entire planet of Hiroshimas, Dresdens, napalmed Vietnamese 9 Paul Goodman, New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative (New York, Vintage, 1971), 9. 150 jungle, and, by the late 1960s, a good number of America’s own inner cities. In this view, the space program was at best a diversion from dealing with the real problems of human brutality, at worst a propagation at scales never before seen of the same destructive impulses that threatened to turn the bountiful Earth into the dead moon. “Here men first set foot outside the earth on their way to the far stars,” radical journalist I.F. Stone suggested the first plaque placed on the moon read. “They speak of peace but wherever they go they bring war. The rockets on which they arrived were developed to carry instant death and can within a few minutes turn their green planet into another lifeless moon. . . . Let the rest of the universe beware.”10 “Was the Space Program admirable or abominable?” wondered Norman Mailer in the recurring theme of his Apollo book. “Did God voyage out for NASA, or was the Devil our line of sight to the stars?”11 This question will likewise recur throughout this chapter, though a little less metaphorically than in Mailer: what values would humanity take with it into space, and more important, what were the potential consequences of its mounting technological power for Earth? Like everyone else who watched the Apollo 11 liftoff, Newsweek General Editor Joseph Morgenstern was stunned by its raw power, and struggled to wrap his mind around its implications. He found himself both weeping and marveling at the thought that the high technology showcased by Apollo, like the rocket itself as it was propelled upward by its flames, was unstoppable. “What are we to make of power that can do such things to people?” he wondered. “What will we make of it?”12 10 I.F. Stone quoted in Donald A, Wollheim, ed., Men on the Moon (New York: Ace Publishing Corporation, 1969), 189. 11 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 80. 12 Newsweek, 28 July 1969, 26A. 151 If the previous chapter explored philosophical debates over the impact of space exploration on humanity’s stature in the universe, in this chapter, a number of America’s sharpest minds will confront much more tangible (and more immediately terrifying) concerns—fears based not on speculation over a potential machine-dominated future, but on a very real, very disturbing recent past infused with memories of butchery and mass murder via the very kinds of techniques and technologies that were now reaching a pinnacle in the Apollo program. II. On the eve of the Apollo 11 launch, CBS reporter Eric Sevareid offered a commentary on the hopes and fears the forthcoming moon landing had aroused. “The great debate about America in space is an exercise in freedom, the freedom of choice,” he told viewers. “How shall a people use its excess energy and resources?” Would the energy poured into the exploration of space serve as “a moral substitute for war that could give the quarrelling human race some sense of common identity, of brotherhood,” or was it more likely that “the divine spark in man will consume him in flames, that the big brain will prove our ultimate flaw . . . that the metal plaque Armstrong and Aldrin expect to place on the moon will become man’s epitaph?” Sevareid’s basic questions, though often lost beneath the immediate excitement of the event, summed up well the 152 competing strains of thought between those supporters and critics who pondered the potential beneficial and pernicious effects of the jump into space.13 That the space program was intimately linked to twentieth-century warfare was widely recognized and discussed in the Apollo era. “Ironies Abound in Space Effort,” Max Lerner declared in a column written during the Apollo 11 flight, and of all the “paradoxes and ironies” he discussed, the outwardly peaceful mission’s roots in the most terrifying of modern war technologies was the greatest. “Americans have a passion now for sterilizing everything that goes to the moon or comes from it,” wrote Lerner, referring to the widespread fear that the astronauts might return carrying deadly moon germs. “But the contamination was original, it was there from the start.” The rocket that shot three Americans to the moon, after all, was a direct descendent of the German V-2 ballistic missiles that terrorized Britons during the Second World War, developed into moon rockets in the postwar United States courtesy of a team containing a number of German rocketry experts and led by a former Nazi, Wernher von Braun. Whatever visions von Braun possessed of the future peaceful exploration of space, he could only progress toward his dream through the compromise of building terror rockets for a murderous totalitarian regime. Likewise, however much space advocates yearned for a benevolent, non-chauvinistic exploration program, most were willing to accept that the initial steps into space could only be taken for militaristic reasons in the context of a troubling—at times terrifying—Cold War. “Whatever the bright side of the moon may be,” lamented Lerner, “the darker side—the power side— 13 CBS News, 10:56:20PM EDT 7/20/69 (Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., 1969), 10-11. 153 says that we are all hopelessly comingled, the bad and the good, and that Hitler’s fierce desire to destroy England helped the three U.S. astronauts in time to aim at the moon.”14 Though the most hopeful space supporters tended to focus their sights and rhetoric on the future, more ambivalent observers like Lerner could not ignore the program’s martial roots. After all, simply declaring the mission “for all mankind” meant little compared to the lessons learned over the prior three decades about humanity’s capacity for evil and destruction. Add to these lessons the enormous power displayed in the space program’s technologies, and a good number of critics were not so quick to assume that it would inevitably bring forth a better future. One object of consternation was Wernher von Braun himself. In hindsight, it is surprising that he was not a more prominent target of critics. Even radicals, for whom the erstwhile Nazi might seem like an obvious target, generally ignored him in their attacks on the space program. Much of this restraint can be traced to the previous decade, when von Braun emerged as a national hero after he and his team of engineers in Huntsville received much of the public credit for jump-starting the U.S. space program in the wake of Sputnik. In addition, revelations that von Braun had been an officer in the German SS and that he was at least complicit, if not actively involved in the deaths of tens of thousands of slave laborers forced to work on his rockets did not gain traction until well after the Apollo era.15 14 Washington D.C. Evening Star, 23 July 1969, reprinted in NASA Current News (hereafter NCN), 24 July 1969, 35, NASA History Office, Washington, D.C. (hereafter NHO). 15 Michael J. Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 2007), 404-409, 428-29, 449, 474-475. 154 Still, there were rumblings of dismay over von Braun’s role in Apollo. The problem was not so much that this ex-Nazi whose rockets pounded England now held such a prominent position at NASA—the American public had long since forgiven the staunch cold warrior for his known wartime activities. Rather, to critics wary of the space program, he stood as a symbol for the potential dark side of space exploration, the “power side,” as Max Lerner described it, especially in the eyes of two authors whose lives had been profoundly impacted by their experiences in the Second World War: Oriana Fallaci and Norman Mailer. Though initially wary of the space venture, Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci came away from several visits to NASA facilities in 1964 believing that it was necessary for Americans to go to the moon. Her account of her experiences, If the Sun Dies, first published in 1965 and translated to English two years later, was a deeply personal story that did not simply chronicle her interviews with astronauts and other NASA personnel, but more often reflected her own intimate impressions of space exploration and the new era it seemed to inaugurate. Indeed, as a work punctuated frequently by Fallaci’s own musings, digressions, memories and fantasies, If the Sun Dies was much less straightforward reportage than an early, overlooked example of what would come to be known as the “New Journalism.” “This book,” she explained in a prefatory note to the reader, “is neither a novel nor reportage. It is the diary of a journey inside my conscience and my memory.” In fact, Fallaci made it clear that “I do not believe in objectivity. . . . 155 Within conscience or memory, objectivity cannot exist. A true portrait of a man cannot be achieved without the beliefs, the feelings, the tastes of the painter.”16 Fallaci’s account is not of much use, then, as a source for direct quotes, which she often embellished, transformed, or even fabricated altogether, nor as a reliable factual guide to NASA as it existed in the mid-1960s. She admitted as much. At the same time, she steadfastly defended the ultimate truth of what she wrote—at least the truth as she perceived it. “Who remembers whether a certain dialogue took place near a rocket or a cheese sandwich?” she asked, and did such minutiae really matter? “I would like to ask . . . the men of this book to forgive me if I put them in one chapter instead of another, in one situation instead of another,” she pleaded. “To my total lack of objectivity these liberties make them truer than the truth.”17 Nowhere was her blatant subjectivity in the search for the larger truth more on display than in her interview with Wernher von Braun. Fallaci structured If the Sun Dies as an extended letter to her father in Italy, who was repulsed by the idea of space exploration. “What’s the use of going to the Moon?” he would ask her. “Men will always have the same problems. On the Moon or on the 16 Oriana Fallaci, If the Sun Dies (London: Collins, St. James Place, 1967), 7. Although it was widely read in NASA circles and Fallaci remained friends with several astronauts into the 1970s, with its artistic license and frequent digressions into seemingly irrelevant topics, If the Sun Dies initially confounded space enthusiasts and NASA personnel. Science writer Willy Ley, for example, in his New York Times review disapproved of Fallaci’s “pronounced tendency to veer off the theme and to ask irrelevant questions” and the book’s lack of “explanations and factual statements.” Ley went so far as to suggest that men avoid the book in favor of “something more concise and informative,” and leave If the Sun Dies to women readers, who may or may not be able to understand it better. See New York Times, 5 February 1967, BR 25. Neil Armstrong, whom Fallaci interviewed for the book, remembered her simply as a “ne’er do well” who fabricated his quotes and then proceeded to spread rumors in the German press that he was an atheist. See Interview, Neil Armstrong with Robert Sherrod, 23 September 1971, Folder “Interviews, Abbey- Callaghan,” Box “Robert Sherrod Apollo Collection, Interviews, Abbey-Newall,” NHO, 5. 17 Fallaci, If the Sun Dies, 7-8. 156 Earth; they will always be sick and wicked.”18 Fallaci’s father had been a partisan during the war, fighting Italian fascists and the occupying Germans—no doubt a major factor in his cynicism over the idea of space as any sort of panacea for the problems of human evil and war—and Fallaci frequently juxtaposed her thoughts on the space program with memories of her family’s wartime deprivations and suffering. In fact, Fallaci spent nearly as much time looking backwards at her childhood as she did speculating on the future in space, and this conflict between heeding the lessons of the past and embracing the Space Age jump into an unknown future consumed her throughout If the Sun Dies. Fallaci’s flashbacks were typically stimulated by some occurrence in her interviews—a certain word, a scenario, or, in her most vivid and painful recollection, a telltale odor emanating from Wernher von Braun. Fallaci visited von Braun at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where he directed the assembly of Apollo’s Saturn V rockets. Initially skeptical of von Braun and his Nazi past, she was surprised to find her hostility giving way to fascination, even respect. “It astounds me,” she conceded. “For half an hour I made myself dislike him. To my utter astonishment I found myself feeling just the opposite.”19 Von Braun won over Fallaci with his eloquent defense of space exploration, with visions of humans walking on Mars as early as the mid-1980s, and with his undying faith in the importance of journeying outward into the universe. “For a second,” she admitted, “I couldn’t have cared less that this was the man who gave Hitler the V2. Forgetful, fascinated, I gave reign to childish curiosity, puerile enthusiasm. . . . in thirty years I’d still be alive and I’d have seen the first journey to 18 Fallaci, If the Sun Dies, 15. 19 Ibid., 219-220. 157 Mars. . . . So what did I care about the past, about past wrongs and errors? What did I care, since the future held the promise of such an amazing dream?”20 Fallaci’s admiration was short-lived, however, for her mind was abruptly jolted back to the German occupation of her childhood Florence in a flashback set in motion by a particular lemon-tinged odor coming from von Braun. At first, Fallaci could not place the scent in her memory, recognizing only that “it was a fragrance of long ago.” Then suddenly, in the middle of a long von Braun appraisal of the United States’ progress in space vis-à-vis the Russians, it came to her where she had last encountered the smell. “That was it,” she realized. “That day in July. Those German soldiers. In the deserted convent where we were hiding. That was when I’d smelled that scent of lemon. They all washed with a disinfectant soap that smelled like lemon.” That day in July, Fallaci’s family had been hiding with two Yugoslav partisans in an abandoned convent when German soldiers showed up at the door. Her father fled, the Yugoslavs hid in a well, and Fallaci and her mother hastily burned a stack of anti-fascist newspapers while the Germans kicked in door after door on their way through the building. When the soldiers finally reached the room where Fallaci and her mother were hiding, Fallaci got her first whiff of the lemon stench that she would forever associate with the Germans and their Italian collaborators.21 For the rest of the interview, Fallaci alternated paragraph by paragraph between von Braun’s monologues on space exploration and her own recollections of her first encounter with the lemon-smelling Germans. Von Braun’s lengthy discourse on the 20 Fallaci, If the Sun Dies, 235. 21 Ibid., 240. 158 existence of God, for example, was interrupted by Fallaci’s continuing story of the German soldiers, who by now had found the Yugoslavs hidden in the well. “As long as I live, Dr. von Braun,” she wrote, “I shall never never [sic] forget the way those Germans laughed when they saw the two Yugoslavians. . . . The two Yugoslavians believed in God too, Dr. von Braun. . . . But God didn’t stop those Germans who aimed their tommy-guns down the well and ordered the Yugoslavians to come out. . . . God didn’t hear [the Yugoslavians] and the Germans took them away, together with their scent of lemon.” On that note, von Braun reentered Fallaci’s narrative, this time ironically in the midst of explaining his understanding of ethics. “We should never remember what’s past,” Fallaci concluded, “but there’s always a scent of lemon to bring it back to us.”22 Fallaci found her encounter with von Braun so disturbing, such an unwanted intrusion of the past on her thinking of the future, that she immediately fled Huntsville. “When you’re oppressed by a memory,” she wrote, “the only thing to do is to get a change of air and I didn’t feel like staying on in Huntsville”—a town with a significant population of German rocket technicians, including a number of bona fide ex-Nazis— “hearing other voices as abrupt as the sound of a whiplash, as curt as the sound of shots, the nightmare of so many years ago”—the nightmare sparked by the faint scent of lemon she encountered on the otherwise charming Wernher von Braun. And this was the larger truth revealed by Fallaci’s metaphorical lemon—to understand the story of space exploration, one had to understand von Braun, and to understand von Braun, one could not simply forget that most terrible cataclysm at the heart of the twentieth century. “This 22 Fallaci, If the Sun Dies, 243-244. 159 was the story we would have to tell the Martians and Venusians,” Fallaci lamented, “when, filled with admiration, they watched us coming down in our spacecraft and asked us: ‘But how did you do it? How did it happen?’”23 If Fallaci hinted that its Nazi roots had left an indelible stain on the American space program, Norman Mailer went a step further, using von Braun to suggest that the totalitarianism he represented might in fact be the very essence of the enterprise. Mailer first met von Braun at a pre-Apollo 11 banquet in Florida where von Braun was the featured speaker. To Mailer, von Braun was the public face of the space program, the only non-astronaut most Americans had ever heard of—“the real engineer, the spiritual leader, the inventor, the force, the philosopher, the genius! of America’s space program. Such is the legend in the street.” Yet despite all this, “the evocation of his name is attractive and repellent at once,” since no one entirely forgot his complicity in the Nazi regime with his work on the V-2s. It was this combination of hero and villain in von Braun which Mailer believed made him a glamorous figure to Americans. On the one hand, he more than anyone was associated with the immense power of the Saturn rocket that made such a great impression on the public. On the other hand, Mailer detected a subtle attraction to the darker side of von Braun that should have been horrifying—his Nazi past. “Who could begin to measure the secret appeal of the Nazis by now?” he wondered. In a late-1960s America rife with social discord, Americans of all political persuasions were calling for 23 Fallaci, If the Sun Dies, 245, 222. Von Braun was not amused with the resulting book. “She makes a living tearing people apart,” he later complained, dismissing her interpretation of his interview. See Interview, Wernher von Braun with Robert Sherrod, 19 November 1969, Folder “Interviews: Shepherd- Young,” Box “Robert Sherrod Apollo Collection, Interviews, O’Donnell thru Young,” NHO. 160 law and order. But “fantasies of order had to give way to lusts for new order,” Mailer speculated. “Order was restraint, but new order would call for a mighty vault, an exceptional effort, a unifying dream. Was the conquest of space then a potential chariot of Satan, the unique and grand avenue for the new totalitarian?”24 Von Braun “had lived his life with the obsession of reaching other planets,” Mailer pointed out. “It is no small impulse. Immediate reflection must tell you that a man who wishes to reach heavenly bodies is an agent of the Lord or Mephisto.” It was Mailer’s favorite unresolved dichotomy of the space program’s essential character—good or evil? For God or the Devil?—embodied in the vision of one particularly fascinating man. What did the presence of a similar impulse in those Americans cheering the moonshot reveal about their motivations and the quality of the endeavor? Von Braun’s appearance at the banquet led Mailer to mull over the connections. Nazism, he pointed out, had been a peculiar combination of two usually hostile philosophies, an anti- modernist primitivism that nonetheless embraced the most rationalist of arrangements to murder millions via sophisticated armaments and orderly gas chambers alike. Might there have been something analogous at work with Apollo, a similar mixture of crude romanticism and advanced technological rationalism that led Americans outward toward the stars? Space supporters, we have seen, took it as a given that there was something primal in human nature that made space exploration all but inevitable— indeed that humanity would suffocate on its own planet if it denied itself the inherent impulse to escape. Yet in order to fulfill this primitive urge, America had to develop the 24 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 65, 67. 161 most modern of technologies under the aegis of its space program. Nazism, too, had been predicated on the idea that “civilization will stifle man unless man is delivered onto a new plane,” Mailer concluded. “Was space its amputated limb,” he wondered, “its philosophy in orbit?”25 What a jaundiced view of the space program! cried defenders in response to Mailer’s over-the-top equation of NASA with Nazism. Von Braun himself was even less thrilled with Mailer’s depiction of him, which was read by millions in Life, than he had been with Fallaci’s more obscure account. “To think that man is supposed to be a great artist,” he complained. “I disliked his references to my part in Nazi Germany. It was a cheap method of hitting a guy. I have a certain political vulnerability.”26 To Apollo enthusiasts, the past was the past, and von Braun had proved his loyalty to America by helping it win the space race. Far from sullying the program, he had actually helped propel the nation and the world toward a brighter future—a future with space exploration at its very heart. Besides, Nazism itself was a concern of the past, not an issue Americans gave much thought to in the Apollo era. “Those Nazis we knew and loved to hate in the home-front propaganda of World War II seem so far off now,” wrote Richard Lingeman in an unrelated New York Times book review from this period, “except to those with long bitter memories.”27 If space proponents of all stripes shared one common characteristic, it was that they tended not to dwell on “long bitter memories,” but were more apt to focus their 25 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 73, 80-81. 26 Interview, Wernher von Braun with Robert Sherrod, 19 November 1969. 27 New York Times, 2 August 1971, 20. 162 attention on the future they hoped space exploration might usher in. Taken to an extreme, this future-oriented mindset could verge on a dismissal of—even hostility toward—the past that critics like Mailer insisted was relevant to developing a meaningful understanding of the space program. It was just such an excessive future-oriented perspective that Oriana Fallaci encountered numerous times during her visits to NASA— a major theme of If the Sun Dies. Although Fallaci would mock, misquote, and caricature these champions of the future, they would ultimately profoundly impact her thinking on the value of America’s space endeavor. III. Wernher von Braun had ended his interview by telling Fallaci, “the future is always interesting”—clearly more so than the past. This was a common theme among the larger NASA culture, as Fallaci discovered when she interviewed Herb Rosen, a NASA public relations official in Los Angeles with a “wicked-looking face . . . icy eyes [and] toothbrush moustache, that were enough to frighten a Nazi.” In Fallaci’s caricature, Rosen was the consummate technocrat, his primary concern in life being the achievement of optimal efficiency in all human affairs. He fetishized the powerful computers at NASA’s disposal, gushing over one particularly advanced machine: “He’s so much more intelligent than we that if he had a tongue and some saliva he’d spit in our faces as soon as look at us.”28 28 Fallaci, If the Sun Dies, 38-39. 163 Trying to play along, Fallaci suggested the computer might be used to back up the holdings of the Library of Congress, so that time would not lay waste to the history of human riches. “Riches?” Rosen replied. “Nonsense, you mean.” To Rosen’s future- oriented mind, Shakespeare, the Parthenon, the Sistine Chapel “or anything else that came before technology” was useless compared to the information stored in a single physics textbook. But don’t worry, he assured her, “technology is ready to wipe it all out: . . . laws, systems, cities. Do you really think we can tolerate such ghosts much longer? . . . We’ve had enough of those madmen who want to turn the Earth into a museum.” Fallaci was stunned when Rosen suggested that “New York has to be wiped out” and rebuilt in accordance with new technology, as must San Francisco, Paris, and Florence . . . Florence—Fallaci’s home. It too must be wiped out, explained Rosen. “It’s not rational. . . . You surely don’t want to hang on to those narrow streets and crooked houses? New streets. New Houses. New churches. That’s what we need. Charges of dynamite.”29 Charges of dynamite—like von Braun’s lemon soap, it was enough to send Fallaci’s mind veering back to a night in August 1944 when, with Florence on the verge of being liberated, German soldiers blew up the bridge of Santa Trinita—“the most beautiful bridge in the world”—along with most of the other historic bridges in the city. Was Rosen’s mindset any different, wondered Fallaci, any less destructive toward the lessons and the treasures of the past? Did his thinking represent the “mighty vault,” the totalitarian “new order” that Mailer would detect in the space program? “You’re a fine 29 Fallaci, If the Sun Dies, 38-41. 164 fool,” Fallaci finally interrupted him. “You’re the one who’s a fool,” he replied. “You’re living in the past and you’re blind. I’m living in the future and looking far ahead.”30 Fallaci could hardly stomach Rosen or his ideas. Yet a similar theme emerged over dinner one night with a group of astronauts she considered friends, when she found herself embroiled in an argument over von Braun’s presence in the space program. “You know how it is,” she recalled to her father: “von Braun, Germany. Germany, Nazis. Nazis, Mussolini, Mussolini, you in prison. You in prison, hunger . . . and fear . . . and firing squads . . . and my dead, your dead, our dead.” It may have been a familiar litany to Fallaci and her father, but the astronauts with whom she was dining were offended. “What I don’t understand,” complained astronaut Dick Gordon, “is your hatred, your perpetual resentment. I got to know the Germans in Germany and they were really decent, really democratic.” “They were not, at that time,” countered Fallaci, but to no avail. “All right,” Gordon responded. “Maybe for us to understand what it was like we’d have to go back to the Civil War.” “The Civil War was the most atrocious, the most cruel civil war that there has ever been,” chipped in astronaut Roger Chaffee. Now it was Fallaci’s turn to be exasperated. What about the Spanish Civil War? she cried. “Haven’t you ever heard either of what happened in Poland, in Yugoslavia, in France, in Italy, in Germany, in places called Dachau, called Mathausen?” No, replied Chaffee, those certainly did not compare to the horrors of the U.S. Civil War.31 “You see, Father?” lamented Fallaci. “They live in a state of limbo, these men who will go to the Moon or to Mars, and they don’t even know what happened in Poland, 30 Fallaci, If the Sun Dies, 41-42. 31 Ibid., 395. 165 in Yugoslavia, in France, in Italy, in places called Mathausen, called Dachau, they don’t even know what the Spanish civil war was like, they don’t even know about hunger prisons fear firing squads hatred rancour the inability to use that stupid useless illogical coward word forgiveness.”32 Fallaci was clearly caricaturing the provincialism of these astronauts as well as the monstrous Herb Rosen, whose refusal to consider the influence of the past on the present and the future was offensive to someone to whom the past meant so much. Yet for all this, Fallaci ultimately found herself in sympathy with the space program, and even to some extent its hostility toward pre-Space Age history. Although she would never fully dismiss the importance of the past, the space program, like America itself, offered her a refreshing break from interminable old-world intrigues and allowed her to imagine a promising future no longer burdened by the tragedies that had thus far shaped the twentieth century. At one point in the narrative, Fallaci returned to Europe for a few months to work on various Continental assignments, including a story on Scandinavian monarchies. Nothing made her pine to return to the space story more. “The deeper I plunged into the out-of-date putrefied world of kings and queens,” she complained, “their idiotic dynastic problems, their grotesque privileges, the more I understood the people of Houston, Cape Kennedy, Downey: I needed them as a comfort, a salvation. Agreed, old Europe was still preoccupied with certain idiocies . . . but young nations are thinking about flying to Mars.”33 32 Fallaci, If the Sun Dies, 395-396. Lack of punctuation in original. 33 Ibid., 187-88. 166 Fallaci encountered—and tentatively embraced—the future-oriented perspective in its extreme form. Few space supporters were quite so eager as Herb Rosen to destroy all vestiges of pre-technological existence, nor as willing as the astronauts to forget troubling lessons of the past. In fact, a number of intellectual space advocates actively considered Apollo in its twentieth-century context. Yet even these more nuanced supporters tended to display a subtle form of future-oriented thinking when speculating on the meaning of Apollo, often presenting it as a major turning point in the thus-far troubled century. A number of proponents, in fact, saw Apollo as something of a redemption for the prior wickedness displayed by humanity in the twentieth century, a potential moral and psychological boost that might finally allow the nation and the world to exorcise the demons of recent history and move onward toward a better future. John Dos Passos, for example, in a pamphlet distributed overseas by the United States Information Agency, reflected on the meaning of the Apollo 8 flight. This event marked a turning point in history, he believed, not only because of the new perspective it offered on humans and their universe, but for the more immediate opportunity it accorded humanity to move beyond a century that had not spoken too well of human greatness. “In our century,” wrote Dos Passos: we have seen everything that is hideous in man come to the fore: obsessed leaders butchering helpless populations, the cowardice of the led, the shoddy self-interest, the easy hatreds that any buffoon can arouse who bellows out the slogans, public derision of everything mankind has learned through the centuries to consider decent and true; but now, all at once, like the blue and white stippled bright earth 167 the astronauts saw rise above the rim of the moon’s grisly skeleton, there emerges a fresh assertion of man’s spirit.34 Over the three decades prior to Apollo, Dos Passos argued, ever since the advent of atomic weaponry, humanity had lived with a fear that the powers unleashed by science and technology might accelerate beyond human control; that its striving for greatness without the moral maturity to handle the results would ultimately prove its undoing. But the day that three astronauts rode a rocket built on concentrated human ingenuity and power to the moon “was the day man proved his mastery over matter; the day he wiped out the unhappy prospects of Hiroshima.”35 Ayn Rand saw similar possibilities for redemption. Like so many others who attended the Apollo 11 launch, Rand had been overwhelmed by the awesome power on display. “This was not part of any normal experience,” she recalled, “and could not be integrated with anything.” Best of all, it had been accomplished by the too-often disparaged entity known as “man”—“not the product of inanimate nature, like some aurora borealis, nor of chance, nor of luck . . . it was unmistakably human—with ‘human,’ for once, meaning grandeur.” The four days between the Apollo 11 launch and the ultimate landing was “a period torn out of the world’s usual context, like a breathing spell with a sweep of clean air piercing mankind’s lethargic suffocation”: For thirty years or longer, the newspapers had featured nothing but disasters, catastrophes, betrayals, the shrinking stature of men, the sordid mess of a collapsing civilization; their voice had become a long, sustained whine, the megaphone of failure. . . . Now, for once, the newspapers were announcing a 34 John Dos Passos, “On the Way to a Moon Landing,” folder “SP—Space and Astronautics,” Box 2, Director’s Subject Files, 1968-1972, Records of the United States Information Agency, RG 306, National Archives at College Park, MD. 35 John Dos Passos, Century’s Ebb: The Thirteenth Chronicle (Boston: Gambit, 1975), 467. 168 human achievement, were reporting on a human triumph, were reminding us that man still exists and functions as man. The story of humanity in the twentieth century, believed Rand, had been a story of frustration—“the frustration of inarticulate desires, with no knowledge of the means to achieve them. In the sight and hearing of a crumbling world, Apollo 11 enacted the story of an audacious purpose, its execution, its triumph and the means that achieved it—the story and the demonstration of man’s highest potential.”36 Although Rand was speaking of redemption, her appraisal hinted at another common theme among those who, while cognizant of the troubled past, tried to find hope in Apollo: given humanity’s seemingly unlimited propensity for evil and atrocity, what if space exploration could serve as an outlet for its aggression and competitive instincts? Could a bold space program lessen the risk of future wars by channeling humanity’s violent tendencies into a beneficent and creative activity? Could it serve, as Eric Sevareid suggested in his televised musings, as a “moral substitute for war?” IV. That space exploration might serve as some sort of “moral substitute” or “alternative” to war was a common theme running through much Apollo discourse, both critical and supportive. Philosopher William James had developed the idea of a “moral equivalent of war” in the early twentieth century as a means to stave off future conflicts. James, although a pacifist, nevertheless believed that human societies needed the 36 Ayn Rand, “Apollo 11,” The Objectivist, September 1969, 4, 6, 10. 169 discipline, fortitude, and vitality that had historically been forged in war (and in the constant preparation for war otherwise known as “peacetime”). “Militarism,” he argued, “is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and human life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible.” The problem was that militarism almost invariably led to war, since there were no other outlets toward which to direct the energies it engendered. Since James believed human beings possessed an “innate pugnacity and . . . love of glory,” and that the “martial virtues” induced by militarism were “absolute and permanent goods,” simply urging the abolition of war without offering an alternative outlet for humanity’s aggression was a fool’s errand. “So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war,” he complained, “as a rule they do fail.” James’s proposal—his method to “inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper”—was the drafting of armies to fight not against external enemies, but against nature in the name of civic improvement. He envisioned large work armies engaged in constructive acts of mining, road-building, skyscraper construction, and other public projects that would benefit the nation, all while fostering the discipline and hardiness of the young as they entered manhood. Thus could future generations of men maintain their vigor while directing their natural passions toward constructive, rather than destructive ends.37 By the late 1960s, the civil endeavor of space exploration seemed to offer just this kind of “moral equivalent of war” toward which the United States could direct its 37 William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” The Moral Equivalent of War and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1971), 3-16. 170 tremendous energies and resources rather than an increasingly terrifying modern warfare. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, for example, rehashed James’s argument for the Space Age, expressing the hope that “space exploration safely absorbs man’s aggressive and competitive instincts,” since “those noble qualities of man—heroism, self-sacrifice, dedication, comradeship in a common cause—which are tragically brought out in war, are evoked in many phases of the space development.” Like James, she also believed “these qualities must continue to be aroused in some fashion, or man will cease to be all that man can be.”38 Wernher von Braun agreed, though in his hyper-masculine reformulation of James he inadvertently infantilized his beloved endeavor. “At last man has an outlet for his aggressive nature,” he gushed. “Unless you give a small boy an outlet to vent his energy and his sense of contest he’ll come home with black eyes. Then you can either chew him out and make a sissy of him or channel his energy into sport or skills. That’s the way it is with space.”39 Lindbergh and von Braun focused largely on space exploration as an outlet for humanity’s aggressive impulses. Others shifted the focus from the innate compulsions of the human animal to the expansionist tendencies of the modern military-industrial state, hoping that it, too, could be driven to divert its energies and resources away from war preparation and toward more beneficent ends. Socialist Michael Harrington, for example, believed that continued space exploration—even beyond the moon—was a worthwhile endeavor if it could serve as an “economic substitute for war.” Harrington hoped the war in Vietnam would soon come to an end and détente would begin to ease tensions with the 38 Lindbergh, Earth Shine, 40-41. 39 Von Braun in Congressional Record, 21 July 1969, E6139. 171 Soviets. But he was not naïve, recognizing that even if these admirable goals were achieved, the enormous federally funded and economically entrenched military-industrial complex would remain largely intact, and would continue to push ever more expensive and dangerous military technologies like the then-contentious anti-ballistic missile system (ABM). If it were true, as Harrington believed, that “the military-industrial complex, with all of its political power, is not going to roll over and die” simply because of an easing in the Cold War, then “a serious peace movement has to have some practical substitute for the annihilation of industry in the American economy.” Since “space exploration requires the same kind of sophisticated hardware as armaments . . . it could perform many of the economic functions of the arms race—only non-violently.”40 Indeed it better, added Paul Goodman, for “the brute fact is this: if the Russians can hit Venus at 30,000,000 miles and we can photograph Mars at a similar distance, we had all better rely on disarmament rather than ‘defense.’”41 If this idea that space exploration could serve as a moral substitute for war was widely expressed by Apollo supporters, it was also a hope shared by some critics, even if many of them were less sanguine that it would actually happen. Lewis Mumford, for example, was prepared to at least entertain the idea that Apollo might divert the nation’s energies away from war toward the somewhat less destructive endeavor of space exploration. Mumford was quite blunt in his disdain for what he saw as a moon program intimately tied to the military-industrial complex, denouncing it in Newsweek as a 40 Michael Harrington, “Left Should Reach for the Moon,” Washington, D.C. Evening Star, 7 January 1969, in NCN, 8 January 1969, 7. 41 Paul Goodman, “Reflections on the Moon,” Liberation (August-September 1969), 61. 172 “colossal perversion of energy,” an “extravagant feat of technological exhibitionism: a feat dedicated to the same malign military-political purposes that now endanger the very survival of the human race.”42 But he was willing to consider the possibility that “the ‘conquest of space’ has proved, if temporarily, the only substitute yet available for harnessing the immense consumptive needs and destructive powers of the megamachine.” Perhaps, then, “the rivalry between the Russian and American megamachines, in their race to land on the moon or explore the nearer planets, might thus be considered a sophisticated though superstitious substitute for William James’ ‘moral equivalent of war.’” Yet even this possibility troubled Mumford, since the “megamachine” he so abhorred would ultimately remain in place. While Michael Harrington saw a strategy for attaining peace through diverting the energy of the military-industrial complex toward the peaceful outlet of space exploration, the more skeptical Mumford believed that “since such space rivalry leaves all the present weapons for annihilating mankind in existence, and in fact increases their lethal potentialities, this form of collective competition holds forth no better promise of ensuring permanent comity than do those international soccer matches which so frequently end in demonstrations of more intense hostility and outright violence.”43 Norman Mailer considered the issue less in terms of substitution than sublimation, and rather than finding this hopeful, the possibility troubled him immensely. For if 42 Newsweek, 7 July 1969, 61. 43 Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1970), 308-309. 173 Apollo was ultimately justified as “a species of sublimation for the profoundly unmanageable violence of man,” then Apollo itself was essentially a meaningless act— something Mailer could not accept. After all, what could be more disquieting, he wondered, than a: journey to a dead arena in order that men could engage in the irrational activity of designing machines which would give birth to other machines which would travel to meaningless places as if they were engaged in these collective acts of hugely organized but ultimately pointless activity because they had not the wit, goodness, or charity to solve their real problems, and so would certainly destroy themselves if they did not have a game of gargantuan dimensions for diversion.44 Was Apollo ultimately driven by good or evil motivations? Mailer was not sure. But it comforted him to think that it was one or the other rather than the meaningless, even nihilistic act suggested by the “substitute for war” crowd. V. If Apollo was meant to be an act of substitution or sublimation, of turning humanity’s attention and energies toward a hopeful future and thus finally breaking its interminable cycle of violence and war, a number of prominent novelists were skeptical that it could ever work to this end. Because the violent impulses of the modern expansionist state and its citizenry would be left undisturbed by the act of shooting a few representatives to the moon, these authors believed, the accomplishment offered little by way of redemption for humanity’s sins, whether past, present, or future. Nor would it inaugurate any new “Year One” in human affairs, or really any significant change in 44 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 152. 174 human behavior at all. “New worlds? Fresh beginnings?” asked the title character of Saul Bellow’s Apollo-era novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet. “Not such a simple matter.”45 Bellow’s protagonist, Artur Sammler, knew a thing or two about new worlds and fresh beginnings, as well as the terrible violence of humanity that space supporters hoped to sublimate into transformative space excursions. A Polish Jew in his eighth decade of life by the time of Apollo, Sammler had been executed by a Nazi death squad during the Holocaust, only to find that the shots had not killed him. Buried alive with the corpses of his wife and sixty or seventy others, he dug his way out of the mass grave and hid out for the remainder of the war before eventually emigrating to the United States. The experience had given him a unique perspective from which to consider the value of humanity’s first leap to another celestial body. Set a few months before Apollo 11, Bellow’s novel followed the aging Sammler as he struggled to come to terms with the rapidly changing environment of late-1960s Manhattan. Traversing the filthy streets of the city, avoiding dog waste and sewage, confounded by the orgiastic, irrational lifestyles of the young generation, having recently been sexually intimidated by a black pickpocket, his nephew in the hospital near death, his flighty daughter now descending into thievery—Sammler found that letting his attention wander toward the “remote considerations” of the upcoming moon landing offered him “diversion” from his discomfort with the modern world and his own painful memories.46 45 Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (New York: Penguin, 1970), 136. 46 Ibid., 105, 136. 175 Sammler was ambivalent about the value of space exploration. Sometimes he thought it seemed like a good idea. Other times it seemed pointless. Often he would express both points of view in the same meandering conversation. On the idea that it might offer any real change in human affairs, however, he remained doubtful. Riding up the West Side Highway along the Hudson one night, he thought about all the “sexual violence, knifepoint robberies, sluggings, and murders” that occurred every day in the city. Could the leap into space change any of this? “Mr. Sammler was ready to think it might have a sobering effect on the species, at this moment exceptionally troubled,” wrote Bellow, echoing the hopes of Arthur C. Clarke. “Violence might subside, exalted ideas might recover importance. Once we were emancipated from telluric conditions.”47 But Sammler had confronted human evil up-close—had been all but murdered by it—and more often than not throughout the novel his outlook for space travel’s transformative potential was more pessimistic. Thinking back to a few years before Apollo, to the Arab-Israeli War—“the second time in twenty-five years the same people were threatened by extermination”—Sammler lamented “the persistence, the maniacal push of certain ideas, themselves originally stupid, stupid ideas that had lasted for centuries”: the “stupid sultanism of a Louis Quatorze reproduced in General de Gaulle,” for example, or the “imperial ambition of the Czar” now continued by the Soviets. What difference did the profound revolutions in these nations make in the end? Would the revolution brought on by space exploration fare any better?48 47 Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, 181. 48 Ibid., 142-143. 176 Reflecting on the horrors of the twentieth century, Sammler faulted the Western middle class for failing to develop a culture capable of resisting those who would justify mass murder; indeed for romanticizing the audacity of supermen like Raskolnikov and the unshakable faith of men like Abraham. Reason had eroded superstitions, the middle class had greatly expanded, the old empires had been dissolved and new independent states created—yet none of this could stop the world’s descent into its bloodiest war yet. “Well, now,” Sammler wondered, “what would one carry to the moon?” Could humanity change its ways as it expanded its arena from Earth into space? Sammler’s understanding of culture and history convinced him it was unlikely. “What did Captain Nemo do in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?” he pointed out. “He sat in the submarine, the Nautilus, and on the ocean floor he played Bach and Handel on the organ. Good stuff, but old.” Likewise H.G. Wells’s time traveler, who journeyed thousands of years into the future only to fall into a familiar state of love with a post-human female. “To take with one, whether down into the depths or out into space and time, something dear and to preserve it,” thought Sammler, “that seemed to be the impulse.” And as with those things dear, suggested Bellow, so it would be with the more disturbing human tendencies that space dreamers hoped to escape with their rockets (that one of the Apollo astronauts’ first moves upon landing on the moon was to plant an American flag could not have mollified those who shared Sammler’s concerns).49 Unlike the ambiguous Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut left no doubt that he saw little value in the space program, and no hope that it might curb humanity’s violent tendencies. 49 Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, 136, 144-145. 177 Though his fictions contained a fair amount of metaphorical space travel, his feelings toward the idea of actual twentieth-century space exploration became clear early in the Space Age with the publication of his second novel, The Sirens of Titan. The story was set in a vague future that much resembled the Space-Age 1960s, when humankind began to shift its sights outward and send its first explorers into space. Unfortunately, “these unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth—a nightmare of meaninglessness without end.” In a prescient description of the 1960s space program (at least in the eyes of its critics), Vonnegut wrote, “The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.” In other words, he explained, “on the basis of horse sense and the best scientific information, there was nothing good to be said for the exploration of space. The time was long past when one nation could seem more glorious than another by hurling some heavy object into nothingness.”50 Vonnegut’s dim view of the space program remained consistent through the Apollo era, from his regular attacks on it in his writings to his role as the token critic on the CBS News Apollo 11 coverage. But his most compelling critique of the moon missions came with his novel Slaughterhouse Five, published in 1969 during the run-up to Apollo 11. Throughout the work, Vonnegut offered the moon as a metaphor for 50 Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan (New York: Delta, 1959), 1-2, 25. An even earlier critique of the emerging space race was Vonnegut’s 1958 short story, “The Manned Missiles,” a fairly restrained (for Vonnegut, at least) story depicting an exchange of letters between the American and Russian fathers of two astronauts/cosmonauts who died in a collision while orbiting Earth. The piece attacked the Cold War and the technocracy that sent the two men to their deaths for reasons of national pride and scientific advancement. “Our boys were experted to death,” lamented the American father. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., “The Manned Missiles,” Welcome to the Monkey House (New York: Dell, 1970), 265-76. 178 humanity’s destructive tendencies, which had found such ghastly expression in the twentieth century. Slaughterhouse Five followed its protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, as he became “unstuck in time” and began to experience existence in numerous simultaneous times and situations, including the World War II firebombing of Dresden (which Pilgrim survived as a POW incarcerated in an underground meat locker), the present-day late 1960s, the day in 1976 when Pilgrim would die (and, with his condition, had in fact already experienced his death numerous times), and into the timeless (or time-warped) realm of an alien spaceship whose inhabitants, the Tralfamadorians, had no conception of “time” at all, since they were able to see everything that has been, is, and ever will be, including the moment when they destroy the entire universe while testing an experimental rocket fuel. At the heart of Slaughterhouse Five was the destruction of Dresden, which Vonnegut himself, like his character Billy Pilgrim, survived in an underground slaughterhouse while the city above was reduced to rubble in a ferocious firestorm. This conflagration, caused by successive waves of British and American bombings, represented a significant turning point in American strategy, marking the first time in the war the U.S. resorted to such a large-scale terror bombing of a non-strategic city, a precursor to the later destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and an initiation into the forthcoming Cold War, when threats to annihilate Soviet cities would become a basic pillar of U.S. nuclear deterrence. 179 Billy Pilgrim recalled his impressions on emerging from the slaughterhouse after the bombing: “Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.” It was not only the rocks that drew Billy’s numerous comparisons to the moon; it was the entirety of the rubble—buildings collapsed, burned, entwined together until they formed “low and graceful curves . . . . like the moon” as far as the eye could see. Lacking water and food, the survivors from the meat locker realized “they were going to have to climb over curve after curve on the face of the moon.” Vonnegut proceeded to compare post-bombing Dresden a dozen times to the moon.51 Yet it was not Dresden itself that sparked the novel’s first moon metaphor, but another contemporary event that greatly saddened Vonnegut as he wrote the novel in the late 1960s. The moon initially popped into Billy’s head after a time-jump from pre- Dresden wartime Germany to August 1967, when he found himself cruising in his Cadillac through the black ghetto of his hometown, the fictional Ilium, NY. Like so many American cities in the summer of 1967, Ilium had experienced devastating riots, leaving it looking to Billy like some of the cities he had seen destroyed in the war. In fact, riot-torn Illium “looked like Dresden after it was fire-bombed—like the surface of the moon.” With this comparison, Vonnegut presented utter destruction as a critical theme of the twentieth century, representing the past (Dresden), the present (riot-torn Illium, and, on the very next page, a Marine major who proposed bombing Vietnam back to the Stone Age, so that it, too, would ultimately resemble the moon) and the future (the 51 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse Five (New York: Dell, 1969), 178-80. For additional use of the moon metaphor, see pp. 59, 194, 195, 198, 213. 180 moon itself). To Vonnegut’s mind, the moon did not represent a promising first step into the space-faring future, but a reminder of the terrible things humans had done to one another, were presently doing to one another, and seemed bound to continue doing to one another in perpetuity. If there were a lesson to be learned from the moon, it was not that it represented the hopeful future, but that it offered a very tangible warning of what the Earth of the future might look like if humanity continued its present course—a lifeless rock hurtling silently through the void.52 It was a common enough metaphor. “We left that village to go to An Xuyen in the far South,” wrote Oriana Fallaci from Vietnam a few years after her NASA visits, “and we flew over the moon. For miles and miles below us stretched a desert of craters and holes just like those on the surface of the moon.” Reversing the perspective, the moon itself was a “pulverized rubble,” Milton Mayer wrote in The Progressive, “like Dresden in May or Hiroshima in August. . . . Uninhabitable—like Stalingrad. Incapable of supporting life—like Warsaw.” No good would come of the moon landing, Mayer believed, no redemption, no moral alternative to war, no escape from Earthly problems, for wherever man went, his problems went with him: “Sorrow, then, to the moon, man’s import wherever he goes.”53 This was an essential lesson of Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. The novel, published early in the Space Age, followed a post-apocalyptic Earth through several millennia, from the aftermath of the twentieth-century “Flame Deluge” (a nuclear 52 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five, 59-60. 53 Oriana Fallaci, Nothing, and So Be It (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1972), 73; The Progressive, September 1969, 16-17. Mayer misdated the Dresden bombing, which actually occurred in February, 1945. 181 war that obliterated much of humanity) through a second nuclear cataclysm in the 38th century. After the original Flame Deluge, science and technology—even knowledge itself—had been suppressed so as to avoid any similar tragedies in the future. “Let us stone and disembowel and burn the ones who did this thing,” the survivors cried. “Let them perish, and all their works, their names, and even their memories. Let us destroy them all, and teach our children that the world is new, that they may know nothing of the deeds that went before.” It was the “great simplification”—a purging of the past for the sake of the future, so that “the world shall begin again.”54 Unfortunately, the past had a tendency to catch up with humanity—the overarching theme of the deterministic A Canticle for Leibowitz. For come the 38th century, and lo and behold—science and technology were again on the ascent, and once again far outpacing the morality and maturity of the humans who embraced them. “After the generations of the darkness came the generations of the light,” and with the generations of the light came all of the follies that had led to the original twentieth- century nuclear holocaust—the computers, the hydrogen weapons, and the means and desire to leap once again into outer space.55 Is humanity helpless against the cycles of history? asked Miller. “Are we doomed to do it again and again and again?” Looking back at the history of the world up to the twentieth century—when history came to a halt in the aftermath of the first armageddon—the answer seemed to be an unqualified “yes.” “Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, 54 Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, (New York: Bantam Books, 1976; orig. 1959), 59. The Apollo-era film The Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston, presented a similar scenario, with survivors of a human-caused apocalypse attempting to suppress scientific knowledge to avoid a reoccurrence in the future. See Chapter 6. 55 Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz, 223. 182 Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk,” mused a 38th- century abbot who would be consumed by the nuclear war before he could escape in his spaceship. “Ground to dust and plowed with salt, Spain, France, Britain, America— burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again.” And outer space? Was it the only chance for salvation from an Earth destroyed by an advanced species that refused to learn from its past or temper its lust for power? It was unlikely, for humanity would maintain its predilections for destruction—would not be born anew in space but would simply exist with its same old brilliance and weaknesses in another location. “It was inevitable,” Miller concluded of the revitalized 38th century civilization, “it was manifest destiny, they felt (and not for the first time) that such a race go forth to conquer stars. . . . But, too, it was inevitable that the race succumb again to the old maladies on new worlds, even as on Earth before.”56 Thomas Pynchon addressed like concerns in Gravity’s Rainbow, and although his version of history was driven more by paranoid determinism than Miller’s cyclical variety, he came to a similar conclusion. Like Norman Mailer, Pynchon looked for the origins of space exploration in Nazi Germany, and suggested that vestiges of the totalitarian mindset remained in America’s space program. Written largely during the Apollo era, Gravity’s Rainbow was a famously enigmatic work, featuring scores of characters and innumerable intricate subplots that have inspired countless studies to untangle its webs of meaning. At its heart, however, the novel told a story of the birth of rocketry in World War II Germany, from the development of the V-2, through a 56 Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz, 245, 224. 183 mysterious new variation known as the “00000,” to the dreams of several important characters of using the rockets to eventually escape the Earth and fly into outer space. Pynchon rarely spoke directly of the American space program in Gravity’s Rainbow—the novel was set in World War II Europe, and although Pynchon did not shy away from anachronisms, his references to the space program were more metaphorical than literal. Yet the allusions are difficult to miss, especially as embodied in two characters, the rocketeer Franz Pökler and his death-crazed, sadomasochist, Nazi patron, Major/Captain Weissmann, AKA Dominus Blicero. Franz Pökler was a rocket enthusiast with dreams of one day building a vessel that could fly into space, and a willingness to assist the Nazi regime in its rocketry development if it might bring him one step closer to making his space fantasies a reality. In this he fancied himself practical: “The choice was between building what the Army wanted,” he rationalized, sounding very much like the figure he was modeled on, Wernher von Braun, “or pushing on in chronic poverty, dreaming of expeditions to Venus.” His Communist (soon to be ex-) wife could not stomach Franz’s moral compromises. “They’re using you to kill people,” she once confronted him. “That’s their only job, and you’re helping them.” “We’ll all use it, someday, to leave the earth,” he responded. “To transcend.” Leni could not stifle a laugh at her generally no-nonsense husband’s talk of transcendence. “Someday,” he responded in all sincerity, “they won’t have to kill. Borders won’t mean anything. We’ll have all outer space.” Like the optimists of the Apollo era, Pökler hoped his rocketry work would one day lead to a vigorous campaign of space exploration that could serve as an alternative to war, a 184 positive, moral outlet for the aggression that had led to so much killing in the past and present, indeed a transcendence from the horrors of everyday life on Earth.57 Yet, like von Braun, Pökler was merely a technician for the designs of another, more powerful man, a former African-colonialist-turned-Nazi named Weissmann. It was Weissmann who ultimately gave aim to Pökler’s rocketry skills, using him to craft a custom-designed V-2 known as the “00000,” the world’s first manned space rocket in which the elderly, demoralized Weissmann, recognizing that his days were numbered, searched for transcendence via his young lover Gottfried, who at the end of the novel found himself inside the nose of the 00000 as it shot through the clouds in its escape from a Germany on the verge of collapse. “I want to break out,” sighed Weissmann shortly before sending Gottfried up in the 00000, “to leave this cycle of infection and death. I want to be taken in love . . .”58 But Weissmann was no fool—he knew that space offered no transcendence from the horrors of life, no radical transformation of human nature nor even a benign outlet for its darker inclinations. Like Walter Miller’s doomed abbot, Weissmann considered Western civilization’s troubled past from the perspective of an incipient space age: “America was the edge of the World,” he recognized, the site for “Europe’s Kingdom of Death, that special Death the West had invented,” i.e. brutal, exploitive colonialism. Although the U.S. had long since broken away from the European colonialists, “the impulse to empire, the mission to propagate death, the structure of it, kept on. Now we are in the last phase.” America was no longer the edge of the world, Weissmann 57 Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Penguin, 1995; orig. 1973), 400-401. 58 Ibid., 724. 185 realized—it was now the agent of death that colonial Europe had once been, only it no longer had anywhere to go, nowhere to expand, to spread its “special Death.” Except, perhaps, upwards? “Is the cycle over now, and a new one ready to begin?” Weissmann wondered. “Will our new Edge, our new Deathkingdom [sic], be the Moon?”59 Yet nobody would ever reach the moon in Gravity’s Rainbow. In the novel, as in the Space Age and the Apollo era, the rocket took two forms: “a good Rocket to take us to the stars, an evil Rocket for the World’s suicide, the two perpetually in struggle.” It was the evil rocket that was ultimately victorious in Gravity’s Rainbow, as Gottfried, enmeshed inside the 00000, ascended into the stratosphere before reaching his apex and then falling, tearing toward his final destination, a crowded movie theater that a split second after the end of the novel would be obliterated. And, Pynchon seemed to be saying, it was the evil rocket that would triumph in reality as well, mocking the dreams of those who yearned for transcendence and a substitute for the deprivations that had scarred the twentieth century. Those who feared humanity would take its evil ways to the stars— would spread its “Death kingdom” to the moon and beyond—were a bit premature with their worries, warned Pynchon, for the real danger of the space rocket and the technocratic system that fostered its development was to the Earth itself. “The Rocket engine, the deep cry of combustion that jars the soul, promises escape,” wrote Pynchon as the 00000 began its flight. But “this ascent will be betrayed to Gravity,” as would all 59 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 722-23. 186 attempted escapes, for “Gravity rules all the way out to the cold sphere, there is always the danger of falling.”60 Pynchon’s writing is notoriously difficult, and the audience for the long, involved, confusing Gravity’s Rainbow was limited. But the public was confronted with similar lessons of the futility of escape during the Apollo era in the much more accessible venue of the movie theater. The spaceship in Planet of the Apes, for example, set out to explore the universe, but like Pynchon’s 00000 it would be overcome by the pull of Earth, by the metaphorical gravity that proved transcendence via space exploration more a pipe dream than a real possibility. Though the astronauts in the film landed in a strange world ruled by highly evolved apes, the planet turned out to be none other than the very Earth from which they had departed so long ago, unrecognizable after humanity destroyed itself in a nuclear war while they were away. In Planet of the Apes, space exploration offered no escape from the urgent problems of humanity, no sublimation for its violent impulses, and the explorers—the hope for humanity—only ended up back where they started, in a world decimated by the very technologies that sent them out in the first place. Space travel, it turned out, contrary to John Dos Passos’s optimism, did not “wipe out the 60 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 727, 758, 723. Emphasis in original. For additional perspectives on Gravity’s Rainbow and Apollo, see Dale Carter, the Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American Rocket State (London: Verso, 1988); William D. Atwill, Fire and Power: The American Space Program as Postmodern Narrative (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1994), 117-137; Georg Schmundt- Thomas, “America’s Germany and the Pseudo-Origins of Manned Spaceflight in Gravity’s Rainbow,” in Peter Freese, ed., Germany and German Thought in American Literature and Cultural Criticism: Proceedings of the German-American Conference in Paderborn, May 16-19, 1990 (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1990), 337-353. 187 unhappy prospects of Hiroshima.” In fact, as Pynchon warned, gravity ruled all the way out into the void, ensuring that the evil destructive rocket would prevail.61 Likewise in Night of the Living Dead and The Andromeda Strain. In both cases, the United States sent probes into outer space, only to watch them succumb to gravity and come crashing back down with disastrous results. The motivations behind the explorations did not matter. Whether for beneficent ends in Night of the Living Dead or in support of germ warfare in The Andromeda Strain, the message from these films was clear: Earth’s problems would never be improved via space exploration, in fact could only be worsened by this false panacea, and perhaps it might be best for humanity to reconsider the wisdom of pouring its energies into diversions that risked being perverted by the base militaristic tendencies of the modern state. After all, nearly every other comparable technology in the twentieth century had succumbed to the “gravity” that Pynchon warned about, ultimately finding some use in the service of killing human beings. How much worse it could be with these mammoth rockets, which, as Mailer, Pynchon, and others warned, were tainted from the very beginning. The concerns of writers like Walter Miller aside, the real threat was not to the moon, or anywhere else the rockets would be targeted, but to contemporary life on Earth, for attempts to escape— indeed the very act of building and using technologies capable of escaping—carried an unacceptable risk of coming back to bite the hand of the creator. 61 Planet of the Apes, DVD, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968 (20th Century Fox, 2001). 188 VI. A few years after her visit to NASA, in early October 1968, Oriana Fallaci might have wished she were on the moon, or at least in the Apollo 7 capsule that would shortly make its first manned test run in Earth’s orbit. Instead, she found herself in Mexico City being dragged by her hair down a flight of stairs, her back and legs ruptured by three bullets from a helicopter machine gun, only to be thrown into a corpse-filled room where she drifted in and out of consciousness for hours, drizzled by the septic waste leaking from a broken toilet pipe in the ceiling overhead. She had gone to Mexico to cover student protests prior to the 1968 Olympics, and instead found herself caught in the middle of a massacre when Mexican armed forces opened fire on the demonstrators, killing hundreds of students and bystanders alike. The ordeal made her wonder whether it would not be better if the world focused a little less attention on the moon and a bit more on the much-too-frequent occurrence of this sort of atrocity.62 But it was not her Mexican experience that ultimately soured Fallaci on the Apollo program she had once embraced. Horrific as it was, it was hardly more disturbing than what she saw on a regular basis while covering the American war in Vietnam, and what she learned about humanity in the process. After accompanying a pilot as he dropped napalm on the Vietcong; after assuring a young soldier that everything would turn out alright, only to see him blown to pieces moments later by a rocket in the course of overtaking a soon-to-be-abandoned hill; after watching Vietnamese children laughing 62 Fallaci, Nothing, and So Be It, 311-12. 189 and singing in rhythm to the bodies of their dead elders being hurled into a mass grave in the aftermath of Hue, Fallaci grieved: “The thought of belonging to the human race makes me feel ashamed.” Yes, “man’s a pretty ridiculous animal,” one particularly sharp American lieutenant agreed with Fallaci. “He’s so intelligent, yet he keeps settling everything with force. He goes to the moon and then fights in Vietnam.” The juxtaposition of these two facts forced Fallaci to reconsider her earlier praise for NASA and its mission. To think, she wrote after surveying the carnage at Hue, “I was thrilled because man was going to the moon. But what’s the point of going to the moon when on Earth we’re doing what I saw today?” Landing on the moon, contrary to the true believers in the Apollo era, would change nothing, would initiate no new age in human history nor offer any redemption for the sins of the past, nor would it likely contribute anything to the cause of peace. “Centuries go by,” Fallaci concluded, “thousands of years; we become more and more skillful at inventing machines to fly higher and higher; yet we remain the dumb animals that couldn’t even light a fire or make a wheel. They are right those who say, ‘All that brainpower spent on landing on the moon, why?,’ or ‘Suppose we use a bit of that great intellect to stop killing one another, to stop destroying our cities?’”63 It was becoming increasingly clear by the Apollo era that one could not simply wish all warlike impulses onto a rocket and blast them into space, especially when that rocket itself was born of and symbolized twentieth century warfare. This much was clear to Washington Evening Star columnist Frank Getlein, who at the end of 1972, in the 63 Fallaci, Nothing, and So Be It, 170-71, 174. 190 midst of the final Apollo moon mission, tried to explain “Why Nobody Cares About Apollo” anymore. He offered “an easy-to-understand explanation in four words: The war in Vietnam.” The moon program, explained Getlein, “was supposed to be what we Americans would have in the 1960s and 1970s instead of war.” This hope was but an illusion, which “collapsed finally because the people applying it had forgotten one thing: The reason you have a moral equivalent of war in the first place is so you don’t have to have the war. . . . For us Americans, unfortunately, the moral equivalent of war has turned out to be war.”64 Standing on the streets of Saigon one night, the dulled thuds of shells exploding in the distance, Fallaci looked at the moon where her astronaut friends would soon travel and thought of something a fellow journalist in Vietnam had said to her: “The moon is a dream for those who have no dreams.” It was a harsh assessment of those who sincerely hoped the exploration of space would somehow improve the lot of humanity, either on Earth or in the future in space. But it was a common sentiment among those looking uncomfortably at the world in the Apollo era and wondering what might come of the new power held by the human species with its space rockets. “Remember the tourists who tried to get Christ off the cross and began by taking the nails out of his hands?” Fallaci’s colleague asked her. “So they did,” she replied, “and Christ fell forward, head downward.” “The Americans don’t want to make anyone suffer,” the journalist explained the metaphor, “they always have the best intentions.”65 64 Frank Getlein, “Why Nobody Cares About Apollo,” Washington Evening Star, 13 December 1972, copy in Folder OA-257021-01 Apollo 17 Flight, Articles, 11-15 Dec 1972, National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C. 65 Fallaci, Nothing and So Be It, 60, 316-17. 191 By 1969, with the Cold War eased and the United States promoting the benign aims of its space exploration, relatively few questioned the peaceful intentions of Apollo. But in an era when “fire” was more likely to be associated with the destructive tendencies of humanity embodied in napalm showers, torched inner cities, and conflagrant polluted waterways than with the majestic flames that promised to carry Apollo into the heavens, thoughtful critics recognized the potential danger of combining highly advanced technologies, the elemental force of fire, a technocratic state initiative rooted in militaristic Cold War rivalries, and the human predilection to ultimately use its ever- increasing powers in one form or another. Perhaps these critical intellectuals were excessively haunted by the recent past, projecting exaggerated fears onto the future that Apollo promised to bring. Maybe rejecting the technological future and dwelling on the human past was simply their wont as humanists: “If the scientists have the future in their bones,” C.P. Snow had complained in his talk on the “two cultures” a decade earlier, “then the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist.”66 But it is telling that by the time of Apollo, even C.P. Snow found himself among its naysayers. Leaving aside the extravagant promises of the most avid space boosters, there was still every chance that Apollo would ultimately prove benign—at a minimum a pleasant diversion from a troubled decade and century, and likely a spur to new scientific knowledge and spun-off consumer technologies to boot. But if this were the best-case scenario, as many critics believed, the worst-case scenario was infinitely more terrifying, 66 C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures: And a Second Look (New York: Mentor, 1964), 17. 192 and worth avoiding at all costs, even if it meant leaving age-old dreams of flying to the moon unfulfilled. 193 Chapter 5: A Psychedelic Moon?: Potland vs. Squareland for the Soul of America Touring Japan with his wife in the spring of 1970, Harvey Kling was in for the shock of his life. In one brief moment, his deeply ingrained notions of patriotism and American identity would be called into question not by the Japanese, who were most gracious hosts, but by an unexpected run-in with a group of his fellow Americans. A highlight of the Klings’ Japan trip was their visit to “Expo '70” in Osaka. With over 64 millions visitors in its six-month run, Expo '70 was the largest world’s fair to date, and the United States went all-out in its effort to promote American life and culture to the rest of the world. To enter the U.S. pavilion was to become enveloped in a smorgasbord of Americana, with exhibits ranging from a dirt-stained Babe Ruth uniform to an Andy Warhol water sculpture, from sleek racecars to nineteenth-century Shaker furniture, from the folk art of America’s indigenous peoples to a documentary photo collection depicting everyday life in Harlem. For all its diversity, however, the U.S. pavilion was most widely associated with its space exhibit. Featuring an impressive collection of rocket components, space food, a full-size simulation of the Apollo 11 landing site, and the actual Apollo 8 command module, charred from its reentry, the American space exhibit proved to be the most popular attraction at Expo '70, with hopeful visitors waiting up to seven hours in lines a kilometer long. The real gem of the American pavilion, the attraction that drew the largest crowds throughout the summer and ensured the space exhibit would be a smashing success, was a fist-sized moon rock brought back from the previous year’s 194 Apollo 12 mission. In the experience of one New York Times reporter, the tens of thousands of Japanese who passed through the U.S. pavilion on opening day showed little concern for America’s arts or sports, its racecars or its landscapes or its architecture. “All they wanted,” he wrote, “was to see that piece of rock.”1 Harvey Kling was one of the thousands of Americans who ventured to Japan for Expo '70, and his experiences across the country had swelled his pride in his national heritage. The Japanese throughout the trip showed his wife and him tremendous respect—not just kindness and consideration, he pointed out, but respect—“basically because we are Americans. Hundreds of school children gathered around us during our travels and asked for autographs, while thousands of others throughout the island just wanted to touch us or to shake our hands.” Such treatment emphasized to Kling the privilege of being an American, among whom even the most unassuming achieved celebrity status in Japan simply because of their Americanness. “We truly felt as though our presence there was [a] representation of the United States of America.” Yes, Harvey Kling—“just plain ordinary” man from Downer’s Grove, Illinois, a member of the local chamber of commerce, the YMCA, active in church work, president of the high school board of education—indeed, the very embodiment of President Nixon’s “silent majority”—was certain that he was a true representative American, an unofficial cultural envoy showcasing American values and culture to the Japanese. Thus his spirits soared when, after standing in line for over two hours outside the U.S. pavilion, 1 Memo, Yukio Kawahara to U.S. Ambassador, 26 April 1970, folder “Exhibits—Osaka 70, 1970,” Box 14, Director’s Subject Files, Records of the United States Information Agency, RG 306, National Archives at College Park, MD (Hereafter USIA); New York Times, 29 March 1970, Sec. 2, pp 29. 195 he rounded a corner toward the entrance, and “There was the American flag—the first one we had witnessed in quite some time. What a feeling of pride!” It was just moments later when Kling’s elation gave way to horror, for “then it happened—up on the platform near the entrance were three hippies or yippies, heavily bearded, unclean, in mod clothes, singing rock music.” He was stunned. “My first impulse was to jump on a park bench and try to explain to the thousands of people walking in the maze that these were not examples of the American people or our American culture.” Kling managed to hold back. Still, it seemed fishy that these hippies had such a prominent spot at Expo '70 while he had been waiting in line for hours to enter the pavilion. Imagine his surprise, then, when he “found out later these people were paid by our government in order to ‘tell it like it is’ in America.” Kling was outraged. Upon returning to the United States he fired off a letter to President Nixon expressing his disgust at the thought of hippies posing as regular Americans in front of the otherwise wonderful portrayals of American life at Expo '70. “Is this what you and your administration really believe in?” he fumed. “Believe me Mr. President, you are not ‘telling it like it is’ for if you know anything about America you know that these people do not exemplify or represent us as we are.” Not only had these hippies spoiled what had up to that point been a wonderful foreign experience, but Kling fretted over the impact they might have on America’s world image for some time to 196 come: “I wonder,” he lamented in closing, “how many autographs Americans will sign next year while traveling in Japan.”2 The White House passed Kling’s message on to the United States Information Agency (USIA), which had organized the American exhibit at Expo '70, for a proper response. Eugene Rosenfeld, assistant director for public information at the USIA, proceeded to drop a bombshell on Kling’s firm notions of American identity and values. “We believe you would like to know about these ‘hippies’ in the photo you sent us,” explained Rosenfeld. “They are: Mike Rivers, a graduate engineer in electronics who works for the U.S. Navy; Andy Wallace, a graduate in English literature of George Washington University . . . [who] lectures on American songs and American folklore; Jonathan Eberhart, a graduate of Harvard University who is the Aero Space editor for Science Magazine and who covers the Apollo space shots.”3 One can only imagine the confusion Harvey Kling must have felt as he read this letter that called into question everything he understood about what it meant to be a patriotic American. To think, those hippies he had denounced as un-American turned out to be a Navy man, an expert on America’s folk heritage, and an aerospace editor who may well have done more to promote American culture and values to the rest of the world via his Apollo reporting than even a thousand handshakes and autographs from the likes of Harvey Kling could ever achieve. Indeed, given that it was the Apollo program which Jonathan Eberhart had publicized so profusely that was drawing record crowds to Expo 2 Letter, Harvey Kling to Richard Nixon, 7 May 1970, folder “Exhibits—Osaka 70, 1970,” Box 14, Director’s Subject Files, USIA. 3 Letter, Eugene Rosenfeld to Harvey Kling, 3 June 1970, folder “Exhibits—Osaka 70, 1970,” Box 14, Director’s Subject Files, USIA. Rosenfeld mistakenly identified Jonathan Eberhart as the aerospace editor of “Science Magazine.” Eberhart was actually the aerospace editor of Science News. 197 '70, ensuring their exposure to all of the other diverse displays of American life and culture, might Harvey Kling have begun to realize that he, himself, was perhaps not the quintessential emissary of American values and culture after all? The story of Harvey Kling is related here not simply as an amusing anecdote of a man firmly putting his foot in his mouth, but rather because it offers an opening into a consideration of Apollo’s role in the much wider cultural conflicts at the dawn of the 1970s between dissenting youth and “the establishment,” or “the system,” that NASA represented so well. As hinted at in Kling’s encounter with the hippies, the Apollo program became a battleground in the larger generational clash over values and the meaning of American identity. NASA represented the values of hard work, rational planning, patriotism and humility, and it was assumed that young radicals would not be caught dead supporting something as “establishment” as the space program. So when Neil Armstrong left his boot-print on the moon, the Harvey Klings of America were certain that it would mark a turning point in the battle between respectable American society and the forces of chaos that had been making so many waves in the late 1960s; that “Middle America” would ultimately have the last laugh as Apollo proved once and for all the righteousness of traditional American values and the moral bankruptcy and irrelevance of the dissenters. Harvey Kling had been inundated with handshake requests in Japan not because he stood for the perverted goals of the destruction-crazed campus trashers and urban rioters, after all, but because he represented a country powerful and enlightened enough to go to the moon. 198 Jonathan Eberhart and his fellow troubadours threw a wrench in Harvey Kling’s firm ideas about hippies. As it turned out, a sizeable portion of 1960s radicals, especially those of a countercultural bent, were no less interested in space exploration than was the mainstream society. Liberal critics tended to argue that an expensive moon landing could not be justified at a time of so many unfulfilled needs on Earth. Deeper intellectual concerns often focused on the potential threat space exploration (and the technological complex that made it possible) represented to the human condition. On the other hand, a good number in the counterculture were thrilled about the thought of travelling to the moon and beyond. The problem—insurmountable for most—was that their vision of space exploration contrasted sharply with NASA’s, and they saw little in the actual feat that was worth cheering or that augured well for the future of the nation or the universe. II. The generational battle lines over the meaning of Apollo were clearly drawn with the first flight around the moon at the end of 1968. It was a year that had seemed near- apocalyptic to many Americans. From campus uprisings to urban conflagrations to heartbreaking assassinations, from rampaging police clashing bloodily with violence- prone antagonists in Chicago to Olympic massacres in Mexico City to bold communist affronts in Czechoslovakia, North Korea, and Vietnam—though the onset of the cold season had brought something of a calm to the domestic unrest, it was not unnatural to wonder whether the nation would survive another year of such tumult once it resumed in 199 1969. At the center of nearly all the domestic trouble, it could not help but be noticed, were the young—the high school and especially college-aged youth who reacted to any provocation (when they were not the provocateurs themselves) with violence as they attempted to push their radical cultural and political agendas onto mainstream society. So when on Christmas Eve the astronauts of Apollo 8 read aloud the Genesis creation story while circling the moon—the same week the crew of the USS Pueblo, seized and held hostage by North Korea since January, was finally released—it took on a special significance. Especially, as numerous commentators pointed out, since the rebellious youth whose disruptive acts and attitudes had dominated headlines throughout the prior year had nothing to do with the achievement. NASA Administrator Thomas Paine fired the first shot when, immediately upon the safe return of Apollo 8, he declared the feat “the triumph of the squares—the guys with computers and sliderules who read the Bible on Christmas Eve.”4 Eric Hoffer, the folksy working-class philosopher who loved nothing more than to berate intellectuals, dissenting youth, and impatient minorities, picked up on Paine’s rhetoric, noting that he, too, was “just tickled to death this thing is being done by squares.”5 Time magazine quickly followed suit. Given the turmoil that had rocked the world in 1968, Time had planned on naming “The Dissenter” as its annual “Man of the Year.”6 But after Apollo 8 circled the moon, it instead awarded the distinction to the three astronauts, declaring that the moon flight might well have been the only real 4 Detroit News, 7 January 1969, 6, in NASA Current News (hereafter NCN), 14 January 1969, 15, NASA History Office, Washington, D.C. (hereafter NHO). 5 NASA, Debrief: Apollo 8, 16MM film, NASM Film Archives, National Air and Space Museum. 6 John Noble Wilford, We Reach the Moon (New York: Bantam Books. 1969), 205. 200 revolution in a year of so much pseudo-revolutionary posturing. “This is what Westernized man can do,” proclaimed a special Time essay, “Of Revolution and the Moon.” Juxtaposing the astronauts with the warped values of the counterculture, the essay noted, “Westernized man will not turn into a passive, contemplative being; he will not drop out and turn off; he will not seek stability and inner peace in the quest for nirvana. Western man is Faust, and if he knows anything at all, he knows how to challenge nature, how to dare against dangerous odds and even against reason. He knows how to reach for the moon.”7 The idea that Apollo 8 represented a “triumph of the squares” struck a chord with the public, and it was widely publicized throughout the following year as Apollo 8 was succeeded by missions 9, 10, and finally the main event in July, and pundits echoed Paine’s divide between the squares and their obvious antithesis, the dissenters. Popular columnist Joseph Kraft, for example, writing on the “absurd antics of today’s protest movement,” believed “Apollo 10 is a kind of propaganda for the system as it is.”8 After that same mission, astronaut Walter Cunningham denounced the students who were “protesting everything in sight, including the ROTC.” A proud ROTC graduate himself, as were two of the Apollo 10 astronauts, Cunningham remarked: “While students are protesting ROTC, we are hailing our newest heroes fresh from a flight around the moon.”9 7 Time, 3 January 1969, 9, 17. 8 Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin, 25 May 1969, in NCN, 26 May 1969, 27. 9 Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 5 July 1969, in NCN, 7 July 1969, 15-16. 201 This triumphalism of the establishment over its youthful critics reached its peak in the aftermath of Apollo 11. Leading the way was Walter Cronkite. A longtime supporter of the space program, Cronkite was as excited as anyone when the lunar lander touched down on the moon, and his enthusiasm spilled forth in his broadcast. CBS, like the other networks, had devoted its entire landing-day schedule to Apollo coverage, filling in the long stretches when little of interest was happening with commentary, interviews, flashbacks to earlier space milestones, and so on. With hours upon hours of airtime to fill, the subject of Apollo criticism came up several times. Reflecting on these strictures, reporter Eric Sevareid took a moment after the Eagle had successfully landed to suggest to Cronkite that while “ordinary people” from the “normal healthy heart of the country” appreciated Apollo, “the only people who seem a little blasé and find this thing a little distasteful are the young intellectuals of a moral and sociological bent.”10 No matter that much of the overt criticism had come from older intellectuals, scientists, and social critics: this perceived slighting of the mission from the nation’s youth was too much for Cronkite. Unable to control his emotion after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, he blurted out on live television, “I’d like to know what those kids who were kinda pooh-poohing this thing are saying right at this moment?”11 Cronkite’s sentiment was repeated endlessly in the triumphal glow of the moon landing. Writing in the Baltimore Sun, Ernest B. Furgurson resurrected Paine’s words to support Cronkite’s idea. Apollo 11 “was, indeed, the triumph of the squares,” he wrote: 10 CBS News, 10:56:20PM EDT 7/20/69 (Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., 1969), 84. 11 Today, 21 July 1969, in NCN, Apollo 11 Special Part II, July & August 1969, 264. 202 Unanimous flunkers of any recognition test that might include Susan Sontag, Bobby Seale, Bill Blass, Marshall McLuhan, Rennie Davis—those figures whipped into demigods by the pace-setters of our New Culture, all figures who would sneer at the Armstrongs, Aldrins and Collinses if it didn’t hurt their necks so to look up that high. Squares who, however temporarily, by sheer force pushed the schoolwreckers and obscenity-spitters off the air and Page 1.12 Roulhac Hamilton, chief Washington correspondent for the Columbus, OH, Evening Dispatch, made the distinction even more clear-cut. The heroes of the moon landing, he wrote, are all men on the edge of middle age, men from the middle class. Nowhere among them . . . was there a whiff of pot, a mop of unkempt hair, a shouting doubter or a self-pitying whine. Squares is what they were. . . . They are men and the sons of men and women who still believe that Boy Scouts are good, that divorce is bad, who teach Bible classes on Sunday, enjoy church suppers and Parent-Teacher meetings, who wash their kids’ mouth with soap, who regard sexual license as wicked, who respect the American flag and observe the Fourth of July. . . . They are, in short, the antithesis of the hippies with the dirty hands and feet who would revise the nation by destroying what it has been and put in its place only the Good Lord knows what. 13 Even Lyndon Johnson, interviewed by Walter Cronkite, had his say, contrasting “this cream of our young manhood, these astronauts,” with the “cynics” responsible for “the riots in the streets, resistance to authority, and questioning the establishment, and student strikes and disorders, and so forth.” This shrill minority might have been the ones making the most noise in the late-'60s, “but they don’t represent the majority at all.” No, believed Johnson, it was the astronauts who “represent most of America.” Time once again agreed. The astronauts and other NASA workers “epitomize the solid, perhaps old- fashioned American virtues. So do the thousands who came to see them off at the Cape and those who celebrated their return with flags and patriotic bumper stickers—few love 12 Baltimore Sun, 22 July 1969, in NCN, 22 July 1969, 9. 13 Congressional Record, 12 August 1969, 23610. 203 beads among them, fewer bell-bottom trousers and no disparaging words about the nation.” Perhaps, opined Time, that was because Apollo 11 “was especially an accomplishment of ‘middle America.’”14 If these boasts that the moon landing belonged to Middle America sound a little exclusionary, it should be noted that not too many in the counterculture argued otherwise. James Simon Kunen, for example, could not agree more. Kunen had risen to fame in the months before Apollo 11 with the publication of The Strawberry Statement, his popular first-hand account of the campus unrest at Columbia University in the spring of 1968. In the year between the Columbia disorder and the publication of his book, he had flown to Cape Kennedy to cover the Apollo 8 launch for the short-lived radical paperback magazine, US. True to Time’s characterization of the typical launch crowd, Kunen was one of the few hippie-types in the press section for the launch—he noted being harassed by the credentials crew at the press center over his long hair and being singled out by a reporter from Women’s Wear Daily who was excited to spot a bona-fide hippie among the otherwise staid gathering. One of the first things Kunen noticed at the Cape was the intense squareness of the NASA folks. During breakfast on his first full day in Florida, “it became apparent that the seat of this futuristic enterprise is ten years behind the time. The boys wear stovepipe chinos 6” above the ankle; the women wear skirts below the knee; Alley Cat is on the juke; and you get two eggs, toast, coffee, juice, and grits for 65 cents.”15 14 Transcript, CBS News interview with Lyndon Johnson, 5 July 1969, pp 21, 26, 41-43, Biographical Files: Walter Cronkite, NHO; Time, 1 August 1969, 11. 15 James Simon Kunen, “The Great Rocketship,” US, June 1969, 14. 204 Still, Kunen treated NASA and its accomplishment more with whimsical indifference than overt hostility. Not so Peter Collier. Writing in Ramparts, Collier launched a harsh attack on the middle-class values he saw represented by NASA. Though he found the astronauts too bland to hold anything personal against them, he loathed what they stood for. “Of, by, and for middle-class America,” he wrote, “the astronauts were its revenge against all the scruffy third worlders and long-haired deviants who had stolen arrogantly onto the center stage.” NASA and its homogenous, white- bread astronauts, Collier complained, projected an image that screamed “WASPer than thou”: These faces were meant to negate the domestic history of the last ten years—the long, unsuccessful struggle to get color and diversity into the face of America. . . . The last decade had been too complex and demanding; the questions that had been raised threatened insights into the national character that would be too painful. . . . American technology would dare anything, it seemed, even making us into a collective schizophrenic and returning us to where we had left off in the Fifties—in the middle of a midwestern idyll of simplicity and moral cretinism.16 If Collier wrote in a tone of disdain for the WASP values represented by NASA, Norman Mailer concluded his excursion into NASA-land on a note of despair. Mailer, recall, returned to his home in Provincetown in a fit of depression at the thought that the squares were finally going to win the war—that they deserved to win the war because they had been fighting harder than what Mailer called his own “abominable army” of “fanatics, far-outs, and fucked-outs . . . an army of outrageously spoiled children who cooked with piss and vomit while the Wasps were quietly moving from command of the world to command of the moon.” Sitting in a restaurant in Provincetown, his deadline 16 Peter Collier, “Apollo 11: The Time Machine,” Ramparts, October 1969, 56-58. 205 looming, Mailer directed all his frustration at his good friend Eddie Bonetti, who that particular night was acting a drunken buffoon. “You’ve been drunk all summer,” he wanted to scream at him, “and they have taken the moon.”17 They have taken the moon. At the beginning of the Space Age, shocked into action by Sputnik, an army of rockabilly singers contributed their part to launching the United States into the new era by releasing a slew of space- and Sputnik-themed songs that foretold of a glorious future in space, whether in terms of beating the Russians, wild adventure, or, most often from these typically sex-crazed young men, a cool place to take dates. Among the most prescient of the lot was Monte Mead. As early as 1959, Mead boldly predicted that Americans would be on the moon, and on the way to Mars, by 1972. His prediction was fairly close (on the moon trip at least) but his idea of who was going to the moon could not have been more wrong. Mead himself was one hip fellow, and he assumed he would be leading other hepcats to the moon in 1972. Squares? No way— “Sorry son,” he sang, “no room for a square—you just don’t have the jive-jive-jive!” Terry Dunavan, another late-‘50s rocker, had a vision similar to Mead’s of life in outer space. But unlike Mead, who was somehow “in the know” about NASA’s secret plans, Dunavan could only speculate. Hence his predictions—he would skip the moon and go straight to Mars—turned out to be less accurate than Mead’s. Still, once Dunavan learned that “the Martians have got hold of rhythm and blues,” it was all he needed to hear. He was sick of the daily hassles from squares on Earth. It was getting to the point, he complained, where “there isn’t any space to rock like we should.” Like Mead, 17 Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970), 440-41. Emphasis in original. 206 Dunavan saw space as a sanctuary for free spirits like himself. “Let’s take a rocket ship a-way up there,” he urged, “and rock on Mars where there aren’t any squares!”18 Who could have imagined, then, that just ten years later the squares would be running the whole show, and that there would be no room at all for boss cats like Monte Mead and Terry Dunavan in outer space? That someone as with-it as James Simon Kunen would stand out like a sore thumb at the Apollo 8 launch? That a foreman at the lunar lander factory would warn a worker, “No hippies here,” when his hair was perceived to be growing dangerously long?19 That Harvey Kling could not in his wildest dreams conceive of a hippie like Jonathan Eberhart being interested in the space program? As early as 1963 The Holy Modal Rounders were beginning to understand. When the seminal psychedelic folk duo declared, “I wanna be a spaceman too,” the response was a firm “no sir, son, it’s a pamum-muh-pah-muh-muh-puh-pah-pah.”20 Pamum-muh-pah-muh-muh-puh-pah-pah? Is that what it sounded like to hipsters when squares talked to them? If so, then it is perhaps best to now return to the king of pamum-muh-pah-muh-muh-puh-pah-pah, NASA administrator Thomas Paine, who by the spring of 1970 had expanded his “triumph of the squares” remark into an all- encompassing space-based thesis explaining the generational discord in American society and offering a rock-solid proposal for how it could be solved. 18 Monte Mead, “Cape Canaveral”; and Terry Dunavan, “Rock it on Mars,” on V/A, Rocket Ship (Buffalo Bop, 1997), Bb-CD 55052. 19 New Yorker, 11 January 1969, 50. 20 The Holy Modal Rounders, “Mister Spaceman,” The Holy Modal Rounders (Prestige Records, 1964), Prestige 7720. 207 III. Nearly a year after Apollo 11, at the end of the 1969-1970 school year, Thomas Paine was invited to give the commencement address at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He used the occasion to present the most audacious characterization yet of the division between the establishment and the dissenters—framed, as always with Paine, in space terms, and now rebranded as the battle between “Squareland” and “Potland.” After offering some lighthearted (and decidedly square) knocks at what he envisioned was the “leadership” of Potland—the Chicago Seven, Timothy Leary, Jane Fonda, John and Yoko, the Hells Angels and Jefferson Airplane, and so on—Paine got down to business laying out the fundamental differences between the two warring societies. Squareland, Paine told the class of 1970, was made up of the “pillars of society.” It was the world the students were raised in, and the world in which their parents still operated. It was boring, perhaps, but it was the bedrock of the well-functioning society. At the core of Squareland was a profound faith in rationalism. It was “outward-looking and mathematical,” was “time oriented . . . and deeply concerned with future consequences.” It “accepts as true only rational facts and theories which predict future events with mathematical precision under rigorous standards of reproducibility.” Only Squareland’s rationalism could ensure that “crops yield, lights light, bridges carry loads, children avoid polio, and men walk on the moon.” In fact, to Squarelanders, a solid definition of “truth” might be “that which successfully takes two men to the moon.” 208 Potland was the exact opposite. “Their truth is subjective and aesthetic,” Paine argued, “non-mathematical, oriented to individual emotional perception”—a ridiculous, even dangerous, style of “truth” that could never in a million years send two astronauts to the moon. While Squareland explored outward with telescopes and space probes, Potland searched “inward with psychedelic drugs, mystical visions, astrological divinations and metaphysical poetry.” Unconcerned about the future, “Potland is obsessed with now.” Rather than investing in “the hard discipline of constructive work” necessary to build a better tomorrow, it preferred “living by plunder,” surviving via the “foreign aid largess and looting opportunities provided by Squareland.” If Squarelanders enjoyed reading bestsellers and watching popular movies and television shows, Potland preferred “free press propaganda and pornography.” In terms of sexual mores, Squarelanders “endorse monogamous heterosexuality to preserve the family unit for child-raising,” and were horrified with “Potland’s swinging AC-DC multiswitch partnerships.” And so on. Paine was obviously having a blast lampooning “Potland.” But all joking aside, he warned, “Potland should not be regarded as a silly subculture, or a run-down hippie movement, but as a full-fledged nation operating in the midst of Squareland [and] carrying out hysterical warfare against it.” Much of Potland’s alienation, Paine believed, was due in large part to its estrangement from America’s space achievements. “Up to now,” he regretted, “the principal impact of the space program has been on Squareland.” It was Squarelanders—those who valued hard work and regular nine-to-five jobs—who saw the greatest economic gains from the space boom. It was Squarelanders who benefitted most from Space Age technological advances. And soon—very soon, hoped 209 Paine—it was squares who would be settling in space colonies to extend humanity’s terrain throughout the universe and carry on the square tradition to eternity. And Potlanders? Well, they might enjoy some of the fruits of space progress, like the communication technologies that allowed them easier contact with their global comrades and the increased leisure time that was sure to come with the space-age technological society. But overall, “they find little satisfaction in the space program today. It is just too square—too disciplined—too rational for them.” The key to solving this problem, and the obvious solution to the larger societal split between the establishment and the dissenters that was causing so much head scratching in 1970, was clear to the single-minded Paine—an expanded space program. Potland was “driven into shrill battle with Squareland,” he suggested, because “Squareland is clearly failing to provide a clear challenge and opportunity to its young men and women.” Squareland, in other words, had turned its back on the space program and was now paying the cost. “It seems entirely possible,” he proposed, “that new challenges in space for young people could be a major factor in depleting Potland’s ranks of bright young adults now goofing off there.” The solution, then, to the social turmoil of the 1960s was simple: “Squareland’s leadership must articulate bold goals, organize sound programs, provide resources, and engage young men in important ventures,” preferably through a vastly increased space budget. Only then might those tempted by 210 the pornography, plundering, and pot of the dissenters be drawn into responsible society.21 For all of Paine’s ham-handed attempts to sell an expanded space program to the next generation, his speech presented the most blatant division yet between the establishment that claimed credit for the moon landings and the dissenters who seemed to want little to do with anything related to NASA. But in reality, the division was not so simple. In fact, many in the counterculture were interested in space exploration. Monte Mead’s dream of an outer space free of hang-ups and squares did not die just because NASA turned out to be square to the core, but lived on in 1960s and 1970s youth culture. Yet Paine, whether he knew it or not, was onto something when he expressed his belief that the dissenting youth were uninterested in the space program because “it is just too square—too disciplined—too rational for them.” For if interest in the idea of space exploration was common, dissenting youth were also thoroughly alienated by the way NASA actually performed its expeditions. The problem was, explained Harlan Ellison in the seminal underground newspaper the Los Angeles Free Press, “nitty-gritty, we did it like jerks.”22 21 Dr. T.O. Paine, “Squareland, Potland and Space,” Worcester Polytechnic Institute Commencement Address, 7 June 1970, NHO. 22 Reprinted in Donald A, Wollheim, ed., Men on the Moon (New York: Ace Publishing Corporation, 1969), 189. 211 IV. Elements of the New Left and the counterculture had been attacking the space program long before the moon landing. One of radical folk singer Phil Ochs’s earliest recordings, “Spaceman,” set to tape in 1964, echoed liberal concerns of this period when many were having second thoughts about the enormous costs of the moon program. Ochs addressed the spaceman floating above the Earth, asking, “Can you hear a child cry, body filled with pain? Deadly sores when cures are there—how much fuel remains?” Bob Dylan belittled the whole thing that same year, pondering, “I ask you how things could get much worse if the Russians happen to get up there first. Wowee, pretty scary!” The following year songwriter P.F. Sloan lumped the space program in with just about every other imaginable problem facing the world in singer Barry McGuire’s smash hit, “Eve of Destruction.” Though Phil Ochs considered him a world-class poseur, McGuire expressed the same, essentially liberal concerns as Ochs, warning, “you may leave here for four days in space, but when you return it’s the same old place.” And unlike Ochs and even Dylan, he took Sloan’s critique of the space race to the top of the pop charts.23 Of course these were folkies—even McGuire, though perhaps not Dylan by this point—and writing critical topical songs about current events was their raison d’être. But as the decade progressed the topical folk boom faded with the rise of the more lyrically esoteric rock 'n' roll. Meanwhile, the space program, though continuing its 23 Phil Ochs, “Spaceman,” The Broadside Tapes 1 (Smithsonian/Folkways, 1989), SF 40008; Bob Dylan, “I Shall Be Free No. 10,” Another Side of Bob Dylan (Columbia, 1964), PC 8993; Barry McGuire, “Eve of Destruction,” Eve of Destruction (Dunhill, 1965), D-50003. On Ochs’s disdain of Barry McGuire, see Marc Eliot, Death of a Rebel: A Biography of Phil Ochs (New York: Citadel Underground, 1995), 89. 212 spectacular successes with the Gemini program, was not as high-stakes as it had been in the early 1960s as Cold War tensions eased and the U.S. was no longer trying to catch up with every new Soviet space feat. By the mid-'60s, then, any chance of a showdown between Space Age and New Left values that seemed possible in the early '60s folk era had faded. Interest in space exploration did not wane, of course, and although space was not a major lyrical theme in mid-'60s rock music, this was the peak of Space Age culture, and those groups that did broach the subject tended to offer a positive image of space exploration, at least in the abstract. The Holy Modal Rounders, for example, who represented a shift in folk music away from the traditional toward the psychedelic, transformed Johnny Cymbal’s contemporary pop hit “Mr. Bassman” into their own “Mister Spaceman.” “In the race to the moon,” they sang, “Oh mister spaceman, you sure have started somethin’/ Oh mister spaceman, don’t you know you got my heart a- thumpin’/ Oh mister spaceman, I wanna be a spaceman too.” The Godz followed suit. The very epitome of 1960s underground rock—they barely sold any records, their music was all but unlistenable to anyone but the most avid fan of unlistenable music, and they were only really appreciated by future generations of minimalist art-punks—the Godz in 1967 laid down their own tribute to Luna, “Soon the Moon.” While the lyrics are obscure—a characteristic of most Godz songs—the hazy, droning, one-guitar-note and spastic drum-banging dissonance dreamily anticipated a visit to the moon, still a rather abstract possibility at this point in the space program, but not in the imagination of the Godz. Any square who by misfortune happened to stumble 213 across a Godz record in the mid-'60s would, at best, be confused; at worst, reduced to tears over its sheer ugliness. Yet the Godz captured the fascination with the moon as much as Walter Cronkite would with his “Whew! Boy!” and “My Golly!” babbling in the heat of the moment, and their enthusiasm for going to the moon represented a good number of the youth Cronkite would dismiss as incidental to the whole deal.24 Not all space-related prognostications from the 1960s counterculture were so sanguine, of course. Take, for instance, the Cosmic Rock Show. Sometime in 1967 or ’68, perhaps in Duluth, Minnesota, perhaps not—even less is known about them than the mysterious Godz—the Cosmic Rock Show laid down one of the more prescient predictions about the eventual moon landing, at least in terms of how the counterculture would come to perceive it. “Ride it to the moon, the psychedelic space ship,” hummed the singer over a distorted electronic organ and raucous drums bordering on chaos, “I got the feeling it’ll be another bum trip.” Meanwhile, the Rolling Stones weighed in from across the Atlantic at the end of 1967 with a similar sentiment in “2000 Light Years From Home.” Recorded at the peak of the Stones’ short-lived full-blown psychedelic phase, “2000 Light Years From Home” evoked a vision of space exploration at once enticing and foreboding. A menagerie of often-discordant noises including strings, fuzz guitar and electronic oscillations over a driving drum and bass rhythm, Mick Jagger’s soft reverb-drenched vocals conjured up both the romance of journeying to unknown worlds 24 The Godz, “Soon the Moon,” Godz 2 (Base Records, 1967), ESP 1047. 214 as well as a dread of the inevitable loneliness of interstellar travel. “It’s so very lonely,” with a lush array of backing harmonies, “you’re two thousand light years from home.”25 Like most mid-'60s rock 'n' roll nods to space, the Rolling Stones ignored NASA and spoke to a more basic interest in the idea of space exploration among the young. Similar space references could be found sporadically throughout mid-'60s rock, from the popular hits of the Byrds, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Pink Floyd to more obscure groups like Soul, Inc. and The Monks. There was little concern with the actual space program, as there had been in the folk era, but rather a fascination, and sometimes unease, with the more general idea of space travel. When the race to the moon heated up in 1968 and 1969, attention from the counterculture increased in turn. Though the interest in outer space carried over from the mid-'60s, this generalized Space Age fascination was now often coupled with more direct appraisals of the space program itself. The thriving underground press of the late 1960s, for example, treated the moon landing to its own analyses, often with front-page stories. As usual with the underground press, coverage ranged from the asinine to thoughtful attempts to tease out the meaning of the event from a radical perspective.26 Though almost all of the coverage in the underground media was critical of at least some aspects of the endeavor, it was not uniformly negative. In fact there was as much ambivalence as hostility. But on the whole, regardless of how they felt about the idea of going to the 25 Cosmic Rock Show, “Psiship,” on V/A, Beyond the Calico Wall (Voxx Records, 1993), VCD 2051; The Rolling Stones, “2000 Light Years from Home,” Their Satanic Majesties Request (London Records, Inc., 1967), NPS-2. 26 The Philadelphia Free Press, for example (27 April 1970, 1-2) believed the first Chinese satellite in 1970 revealed the supremacy of Maoism since “the people of China have organized their collective efforts to produce in twenty years the technological skills acquired by the Soviet Union in forty years and the U.S. in eighty.” 215 moon—and some even admitted empathy with the men hopping around on the moon, clean-cut organization men they would have despised in nearly any other context—most writers could not overcome the feeling that the U.S. accomplished its goal in a most disagreeable manner. Harlan Ellison, a well-known science fiction author, over thirty but in tune with younger radicals, was excited about the prospect of a moon landing. “I’ve been dreaming,” he wrote, “along with all other SF [science fiction] fans, about that moment when the first men would get Lunar dust on their boots.” Yet when it happened—and Ellison assured the reader that he spent the week glued to his television—he was overcome with ambivalence rather than joy. “I was knocked out by Buzz Aldrin bounding about on the Moon like a kangaroo,” he conceded, “but there were so many negative vibes attendant on the project that it really brought me down.”27 Other commentators followed Ellison’s path from anticipation to unease. “It’s 1969 and three men are going to walk on the moon,” read an unattributed article in the Providence, RI Extra. “Incredible! I was a science major in school and I always wanted to fly in space. . . . What would it be like weightless? . . . What would it be like to look back at my home planet from 240,000 miles away?” wondered the author. “I decide to find out so I drop some acid and go to a friend’s to watch the coverage on color T.V.” After watching, and watching, and waiting, and waiting for something to happen, the author grew bored as well as irritated by the banality of the television coverage, which flooded the momentous event with commercials and product endorsements. “I leave pissed and 27 Wollheim, Men on the Moon, 189-90. 216 spend the rest of my trip drifting in and out of T.V. rooms trying to figure out why this amazing human feat is so depressing, and so totally alienated from me.”28 The reaction of Ellison and the anonymous writer in Extra—an avid interest in space exploration crushed by disappointment with the actual moon landing—was not uncommon in the underground press, nor in the wider counterculture. When commentators like Thomas Paine and Walter Cronkite blasted the rebellious youth for essentially having nothing to do with the success of the moon landing, they also assumed that the critical youth had little interest in space exploration in general. But interest in space exploration among the postwar generation—including the counterculture and even the more sober New Left—was in fact significant. This was, after all, an age group that grew up reading the science fiction of Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke, all of whom piqued many a young mind’s interest in outer space. It was also a generation raised amid prosperity and in a technological society where nearly any technical feat, including a moon landing, seemed possible. Jerry Rubin, who more than anyone stoked the fires of generational war when he urged youth to “kill your parents,” offered a vivid contrast between the mindset of the new generation and the old. “The 1950’s were a turning point in the history of Amerika,” he explained: Those who grew up before the 1950’s live today in a mental world of Nazism, concentration camps, economic depression and Communist dreams Stalinized. A pre-1950’s child who can still dream is very rare. Kids who grew up in the post- 1950’s live in a world of supermarkets, color TV commercials, guerilla war, international media, psychedelics, rock 'n' roll and moon walks. For us nothing is 28 Extra, 29 July 1969, 9. 217 impossible. We can do anything. This generation gap is the widest in history. The pre-1950’s generation has nothing to teach the post-1950’s.”29 It might have come as a shock to the NASA crowd to hear Rubin claim the moon landing for his generation of misfits and rebels. But while Rubin’s stark split might have been exaggerated (he was an ancient 31 at the time of Apollo, after all), his description of a generation for whom anything seemed possible—a true “Space Age” generation—was not. “Perhaps I should have been reminded of Prometheus stealing fire from Olympus,” wrote the 20-year-old James Kunen on witnessing the Apollo 8 launch. “I was not. I grew up with rockets. They are part of my world. To me, launching a thirty-six story building is impressive, but not inconceivable.” And humans walking on the moon? “It was just one of those things that happens these days,” he explained after Apollo 11.30 Ironically, it was this very sense that anything was possible, that even the sky was no longer the limit, that made the actual moon landing something of a letdown to this generation of great expectations. Ellen Willis, looking back at Apollo in the aftermath of the 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion, recounted a childhood and young adulthood entranced by the wonders of space introduced to her via New York’s Hayden Planetarium and her avid reading of science fiction. “I wanted to go to the moon myself,” she recalled, “what science fiction fan doesn’t?” Harlan Ellison and the Extra commentator came to Apollo 11 with similar expectations, but were ultimately disappointed, even angered, by what they saw. Willis’s hostility toward the space program ran so deep she did not even watch the moon landing. “I don’t remember the circumstances,” she 29 Jerry Rubin, Do It: Scenarios of the Revolution, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 90-91. Emphases in original. 30 Kunen, “The Great Rocketship,” 17; Washington Post, 24 August 1969, 34. 218 recalled, “did I purposely decide not to watch it? did I forget? did I have a deadline?—but the deeper reason is clear: I felt alienated from the American version of spaceflight.”31 The reasons for this alienation from the moon landing, widespread among the counterculture, varied. There were predictable accusations from more politically oriented radicals that Apollo was an imperialist venture, plain and simple. The sight of the astronauts planting an American flag on the moon only lent credence to this charge. Others complained that the gobs of money spent on the venture would have been better applied to social programs. But this was an “old liberal criticism,” replied radical Andrew Kopkind, “good-natured but irrelevant.” Paul Cabbell, in a front-page Los Angeles Free Press article, even defended the moon effort in response to its liberal detractors. “The children of the poor are running around with fish bowls on their heads, imitating spacemen,” he wrote, “Neil Armstrong is their fucking idol, Superman and Wyatt Earp are dead.” Cabbell believed “the beef ought to be directed towards the people who run the war, not NASA. Nixon wants more for Vietnam and less for NASA. Why not more for NASA and poverty and none for Vietnam?” In any case, as Peter Collier explained, to criticize the space program as too expensive was to miss the point, for “Apollo had become a fantasy, not an item in the budget, and it was as fantasy that it had to be appreciated.”32 But even as fantasy, Apollo was lacking—and this was the primary reason the counterculture found it so alienating. On a basic level, plenty of countercultural 31 Ellen Willis, No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 240-241. 32 Kopkind in Hard Times, 4 August 1969, 1; Los Angeles Free Press, 18 July 1969, 1, 14; Collier, “Apollo 11: The Time Machine,” 56. 219 observers were amazed that NASA could take something as exciting as a moon landing and make it boring. Attacks of this nature were directed as much at the non-stop television coverage as at NASA itself. “There were only a few moments of genuine excitement during the course of eight days,” complained Michael Hoffman in Philadelphia’s Distant Drummer, “and yet the saturation coverage demanded that the time in between be filled.” Borrowing a concept from Daniel Boorstin (himself an avid NASA supporter), Hoffman believed, “It was during these moments that the pseudo- event was created.”33 Boorstin’s idea of a “pseudo-event” applied to trivial events that were hyped up or even created by the media solely for the purpose of satiating the public’s desire for news, thus turning everyday occurrences into “news.” Leave it to NASA and the corporate media to turn the event of the century into a pseudo-event! Hank Malone, writing in the Detroit Fifth Estate, was even more critical. “Andy Warhol would have given his right arm (and probably his left buttock) to have created that epically-dull 2 ½ hour underground film,” he wrote. “Everybody says it was ‘great’ or fantastic, and yet everyone seemed bored by it all.” “That’s America for you,” he concluded, “they take a miracle and turn it into a bummer.”34 Such complaints may seem petty, but they were widespread enough that they have to be taken seriously. Still, Abbie Hoffman had no time for those who would dismiss the entire moon landing as one big bore, and even offered uncharacteristic praise for the 33 Distant Drummer, 30 October 1969, 8. 34 Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1992; orig. 1961); Fifth Estate, 20 August 1969, 4. 220 American system and “albino crewcuts” that pulled it off. “One really can’t help but get caught up in the majesty of it all,” he admitted, “the holiness, this birth of the New Age. There they are now. . . . When they leap it’s poetry, when they talk, even some number- jumbo, you’re aware that in one hundred years, one thousand years, this will endure as an art form.” He had familiar complaints, of course, especially about the television coverage. “Not anyone but good ol PIG NATION with a used-car dealer for president, could have thought about selling time to sponsors to broadcast the flight of Apollo 11,” he complained. “Only in Amerika.” Still, “One tries not to be cynical; after all, they are jumping around on the fuckin moon.” Like so many others, however, Hoffman came away from the experience disappointed, his joy overshadowed by the terrifying realization that “Amerika brought its morality with it” to the moon. “It’s really sad,” he wrote, “The flag bit, I mean.”35 Hoffman’s “flag bit” was just one symbol of the larger problem, which was that NASA quite explicitly left no room for the counterculture and its values on the trip to the moon. The moon landing was done the squares’ way, no ifs, ands, or buts about it, and to the counterculture this meant using the feat to promote a conservative ethos of outdated WASP patriotism. Of course, in reality, much of the moon landing, including the flag, was determined by political wrangling way above NASA, which for its part did its best to stress that the mission was not a triumph of the squares, nor of the United States, but rather a victory “for all mankind.” Still, it was no accident that the astronauts were a fairly homogenous bunch, and that the values they embodied looked not to the present or 35 Abbie Hoffman, Woodstock Nation: A Talk-Rock Album (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 40-43. 221 the future, as Peter Collier noted, but back to an idyllic pre-counterculture, pre-New Left 1950s. While some critics, like Abbie Hoffman and Harlan Ellison, were able to at least find some joy in watching the astronauts bounce around on the moon, others were unable to empathize at all with these representatives of square America. “When all is said and done,” asked a second unnamed writer in Extra, “will we be able to say that Armstrong and Aldrin brought back something human? Did they dig it? They ran on the moon. They saw the universe, but rather than communicate to us that this was man’s first cosmic lay we have only a sense of universal masturbation.”36 Ellen Willis explained it best. The reason for her alienation from the space program was clear: like so many others, she wanted to go to the moon herself: “I at least wanted to imagine going to the moon myself. But NASA’s iconography left no room for such fantasies.”37 And that was NASA’s real crime. Looking beyond all of the rhetoric—and there was plenty of it—damning NASA simply because it was part of the American power structure, it is clear that even those willing to give NASA a chance, willing to suspend their hostility toward the establishment for a moment to revel in the excitement of the moon landing, still often came away alienated, soured by the feeling that NASA did it wrong, that with its flag and its Nixon-glorifying plaque and its litter left behind on the moon, with its two unimaginative picture-perfect white small-town middle-class corn-on-the-cob-eating Nixon-saluting ex-fighter-pilot men taking the first steps on the moon and sealing once and for all the triumph of the squares, NASA had 36 Extra, 29 July 1969, 9. 37 Willis, No More Nice Girls, 241. 222 declared the universe of many freaks’ dreams off limits—squares only, Americans only, white males only on this moon. Even worse than its exclusionary nature was NASA’s assault on the imagination. The true tragedy was clear to Hank Malone in the Fifth Estate: the Apollo moon landing was “the ultimate WASP trip. . . . The entire event utterly lacked poetry and wonder.” This was not just a criticism of the unavoidable boring stretches in the televised coverage, but of NASA’s planned-to-a-T, no-room-for-improvisation-or-even-excitement moon landing, its uncanny ability to strip outer space of any sense of mystery or awe, to transform the heavens from the realm of transcendence into just another parking lot for America’s technological junk. The astronauts were men of a generation Jerry Rubin declared incapable of dreaming—unimaginative automatons programmed to follow precise instructions beamed from Houston and nothing else. That was the nature of squares, of course, but now this lack of imagination threatened to become contagious as these robots trampled the dreams of so many in the counterculture who had their own visions of space travelling and moon walking—visions that had nothing to do with NASA’s version, but which NASA had corrupted nonetheless. V. If the counterculture was so critical of NASA’s performance, what was its own idea of space exploration? The underground press is an important barometer of countercultural and New Left thought, but it could not compete with the exposure gained 223 by another form of media in which the counterculture and mainstream Americans alike invested a significant amount of attention—the rock music of the era. Here, too, the flurry of space activity beginning in 1968 sparked a vigorous response as groups worked space themes into their lyrics and song structures. And here, even more than in the underground press, were revealed the very different conceptions of space exploration held by the counterculture and by NASA. Continuing the trend of the mid-1960s, most rock groups who broached the subject held the idea of space exploration in awe, excited that the science-fiction future they had fantasized over as children was rapidly entering the realm of the possible. Yet their enthusiasm was held in check as they recognized who it was that was actually going into space—not themselves, but squares, representatives of the establishment, of the power structure that was wreaking so much havoc on Earth, and which would surely do the same as it made inroads into outer space. Hence, it is possible to discern two distinct themes concerning space exploration in Apollo-era rock music—a romantic vision of the possibilities that space travel opened up for personal liberation, contrasted by an almost uniform disdain for NASA and the establishment that controlled the actual leap into space. Numerous groups integrated the moon landing into their lyrics; countless more told personal stories of travelling in space. Few were critical of space exploration in the abstract. Just as few offered unqualified praise for NASA and the actual moon missions.38 What will interest us here are those groups that offered both images of space 38 A major exception was the Byrds’ “Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins,” although, filling only around minute at the end of their Ballad of Easy Rider album, it feels more like an afterthought than a meaningful tribute. Although more research is needed, it is possible that this trend might not necessarily hold true for some foreign countercultures. Take South Africa, for example, where public outrage over being unable to watch 224 exploration—a romantic vision of a personally enlightening journey into space, and a damnation of the system that actually sent astronauts to the moon.39 Although it was not a common lyrical topic, the moon landing did work its way into a number of songs during the Apollo era. Black Sabbath, the British godfathers of heavy metal who enjoyed a huge following in the United States, addressed the moon landing on the American version of their 1970 debut album with the track “Wicked World.” Lyrically resembling something of a condensed version of Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction,” “Wicked World” recited a laundry list of problems indicating that the world was indeed a pretty terrible place in which to live at the moment, with war, hunger, duplicitous politicians, even absentee parents contributing to its wickedness. Yet in the midst of all this suffering, the U.S. saw fit to focus its energies on shooting people to the moon. “They can put a man on the moon quite easy,” pointed out singer Ozzy Osbourne, “while people here on Earth are dying of old diseases.”40 The pioneering American psychedelic rock group Jefferson Airplane followed suit in February 1970, looking beyond Black Sabbath’s liberal complaint to embrace the burgeoning ecology movement in “Have you Seen the Saucers,” a call to the children of “Woodstock Nation” to “have a care for the needs of your planet.” “Tranquility Base, the Apollo moon landing played a major role in the lifting of the apartheid nation’s ban on television broadcasts. Freedom’s Children, the country’s premier psychedelic rock band, was in London in 1969, where they dropped acid, watched the moon landing, and went on to record a tribute entitled “The Eagle Has Landed,” followed by a full Apollo-inspired album, 1970’s Astra. For the Freedom’s Children story, see Ugly Things 25 (Summer 2007), 95-101; and 26 (Winter/Spring 2008), 204-205. 39 Rock songs from the late 1960s and early 1970s not discussed in this dissertation that mention the Apollo moon landings include: The Velvet Underground, “Satellite of Love,” Peel Slowly and See, Disc 5 (Polygram Records, 1995), 31452 7887-2; John Stewart, “Armstrong,” Cannons in the Rain (RCA Victor, 1973), SP-4827; Lothar and the Hand People’s “Space Hymn” was clearly inspired by Apollo 8. See Lothar and the Hand People, “Space Hymn,” Space Hymn (Capitol Records, 1969), ST-247. 40 Black Sabbath, “Wicked World,” Black Sabbath (Warner Brothers Records, 1970), WS 1871. 225 there goes the neighborhood,” complained the Airplane’s multiple singers in a well- harmonized assault on NASA and its moon landing, “American garbage dumped in space and no room left for brotherhood.” (Ed Sanders of the Fugs, recording solo in 1972, would hit the same theme with his “Beer Cans on the Moon.”) The year after Black Sabbath and Jefferson Airplane filed their grievances, the MC5, perhaps the most overtly revolutionary rock group of the late '60s, one-time house band for the armed Detroit counterculture/political-revolutionary hybrid White Panther Party, once again lumped the space program in with other ills brought on by the establishment: “Atom bomb, Vietnam, missiles on the moon/And they wonder why the kids are shooting up so soon?”41 Despite these criticisms, these three bands would in the very same time period record two of the best space-themed songs, and one full space-themed album, each offering a striking alternative to the staid space experience supplied by NASA. Far from despairing over the despoiling of space or the neglect of earthly concerns, as in the songs mentioned above, these more positive songs found much excitement, hope, even salvation in the idea of space exploration, so long as it was not left in the hands of NASA. Black Sabbath presented their own, more personal version of space travel on their second album, Paranoid, released later in 1970. Sandwiched on Side One between their two most famous songs, “Paranoid” and “Iron Man”—two songs that would define heavy metal for generations to come—lay “Planet Caravan,” the closest this usually gloom- and doom-laden band would ever come to light psychedelia: a delicate, floating hymn to 41 Jefferson Airplane, “Have You Seen the Saucers,” Early Flight (Grunt, 1974), CYL1-0437; Ed Sanders, “Beer Cans on the Moon,” Beer Cans on the Moon (Collector’s Choice Music, 2007), CCM-865; MC5, “Gotta Keep Movin’,” High Time (Atlantic, 1992), R2 71034. 226 space travel, formed by a hypnotizing repetitive bass line interspersed with lightly tapped congas and a gently strummed guitar, occasional flourishes of wood flutes and soft piano chords, and wistful vocals that offered a far more romantic vision of space travelling than the actual moon landing they had criticized on their first album. “We sail,” crooned Osbourne this time, “through endless skies, stars shine like eyes, the black night sighs. . . . And so, we pass on by, the crimson eye, of great god Mars, as we travel the universe.” Unlike the grainy black and white of the televised Apollo landing, Sabbath’s outer space offered vivid flashes of color—silver starlight, a purple blaze, sapphire haze, the crimson eye of Mars, an astonishing medley of visual and mental stimulation more reminiscent of the light show at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey than anything experienced during the real moon landing. In just four and a half minutes of ethereal psychedelia Black Sabbath managed to restore at least some of the magic of outer space that many countercultural science fiction fans found lacking in the actual moon landing.42 The MC5, despite their fears of missiles on the moon, also dreamed of taking to the stars. At the end of October 1968, as the space program roared back to life with Apollo 7, the MC5 hosted a Halloween Eve concert in Detroit for their hometown fans. Dubbing their music “high-energy rock 'n' roll,” the MC5 played loud, fast, brutal— perhaps the closest approximation in 1960s rock to the power unleashed by a Saturn rocket launch (a comparison Norman Mailer made explicit when he inadvertently stumbled across an MC5 performance). The group was so explosive on stage, in fact, so energetic, so raucous, so violent, they recorded this particular concert and released it as 42 Black Sabbath, “Planet Caravan,” Paranoid (Warner Brothers, 1970), BSK-3104. 227 their first LP in 1969—a rarity for a debut album, then and now. True to their revolutionary reputation, the MC5 was the only group (of many that promised) who actually showed up and performed at the “Festival of Life,” the gathering in Chicago’s Lincoln Park during the 1968 Democratic Convention that descended into a half-week of bloodshed and chaos shortly after they finished their set.43 Yet beyond their political radicalism, the MC5 were also fascinated by the idea of space travel, an allure that came through clearly in their now-legendary performance that October night in Detroit. After blazing through a furious set, the group closed with “Starship,” a song based loosely on a poem by Sun Ra, a pioneer avant-garde jazzman and band favorite who had himself long been captivated by space travel, arguing as early as 1955 that “The space age cannot be avoided.”44 Equal part MC5’s high-energy rock and Sun Ra’s spaced-out free jazz, “Starship” found the group, like Black Sabbath, yearning to flee the Earth into the infinity of outer space. “Starship!” bellowed the singer, Rob Tyner, over sharp stabbings of distorted dual guitars and the frantic beat of a rapidly thumping kick drum, “Starship take me, take me where I want to go/ Out there, among the planets, let a billion suns cast my shadow.” The group then roared through the countdown, the lift-off, and the ascension into space, at which point the song changed drastically from hard-pounding rock 'n' roll to a spaced-out free-jazz-influenced 43 For a brief overview of the MC5 story, see Fred Goodman, The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce (New York: Times Books, 1997), 152-82. The MC5 were not, in fact, as revolutionary as they seemed in 1968-69, ditching the White Panthers and their revolutionary agenda when they believed the association was not helping their music careers. On the White Panthers, see Jeff A. Hale, “The White Panthers’ ‘Total Assault on the Culture,’” in Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, eds., Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s (New York: Routledge, 2002), 125-156; Mailer’s encounter with the MC5 is recounted in Miami and the Siege of Chicago (New York: New York Review Books, 2008; orig. 1968), 141-144. 44 Chicago Seed, Vol. 4, Iss. 6, 9. 228 meditation on the radical experience of soaring through space. “There is a land whose being is almost unimaginable to the human mind,” spoke Tyner softly, reciting the Sun Ra poem, surrounded momentarily by near-complete silence before the band erupted once again into a free-form cacophony. “Out in outer space,” he concluded, “a living, blazing fire so vital and alive there is no need to describe its splendor.”45 If Black Sabbath and the MC5 offered their conflicting visions of space exploration in different songs from the same era, David Bowie managed to present both versions in the same song, 1969’s “Space Oddity,” which, ironically enough, given that it implies the death of an astronaut in space, was used by the BBC in its Apollo 11 coverage. The song told the story of Major Tom, shot into space and, like NASA astronauts, in constant contact with ground control. Everything was going according to plan until Tom experienced his first spacewalk. “This is Major Tom to ground control,” sang Bowie, “I’m stepping through the door, and I’m floating in a most peculiar way, and the stars look very different today.” It was an overwhelming experience, the sort of mind-blowing encounter with the infinite explored by the MC5 and Black Sabbath. Bowie’s flight plan seemed to call for something similar to the Apollo 8 mission—Major Tom would perhaps circle the moon and return to Earth a hero. Whatever the specific plan, it was far from the course Tom ultimately decided to take. Entranced by the beauty of outer space, the wonderful feeling of floating freely, even if confined to his “tin can,” Major Tom cut off communication with ground control and was content to sail to his 45 MC5, “Starship,” Kick Out the Jams (Elektra Records, 1969), EKS-74042. 229 death in the void of outer space. “I think my spaceship knows which way to go,” announced Tom in his last broadcast, “Tell my wife I love her very much she knows.”46 During the first American spacewalk, astronaut Ed White was so overcome by the experience of floating in space he hesitated to return to the spacecraft. “This is the saddest moment of my life,” he sighed as he finally made his way back into the capsule.47 With Major Tom, who did not succumb to reason a la Ed White, Bowie helped return a bit of wonder back into space exploration. Major Tom found the idea of soaring through the universe much more appealing than following the soul-destroying alternative of a flight plan that would return him to Earth. How could any sensitive human being do otherwise? wondered the counterculture. Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane may have seen the moon in early 1970 as an unfortunate dumping ground for NASA’s litter, but he also saw in space the potential for freedom from an increasingly rotten Earth—a place to get away from the destructive forces that NASA represented. Toward the end of 1970, as Jefferson Airplane slowly disintegrated as a functioning unit, Kantner and a group of friends, including fellow Airplaners Grace Slick and Jack Cassidy, the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart, and superstars David Crosby and Graham Nash, got together to record a concept album called Blows Against the Empire. The album, tellingly credited to Paul Kantner and “Jefferson Starship,” proved to be a hit, reaching number 20 on the pop charts and achieving the impressive feat of being the first rock album ever nominated for a Hugo, 46 David Bowie, “Space Oddity,” Space Oddity (RCA Records, 1972), AFL1-4813. 47 Quoted in Andrew Smith, Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth (New York: Fourth Estate, 2005), 235. 230 the most prestigious science-fiction literary award.48 An esoteric mixture of acoustic folk, hard-charging rockers, and experimental electronic instrumentals, Blows Against the Empire told the story of a group of hippie rebels who “intend to hijack the first sound interstellar or interplanetary starship built by the people of this planet,” in order to escape from an “Amerika” that was getting “too thick,” that was suffering through “Dick” and a “grade-B movie star governor’s war,” and that threatened to destroy the next generation of children in the process of destroying itself. True freedom seemed less and less likely on the troubled Earth. Liberation would only come in outer space. Kantner, sounding a lot like Wernher von Braun and Thomas Paine in their more optimistic moods, predicted that the first functioning interstellar vessel would be ready by 1990. At that point, “People with a clever plan can assume the role of the mighty and hijack the starship/ Carry 7000 people past the sun/ And our babes'll wander naked thru the cities of the universe/ C’mon free minds, free bodies, free dope, free music, the day is on its way, the day is ours.”49 The second side of the album, the core of the story, followed a path similar to the MC5’s “Starship,” through the hijacking, the escape from the solar system, the voyage into infinity and the development of a new interstellar consciousness among the refugees. Kantner had explored similar ground in an earlier recording, “Wooden Ships.” Set in 1975, it followed a smaller group of rebels who escaped from a post-apocalyptic America in their wooden ship. Co-written by Kantner, David Crosby, and Steven Stills (Crosby, 48 Jeff Tamarkin, Got a Revolution!: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane (New York: Atria Books, 2003), 233-34. 49 Paul Kantner, “Mau Mau (Amerikon)” and “Hijack,” Blows Against the Empire (RCA Records: 1970), LSP-4448. 231 Stills & Nash would soon record their own version), it was one of the standout tracks on Jefferson Airplane’s 1969 “Volunteers” album. “Take a sister by her hand,” harmonized the group, “Lead her far from this barren land/ Horror grips us as we watch you die/ All we can do is echo your anguished cry and stare as all your human feelings die.” There would be no technology on this trip—“No glowing metal on our ship of wood only.” Only the wooden ship could bring freedom from a doomed civilization: “Wooden ships on the water very free and easy/ Easy you know the way it’s supposed to be.”50 Only a year later Kantner’s sights had shifted from the seas to the stars, and the wooden ship would no longer suffice. This time, the revolutionaries would steal the highest of technologies, the starship, to achieve their liberation from the tyrannies of Earth. But at its core, the message was similar to that of “Wooden Ships—“Shall I go off and away to bright Andromeda? Shall I sail my wooden ships to the sea?” asked Kantner, making the connection explicit. “Or stay in a cage of those in Amerika? Or shall I be on the knee? Wave goodbye to Amerika, say hello to the garden.”51 Kantner’s space opera might seem a bit hokey in hindsight (“Empire is pretty stupid,” one critic put it bluntly) but it found a ready audience in the counterculture.52 More important, Blows Against the Empire, recorded during the same year in which the Kantner-penned “Have You Seen the Saucers” criticized NASA for its real-life moon landing, more than any other work revealed the split vision toward space exploration among many in the counterculture—a romantic vision of the freedom offered by space 50 Jefferson Airplane, “Wooden Ships,” Volunteers (RCA Records, 1969), LSP-4238. 51 Paul Kantner, “Let’s Get Together,” Blows Against the Empire. 52 David Pichaske, A Generation in Motion: Popular Music and Culture in the Sixties (New York: Schirmer Books, 1979), 141. 232 that was fostered by a lifetime of science fiction consumption, immersion in a technological society, the countercultural yearning for speed and “the road,” and, thanks to LSD and other hallucinogens, a unique pre-appreciation of space travelling not available to squares, versus the bland, oppressive vision of exploration offered by NASA, itself just one part of a larger destructive system that was devastating Earth, and that could only offer further oppression in space, not liberation. At its core, it came down to the same “us” vs. “them” mentality that fueled much of the countercultural rebellion of the period. When we go into space, Kantner was saying, it will be liberating, a step toward building a new society and culture based on freedom and love—“Do you know, we could go?” asked Kantner in “Have You Seen the Stars Tonite.” “We are free, anyplace you can think of, we could be.” When they go to the moon, on the other hand, they bring all the trouble they created on Earth with them, treating the moon as a garbage dump to be exploited by humanity—not the first step toward a new empyreal consciousness but simply more of the despicable same. When I go into outer space, sang the MC5, when my starship takes me where I want to go, when I “feel the stars burning on my face,” then whole new vistas of thought and reality will explode into my consciousness, transforming me into spaceman, and propelling me into a transcendent reality. When they go into space, it is to place missiles on the moon—and they wonder why the kids are shooting up so soon (or why the kids are dreaming of escaping their world and experiencing a rebirth in space)? Black Sabbath never explained what they hoped to find in space—that wasn’t the point. The point was the journey itself, which they presented beautifully in “Planet Caravan.” It was another 233 personal account of space flight—“We sail through endless skies”—a wonderful alternative to their version, the “they” who can “put a man on the moon quite easy, while people here on Earth are dying of old diseases.” Abbie Hoffman also drew a clear distinction between “their” version of space travel and the counterculture’s. When they go to the moon, complained Hoffman, they take their twisted morality with them and gore its once peaceful skin with their imperialist flag. But when we go to the moon—and we will go to the moon, he warned, since “young people here in WOODSTOCK NATION are learning to fly in space”—we “will fly off in some communal capsule, Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Hippies, liberated women, young workers on the line, and G.I.’s sitting in stockades because they don’t want to go to Vietnam. There will be a whole mess of us laughing and getting stoned on our way to OUTERSPACE, and the first thing, the very first thing we’re gonna do out there is to rip down that fuckin flag on the moon.”53 There was little confusion in these visions over who “they” were. Even Thomas Paine saw the distinction clearly, if from the other side. Black Sabbath, the MC5, and Jefferson Airplane all revealed a clear interest in space exploration, but any leap into space left in “their” hands would simply extend the horrors of Earth to the rest of the universe, whether the poverty and disease that were left unaddressed by the mad dash into space, the projection of their predilection for violence and war to the stars, or the corruption of the solar system with humanity’s pollution and rubbish rather than the development of a more harmonious existence that would generate less pollution and trash 53 Hoffman, Woodstock Nation, 43. 234 on Earth. These were not simply paranoid fantasies of deluded radicals. Gather a group of any three Americans at the time of Apollo 11 and it was likely that a majority, regardless of whether they supported the moon landing, believed the space program diverted too much money from more pressing needs on Earth. The extension of the arms race to the moon, if not practical from a strategic perspective, made perfect sense in a contest with clear Cold War origins, and from a nation that seemed to cynics at the turn of the 1970s to have extended its warfare as far as possible within the confines of Earth. It did not help when Edward Teller, popularly considered the father of the H-bomb, reappeared in the news at the time of Apollo 11 to propose a series of atomic explosions on the moon (for the purpose of scientific research, of course). Nor that Freeman Dyson, an avid proponent of space colonization, believed outer space could serve as a dumping ground for excess garbage once terrestrial landfills reached saturation. A good number of countercultural attacks on NASA and the moon landings might have ranged from the juvenile to the absurd, but they were not all without provocation from Squareland.54 At its core, the space-oriented battle between Squareland and Potland was not the liberal critic vs. space proponent debate over whether there was any purpose to going into space—to many in the counterculture there clearly was. Rather, it was a battle over which value system would be taken into space—NASA’s values, reflective of the power structure that was wreaking such havoc on Earth, or the more humane, sustaining values 54 Washington Post, 1 June 1969, 5; Freeman Dyson, “Human Consequences of the Exploration of Space,” in David L. Bicknell and Richard L. Brengle, eds., Image and Event: America Now (New York: Appleton- Century-Crafts, 1971), 281-282. 235 of the counterculture. Monte Mead, at the beginning of the Space Age, viewed space as a place where he and his ilk could live by their own values, free of the daily hassles from Squareland. Kantner, the MC5, Black Sabbath and the dissenting generation that made up their large audiences took Mead’s good-time, party-centered vision of a future in space and colored it with a dash of LSD-tinged psychedelic dreamscapes and a heaping dose of revolutionary rhetoric. Things are getting too heavy here on Earth, Kantner sang, so let’s split, not to inner-city bohemias, or rural communes, or even on wooden ships out to sea—they would still be in control, no matter how secluded the spot, for some version of them was always in control everywhere on Earth. No, let’s split to outer space. Not only would there be no squares on the psychedelic moon, but the universe would be far more than merely the wild dance party with a top-notch jukebox that Monte Mead was seeking. It would be the site of the birth of a new consciousness, a new culture superior to that left behind on Earth. Apollo, Peter Collier had written, “finally became an exercise in subjectivity; it was, as in other things, your vision against theirs.” The two different visions of space exploration are seen clearly when comparing the yearnings of the counterculture to the actual NASA program.55 Or are they? Ironically, the countercultural vision of an escape from Earth into space shared much in common with the space futures offered by the most optimistic among the enemy, by them, by the Thomas Paines and Wernher von Brauns of the space program. When Paine drew his Manichean distinction between Potland and Squareland, it was Squarelanders whom he believed were most interested in the “distant but inevitable 55 Collier, “Apollo 11: The Time Machine,” 58. 236 day when man will establish new colonies on other worlds, extending the domain of terrestrial life, and initiating entirely new human cultures.”56 He was dead wrong. Perhaps his optimism clouded his judgment, but he was unable or unwilling to see that Squareland by the early 1970s had little interest in space colonization, and that its disinterest in aggressive exploration beyond Apollo was responsible for the space budget decline. On the other hand, Potland, at least some elements of it, shared with Paine a basic yearning to penetrate into the mysterious universe. In fact, when talk of space colonization heated up in the later 1970s, the debate between pro- and anti-colonization forces would not be held in any forum controlled by Squareland, but in the pages of a prominent counterculture venue—Stewart Brand’s Co-Evolution Quarterly.57 Thoughtful intellectual critics of the space program like Lewis Mumford and Loren Eiseley were fond of quoting a particular line from Moby Dick that seemed to best sum up Ahab’s maniacal crusade, and, by extension, the American space quest: Ahab, musing about himself, “all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.”58 To liberal critics, especially, the space program could be praised for its means: its well- organized, rational approach to problem solving, its achievement of such a remarkable feat in such a short period of time, with little loss of life and in a completely open manner. But the end toward which this effort was directed, a moon landing, was madness in light of the attention still needed to improving the human condition on Earth. 56 Paine, “Squareland, Potland and Space,” 8. 57 On Stewart Brand and space colonization debate, see Andrew G. Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007). 58 Loren Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), 54; Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1970), 301. 237 Those elements of the counterculture with an interest in space exploration turned this liberal viewpoint on its head. They had no doubt that space travel was a worthy goal, and they crafted some of the most romantic portrayals of personal flights through the universe. But they were horrified that the future in space seemed to have been placed in the hands of the very power structure they loathed, which proceeded to offer a bland, pre- planned, mystery-stripped trampling of the counterculture’s space fantasies. Michael Rossman, a veteran of Berkeley’s “People’s Park” battle in the spring of 1969, put his thoughts to writing on the day of the Apollo 11 launch—“Memo from Spaceport Berkeley” he called it. “Today the Space Force is reaching moonward in a titanium hand, to plant Nixon’s name in the vacant lot of my childhood dreams,” he lamented. Meanwhile, in Berkeley, “the Park lies flat as lunar rubblescape, our green launching aborted.”59 To Rossman, the goal of going into space was perfectly sane. It was allowing NASA and the establishment power structure to corrupt the moon, as they had corrupted his park, that was utterly mad. Further separating liberal and intellectual from countercultural critics of Apollo was the issue of space as a refuge from a dying Earth. When Hannah Arendt and Loren Eiseley heard space proponents refer to the Earth as a “prison” to be escaped as soon as possible, they found such talk dehumanizing, an evasion of responsibility, possibly even a bit insane. The urge to establish space colonies amounted to a betrayal of the Earth that had nourished and would continue to nourish human life, so long as it was properly cared for. The only way the Earth would become hostile to humanity anytime soon was 59 Michael Rossman, The Wedding Within the War (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971), 336. 238 through neglect. Hence, the rise of the ecological movement coincided with the realization of just how precious the Earth was compared to the rest of the solar system—a point driven home by the visits to the barren moon and the new close-up photos of a seemingly dead Mars that were beamed back from the Mariner probes shortly after Apollo 11. Undercurrents of apocalypticism ran deep in the counterculture, however, so while the counterculture led the movement toward environmentalism, it also contained contrasting strains of belief that the only hope for survival, given the horrendous mess the establishment was making of the world, was to flee Earth and establish new worlds based on its own, more promising values. This was the message of Paul Kantner on Blows Against the Empire, as it was of his earlier “Wooden Ships.” It was also a theme proposed by Black Sabbath in yet another of its space-related songs. “Freedom fighters sent out to the sun,” sang Osbourne in 1971’s “Into the Void,” “Escape from brainwashed minds and pollution/ Leave the Earth to all its sin and hate, find other worlds where freedom waits.” The Doors addressed this idea in 1970’s “Ship of Fools.” Even Phil Ochs, singing about the Cuban missile crisis way back in 1964, found himself considering an escape to Mars as an alternative to remaining in a country where the majority had supported President Kennedy’s confrontational Cold War style.60 Finally, to many older critics, liberals and intellectuals who believed the hope of redemption in space was an evasion from responsibilities on Earth, the idea of leaping 60 Black Sabbath, “Into the Void,” Master of Reality (Warner Brothers Records, 1971), BS 2562; The Doors, “Ship of Fools,” Morrison Hotel (Elektra Records, 1970), EKS-75007; Phil Ochs, “Talking Cuban Crisis,” All the News that’s Fit to Sing (Carthage Records, 1986), CGLP 4427. 239 into space with the aim of evolving toward a superior post-human culture was repugnant. To Kantner, that evolution was the whole point. “And more than human can we be,” he sang, “‘Cause human's truly locked to this planetary circle.”61 The counterculture, then, had a vision of a future among the stars that was quite different from the liberal goal of a deliberate, mechanical, scientific exploration of space, and saw space in terms more akin to the most avid space colonization proponents. Still, while there were abstract similarities between the goals of the counterculture and pro- NASA space zealots, the two visions were, as we have seen, far removed from one another. Thomas Paine often spoke passionately of a future in space. He was a vociferous proponent of colonization, beginning with a floating space station and moon colonies, and expanding outward from there. Yet while Paine talked of “initiating entirely new cultures” in his “Squareland” speech, when he got down to specifics his vision was incalculably less inspiring than the radical personal transformations of the counterculture. Speaking to the New York Times Magazine in the run-up to Apollo 11, Paine boldly predicted that by the end of the twentieth century humans would be living in domed settlements on the moon, where they could experience “brilliant sun and stars, dramatic landscapes, mountains and craters, a magnificent view of the earth. The loneliness so lonely, the togetherness so together.” Fine, as far as it went—really not too different from Paul Kantner’s “Hydroponic gardens and forests, glistening with lakes in the Jupiter starlite,” or the MC5’s “Land where the sun shines eternally, eternally, eternally.” But unlike the MC5’s radical “land whose being is almost unimaginable to 61 Kantner, “Hijack,” Blows Against the Empire. 240 the human mind,” Paine’s vision of this step into the unknown would hardly be radical at all. “It will be like Phoenix,” he assured readers—as in Arizona.62 VI. The counterculture was in some ways a perfect audience for the vision NASA wanted to sell. “Further,” screamed the forehead of Ken Kesey’s iconic psychedelic school bus, clearly laying out the intentions of the burgeoning counterculture. “Out—the one remaining way to go,” confirmed Kantner on Blows. It was a generation that would turn the aimless speedsters in movies like Vanishing Point, Two Lane Blacktop, and Easy Rider into existential heroes. Yet it seemed to have no place in its own mythology for the infinitely more daring (and, it seemed by the end of the Apollo era, equally aimless) astronauts. As Paine surmised correctly, NASA’s version of “further” and “out” were drastically different than the counterculture’s, too square, too rational, too disciplined for a group whose ethos was summed up in another commonly vocalized yearning—“Now!” Jonathan Eberhart, the singing hippie whose appearance in Japan so offended Harvey Kling at the beginning of this chapter, like others in the counterculture had vivid dreams about experiencing the wonders of outer space. “As a kid I never wanted to be a cowboy or a fireman or any of that classic Norman Rockwell stuff,” he recalled on the fifth anniversary of Apollo 11. “I just wanted to experience what is out there in space.” Eberhart recounted being particularly entranced by the thought of standing on the surface 62 New York Times Magazine, 8 June 1969, 60. 241 of Venus, where, he learned, “the atmospheric pressure . . . was so great that, assuming your eyes could see at the right wavelengths in the first place, the light would be bent completely around the planet and you could see the back of your head. As a science writer,” he explained, “I had to evaluate, skepticize and check out the possibility with other sources. As Jonathan Eberhart I stayed awake all night trying to imagine it.”63 Eberhart believed that the expansion of humanity into space and into other star systems was inevitable, but unlike others in the counterculture, he was content to follow NASA’s lead. Unfortunately for NASA, Eberhart’s enthusiasm for the space program was not widespread among the larger counterculture, most of which saw little hope of being invited into the NASA program—and little desire to be invited, for that matter. What the counterculture wanted out of space exploration was not conquest, nor scientific discovery nor any of the other practical promises NASA could deliver with an ambitious program, but enlightenment, personal enlightenment, of a form the space program could not hope to offer. But the space program had larger problems stemming from the counterculture. While those like Kantner and the MC5 looked outward for transcendence, sharing an end, if not the means, that was similar in some ways to the dreamers at NASA, just as many in the counterculture, fueled by the same drugs and same states of mind as their space- oriented peers, turned their vision in an opposite direction, inward instead of outward, toward an idyllic past rather than a glorious future. Who needs NASA to take us to Venus so we can see the back of our heads? they might have responded to Jonathan 63 Science News, 27 July 1974, 51. 242 Eberhart—we’ve been able to do that right here at home for some years now with a little help from our friend LSD! (or yoga, or transcendental meditation, or any of the other paths to transcendence that did not even require leaving one’s own living room). Most troubling for a space program trying to survive through the 1970s with a decent amount of funding and a sustained, if no longer necessarily ambitious, agenda, this latter trend of the counterculture, this turn away from hard rationalism and toward personal enlightenment, toward a trust in intuition over truth, toward a notion of progress reached through meditation and spiritualism more than advanced technology and space flights, had by the early 1970s made serious inroads into mainstream culture, threatening to undercut interest from the very Middle America whose support NASA needed to continue its exploration of the solar system. 243 Chapter 6: “God is Alive, Magic is Afoot”: Moon Voyaging in the Neo-Romantic 1970s Like nearly everyone else in the United States at the turn of the 1970s, His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada had something to say about the moon landing. The founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness—a.k.a. the Hare Krishnas—Swami Bhaktivedanta shared his thoughts in a short 1970 book entitled Easy Journey to Other Planets. If the title alone might have rankled the hundreds of thousands of Americans who had worked assiduously over the course of the decade to land men on the moon by 1969, the Swami’s argument was even more galling. “The latest desire man has developed is the desire to travel to other planets,” he recognized. But NASA’s method of doing so was ineffectual—“the playful spaceships of the astronauts are but childish entertainments and are of no use for this purpose.” Rather, he explained, “the generally accepted process for transferal to other planets is the practice of the yoga system.” The yogi—the expert practitioner of the Swami’s brand of yoga—“can transfer himself to any planet he likes. He does not need the help of spacecraft.” In fact, “for the perfect yogi . . . transferring from one planet to another is as easy as an ordinary man’s walking to the grocery store.”1 Bhaktivedanta’s Hare Krishnas were small in number in 1970, but their visibility was considerable thanks to their ubiquitous presence in America’s big cities as well as ex-Beatle George Harrison’s use of their “Hare Krishna” chant in his chart-topping hit, 1 A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Easy Journey to Other Planets (Los Angeles: The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1997; orig. 1970), vii, 28, 29, 71. 244 “My Sweet Lord.” As a result, they were among the more recognizable representatives of a larger Eastern mysticism trend that had sprouted up among the counterculture and college students in the late sixties. Still, the Swami’s proposal that anyone who practiced his yoga techniques could literally travel to the moon and beyond without spaceships may have seemed a bit far-fetched to mainstream Americans, and unlikely to find much traction beyond a small number of misguided youth. But it did. In fact, ideas remarkably similar to Bhaktivedanta’s were read by millions of Americans in the July 4, 1969 issue of no less a bastion of Americanism than Life magazine, just a couple weeks before the moon landing. More surprising, they were propounded by an undisputed American icon: Charles Lindbergh. Although Lindbergh had consciously avoided the limelight over the prior quarter century, his name was still well known to almost every living American, and in the summer of Apollo this had little to do with memories of the “Lindbergh baby” or the ugliness of his World War II-era Nazi sympathies and everything to do with his historic 1927 transatlantic flight—a feat recalled countless times in the media as a direct predecessor to the moon mission. The Apollo 8 astronauts esteemed him enough to invite him to lunch the day before their liftoff, where he regaled them with stories of his old friendship with America’s foremost rocketry pioneer, Robert Goddard. The next day he found himself “literally hypnotized” by the launch—an experience his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, portrayed so vividly in her own writing.2 2 On the lunch, see Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Earth Shine (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1969), 9-14. 245 Lindbergh, then, seemed the perfect commentator to offer perspective on the upcoming Apollo 11 flight—a devotee of aviation and rocketry who had spent the decades after World War II balancing his time between the aeronautics industry and various national security agencies, and a man familiar with the worldwide celebrity that Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins would inevitably experience after achieving this new astronautical milestone. His personal thoughts on the moon flight came as something of a shock, then, for when Life asked him to pen a reflection on the meaning of the great adventure, he declined, instead responding with a long, candid letter (which Life published) announcing that he had lost faith in the rationalism and technology that had dominated American life in the postwar era, and revealing himself as an unapologetic mystic who had come to the startling conclusion that “in instinct rather than in intellect is manifest the cosmic plan of life.”3 The emotional experience of watching the Apollo 8 liftoff was nearly powerful enough to tempt him back into the world of astronautics, Lindbergh admitted. “But I know I will not return,” he wrote to Life. “Why not? Decades spent in contact with science and its vehicles have directed my mind and senses to areas beyond their reach.” Yes, the Apollo program and others like it—technology-based programs—could take us to the moon, perhaps even Mars and Venus, he recognized, but not likely beyond the planets of our own solar system. Such trips would be exciting, no doubt, but Lindbergh, like Swami Bhaktivedanta, looked beyond these limited mechanical space adventures to the advent of an entirely new age, “one that will surpass the era of science as the era of 3 Life, 4 July 1969, 60B. 246 science surpassed that of religious superstition. . . . I think the great adventures of the future lie—in voyages inconceivable by our 20th Century rationality—beyond the solar system, through distant galaxies, possibly through peripheries untouched by time and space.” In other words, it would not be by building more advanced spaceships that man would eventually explore the universe, but rather “through his evolving awareness.” In fact, Lindbergh pondered, in this new era, with the development of a new consciousness, “will we discover that only without spaceships can we reach the galaxies?” The answer seemed to be yes: “To venture beyond the fantastic accomplishments of this physically fantastic age, sensory perception must combine with the extrasensory. . . . I believe it is through sensing and thinking about such concepts that great adventures of the future will be found.”4 What in the world was occurring in American culture at the turn of the 1970s that would find an all-American hero like Charles Lindbergh promoting ideas that sounded precious little different than a trendy Indian guru’s? To the Apollo program’s great misfortune, what should have been technology and rationalism’s crowning achievement—the impossible realization of a moon landing—in fact occurred at a moment of great cultural upheaval in America, a period when the nation’s profound postwar investment in rationalism and its material products as the primary path toward a fulfilling existence began to ring hollow to millions of Americans. The technocratic society of the mid-twentieth century had delivered many things—some good, some bad; some mundane, some astonishing—and a generation of influential social thinkers and 4 Life, 4 July 1969, 60A-60C. 247 politicians had promoted the rational society as the good society. But if such a society promised amazing and continuing progress in terms of material abundance, it was becoming clear to many by the turn of the 1970s that it could not deliver, no matter how impressive its accomplishments, any deeper understanding of the real meanings of existence—no greater picture of the universe and humanity’s place in it beyond the mere physical, no answers or even guidance to the metaphysical questions of philosophy, leaving instead an emptiness that further gadgetry or efficiency or even amazing moon landings could never hope to fill. One of the most troubling aspects of this postwar American society was its hyper- rationalism—its overwhelming faith in rationalism, reason, and logic as ends that were valuable for their own sake; its trust in a careful, studious approach to problem solving and social development, the “logic of the next step” as Norman Mailer famously described it; and its equation of material and technological advancements with “progress.”5 It was a trend that had been developing in Western culture for centuries, but that surged forth to new heights in the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, when the rationalist mindset came to dominate social discourse. This was, after all, the decade in which God was declared dead, rationalized away to the back seat of a human-driven engine of progress, and a period when technocrats felt confident enough to urge a rational basis not only for actions but for values and morality as well. No phenomenon better represented these rationalist values than the Apollo program, from its ambitious goals to its profound faith in technology-driven progress all 5 Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (New York: Plume, 1994; orig. 1968), 85. 248 the way down to the mindsets of its workers and astronauts. The moon landings offered the clearest sign yet that humanity was now, through the power of its own mind as expressed in its science and technology, prepared to penetrate into realms theretofore reserved for the gods in order to arrive at a truer understanding of the universe than that previously offered by religion or myth. It was the ultimate proof that humanity would ultimately do whatever it was capable of doing—and that through rational science and technology, it could do anything. Unfortunately for NASA, this rationalist hubris began to crumble just when it was making its greatest showing with the moon landings. Much as the original eighteenth- century Enlightenment (to which modern rationalism can be traced) engendered an anti- rationalist Romantic reaction, so too did the excesses of mid-twentieth-century rationalism spark a backlash, a neo-romanticism that first emerged in the counterculture before spreading to mainstream America by the time of Apollo. This critical cultural shift was characterized by the rise of a new appreciation for the powers of intuition and transcendence over rational deliberation (expressed nowhere better than Lindbergh’s emphasis on the power of instinct over intellect); of more spiritual worldviews that challenged the dominance of secular rationalism, invested importance in mystery and magic, looked upon nature more in reverence than as a field for further conquest, and that often found greater value in meditation or ecstatic prayer than in shooting men to a dead moon, in journeys of personal discovery than in journeys to other planets. In this environment, Apollo came to be seen as less a great leap into the wonderful future than an irrelevance from an earlier, discredited era. 249 In fact, rather than showcasing its benefits, when all was said and done Apollo actually helped reveal some of the spiritual emptiness of the hyper-rationalist society. With faith in rationalism already falling prey to skepticism, Apollo provided the clearest evidence yet that the critical dilemmas with which humanity had wrestled since time immemorial could never be addressed by rationalist jaunts to the moon, nor via any of the other materialist endeavors that characterized the Space Age. Answers to the philosophical questions of life were not to be found “out there”—only dull rocks. And in the Apollo era, mainstream America began to ponder these types of metaphysical questions with a vengeance—had, in the opinion of one social observer, immersed itself into “the biggest introspective binge any society in history has undergone.”6 As a result, if the initial reaction to Apollo was one of excitement, the slightly longer-term feeling (as in a few months after splashdown) began to be that of a letdown—disillusionment not just with Apollo itself, but with the larger technological society it represented. As Newsweek recognized, “Apollo appears as a metaphor for all of contemporary technological speed—that is, in the textbook definition, of velocity without direction.”7 In the vacuum left by this directionless drive’s inability to offer any solid moral or spiritual basis for society, Americans began to look elsewhere for meaning, ensuring NASA a near future of constriction and, throughout much of the 1970s, irrelevance. In the mid-1960s, it had been clear to the prominent space advocate Willy Ley that Wernher von Braun was a more important contributor to human civilization than was 6 Theodore Roszak quoted in Daniel Bell, “The Return of the Sacred: The Argument About the Future of Religion,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 3, No. 6 (March 1978), 48. 7 Newsweek, 7 July 1969, 40. Emphasis in original. 250 Ludwig van Beethoven. “We need von Brauns in order to go to Alpha Centauri,” he told Oriana Fallaci. “Beethoven can’t get us to Alpha Centauri. I love Beethoven. I love him much more than von Braun. But I want to go to Alpha Centauri. And not with my eyes shut, listening to a symphony; with my eyes open.”8 By the early 1970s, Americans in large part were beginning to choose the metaphorical Beethoven over von Braun. This chapter takes a step away from the prior focus on specific reactions to Apollo in order to explore this wider retreat from rationalism, and the effects this new cultural aura had on the fate of Apollo and the space program throughout the rest of the 1970s. II. “The whole decade had a Faustian quality about it,” journalist Peter Schrag wrote of the 1960s a few years after their conclusion. “We were offered a future of robot maids, commercial space travel, effective weight and appetite control, human hibernation, weather control, genetic manipulation, direct electronic communication with the brain, and all the rest.”9 Although the specifics of Schrag’s list may have been unique to the postwar era, they actually represented just the latest manifestations of a much older rationalist tradition in Western culture. Indeed, although Apollo has thus far been considered largely in its postwar context, it was in many ways rooted in forces and ideas that stretched back centuries. Considered in this framework, Apollo might be seen as a culmination of the progress-oriented worldview that blossomed in the West during the 8 Oriana Fallaci, If the Sun Dies (London: Collins, St. James Place, 1967), 202. 9 Peter Schrag, The End of the American Future (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 259. 251 eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a broad intellectual movement which offered the then- radical proposition that the world, the universe, and life itself were best understood via reason rather than religion or myth—indeed, that the only valid knowledge was that derived from human reason—and that the universe was ultimately knowable via science and human intellect. It was this environment that gave birth to the Encyclopedie, in which French philosophes ambitiously hoped to eventually collect all reason-based knowledge. It was a period of time that also witnessed the rise of “reasonable Christianity,” which offered Christian moral guidance stripped of miracles and revelation, and that saw deism flourish among the intelligentsia. Most important, it was the genesis of what social critics Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, echoing Max Weber, called the “disenchantment of the world: the dissociation of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy.”10 No longer would Westerners live in a world of specters, spirits, demons and gods, miracles and magic and revelations, Enlightenment thinkers hoped, but rather would see, study, and ultimately understand the world in the materialist forms of which it was composed. Looking back on the Enlightenment from his later, Romantic-inspired perspective, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe lamented its clockwork view of the universe, which seemed to leave little room for human perspective or emotion. “A system of nature was announced,” he wrote, “and therefore we hoped to learn really something of nature,—our Idol. . . . But how hollow and empty did we feel in this melancholy, atheistical half-night, in which earth vanished with all its images, heaven with all its 10 Adorno and Horkheimer quoted in Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 8. 252 stars.”11 As Goethe indicated, the rationalism of the Enlightenment was a major factor in the nineteenth-century rise of Romanticism, which was at least in part a corrective to the alienating notions of a materialist, reductionist world stripped of wonder and magic that the more secular Enlightenment philosophes had promoted. A similar, though more widespread romantic disillusionment with rationalism reemerged in the United States of the late 1960s, just when the Enlightenment faith in human reason to solve most of the problems of existence was reaching its modern apex. This was the decade, for example, in which the respected University of Texas economist Clarence Ayres argued that science and technology not only offered the best path toward a well-functioning society, but should be the basis for all morals and values as well. “Science and technology are not wertfrei [value-free],” Ayres argued in Toward a Reasonable Society. In fact, they are “the matrix from which all genuine values—as distinguished from sentimental fancies—derive their meaning.” Rather than look to religion or myth for answers to the eternal mysteries of the universe, or to secular “religions” like laissez faire for the happiness and well-being of humanity, modern industrial society should look to technology—which he broadly defined as the “life process” by which we make rational decisions based on our understanding of cause and effect (a definition somewhat akin to the influential technological critic Jacques Ellul’s 11 Quoted in Arthur Zajonc, “Goethe and the Science of His Time,” in David Seamon and Arthur Zajonc, eds., Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 17. 253 understanding of “technique”)—as “the answer, or the source from which we can seek answers, to the enigmas by which mankind is perpetually haunted.”12 Ayres’s proposed twentieth-century update on Enlightenment ideals was not just a more reason-based understanding of the world, but a full-fledged technocracy in which all values and decisions would be based on scientific and technological knowledge. This meant that not only would technocrats call the shots on obvious social issues like economic planning and education, but would also govern decisions concerning the most intimate aspects of each citizen’s life, up to and including his or her sexual activity. After all, “in the absence of some sort of control or organization,” sexual relations “intrude upon, interrupt, confuse, and nullify all the other organized activities by which we live.” In light of sex’s inevitable infringement on the more important activities of the productive society, Ayres believed that “some sort of regularization of sex relations is absolutely essential,” and pondered the establishment of “a commission of efficiency experts” which might be “given the task of devising a system of sex behavior that would comport with the organizational necessities of industrial society.”13 What is so remarkable about Ayres is not so much the ideas he presented in Toward a Reasonable Society as the fact that the work was taken seriously in the 1960s, garnering widespread and respectful reviews even from those who disagreed with his prescriptions. Although Ayres’s message was extreme, even outlandish at times, his emphases on rationalism as the foundation of a progressive society, on the essential value 12 C.E. Ayres, Toward a Reasonable Society: the Values of Industrial Civilization (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978; orig. 1961), 9, 15. 13 Ibid., 268-69. 254 of bureaucratization, and on the necessity of technocratic experts to translate reason into positive action were well in line with the liberal social discourse that defined the era. “The real threat to democracy comes, not from overmanagement, but from undermanagement,” believed one the decade’s premier technocrats, Robert McNamara. “To undermanage reality is not to keep free. It is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality. . . . if it is not reason that rules man, then man falls short of his potential.”14 “We must pursue the idea that it is more science, better science, more wisely applied that is going to free us from [our] predicaments,” added Glenn T. Seaborg, head of the Atomic Energy Commission and one of the most respected scientist-scholars of the twentieth century. “What I am speaking of . . . is the application of science and scientific thinking both to alleviate immediate ills and to set the underlying philosophy for a rationale for the future handling of our technological and social development.”15 No less an iconic liberal than John F. Kennedy made the case that the dilemmas of modern society were largely technical in nature, not political, and could thus be solved rationally by dispassionate technocrats: “Most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint—Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative, or moderate,” he explained at a 1962 press conference. “The fact of the matter is that most of the problems . . . that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems. They are very sophisticated judgments, which do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past. 14 McNamara quoted in Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1969), 12. 15 Seaborg quoted in Schrag, The End of the American Future, 259. 255 [They] deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men,” and were thus best left to the experts to manage.16 It was the technocratic mindset expressed by these prominent 1960s liberals that author William Braden deemed “logos gone loco.”17 The Enlightenment faith in reason as the best means to understanding the world had by the mid-twentieth century progressed to what Daniel Bell, rehashing Max Weber’s earlier studies of Protestantism and capitalism, would call “rationalization”: “Reason is the uncovering—the underlying structure—of the natural order,” Bell explained of the Enlightenment ethos. “Rationalization is the substitution of a technical order for a natural order—in the rhythms of work, in the functional adaptation of means to ends, in the criteria for use of objects, the principle criterion being efficiency.”18 This rationalization had developed to such an extent over the twentieth century that by the mid-sixties it had finally fostered a sort of “paranoia in reverse,” Peter Schrag believed: “they—the planners, the scientists, the technicians—were taking care of things. It was inconceivable that there might be a serious problem that they couldn’t solve (or that there might be personal problems that could not be converted into social problems and thus made manageable by social or behavioral experts).”19 The end result, argued Theodore Roszak in his study of the postwar technocracy, was “a social order where everything from outer space to psychic 16 Kennedy quoted in Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Warner Books, 1980), 77. 17 William Braden, The Age of Aquarius: Technology and the Cultural Revolution (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), 189. 18 Bell, “The Return of the Sacred,” 30. 19 Schrag, The End of the American Future, 255. 256 health, from public opinion to sexual behavior is staked out as the province of expertise.”20 Not even God could escape the rationalist assault—was, in fact, declared dead by mid-decade as mainstream Christian denominations looked to increasingly modernize, and secularize, their teachings and institutions. Announcing that “the era of metaphysics is dead,” theologian Harvey Cox followed on the heels of the mid-sixties “Death of God” movement with his 1965 bestseller, The Secular City. Cox argued that the modern secular society of the 1960s “looks less and less to religious rules and rituals for its morality or its meanings. For some, religion provides a hobby, for others a mark of national or ethnic identification, for still others an esthetic delight. For fewer and fewer does it provide an inclusive and commanding system of personal and cosmic values and explanations.”21 Rather, humanity looked to itself and its problem-solving abilities, its rationalism and its technology to provide a meaning for existence. It was a common theme among social observers in the mid-1960s, and many mainstream religious denominations took it as a prescription for how to remain “relevant” in the new rational society, altering everything from their doctrines to their styles of worship to their social commitments in response. Looking at the scene in 1967, religious scholar Martin Marty recognized that “the transcendent order” of traditional religion “has disappeared from consciousness,” to the extent that “theologians now tell Protestants, Catholics, and Jews that people in these religions must advance the cause of ‘secularization.’ They must 20 Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, 263. 21 Braden, The Age of Aquarius, 266; Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective, Revised Edition (Toronto: The Macmillan Company, 1966), 3. 257 purge the world of its mythical, superstitious, and—in a dramatic usage of the term— religious vestiges.”22 By the mid-sixties, then, the “reasonable Christianity” that first emerged during the Enlightenment had finally seemed to prevail, to the extent that one exasperated student seeking an institution in which to explore spiritual matters would be driven to ask, “who in the world would expect to find anything sacred in the churches?”23 Not only was the Apollo program conceived of and developed within this social and intellectual environment, but more important, the program itself was perhaps the quintessential expression of this technocratic mindset, for at the end of the day it had no better self-justification than the rationalist notion that it was an inevitable product of continuing human progress—the moment it became possible for Western man to go to the moon, he did, because that is what Western man does. “Over there stands the Saturn,” wrote Oriana Fallaci after her first encounter with a moon rocket, “an enormous candle waiting to be lighted to the glory of ourselves, not of God.”24 NASA and its supporters strenuously denied that its attempts to unlock the mysteries of the universe in any way challenged the relevance of God and religion. Wernher von Braun, for example, echoed the viewpoint of many within NASA when he wrote to a citizen concerned over Apollo’s religious implications that “the better we understand the intricacies of the universe and all it harbors, the more reason we have 22 Martin E. Marty, “The Spirit’s Holy Errand: The Search for a Spiritual Style in Secular America,” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (Winter, 1967): 101-102. 23 Andrew M. Greeley, Come Blow Your Mind with Me (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971), 30. 24 Fallaci, If the Sun Dies, 390. 258 found to marvel at God’s creation.”25 Indeed, the agency’s workers and leaders were as religious as any representative sample of Americans, and the astronauts were all good mainline Protestants. But the very nature of their mission served to emphasize the power of humanity to accomplish any goal to which it directed its energies, in this case a rationalist penetration of the once-sacred heavens—a gesture that may not have been actively hostile to religious beliefs, but which nonetheless helped chisel away at what remained of the sanctity of the universe. In his commencement speech denigrating the counterculture, NASA Administrator Thomas Paine made the remarkable assertion that what qualifies as “truth” might best be defined as “that which successfully takes two men to the moon.”26 He meant it. One historian, following Paine’s lead, has described Apollo as the most fitting embodiment of the “civil religion” of the 1960s, by which he meant a mythology that best expressed the common values of the American people in the postwar era. “If a world civil religion ever emerges,” wrote Charles Reagan Wilson, “the symbols and sentiments of science and technology, especially the Apollo adventure, may well be at its mythic center.”27 Apollo seemed to showcase everything that made America great: not its fear of God nor respect for human limitations in the face of a vast, ultimately unknowable universe, but rather its unlimited energy and curiosity, its itch—no, its destiny—to explore to the limits of its ever-expanding capabilities, its constant and amazing 25 Letter, Wernher von Braun to Mr. Arthur H. Peterson, 19 November 1971, “Impact: Religion (1969- 1971),” “Impact of Space Program” collection, NASA History Office, Washington, D.C. (hereafter NHO). 26 Dr. T.O. Paine, “Squareland, Potland and Space,” Worcester Polytechnic Institute Commencement Address, 7 June 1970, NHO. 27 Charles Reagan Wilson, “American Heavens: Apollo and the Civil Religion,” Journal of Church and State, 26, no. 2 (Spring 1984): 226. 259 advancements in science and technology, and its generous openness and dedication to freedom that allowed the whole world to revel alongside it in the feat. “The first cathedral of the age of technology,” Norman Mailer had called NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building, more in protest than in joy, but nevertheless conceding the power of Apollo to reflect the increasingly secular and technocratic values of moment.28 To devoted space advocates like Paine, Apollo itself was the civil religion, and a massive investment in space exploration was the answer to almost all problems. “I want you to hitch your wagon to our rocket” he had urged the Reverend Ralph Abernathy when the civil rights leader arrived with a mule train to protest the launch of Apollo 11, because Apollo best represented what humanity was capable of, and it, not pondering, protest, nor prayer, was the modern model for how to tackle tough issues.29 To those less interested than Paine in space exploration but who shared his technocratic mindset, the specific space goals Paine cared about so deeply could be easily discarded in favor of more important projects, but Apollo nonetheless survived as a powerful symbol for what could be accomplished by a society embracing secularism, rationality, and technology. New York Times religion editor Edward B. Fiske summed up well the challenges that Apollo posed to traditional religious belief, as well as the extent to which it represented the ultimate manifestation of 1960s rationalism. Following the Apollo 8 flight around the moon, Fiske was inspired to pen a Christmas-day contemplation of the event, which he subtitled, “Traditional Beliefs in Supernatural Are Being Challenged by 28 Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970), 55. 29 Washington Post, 16 July 1969, A7. 260 Secularity.” “On the first Christmas three Wise Men looked skyward and began following a star to Bethlehem,” he began: This year three men looked earthward and followed a man-made course around the moon. The contrast between the two events reveals much about the problems confronting Christians as they celebrate Christmas, 1968. . . . This is an age when men are increasingly coming to view the universe not with the awe of the worshiper but with the curiosity of the scientist; not with the fear of the unknown but with confidence that science will soon unlock its deepest secrets. Despite the specter of atomic warfare and the reality of incurable disease, modern man is increasingly confident of his ability to explain and control the world with scientific terms and techniques.30 If there was no wholesale dismissal of religion in the 1960s—America was still an overwhelmingly religious society, and Americans went to church as ever; even the “Death of God” movement was one of hope and was based in the churches—there was an unmistakable decline in its transcendent, revelatory, and supernatural aspects, and a shift toward more secular forms that stressed good deeds, peace, and social justice over personal faith; that emphasized the power of humanity to shape its own course rather than the divine will of God. It was a very modern approach that meshed well with the larger liberal technocratic mindset of the period. Yet Fiske, like everyone else who declared the death of God and the inevitable rationalization of American society, spoke too soon, for at the very moment Americans were showcasing the awesome power of human rationality by stepping onto the moon, the nation was beginning to erupt into what Tom Wolfe would eventually dub the “Third Great Awakening.” Although this critical cultural shift would have immense religious 30 New York Times, 25 December 1968, 38. 261 implications, as millions of Americans defected from their secularized mainline congregations to form new, more spiritual-focused parishes, or even bolted their denominations altogether in favor of the evangelical and fundamentalist or new age faiths that mushroomed in the early 1970s, this religious revival was only one part of a much larger cultural upheaval that saw a widespread questioning and often rejection of the more general rationalism of the postwar era. The first stirrings of this neo-romantic turn were heard within the mid-sixties counterculture and on the nation’s college campuses. III. In one of those priceless moments when culture and politics collided in the late 1960s, rock group the MC5 found themselves one summer Sunday afternoon presenting their vision of space exploration in the midst of one of the decade’s most violent political confrontations. They had come to Chicago that day to protest the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and as they neared the end of their short set, performed right on the grass in the middle of Lincoln Park, a police helicopter suddenly moved in overhead. Stoned out of his mind on a batch of particularly potent hash cookies, guitarist Wayne Kramer thought the staccato roar of the helicopter meshed perfectly with the spaced-out vibe of “Starship.” But he also had enough sense to recognize that its presence did not bode well for the few thousand demonstrators gathered in the park. Moments after their power was cut in a dispute over the extension cords running from a nearby hot dog stand, the group performed what was probably the fastest equipment-breakdown and van- 262 loading of their lives, and then tore out of the park just as police descended on the crowd in the first major melee of the convention. Leaving the park, they were lucky enough to spot a van just arriving to the scene that contained another rock band from Detroit, the Up, who were unaware that the live music portion of the “Festival of Life” had begun and ended with the MC5’s abbreviated performance. After John Sinclair, the MC5’s manager, apprised them of the situation, the Up did an about-face and both groups drove the 250 miles back home.31 “Home” by this point was no longer Detroit, but the nearby college town of Ann Arbor, where both the MC5 and the Up had moved earlier in 1968 when the violence and police harassment of strife-ridden Detroit became too much for a group of white radicals trying to survive on their music. In fact, when the two groups arrived in Ann Arbor that evening from Chicago, they both pulled up to the same complex of two former frat houses that they had transformed into their “Trans-Love Energies” commune. Both bands lived there, along with a good portion of Ann Arbor’s freak and radical communities and other transplanted communards who had joined the migration from Detroit. In addition to living together, the MC5 and the Up had much else in common. Both epitomized the type of loud, distorted, backed-by-towering-high-wattage-amplifiers, high-energy rock 'n' roll Detroit was known for in the late-'60s, and they played many a raucous concert together. Both groups also became, along with John Sinclair, the public faces of the radical White Panther Party, preaching the gospel of “total assault on the culture” via “rock 'n' roll, dope, and fucking in the streets,” and posing frequently with 31 Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (London: Abacus, 1997), 53-56; Ugly Things, Winter/Spring 2008, 17-18. 263 rifles, knives, bullet belts, marijuana plants, and other tools of the revolution. In fact, the Up has come to be remembered as a sort of “little brother” band to the MC5, both musically and politically, that was never quite able to make the jump to the big time.32 On at least one issue, however, the MC5 and the Up seemed to disagree. While the MC5 looked outward toward a destiny in space with “Starship,” the Up had a decidedly different perspective on what the ideal future should bring, best summarized by their debut single, 1970’s “Just Like an Aborigine.” Heavy, plodding, and raw, with musicianship walking the fine line between minimalist and inept, the song was nothing less than an ode to the primitive lifestyle of savages. The Up had had enough with modern American civilization, had begun to see the spiritual poverty of its “phony money” and “drowning in milk and honey”—“Let’s put an end to this destitution,” they railed, “What we need is a new revolution!” But the Up’s revolution, unlike the MC5’s, would result not in a transformative flight across the universe but rather in a regression to what they imagined was a more natural mode of living right here on Earth, a lifestyle akin to what they knew of Aborigines, where “the soil’s my mother” and “the trees are my brother” and where every human being could live in harmony with nature. “The city done gimme an overdose; I wanna take off all of my clothes!” grunted the singer, who made it clear he would “rather be chased by some kangaroo in the land they call ‘down under,’ than to piss and moan and say ‘boohoo’ and die chokin’ on laughter” in modern technological America. “Just Like an Aborigine is the song of the post-Western cultural 32 McNeil and McCain, Please Kill Me, 56-57; The Up, Killer Up! (Total Energy Records, 1995), NERCD30002, Liner Notes; Jeff A. Hale, “The White Panthers’ ‘Total Assault on the Culture,’” in Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, eds., Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s & ‘70s (New York: Routledge, 2002), 125-156. 264 (human) revolution,” wrote John Sinclair in the liner notes, “which is to say, the song of our lives.”33 Paul Goodman was baffled by such sentiments coming from the counterculture. He was intrigued by the younger generation, and though he seldom spared his criticisms, he was ultimately sympathetic to their situation and many of their actions. But when he came across groups like the Up, he could only shake his head in disappointment. While the Up themselves likely flew under Goodman’s radar, he recalled encountering another “young hippie—it was at Esalen—singing a song attacking the technological way of life, but he was on lysergic acid and strumming an electric guitar plugged into the infrastructure of California.” “What is the content and organization,” wondered the equally bewildered religious scholar John Charles Cooper, “of a mind that apparently can harmonize the use of electricity, jet planes, and I.B.M. machines, not to mention heart transplants and the fact of nuclear energy, with a belief in reincarnation and the power of dark curses and the protective power of crosses and ‘haint strings’?” Though Goodman could offer no convincing answer to Cooper’s question, of one thing he was certain: “It won’t do.”34 As logical as Goodman’s protests were, they were unlikely to make much headway, for he found himself running up against a very powerful tendency within the counterculture: primitivism, which at its extreme involved the conscious rejection of the 33 The Up, “Just Like an Aborigine,” Killer Up!. Original Liner notes reprinted on back cover of Michigan Mixture, Vol 1 (Clinging Hysteria Records, No Date), CHR1. This bootleg compilation also features a different version of “Just Like an Aborigine” with slightly different lyrics. 34 Paul Goodman, New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 107; John Charles Cooper, Religion in the Age of Aquarius (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1971), 29. 265 Western (and especially modern American) technological way of life in favor of the imagined pre-industrial, harmonious lifestyles of indigenous peoples, whether Australian Aborigines, American Indians, or any number of Asian religious cultures. Although many in the counterculture shared the MC5’s interest in space exploration, the appeal of all things “primitive”—in spirituality, physical appearance, diet, sexuality, and general lifestyle—had a strong pull as well, and presented a direct challenge to the rationalist mindset and its manifestations, including Apollo. If intellectuals like Loren Eiseley and Norman Mailer had dipped their toes in primitivism with their critiques of the space program, lamenting the loss in Western society of any real appreciation for humanity’s relationship to nature and the more transcendental aspects of existence, they had nothing on the counterculture, where primitivism flourished. While the Up saw fit to look all the way to Australia for a model, most of their peers looked closer to home, drawing inspiration from Native Americans both for fashion and for guidance toward what many considered a more natural and fulfilling lifestyle and spirituality. Fringe and feathers, moccasins, buckskin and peace pipes, beaded jewelry and headbands and face-paint—by 1967 to be a hippie was to adopt a large part of one’s style from America’s visions of Indians. That hippies drew heavily on American Indian imagery and lore was obvious from the moment they first emerged in the national consciousness, even before they actually began establishing rural communes to more explicitly emulate Indian lifestyles. In mid-January, 1967, for example, thousands of hippies gathered in Golden Gate Park to celebrate life and “groove” to the words of Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Gary Snyder 266 and other hip notables as well as San Francisco’s best psychedelic rock bands. Although the seminal event has come to be remembered as the first “Human Be-In,” the Indian influence came through clearly in its original title: it was a “Pow-Wow,” a “Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In.” Flyers promoting the event made the connection explicit, depicting an Indian on horseback holding an electric guitar. It was but one prominent example of the Indian imagery that filled the counterculture’s art, from flyers to album covers to illustrations in countless underground newspapers.35 Beyond American “Indians,” a second group of Indians had an equally strong influence on the counterculture—the gurus who, like Swami Bhaktivedanta of the Hare Krishnas, had arrived in the United States in the 1960s and found in the younger generation a receptive audience for their various brands of mysticism. If white Americans had a long tradition of adopting Native American customs or appearances in the name of any number of political or cultural causes, there was little such precedent for the widespread attraction to Eastern mysticism among the counterculture and a significant number of college students in the latter of the 1960s. Aided by celebrity endorsements from popular rock musicians, a variety of yogis and gurus and swamis supplied the counterculture with both an appearance—sandals, hookahs, and bold orange, gold, purple and pink silks challenged (and often mixed with) the fringed buckskins, moccasins and peace pipes of the Native American influence—as well a new spiritual perspective. 35 Philip Deloria, “Counterculture Indians and the New Age,” in Braunstein and Doyle, Imagine Nation, 159-88. 267 This attraction to both forms of “Indians,” as well as to the West’s own pre- Christian, pre-science mystic traditions, symbolized a clear reaction against the prevailing rationalist mindset. These cultures, as imagined by the counterculture, were untainted by the dehumanizing rationalism and technology of the West, and seemed to represent a superior way of thinking and being that stressed a harmony with nature instead of its self- serving domination; an appreciation of the preternatural rather than a repressive materialism; and a perspective that was open to mystery, intuition and interpretation rather than any single notion of an empirically provable “truth.” “The tribal gods are being worshipped once again, in substantial part as a protest against the hyperrationalist society and the failures of that society,” recognized University of Chicago theologian and sociologist Andrew Greeley of his own students. “There are few better ways of rejecting science than turning to astrology, few more effective ways of snubbing the computer than relying on tarot cards, and few better ways of coping with rationalist ‘liberal’ college professors than putting hexes on them.”36 As Greeley hinted, the primitivism of the counterculture was often viewed as a flamboyant expression of its deep anti-technology leanings, which stemmed from its profound disappointment with America’s twentieth-century technological culture. Here was a youth culture, after all, among whom “plastic,” “white bread,” “robot,” and other seemingly progressive products of twentieth-century technology became popular derogatory terms for squares and their bland, conformist, unnatural lifestyles. Plastic received special abuse. This technological wonder-product came to symbolize 36 Greeley, Come Blow Your Mind with Me, 59. 268 everything that was wrong with American society in the mid-twentieth century—its artificiality, its push toward homogeneity, its disdain for life and the natural world. “Plastic,” author Leonard Wolf noted in his glossary of hippie lingo, though invested with a variety of meanings by the counterculture, was nonetheless considered “pejorative in all senses.”37 Although science and technology had long been the hallmark of American progress, “in our generation they have come to seem to many, and to very many of the best of the young, essentially inhuman, abstract, regimenting, hand in glove with Power, and even diabolical,” recognized Paul Goodman.38 “Let’s face it,” a student put it plainly to Andrew Greeley, “science is dead.”39 This attitude, seen not just among the counterculture but in a significant number of college students as well, did not fail to garner the attention of social critics who were often perplexed by the anti-technological orientation of the new radicalism. Theodore Roszak, a sympathetic historian who popularized the term “counter culture,” could not help but notice a striking “cleavage that exists between it and the radicalism of previous generations where the subjects of science and technology are concerned. To the older collectivist ideologies . . . science was almost invariably seen as an undisputed social good, because it had been so intimately related in the popular mind . . . to the technological progress that promised security and affluence.”40 To many younger radicals, however, science and technology promised not 37 Leonard Wolf, ed., Voices from the Love Generation (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1968), 280. For a larger overview of the changing perceptions toward plastic during this period, see Jeffrey Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), esp. 242-302. 38 Goodman, New Reformation, 6. 39 Greeley, Come Blow Your Mind with Me, 31. 40 Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, 205. 269 a better society but a post-nuclear wasteland, a poisoned atmosphere, or a future in which everything natural would be replaced by the artificial in a plastic, mechanized world where the individual would no longer control his or her own life. Yet if there were clearly strong anti-technological currents running through the counterculture, it also had few qualms about embracing technologies it found useful or enjoyable. Indeed, it was this seemingly contradictory stance of a generation that decried plastics, Wonder bread, prescription amphetamines and sedatives, network television and other technologies while celebrating the “better living through chemistry” of LSD and amplified rock music that so confounded (and often infuriated) older observers like Goodman. Not only were some technologies embraced, in fact, but a number of very influential members of the counterculture could even be found promoting visions of a full-fledged technological future that older critics like Lewis Mumford and Norman Mailer would have found nightmarish. In 1967, Richard Brautigan published his seminal poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” in which he envisioned a “cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony,” a “cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.”41 Brautigan’s idea would sprout up time and again in countercultural writings. John Sinclair, for example, who promoted modeling the new post-revolutionary society after 41 Richard Brautigan, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” printed in Haight Ashbury Maverick, No. 3, 1967. 270 “the native red people who once flourished on this land, who lived then like we want to live now and in the future,” nonetheless echoed Brautigan in one of his weekly columns for the Fifth Estate.42 “The way to total freedom is through the cybernetic revolution,” he wrote, “which means that the technology will be freed to do the work of the people and the people will be freed to have a good time doing whatever they might do.”43 Peter Berg, a member of the anarchistic San Francisco Diggers, likewise announced in a manifesto decrying capitalism and squares that “computers render the principles of wage- labor obsolete by incorporating them. We are being freed from mechanistic consciousness. We could evacuate the factories, turn them over to the androids, clean up our pollution. . . . GIVE UP JOBS SO COMPUTERS CAN DO THEM! Any important human occupation can be done free.”44 Newsweek, examining the exotic lifestyle of hippie communards, explored these complex feelings toward technology by directly contrasting them to the rationalist drive behind Apollo: “On the day two Americans harnessed technology to land on the moon, 25 members of New Mexico’s New Buffalo commune harvested wheat by hand—‘the way the Babylonians did 3,000 years ago.’ It is not that hippies have anything against technology,” the article explained. “On the contrary, most of them agree . . . that technology will ultimately free man from all kinds of work and leave him free to explore art and states of mind,” i.e., the Lindbergh model of human progress. “But the hippies 42 John Sinclair, Guitar Army: Rock & the Revolution with MC5 and the White Panther Party (Los Angeles: Process Media, 2007; orig. 1972), 197. 43 Fifth Estate, 26 December 1968, 5. 44 “Trip Without a Ticket,” in Haight Ashbury Maverick, No. 3, 1967, 14. 271 insist that today’s technology is operating in a spiritual vacuum. They say that ‘Prometheus is searching for the stars with a hollow grin on his face.’”45 As these arguments indicate, many in the counterculture were not opposed to technology per se, only to improperly used technologies that led to increased alienation and destruction rather than further freedom and creativity. Although there existed a strong identification with the stereotyped values of preindustrial, “primitive” lifestyles, many hippies saw no reason why such values could not be compatible with technology— indeed, why they could not direct the use of technology toward more moral and sustaining directions so that it could contribute to rather than detract from a fulfilling life and society. “We are the electric aborigines of the New World,” John Sinclair explained of what many saw as an irreconcilable contradiction: a new society based on the tribal values of the Indians, but using the modern technology of rock 'n' roll recordings and performances to spread the message, since “rock and roll music is the most vital revolutionary force on earth.”46 It was fitting, then, that Sinclair’s post-White Panthers organization, the Rainbow People’s Party, would adopt as its logo a crude drawing of a rifle, a guitar, and an oversized peace pipe that together formed a tepee. “We can’t have the guitar without the gun or we won’t survive,” he explained of the symbolism, “we can’t have the gun without the guitar or else we’d just be more of the same old shit we are trying to do away with; and without the sacrament that gives us our vision [i.e., the marijuana-filled peace pipe] neither the guitar nor the gun would amount to anything 45 Newsweek, 18 August 1969, 89. 46 Sinclair, Guitar Army, 197; Fifth Estate, 26 December 1968, 5. 272 worthwhile.” 47 In this framework, it becomes clear how the Up could proclaim an affinity for the life of Aborigines without giving up their guitars—they were electric aborigines, with both aspects of their lives working toward the same end. “Woodstock Nation is built on electricity,” Abbie Hoffman confirmed after witnessing the new marriage of tribalism and technology at the Woodstock festival. “It is our energy, music, politics, school, religion, play, battleground and our sensuality.”48 Countercultural poet Lenore Kandel made the case simply when asked about the paradox of this sort of “industrial pastoralism”: “It’s not a paradox,” she explained. “That which aids in life, in survival, in joy, all these things are life affirming. That which goes toward destruction is cruelty. . . . I mean machines are fine, but there has to be awareness.” “So the objection isn’t to our technology?” the same interviewer asked Steve Levine, an editor of the Haight Ashbury psychedelic underground newspaper, the Oracle. “To its use,” he replied, “to its use.”49 To this mindset, buying (or better, building) a fuzz petal for one’s electric guitar, customizing a motorcycle, producing Eastern-tinged sitar rock on cutting-edge multitrack recording consoles and manufacturing it on vinyl records, and concocting increasingly novel and potent batches of LSD represented creative and fulfilling uses of technology, used in the furtherance of art and freedom and self-expression rather than toward dehumanizing ends. This idea would in the 1970s be refined into the more developed notion of “appropriate 47 Sinclair, Guitar Army, 195-96. 48 Abbie Hoffman, Woodstock Nation: A Talk-Rock Album (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 10. 49 Wolf, Voices from the Love Generation, 30, 55. 273 technology,” but it in the 1960s it was the basis of the early counterculture’s mixed feelings toward technology.50 At its core, then, the counterculture was less opposed to technology than it was to the larger technological society, rooted in an alienating form of Western rationalism, that it saw solidifying in the postwar era. Theodore Roszak, for one, recognized beneath the counterculture’s anti-technological sentiments a broader neo-romantic reaction against rationalist technocracy. Whereas a good number of critics blasted the counterculture for its irrationality, Roszak saw a more nuanced anti-rationalism—a Romantic streak that did not necessarily eschew reason altogether, but questioned its dominance by placing equal or more value on feeling, emotion, mystery, even magic. If the parallels to Romanticism were unmistakable, the difference was that this time around the sentiment was not limited to a few visionary poets challenging the emerging industrial order of their day, but rather flowed through an entire subset of a generation confronting a well-entrenched and seemingly all-powerful technocracy. “Theosophists and fundamentalists, spiritualists and flat-earthers, occultists and satanists,” Roszak wrote—“it is nothing new that there should exist anti-rationalist elements in our midst. What is new is that a radical rejection of science and technological values should appear so close to the center of our society, rather than on the negligible margins.”51 And, Roszak thought, mainstream Americans might learn a thing or two of value from the counterculture. For all the political differences in American life, he pointed out, 50 On the appropriate technology movement and its relationship to the counterculture, as well as Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog and its embrace of countercultural technology, see Andrew Kirk, “‘Machines of Loving Grace’: Alternative Technology, Environment, and the Counterculture,” in Braunstein and Doyle, eds., Imagine Nation, 353-378. 51 Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, 51. 274 the technocracy itself had been largely left unchallenged—even by many radicals—to the extent that it had become, as President Kennedy had earlier hoped, “a grand cultural imperative which is beyond question, beyond discussion.” It was only the counterculture that seemed willing to confront this technocracy, to defect from the rationalism that had for centuries been the engine of Western progress and try to prevent it from finally leading America to “an existence wholly estranged from everything that has ever made the life of man an interesting adventure.”52 Roszak was far from the only social critic to take the counterculture seriously, to recognize it as a profound challenge to the core beliefs of rationalist America rather than simply a degenerate movement of losers and wimps. Religious scholar Martin Marty, for example, believed that the hippies revealed “the exhaustion of tradition: Western, production-directed, problem-solving, goal-oriented and compulsive in its way of thinking.” Marty, explained a special Time report on the hippies, “refuses to put the hippies down as just another wave of ‘creative misfits,’ sees them rather as spiritually motivated crusaders striking at the values of straight society where it is most vulnerable: its lack of soul.”53 Paul Goodman ultimately recognized that “rationality itself is discredited” among much of the younger generation. “Many of those who have grown up since 1945 and have never seen any other state of science and technology assume that rationalism itself is totally evil and dehumanizing,” he wrote. “Here again, as in politics 52 Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, xiii. 53 Joe David Brown, ed., The Hippies: Who They Are, Where They Are, Why They Act That Way, How They Might Affect our Society (New York: Time Incorporated, 1967), 5. 275 and morals, the worldwide youth disturbance may indicate a turning point in history and we must listen to it carefully.”54 One person who took the counterculture’s attacks on reason very seriously was Ayn Rand. She also recognized the Apollo program as the most vivid expression of the arch-rationalism she championed, and its success perhaps the best hope in the struggle of reason against the growing irrationalism of American society. Apollo, often seen by critics and proponents alike as the epitome of technological rationalism in the late 1960s, was frequently juxtaposed with countercultural events by commentators looking to highlight the superiority or depravity of one or the other.55 But no one used Apollo to revile the counterculture with more venom than did Rand when she contrasted the moon triumph with the other major feel-good story of the summer of 1969: the now-legendary Woodstock Music and Art Fair. These events symbolized to Rand like nothing else the two opposing ways of life that were at war in the late 1960s, with the winner bound to shape the future course of the nation. Despite her strong opposition to a big and active government, Rand looked positively on Apollo as a crowning “achievement of man in his capacity as a rational being—an achievement of reason, of logic, of mathematics, of total dedication to the absolutism of reality.” The lesson she drew from Apollo was that “nothing on earth or 54 Goodman, New Reformation, 20; New York Times Sunday Magazine, 14 September 1969, SM 33. 55 See, for example, Newsweek, 18 August 1969, 89, on hippie communes; Michael Rossman, The Wedding Within the War (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971), 336; Sidney J. Slomich, The American Nightmare (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1971), 58; and Newsweek, 7 July 1969, 59 on the 1969 “People’s Park” debacle in Berkeley; Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 460, and Hoffman, Woodstock Nation, 10-13, on Woodstock; Andrew Kopkind in Hard Times, 4 August 1969, 1, on the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention; and Thomas Paine’s Worcester Polytechnic commencement address for the most general comparison. 276 beyond it is closed to the power of man’s reason. Yes, reason could solve human problems—but nothing else on earth or beyond it, can.” She was furious, then, at the widespread criticism of the mission, especially from intellectuals, which “revealed the naked essence (and spiritual consequences) of the basic premises ruling today’s culture: irrationalism—altruism—collectivism. The extent of the hatred for reason was somewhat startling.” But even the critical intellectuals seemed like models of rationality compared to the “scummy young savages” wallowing in the mud at Woodstock.56 To say that Rand looked upon the throngs at Woodstock in horror would be no exaggeration, for she recognized the Dionysian challenge they presented to the Apollonian rationality she championed. “Apollo and Dionysus represent the fundamental conflict of our age,” she argued. “And for those who may regard them as floating abstractions, reality has offered two perfect, fiction-like dramatizations of these abstract symbols: at Cape Kennedy and at Woodstock . . . they concretized the essentials of the two principles involved, in action, in a pure, extreme, isolated form.”57 Rand found the crude, dirty, drug-addled hippies who trashed the countryside and took advantage of nearby “square” residents viscerally disgusting. But worse, she feared that their way of life was a reflection of where the larger American culture was headed as it more and more came to reject the tenets of rationalism. “The hippies are the living demonstration of what it means to give up reason and to rely on one’s primeval ‘instincts,’ ‘urges,’ ‘intuitions’—and whims,” she warned.58 56 Ayn Rand, “Apollo 11,” The Objectivist, September 1969, 6, 10-11, 14; Ayn Rand, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (New York: Signet, 1971), 76. 57 Rand, The New Left, 59. 58 Ibid., 78. 277 Far from offering a more sustainable course of living than the technocracy (which Rand also loathed, more for its centralization than its rationality), the hippie way of life was eminently unsustainable. Woodstock made this clear, as hundreds of thousands of hippies descended on Bethel, NY, with absolutely no plans to support their basic needs over the long weekend. “Dionysian desire worshipers,” Rand considered them, living only for the moment, for “now,” such that “they are unable to grasp even what is needed to satisfy their wishes—for example, the wish to have a festival.” As a result, Woodstock demonstrated their “state of stagnant, resigned passivity: if no one comes to help them, they will sit in the mud. If a box of Cocoa Puffs hits them in the side, they’ll eat it; if a communally chewed watermelon comes by, they’ll chew it; if a marijuana cigarette is stuck into their mouth, they’ll smoke it. If not, not. How can one act, when the next day or hour is an impenetrable black hole in one’s mind?”59 The well-planned, rationalized Apollo mission offered the clearest possible contrast to Woodstock, and to Rand’s mind a more hopeful guide for America. It, more than anything else, represented the power of rationality to advance humanity, and made a sham of the values on display at Woodstock. “No one tore apart the circuits of the spacecraft’s electric system and declared: ‘It will do the job if it wants to!’” Rand wrote. “No one made a decision affecting the spacecraft, by hunch, by whim, or by sudden, inexplicable ‘intuition.’ . . . No one suggested that the flight of Apollo 11 be planned according to the rules of astrology.”60 The hippie maxim, “do your thing,” would have spelled doom for the Apollo mission, and it would spell doom for the nation if it 59 Rand, The New Left, 78-79. 60 Rand, “Apollo 11,” 14. 278 continued to gain influence among the young and be indulged by the intellectual and liberal elites. “You have all heard the old bromide to the effect that man has his eyes on the stars and his feet in the mud,” she concluded. “It is usually taken to mean that man’s reason and his physical senses are the element pulling him down to the mud, while his mystical, supra-rational emotions are the element that lifts him to the stars. . . . But, last summer, reality offered you a literal demonstration of the truth: it is man’s irrational emotions that bring him down to the mud; it is man’s reason that lifts him to the stars.”61 The hippie lifestyle on display by the younger generation at Woodstock was reason enough for Rand to fret over America’s future. But her revulsion was compounded by the fact that the nation’s elites seemed to actually embrace the hippies’ Dionysian values over the rationalism of Apollo. “These are the young people whom the press is hailing as a ‘new culture’ and as a movement of great moral significance,” she complained, “the same press and the same intellectuals who dismissed or denounced Apollo 11 as ‘mere technology.’”62 To support her case that the counterculture’s perverted values were well on their way toward infiltrating Middle America, she offered a telling example of one such prominent man of stature, a man whose Dionysian core was often obscured by the false Apollonian face he tended to wear in public (as if it were possible to embrace elements of both spirits! she scoffed), a man whose high public esteem would enable him to seduce the masses toward a softened but no less dangerous version of the irrationalism displayed at Woodstock: a man named Charles Lindbergh, whose vision of a society guided by instinct over intellect shut the door for any further 61 Rand, The New Left, 80-81. 62 Ibid. 279 rational triumphs of the Apollo variety, and instead offered a future of endless, daily Woodstocks on all scales of life. Like most other Life readers caught unawares, Rand had been shocked to learn of what seemed to be an abrupt about-face by this man, once a national hero but now sounding little different to her ear than an incoherent hippie. Lindbergh represented to Rand a prime indicator that the values of Woodstock were triumphing over the values of Apollo. In many ways, she was right. Though Woodstock, and the counterculture in general, were extremes (just as she presented Apollo as an extreme example of rationalism), they were in fact only the most blatant manifestations of a much broader shift in American culture away from the hyper-rationalism that guided Apollo and toward a more neo-romantic outlook that may not have valued “wallowing in the mud on an excrement-strewn hillside near Woodstock”—a primitivism that the Manichean Rand believed inherent to all non-rationalists—but which had made clear strides toward dethroning blind rationalism as the predominant American value system. IV. If the counterculture expressed a deep aversion to technology without actually eschewing it to any great extent, the same was true of the larger American culture, where a profound (if less flamboyant) technological skepticism had begun to surge by the early 1970s. A subject that had traditionally been ignored in political and social discourse, author Langdon Winner pointed out, by the 1970s “technology and its various 280 manifestations have become virtual obsessions in discussions about politics and society on a wide variety of fronts.”63 A good portion of this rhetoric took a critical stance. While there was no wholesale disavowal of technology, and astounding scientific and technological developments continued largely unabated, there nonetheless emerged a new awareness of the social costs and potential dangers of accepting a notion of “progress” tied almost entirely to technological advancement. From Hollywood movies to bookstores to unemployment lines, Americans were confronted daily with a new hostility toward the technology (and technologists) that had been so celebrated just a few years prior. Edward Shorter, writing in American Scholar, summed up the new mood when he noted that “among all the critiques of American society in 1970 . . . there runs a common thread: modern technology is destroying the emotional and collective life not just of those immediately caught up in it but of the entire society. The agony we are presently enduring is a crisis of technological society.”64 Evidence of the critiques to which Shorter referred abound. If the mid-'60s saw the first major stirrings of the anti-technology reaction, with the works of Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Ellul, and Lewis Mumford gaining a wide readership, the later 1960s and early 1970s saw a much wider proliferation of skeptical works whose titles alone spoke volumes, from Mumford’s vaguely menacing Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power, to the more explicit collection, The Technological Threat, all the way to Gene Marine’s 1969 polemic America the Raped: The Engineering Mentality and the Rape of a 63 Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1977), 2. 64 American Scholar, Spring 1971, 330. 281 Continent, which was advertized as “a sharp cry that commands every thoughtful American to reflect on the price we pay for the technological blitzkrieg that we confuse with progress,” and Martin Heuvelmans’s equally lurid The River Killers.65 Meanwhile, bestseller lists featured books like Philip Slater’s The Pursuit of Loneliness, which advanced the argument that Americans were unhappy slaves to their technology, and Charles Reich’s enormously popular The Greening of America, which promoted the new anti-technocratic wave that he saw emerging in the counterculture. “A few decades ago the distrust of technology was an avant-garde position,” philosopher William Barrett noted of this new cultural environment. “Today that distrust has become so widespread that it has become banal.”66 Banal or not, so threatening did technology seem to the vice president of the civil- liberties-oriented Fund for the Republic, Wilbur H. Ferry, that he would ask readers of the Saturday Review in all seriousness, “Must We Rewrite the Constitution to Control Technology?” His answer was an emphatic yes, because “the measures that seem to me urgently needed to deal with the swiftly expanding repertoire of toxic technology go much further than I believe would be regarded as Constitutional.” In fact, he thought, the potential dangers of runaway technology were so severe that merely amending the Constitution to allow certain regulations would be ineffective. Rather, the nation’s 65 New York Times, 11 May 1969, BR 18. Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1970); Jack D. Douglas, ed., The Technological Threat (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971); Gene Marine, American the Raped: The Engineering Mentality and the Devastation of a Continent (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969); Martin Heuvelmans, The River Killers (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1974). 66 William Barrett, Time of Need: Forms of Imagination in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1973), 364; Philip E. Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970); Charles Reich, The Greening of America (New York: Bantam Books, 1971; orig. 1970). 282 foundational document had become so outdated by modern technology that it would have to be fundamentally revised in order to properly deal with the threat.67 Evidence that America had begun to lose faith in its technology and technocratic experts was widespread, and could be seen far beyond the works of social criticism that were likely to show up in American Scholar or Saturday Review essays. In fact, it was revealed nowhere more vividly than in one of the most popular film genres of the 1970s: the technological dystopia movie. The future did not look particularly promising in representative movies like Westworld or The Omega Man, which depicted technological tragedies ranging from a weekend getaway that ended in a robot-rampage-bloodbath all the way to the apocalyptic downfall of civilization. In Michael Crichton’s Westworld, two friends looking for a fun vacation shelled out a good deal of money to spend a weekend immersed in an Old West-themed amusement park populated by robots designed to act like movie cowboys, which meant plenty of bar fights, shoot-outs, and even the occasional awkward visit to a brothel. Though the robots were designed to never harm any of the human guests, the seeds for disaster were obvious. “We aren’t dealing with ordinary machines here,” remarked one technician. “These are highly complicated pieces of equipment, almost as complicated as living organisms. In some cases they’ve been designed by other computers. We don’t know exactly how they work.” Sure enough the robots, led by a sinister Yul Brynner, ultimately turned against the humans in a murderous rampage. One of the stars finally managed to kill the Brynner robot and end the threat, but not before nearly all the other 67 Wilbur H. Ferry, “Must We Rewrite the Constitution to Control Technology?” Saturday Review, 2 March 1968, 55. 283 humans in the park had been killed and the movie’s message about the perils of building ever more complex machines that humans could not even understand let alone control came across clearly.68 A much direr scenario was presented in The Omega Man, which starred Charlton Heston as one of the few human survivors of a germ-warfare apocalypse. Stranded in a downtown Los Angeles penthouse, Heston’s character had to engage nightly in battle with the race of post-human mutants that remained after the calamity, and who now wanted to ensure that science and technology would never again advance to the point where they had the ability to pose such an existential threat to Earth’s inhabitants. A flashback to the days of the annihilating plague made the message clear: “Is this the end of technological man?” asked a terrified television commentator. “Is this the conclusion of all our yesterdays? The boasts of our fabled science? The superhuman conquests of space and time? The age of the wheel? We were worried of judgment. Well, here it is. Here, now.” Heston’s character, a scientist and one of the few humans lucky enough to have received an experimental anti-plague serum before all the others perished, remained as a symbol of the culture that had destroyed the world with its science and technology. “He has no place here,” argued one of the mutants after they captured him. “He has the stink of oil and electrical circuitry about him. He’s obsolete. . . . the refuse of the past.” He was, indeed, the “last living reminder of Hell.” Accordingly, he was condemned for practicing the “proscribed rites” of science, medicine, technology, electricity and other 68 Westworld, DVD, directed by Michael Crichton, 1973 (MGM, 1998). 284 variations of twentieth-century technological sin. In killing him, the mutants believed, they could finally “cancel the world you civilized people made. We will simply erase history from the time when machinery and weapons threatened more than they offered,” which in the movie’s near-future timeframe correlated to the early 1970s.69 No, the technological future did not look very appealing to moviegoers in the first half of the 1970s, as the computers and machines in which humans had invested their hopes of a better future turned against their creators, from the robots in Westworld and its sequel, Futureworld, to the computers in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Colossus: The Forbin Project, The Terminal Man, and later in the decade, Demon Seed. Each of these computers had been created in the belief that it would ultimately benefit humanity by removing the dangerous influence of emotion from decision-making, instead offering solutions to problems—social, scientific, political, military, even personal—based on pure rationality. Yet in practice, such rationality untempered by human emotion or intuition was horrifying, as the computers ultimately overpowered their creators and threatened everything from undermining a space mission to achieving world domination. Ecology, too, gained a voice in the technological dystopia movie, and the message was similar—humans, led by technocratic experts, threatened to destroy the Earth with their technology. Silent Running, for example, one of the few space-themed movies released in during the Apollo era, offered a bleak future in which plant life was extinct on Earth. Soylent Green showcased the horrors of overpopulation and increasing artificiality, while No Blade of Grass highlighted the terrifying effects of pollution. 69 The Omega Man, DVD, directed by Boris Sagal, 1971 (Warner Home Video, 2000). 285 Finally, misguided technologies led to various forms of biological horror in The Omega Man, Night of the Living Dead, and The Andromeda Strain. All of these movies offered a glimpse of the chaos to come if the rationalists were allowed to maintain their technological course. In the future they facilitated, nature would be befouled if not annihilated entirely. The nation or even the world would be run by a totalitarian government or a similar international business consolidation, or worse, a supercomputer that had escaped the control if its creators. Life would be regimented, regulated, artificial and conditioned, a scenario articulated in the most acclaimed dystopian movie of the era, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Technocrats would call the shots in accordance with whatever they believed would promote the most harmonious rational society. But inevitably they would be unable to fix the problems their technology created with even better technologies, leaving all of humanity at the mercy of hostile computers, viruses, robots, mutants, or zombies. That the scientists and technologists who appeared in these films were often caricatured does not detract from the fact that the futures these movies imagined were usually extrapolated from the real directions toward which the technocrats seemed to be pushing the country in the 1960s. Clarence Ayres’s proposal to “regularize” sexual relations so that they would not disrupt more productive social endeavors, for example, was explored in two movies from the early 1970s, George Lucas’s grim THX 1138 and Woody Allen’s more light-hearted science-fiction romp, Sleeper. Both films depicted a future in which society had advanced beyond the need for sexual intercourse, instead relying on machines for efficient pleasure and reproduction. In THX 1138, Lucas’s first 286 feature film, technocrats with powerful computers oversaw a completely regimented underground society, which consisted entirely of sterile solid white or technology-laden environments. Individuality was banned, as was sexuality, and the inhabitants were kept on a steady regimen of drugs to keep them both sedate and capable of fulfilling the society’s mind-numbing labor demands. As Ayres would have it in his reasonable society, work and production were more valuable than sexual relations. Hence, sexual relief (for men, at least) came in the form of a pulsating machine that pleasured them while also extracting the ingredients necessary for the artificial reproduction that would keep the society populated with workers. As with sex, so it was with God. If secularization seemed to be on the rise in the 1960s, in Lucas’s future it was complete. Humanity had so much faith in itself and its own inventions that God was no longer useful—when people needed to confess their sins or contemplate their lives to a receptive audience, they went into a booth and unburdened their troubles to a picture of Jesus. An automated tape recorder would respond intermittently with meaningless interjections, and would then close the session by expressing the values of the hyper-rationalist society—“Blessings of the state. Blessings of the masses. Thou art a subject of the divine, created in the image of man, by the masses, for the masses. Let us be thankful we have an occupation to fill. Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents, and be happy.”70 Though Allen’s Sleeper was decidedly lighter fare, beneath the slapstick was a contemplation of sex and God in the totalitarian technocratic future that was not far 70 THX 1138, Special Edition, DVD, directed by George Lucas, 1971 (Warner Home Video, 2004). 287 removed from Lucas’s. The movie is most commonly remembered for the introduction of the “orgasmatron,” a pleasure machine used by an individual or a couple seeking to “perform sex” in a world where humans were no longer able to copulate with one another naturally. Less remembered, but also echoing THX 1138, was the automated confessional, a computer to which Allen’s character confessed his sins and was immediately absolved.71 The technological skepticism represented so well by this flood of movies also had more tangible consequences during the Apollo era. In 1969, the National Academy of Sciences submitted a report to Congress warning of the dangers of unlimited technological development and recommending the creation of a new federal agency to advise leaders on such issues. Congress responded by creating the Office of Technology Assessment—the first new congressional advisory committee in over half a century—to help direct future technological developments away from those that might prove overly harmful.72 To the New York Times, the new office was a clear sign of “the changing American attitude toward technology. About all that Americans used to ask of a new technology was that it work, which usually meant that it make life a little easier and faster while turning a handsome profit.”73 But times had changed, and pesticides, sonic booms, rivers catching fire and other such technological travesties had engendered in the public a new appreciation for the dangers of unlimited technological progress. The advisory agency fell far short of the sweeping Constitutional revision Wilbur Ferry had called for, 71 Sleeper, DVD, directed by Woody Allen, 1973 (MGM, 2000). 72 New York Times, 31 August 1969, 28. 73 New York Times, 25 March 1970, 23. 288 but it was one clear sign among many that the public was growing wary of the blind technological development that had been held in such high regard just a few years earlier. More immediately, many thousands of men and women who had been encouraged in the aftermath of Sputnik to become technicians, engineers, scientists, mathematicians and other technical experts found their services no longer so valuable in the changing society of the early 1970s. If the national concern at the beginning of the 1960s was producing enough scientists and engineers to reestablish dominance over the Russians, by the end of the decade the issue shifted toward figuring out what to do with the resulting glut of overtrained scientists and technicians. “The late sixties were, as we all learned, disastrous for the brain business,” Peter Schrag explained: “aerospace engineers selling hot dogs; people with shiny Ph.D.s from the Ivy League teaching freshmen in junior colleges (if they could find jobs at all); men of prestige scratching for funds to support their laboratories and their shrinking teams of assistants.” The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Schrag noted, estimated that by 1971 there might have been up to a hundred thousand unemployed professionals in those two previously thriving fields alone.74 The New York Times, too, reported that as the economy began to cool in 1970, technology workers were among those hardest hit. “In Seattle, the unemployed include thousands of defense-aerospace engineers,” it reported. “In the bedroom community of Chevy Chase, Md., with its mansions and spacious lawns, research physicists and chemists are out of work.”75 74 Schrag, The End of the American Future, 259-60. 75 New York Times, 23 August 1971, 46. 289 The movie Fun with Dick and Jane played these troubles for laughs, portraying a despondent laid-off aerospace executive resorting to robbery in order to maintain his comfortable suburban lifestyle. The author H.E. Francis better captured the real despair among many of these unemployed technology workers in his short story, “Ballad of the Engineer Carl Feldmann.” Feldmann was a former high-ranking NASA engineer, laid off in the contraction of the early 1970s and unable to find new work, not even in the gas stations, grocery stores, and other low-level jobs he applied for. That he was clearly a “brain” did not help his search—“I look from far off like a NASA engineer,” he complained, “so the neon sign OVERQUALIFIED . . . goes on before I hit the EMPLOYMENT Apply Here door.” He became increasingly paranoid that people somehow recognized him from his position at NASA, and were laughing—or worse, embarrassed—at his new humble position as he moved through a series of demeaning temporary jobs. Worse, he felt lost without the meaning that his space work had brought to his life. “An arm cut off,” he thought of himself after his dismissal. “What is the arm without the body? How could he breathe outside that citadel?” But America had turned its back on the space program, and now Feldmann could not even afford to properly heat his house in the winter. He fell into a deep depression. Sitting in his backyard one day, he reflected on the nation’s abandonment of his dreams of a future in space, the thoughts flowing stream-of-conscious-like: “Ah, a dream of some timeless time when . . . But cast out. No use. We pay you. Displaced. I want my place. Drones and nothing else?” 290 Suddenly he snapped, grabbed his two daughters, and strangled them to death—the better that they would no longer have to live in a world that caused so much misery.76 Carl Feldmann was clearly a victim of the larger economic troubles of the early 1970s, as were the unemployed tech workers examined by the New York Times. But his predicament also spoke volumes about the nation’s evolving opinion toward technology and the “brains” who had been lauded as national saviors just a decade prior, but whose accomplishments by the early 1970s had begun to seem hollow. “By the end of the sixties most Americans had become schooled,” Schrag argued. “They had been persuaded that only expertise could confront the major problems of technology and society, but they had also learned that the brilliant future that expertise was supposed to bring had not materialized. . . . The short of the argument was simple: Americans had entrusted the future to experts, lost faith in their investment, and were now, hesitantly, uncertainly, trying to put the experts in their place.”77 In itself, this growing skepticism about the inherent value of scientific and technological advancement certainly affected the public’s appreciation of the space program. “The irony of this age,” lamented the Houston Chronicle of Apollo, “is that just when impersonal and amoral science is reaching its apogee of useful invention, the worship of science is ebbing.”78 Aside from the protests of some left-intellectuals, Apollo itself did not appear to represent the direct threat to humanity that was seen in so many of the other technologies demonized by the dystopian movies. In fact, its 76 H.E. Francis, “Ballad of the Engineer Carl Feldmann,” Michigan Quarterly Review 18, no. 2 (Spring 1979): 245-64; Fun with Dick and Jane, DVD, directed by Ted Kotcheff, 1977 (Sony Pictures, 2003). 77 Schrag, The End of the American Future, 273-75. 78 Houston Chronicle, 22 July 1969, in NASA Current News (NCN) Apollo 11 Special, 227. 291 supporters pointed out with much validity that Apollo was essentially a benign enterprise, channeling human scientific curiosity and technological energies into an endeavor that was at worst a good (if expensive) show, and at best a new frontier in human knowledge and exploration. A defensible argument, perhaps, but if the actual program seemed harmless enough, it was also the most visible manifestation of the wider technological mindset of the era, and its beneficent nature was not enough to fully dissociate it from the larger reaction against technology. But it was not the changing attitudes over science and technology alone that spelled doom for a continuing, well-funded space program. Rather, it was the much wider, much more consequential questioning of the nation’s very understanding of “progress” that ultimately challenged the whole basis of venturing into outer space. Progress, a concept that over the past century had come to be increasingly tied to technological advancement for its own sake, had by the time of Apollo come to be reconsidered among a growing number of Americans in more human-oriented terms. What are the potential downsides to these new technologies, more and more Americans began asking, and in any case, are they really making me happy? Ironically, the calamities that befell humanity in so many of the 1970s dystopia movies—overpopulation, brutal warfare, food shortages—represented the very futures that avid space boosters hoped to avoid through an aggressive program of exploration. If humanity could extend its terrain to the limitless stars, after all, pressures would be eased on Earth and many of these problems could be avoided. However, in the real world of the Apollo era, NASA’s technocratic mindset and methods were often seen more as 292 causes than cures for these problems of the technological society. NASA may have been harmless—at worst, unnecessary and unrewarding—but it had the bad fortune to promote itself as the next logical step in national and human progress at a moment when the very meaning of “progress” was engulfed in controversy. Surveying American society since World War II, for example, historian John Lukacs came to the remarkable conclusion that nothing essential had changed in any significant way over the last three decades, with one notable exception: “In 1945, most people in the world, and just about everyone in the United States, still believed in progress. By this they meant mostly technical progress—that is, man’s capacity to change his environment and consequently enable us to lead richer and easier lives. People may still believe this in India or China or Africa. In the United States fewer and fewer do.”79 Lukacs’s point was valuable, but it was also incomplete. In truth Americans had not given up on progress, or even on science and technology. The shift that Lukacs detected was in fact a new understanding of the very notion of progress, as Americans began to divorce it from its simple equivalence with technological gain and instead reconsidered it in less tangible ways concerning its impact on the less material and quantifiable qualities of life. A Harris Poll taken in the early 1970s, for example, found that “81 percent of the sample of 1,548 agreed that scientific progress has improved modern life, but 76 percent also agreed that ‘our scientific progress has gone far beyond our progress in managing our human problems and it’s time we concentrated on the 79 John Lukacs, “So What Else is New?” New York Times Magazine, 9 February 1975, 50-51. 293 human side.”80 More specifically, a 1971 Wall Street Journal poll revealed that while over 80% of Americans believed it was important for the U.S. to be the world leader in social reform, only 51% believed the same about space exploration. In this new atmosphere, flying people to the moon no longer seemed to be the epitome of “progress”; was no longer valuable for its own sake.81 This was a very significant shift in the public mindset, and it had profound implications for the space program. A defining characteristic of Western civilization had long been its continual advancement in science and technology. This emphasis on technological progress had reached a peak in the postwar United States, and at its spearhead was the Apollo project. In the decade after Sputnik, with the U.S. whipped into a space frenzy, “science” had come to be largely equated with space exploration, and both were critical registers for the nation’s continuing progress—against the Soviets in Cold War terms, for certain, but also in a broader sense of perpetual material advancement and national and personal well-being.82 Pondering the decade from the vantage point of the early 1970s, Sidney Slomich—himself a former senior scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and self-proclaimed “expert” in recovery— emphasized the troubling extent to which space exploration, and Apollo specifically, had 80 Irene Tavis, “A Survey of Popular Attitudes Toward Technology,” Technology and Culture 13, no. 4 (October 1972): 610. 81 Wall Street Journal, 16 November 1971, NCN. 82 On the equation of “science” and “space,” see Michael L. Smith, “Selling the Moon: The U.S. Manned Space Program and the Triumph of Commodity Scientism,” in Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 193. 294 come to personify American progress. With Apollo, wrote Slomich: Americans decided that their identity lay not in individualism and constitutional morality, in concern for freedom and justice, in the search for the good life, but in modern Pyramid-building and in great technological feats in space. . . . Landing a man on the moon and bringing him back by the end of the decade was the great American goal of the Soaring Sixties. Apollo was the decade’s ideology, 1961’s declaration of independence from the human values of the 1776 revolution.83 If Slomich was a little overdramatic here, overemphasizing the actual importance of Apollo, he nonetheless put his finger on the fact that American progress and society—its identity, even—were intimately associated with technological gains. The failure, then, of the greatest technological feat of all to capture and maintain the public’s interest speaks volumes about the changing cultural environment of the era. V. In many ways, the Apollo moon landings revealed much of what was troublesome about the old rationalist science. For all its very real immediate excitement, Apollo seemed to lack any deeper, longer-lasting meaning for humanity—a problem seen clearly by the flood of platitudes from those who deemed it self-evidently important, but who could never clearly explain why. More surprising, given the powerful and moving images of the launch and the moonwalk, was that the whole event ultimately lacked the sense of wonder that might have inspired sustained interest in further exploration and lent to more meaningful interpretations of its relevance. Watching men walk on the moon 83 Sidney Slomich, The American Nightmare, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1971), 59. 295 was fantastic, no doubt, even awe-inspiring. But it was not quite magical, and this affected perceptions of it. If it was an exhilarating example of America’s technological capacity, this very emphasis on the step-by-step, day-by-day, year-by-year planning and surveying in the service of building the ideal moon machine tended to strip it of any of the magic that a less scripted voyage into the unknown might have engendered. Far from being the greatest week in the history of the world since the creation, as President Nixon would have it, Apollo seemed to offer no deeper meaning than itself, and thus failed to sustain the interest of the public that would be so crucial to maintaining its continued support. Consider an alternative image of space exploration seen by many in the late 1960s, Stanley Kubrick’s monumental 2001: A Space Odyssey, which debuted in the spring of 1968 and remained in many theaters through much of 1969 as the Apollo program reached its peak. The most realistic space movie to date, with several prominent NASA proponents on board as consultants (including Arthur C. Clarke, who shared writing credits with Kubrick), 2001 nonetheless presented a vision that served to undermine NASA’s rationalist approach to cracking the mysteries of the universe. In the film, Kubrick offered nothing less than the entire history of the human species, from the exact moment its primitive ape ancestor developed into Homo faber—man the toolmaker—to the emergence in the year 2001 of Homo superior, a new, post-human evolutionary step that would ultimately leave Homo sapiens behind. In Kubrick’s world, both steps of human evolution—into and beyond—were driven by the intervention of some unknown extraterrestrial beings or force, and the leap into post-humanity resulted 296 in part from an aggressive space exploration program that was able to send a group of astronauts toward Jupiter by the early twenty-first century. The film began in prehistoric times, when a mysterious black slab appeared to a group of pre-human apes and taught them how to use tools, a transformative step along the path from ape to human. Fast-forward two million years to the turn of the twenty- first century, and humanity had advanced its tool-making capacity to the high technology of space stations and moon colonies. In 2001, a second black slab was discovered buried on the moon. As a team of researchers studied it, it suddenly began transmitting a piercing radio signal toward the vicinity of Jupiter. Eighteen months later, a team of astronauts—two awake, three in an induced hibernation for the long trip—was on its way to Jupiter to search out the target of the slab’s signal. The astronauts themselves were unaware of the true nature of their mission, which was guided by a highly advanced communicative computer called the HAL 9000, or simply “HAL.” HAL, it was explained, was “foolproof and incapable of error.” Along the way, however, HAL malfunctioned—or, as the most “human” character in a movie of deliberately wooden astronaut performances, became irrational—and developed an animosity toward the humans on board, killing most of them before a lone survivor managed to disable “him.”84 This supercomputer-gone-bad story was itself an early example of the mini-genre that would blossom in the early 1970s. But it was the final section of the movie, “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite,” which caused the most sensation, split critics, and created a 84 2001: A Space Odyssey, DVD, directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1968 (Warner Home Video, 2001). 297 vision of space exploration that NASA could never hope to live up to with its real-life missions. After Dave Bowman, the sole surviving astronaut, managed to incapacitate HAL, the ship arrived at Jupiter and Dave suddenly found himself immersed in a psychedelic journey more akin to a particularly vivid LSD hallucination than anything NASA astronauts had ever experienced in outer space. After encountering yet another black slab, Dave was thrust into a phantasmagoria of darting colors and lights, his head shaking uncontrollably until his face turned to nothing more than a blur as a kaleidoscopic spectrum of brilliant incandescent color patterns shot outward toward the audience like a thousand roman candles being fired at once. Dave, it seemed, had traveled through the mysterious far corners of the universe in little more than the blink of an eye, or perhaps had undertaken the equally mysterious “journey to the center of the mind” that the rock group the Amboy Dukes’ contemporaneous hit single described—the ambiguous ending never did make it clear exactly what happened to him during this experience.85 Regardless, Dave eventually ended up within the quiet confines of a quaint Earthly bedroom, where he proceeded to watch himself progress almost instantly to old age before encountering one last black slab. Pointing toward the monolith, Dave took the final step into post-human evolution whereby he was reborn as a wide-eyed fetus, enveloped in a luminescent embryonic sphere, floating over and looking down upon the blue and white Earth—a star-child experiencing the universe afresh from an entirely new perspective and awareness. 85 The Amboy Dukes, “Journey to the Center of the Mind,” Journey to the Center of the Mind (Mainstream, 1968), S/6112. 298 2001 was a milestone in cinematic history, whether in terms of special effects, its stirring soundtrack, or the startling conclusion, and although it became immensely popular and was nominated for several Oscars, critics were divided. Many found it boring, pretentious, and nonsensical on first viewing. They were not wrong. The first half of the movie was indeed slow moving—purposely so, in order to show that little of substance would actually change with the corporative, technocratic version of space exploration Kubrick depicted. There would be new gadgetry, for certain, and impressive progress in the establishment of orbiting space colonies and moon bases, but no radical changes were in store for the daily routines of life. From the Pan Am space shuttles to the concentrated food “products” and overly complicated zero-gravity toilet to a father’s apology for missing his child’s birthday because he had work to do on the moon— technology had advanced enormously, but it simply moved the familiar dilemmas of human life from Earth into space. The end of the film was something else altogether, and if critics tended to dismiss it as overblown, incomprehensible, or a vacuous excursion into half-baked mysticism (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who reviewed the movie for Vogue, considered the conclusion “too private, too profound, or too shallow for immediate consumption”), a good bulk of the younger generation found it breathtaking.86 The physicist Freeman Dyson, for example, found the movie “unsatisfying.” He was confused over why Kubrick seemed to invest so much more humanity in the machines, especially HAL, than in the actual human characters. He was surprised, then, by the reaction of his teenage children and their 86 Vogue, June 1968, 76. 299 friends. “They found it exciting and moving,” he wrote. “I conclude from this that Kubrick knew what he was doing. He was pitching his message to the young people, not to middle-aged professors, and the message got through.”87 John Updike included a similar scene in his novel Rabbit Redux, which was set during Apollo 11 and featured a minor sub-story about the Angstrom family—Harry, Janice, and their thirteen-year-old son Nelson—going to see 2001, still playing in theaters over a year after its debut. Asked later how he liked the movie, Harry answered, “The kid liked it, I don’t know, it didn’t make much sense to me.”88 Not that many in the older generation did not eventually come around. On the contrary, although the movie was met with a flood of negative critiques on its opening, over time the reviews turned increasingly positive, as reviewers recognized the film’s bold vision and sheer originality. In a phenomenon rarely encountered in the film- criticism world, a few early naysayers even reconsidered the movie and reversed their opinions in second reviews. Writing in Newsday, for example, critic Joseph Stennis originally considered 2001 “as a whole, disappointingly confusing, disjointed and unsatisfying. . . . antidramatic and thus self-defeating.” After reading a number of other negative reviews, however, Stennis had a feeling that he and the other critics were missing something, so he saw the movie a second time. “A professional critic,” he noted in his follow-up review, too often “approaches a film with preconceptions about what form it should have. He is the upholder of the familiar, the promoter of the status quo.” 87 Dyson quoted in Jerome Agel, ed., The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 (New York: The Agel Publishing Company, Inc., 1970), 309. 88 John Updike, Rabbit Redux (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988; orig. 1971), 58. 300 Such was the case with 2001, a movie so unorthodox that it “upsets the members of the critical establishment because it exists outside their framework of apprehending and describing movies.” He admitted he fell into this camp with his original review. But now, “after seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey a second time, I’m convinced it is a masterwork. . . . this awesome film is light-years ahead of any science fiction you have ever seen and owes more to the mystical visions of Jung and William Blake than to H.G. Wells or Jules Verne.”89 Stennis was onto something when he recognized that 2001 was much more than a science-fiction film about the type of planet-hopping NASA hoped to eventually pursue. In fact, the more realistic parts of the movie were boring, and served as a subtle critique of any future extension of the West’s dehumanizing technological culture into space. It was only when a mystic element was introduced—in the beginning, when the slab sparked a profound evolutionary progression toward the modern human, and at the end, when another slab transformed Dave Bowman into a post-human star-child—that the film offered real excitement and a promise of enlightenment in space. If the ending, as early critics complained, was nonsensical, it did not matter. Indeed that was the point, for the movie showed that salvation via space would only be found in the irrational, in Charles Lindbergh’s “voyages inconceivable by our 20th century rationalism . . . through peripheries untouched by time and space”—in whatever mysterious and unexplainable transformation happened to Dave after he met the final two black slabs.90 NASA, with its rockets and computers, did an outstanding job of taking men to the moon, and, optimists 89 Agel, The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, 263-267. 90 Life, 4 July 1969, 60C. 301 hoped, might have even been able to offer visits to Mars and eventually the outer planets given enough funding and commitment. But not even the most aggressive technology- based program could take humanity “beyond the infinite,” as did the obscure forces at work in 2001. Cultural critic and Newsweek General Editor Joseph Morgenstern, writing about the nation’s ambivalent feelings toward Apollo, understood as much, and recognized that it was a major reason why 2001 was much more appealing than Apollo itself to many in the younger generation. “No wonder the kids love ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’” he wrote. “Stanley Kubrick’s film isn’t science fiction but anti-science fiction. Its technicians are mean-spirited twirps [sic] who commercialize space and climb the walls with boredom on a flight to Jupiter. What kids love most about ‘2001’ is its climax. God saves the human race by luring a spaceman to Him, improving the poor wretch with an instant mutation and shipping him back to his planet as an embryo-without-portfolio. Salvation through God, not through science, even if the movie casts the maker as a slab.”91 Arthur C. Clarke, though an avid proponent of space exploration, was shrewd enough to recognize the same truth about the movie he helped pen. “M-G-M doesn’t know it yet,” he remarked, “but they’ve footed the bill for the first $10,500,000.00 religious film.”92 Speaking to the American Aeronautical Society in 1967, Clarke had been honest enough to admit that “what we really seek in space is not knowledge, but wonder, beauty, 91 Newsweek, 7 July 1969, 68. 92 Clarke quoted in Agel, The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, 10. Clarke’s failure to recognize the grand religious epics of the 1950s, including Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments, which each cost more to produce than 2001, does not detract from his overall point. 302 romance, novelty—and above all, adventure.”93 He helped Kubrick present the staggering wonder of the universe in 2001, and he was truly convinced that an ambitious program of space exploration could ultimately lead to similar real-life revelations. This was, after all, the future that many proponents believed the astronauts would ultimately effect—a willed push toward the next stage in evolution, a glorious future and new start for humanity in outer space. “If we conceive of the universe as the natural environment for man’s evolution,” wrote one prominent enthusiast to NASA Administrator Thomas Paine, “then the space effort represents man’s conscious effort to evolve,” and thus must be aggressively pursued.94 Wernher von Braun likewise believed Apollo inaugurated a new stage in human evolution, the first crucial step into the promising space-faring future in which post-humans would be greeted with wonders so far exceeding those portrayed by Kubrick that they were unimaginable to the current human mind. Yet for all this hype, it was clear almost immediately that Apollo was not a step in any sort of new evolution, and just about everyone in America knew so shortly after it was over. There were no 2001 moments during the actual Apollo missions, no transcendent spiritual developments that promised to alter humanity’s destiny. Nor could there be, not because Kubrick’s tale of black slabs and psychedelic color shows was absurd given what scientists knew of the solar system, but because NASA’s rationalist, technological, by-the-books version of space exploration precluded any approach that might even consider such occurrences possible. The moon landing was a real-life event, 93 Arthur C. Clarke, “Voyage to the Planets: Man and Space,” Keynote Address to the Fifth Goddard Symposium, American Astronautical Society, March 14-15, 1967, copy in Biographical Files, Clarke, Arthur C. (thru 1971), NHO. 94 Letter, Mrs. Earl Hubbard to Thomas Paine, 4 June 1968, copy in Impact Files: “Future, 1929-1971”, NHO. 303 of course, not a big-budget motion picture, and it was unfair to both to compare the two. But during the Apollo era, Kubrick’s movie offered the most popular alternative concept of space exploration outside of the actual Apollo missions, and its vision of the potential consequences of space travel was one very much pushed by proponents like Clarke. More important, its mystical conclusion turned out to have more in common with what a growing number of Americans at the dawn of the seventies were looking for in their life—spiritual enlightenment—than did the more limited scientific results of the actual moon landings. Apollo could only seem tame, even disappointing, by comparison. Worse still, the disenchantment of the once-glowing moon that stemmed from the Apollo landing made it clear that there would never be any magical 2001 moments in NASA-style space exploration, not on the moon, nor Jupiter, nor anywhere else humanity could conceivably travel in the future. In 2001, as in Night of the Living Dead, The Andromeda Strain and countless Twilight Zone episodes from earlier in the decade, space was still a place of wonders, of the unexpected, with immense potential repercussions for humanity. After Apollo, the moon, at least—and by extension all the other planets in the solar system that once glowed with mystery—no longer fostered the imagination, no longer offered such reverence. Instead, it offered rocks—dull, grey-black rocks not too different from those that could be found by climbing the Palisades cliffs on the Jersey side of the Hudson River, one NASA geologist told a disappointed audience getting their first peek at a moon rock. The lack of wonder, of magic, of 2001 moments of blissful transcendence and rebirth in the real moon missions was disappointing, however subtly, to those who looked to outer space as a place of mystery. But this disappointment had a 304 minor impact compared to the more powerful disenchantment of humanity’s most revered celestial body that resulted when humans set their boot-prints upon it. In the run-up to Apollo, a number of articles appeared in the media bemoaning the loss of the moon as a source of mystery which had fired the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. “So Long to the Good Old Moon,” read one Life headline. “Voyages to the Moon Were More Fun Before NASA,” declared another in the Washington Post. Though these pieces were generally lighthearted, there was a serious message beneath their whimsy. Such laments revealed a deeper feeling that was often obscured beneath the celebratory rhetoric, something the poet Babette Deutsch expressed more forcefully in her poem, “To the Moon, 1969,” which appeared in the New York Times the day after the moonwalk: “Now you have been reached, you are altered beyond belief,” she declared. “Are you a monster?” she asked. “A noble being? Or simply a planet that men have, almost casually, cheapened?”95 To many Americans, the latter seemed to be the case. Before Apollo, the moon glowed, and was held in at least some degree of awe by most every human culture. But the moon did not glow up-close. Looking at it for the first time through a powerful telescope earlier in the decade, Oriana Fallaci had been stunned. “It’s grey,” was all she could say. “I thought it was white, but it’s grey.” Her telescope guide, NASA scientist Ernst Stuhlinger, informed her it was actually black. “The white Moon. White as the Moon. Pale as the Moon. And it was black,” she wrote. “I was very upset. I thought . . . that I’d never be able to read Sappho or Leopardi without thinking why say it’s white 95 Life, 4 July 1969, 47; Washington Post, 7 July 1969, E3; New York Times, 21 July 1969, 17. 305 when it’s black? I thought that it’s sometimes better not know things, to remain ignorant, since there’s always something sad behind the truth.”96 Though the Aristotelian conception of the moon as pure energy was long discredited, and by the time of Apollo most Americans knew the moon was nothing more than rock, the disenchantment that stemmed from actually touching it was still considerable. Furthering the disenchantment of outer space were the pictures beamed back a few weeks after Apollo from the Mariner probe, which revealed that Mars glowed no brighter than the moon. In fact, Mars did not look much different from the moon at all— both were rocky, lifeless expanses of nothing. One was gray, one was reddish, but “if no one told you, you wouldn’t know if this was Mars or the Moon,” remarked one Mars expert of the Mariner photos.97 If the moon looked like Mars looked like a Kurt Vonnegut character’s driveway in Dallas—if this was the reality of the two most dreamt- about planets, what hope was there of finding anything else, anything to rival the glories of 2001 in the rest of the universe? “The moon as we have now touched it, is perhaps the only little bit of sacred ground we (this living generation) has ever had,” complained author Barry Malzberg, “and its incorporation into advertisements for moon sales, moon cocktails, and the Roosevelt Raceway is everything that could be predicted of America and exceedingly depressing.”98 In other words, to answer Deutsch’s question, Apollo had cheapened the moon by approaching it less in awe than with thoughts of exploitation. But C.P. Snow pointed out the larger problem, one that NASA could scarcely avoid. 96 Fallaci, If the Sun Dies, 264-65. 97 Washington Post, 1 August 1969, 1. 98 Malzberg, writing under the pseudonym “K.M. O’Donnell,” quoted in Donald A, Wollheim, ed., Men on the Moon (New York: Ace Publishing Corporation, 1969), 165-66. 306 “The trouble is, the solar system is a desperately disappointing place,” he wrote. “Scientists have known this for a long time; it is now being confirmed in concrete, only too concrete, fact.”99 If the Modern era had been one long process of the disenchantment of the world, as Max Weber had posited in the early twentieth century, it took the rationalists of the Space Age to rob the one sanctuary of wonder and magic left to humanity—outer space—of its enchantment. As a result, Apollo, some lamented, far from expanding humanity’s imaginative capacity, would instead serve to constrict it—the ultimate crime in the eyes of humanists. Snow, for one, disagreed with those who believed Apollo would spark human creativity in unprecedented and unpredictable ways. In fact, he believed that it would ultimately hamper the imagination more than foster it. “It is no use holding out the prospect of limitless horizons when the horizons are certain to turn out only too desolately limited,” he pointed out. “One of the casualties of the moon landing will be science fiction, at least as applied to space travel. You can write scientifically about what you know to be improbable, but you can’t write scientifically for long about what you know to be impossible.”100 If Snow underestimated the power of the human imagination (and misunderstood the new wave of science fiction’s willful deviations from science fact), he was not alone in predicting that Apollo would damage the ability of writers to offer vivid images of a wondrous outer space. Visiting a science fiction and fantasy bookstore one day at the end of the Apollo era, literary scholar Hugh Kenner struck up a conversation with the owner about the effects of Apollo on book sales. “I wonder,” he mused, 99 C.P. Snow, “The Moon Landing,” Look, 26 August 1969, 72. 100 Ibid. 307 “whether the classic stuff lost its bite when we got so used to the real thing. Men on the moon on everyone’s home screen. Fiction couldn’t keep up.” “On the contrary,” replied the storeowner, “reality couldn’t keep up. When your image of interplanetary adventure becomes a man in a huge white diving suit stumbling over a boulder, when you’ve lived through the excruciating real time of those slow motion excursions, then crystalline cities on Venus lose their believability.”101 This disenchantment helped reveal the spiritual poverty of ventures like Apollo, and can help explain why it turned out to be so dissatisfying in the long run. Ultimately, Americans were unable to successfully invest it with any deeper meaning than simply being a marvelous human accomplishment. Further, it represented the larger emptiness of the modern rationalist science that sought “truth” via unlocking the rules of a measurable, predictable Newtonian universe—what Theodore Roszak described in his neo-romantic manifesto, Where the Wasteland Ends, as “the sort of astrophysics that finds it sufficient to know everything about the stars except why they were once regarded as divine.”102 Though liberal critics often argued otherwise, Apollo was more than just a stunt to beat the Russians to the moon and win the space race. Rather it was the purest embodiment of modern rationalist science and technology, an endpoint of sorts (or a new beginning, proponents hoped) in the long Western drive toward demystifying and taming nature and the universe. This was, perhaps, the grand “meaning” of Apollo that only a few of the more lucid commentators were able to convincingly articulate at the time. Yet 101 New York Times Book Review, 11 February 1973, 4. 102 Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1972), 409. 308 it was this very meaning that made the consequent disappointment and disenchantment all the more profound, and contributed to a wider questioning of the rationalist mindset. “More and more [our culture’s] psychotherapists find that what their patients suffer from is the existential void they feel at the bottom of their lives. . . . And no amount of Promethean history making or humanist bravado drives off this secret despondency for more than a little time,” wrote Roszak of events like Apollo that tried and failed to offer meaning to an increasingly troubled society. “It is not that our technological achievements are all worthless. . . . It is rather that they are meaningless in the absence of a transcendent correspondence. They leave ungratified that dimension of the self which reaches out into the world for enduring purpose, undying value.”103 A boon to geologists and astrophysicists and others invested in prying loose the material secrets of the once-sacred moon, Apollo ultimately proved hollow to a good portion of previously intrigued Americans—not necessarily at first, when the excitement of seeing a bona fide moon rock drew enormous crowds in the U.S. and around the world, but over time, as Americans began to realize that the much-exalted moon landing did not—could not—really change the course of human life or society in any significant way. "How many of us could say that these first flights through outer space, a dream as ancient as the sun ships of the Pharaohs, have substantially changed the real substance of our lives, our private communion, however stuttered, with the unseen powers of the universe?” asked the author J.G. Ballard, who, though long critical of Apollo, was still 103 Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends, 379. 309 surprised at its lack of impact. “If anything, the movement has been in the opposite direction, toward inner space, in terms of drugs, meditation and mysticism.”104 Ballard was on to something. There were, in fact, new personal interests and values arising throughout society that NASA simply could not satisfy with its moon missions, or any scientific or technological endeavor for that matter. Upon first arriving in Houston, Norman Mailer had asked the director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, Dr. Robert Gilruth, “Are you ever worried . . . that landing on the moon may result in all sorts of psychic disturbances here on earth?” Mailer described “the look of pain in Gilruth’s eyes at the thought of mustering NASA-type answers for this sort of question.”105 It was not just that Gilruth had no satisfactory answer—who could answer such a question with any certainty?—but rather that he did not even understand the question, for such concerns about psychic disturbances or Ballard’s spiritual aspects were not valid to the scientific mind, did not compute rationally and thus were beyond the realm of NASA’s expertise. The agency had been charged with landing men on the moon and returning them safely, after all, not with deciphering the mystical aspects of the human presence in space. They completed their task marvelously, and in the process brought back rock samples that contributed immensely to scientists’ knowledge of the history of the universe. Besides, it should have been up to creative intellectuals like Mailer and Ballard to explore the deeper meanings of the event—NASA had given them plenty to work with, and it was not to blame if they failed to turn it into anything. 104 J.G. Ballard, review of Of a Fire on the Moon, in the Guardian, 26 Nov 1970, copy in Folder 610.3 Correspondence: Of a Fire on the Moon, 1971, Box 610, Norman Mailer Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. 105 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 16-17. 310 But regardless of whether the fault lay with NASA, the intellectuals, or the wider culture, it was the sacred elements of the universe that now intrigued many Americans— its mystery, not its history—and Apollo simply could not provide much guidance on such concerns. “The moon landing is technological, not metaphysical or theological,” complained one Harvard student, and therefore it “has no relevance to my idea of myself or man.”106 Movie director George Lucas, for one, seemed to understand this student’s perspective. Explaining his motivations for making Star Wars later in the decade, he noted, “there’s a whole generation of kids growing up without any kind of fairy tales.” Apollo had done little to provide Americans with a new fairy tale—indeed, by demystifying the moon and outer space, may have damaged the ability to find value in space-based fairy tales at all. Lucas, for his part, would attempt to reinvest outer space with the stuff of fairy tales, including a strong dose of mysticism based on a mysterious force known, fittingly, as “the Force,” which proved to be more powerful than even the most advanced technologies of his futuristic world.107 But long before Lucas conceived of his ideas for Star Wars, Americans were already beginning to look elsewhere for the fulfillment they found lacking in the Apollo-era technological world. And to the surprise of rationalists like Ayn Rand, who looked toward NASA and its astronauts as models of sanity in a society growing ever more irrational, it was a new breed of astronauts that would best showcase the new, neo-romantic cultural tendencies in early 1970s America. 106 Newsweek, 7 July 1969, 64. 107 Lucas quoted in Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 263. Although Star Wars purported to be set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” it was nonetheless “futuristic” in its technology. 311 VI. Circle . . . square . . . wavy lines . . . square . . . star—unlike previous Apollo astronauts, who had not been much given to public introspection during their missions, Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, had few qualms about communicating his deep inner thoughts for the whole world to hear. But only a few on Earth knew to listen. Like a growing number of Americans by 1971, Mitchell had of late developed an interest in extrasensory perception (ESP) and wanted to test the limits of his psychic abilities. What better venue in which to investigate the capacity of the human mind to transmit thought over vast distances than the yawning void of outer space? Shortly after he returned from his Apollo 14 mission, word leaked out that he had indeed performed a series of ESP experiments on the way to and from the moon, coordinating specific times with several “receivers” on Earth to whom he attempted to psychically communicate the simple patterns on a set of Zener ESP test cards. Mitchell’s experiment was not a part of the flight plan, and NASA was unaware it had occurred until after the mission. It was just too unorthodox for the agency to countenance, too far afield from the normal astronaut spiritual acts of reading the Bible and taking communion on the moon, and it would have almost certainly led to Mitchell being quietly bumped from the crew had his intentions been discovered ahead of time. But Mitchell was permitted to do what he pleased in his free time, and he wanted to test how well telepathy worked across the vacuum of space. 312 The experiment proved far from successful. Of the six transmissions he had coordinated with the receivers back on Earth, Mitchell was only able to find time to conduct four of them, and the results were abysmal—so bad, in fact, he later rationalized that such extreme inaccuracy could not have occurred by chance, suggesting that outer space might indeed have some sort of negative-positive effect on telepathic communications. After returning from the moon, Mitchell quit the space program, divorced his wife, and dedicated the rest of his life to the study of parapsychology. To this end, he founded the Institute for Noetic Studies in the belief that “the future of our world will be determined by our awareness and deeper understanding of ourselves. . . . Man’s consciousness is the critical factor in the future we will build for ourselves.”108 By 1973 he could be found appearing on morning talk shows promoting psychic phenomena alongside the famous psychokinetic spoon bender, Uri Geller.109 After the first moon landing, Paul Goodman had listened with alarm when a teenager casually told him that he was unimpressed with the event, and that he would place much more value in something that proved the validity of tarot cards. If this was a fringe view in 1969, a youthful interest in the occult that seemed to be little more than a passing fad among the counterculture and some college students, just two years later the New York Times would showcase Edgar Mitchell promoting essentially the same argument: “Capt. Edgar D. Mitchell Jr., the Apollo 14 astronaut who performed extra- 108 Today, 16 November 1973, NCN. 109 New York Times, 19 November 1973, 70. On Mitchell’s ESP tests, see New York Times, 22 June 1971, 22; and 9 January 1974, 31. 313 sensory perception tests during his moon mission last February, said today that such tests might prove more important to man than space exploration itself.”110 Contemplating recent trends in American culture during the Apollo era, Theodore Roszak came to believe that “we are in for an interlude during which an increasing number of people in urban-industrial society will take their bearings in life from the I Ching and the signs of the zodiac, from yoga and strange contemporary versions of shamanistic tradition. . . . I think this is the great adventure of our age and far more humanly valuable than the ‘race for space.’” Looking at the counterculture of this same period, author Jim Hougan recognized that for all its anti-technological sentiments, it did not reject technology outright. In fact, by the 1970s many counterculturalists had become quite savvy about using appropriate technologies to beneficial ends; had, since their rise in the 1960s, advanced from placing their faith in the pure fantasies of the I Ching and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to promoting the more humanistic and sustaining tools and technologies offered in Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. If Roszak exaggerated the number of mainstream Americans who were basing their life decisions on the I Ching, it is nonetheless clear that even as the counterculture was maturing toward somewhat less irrational perspectives, mainstream society began to embrace ideas that had previously been limited to the counterculture, such that by the early 1970s elements of both trends converged into a wide cultural shift that ultimately challenged the rationalist ascendency of the previous decades.111 110 Goodman, New Reformation, 32; New York Times, 22 June 1971, 22. 111 Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends, 262; Jim Hougan, Decadence: Radical Nostalgia, Narcissism, and Decline in the Seventies (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1975), 66. 314 Yet few could have predicted that this trend would penetrate all the way to the astronaut corps. After all, NASA’s chief psychologist had once made clear the defining characteristic of the successful astronaut: he was “super normal.”112 Even accepting that the astronauts were much more complex individuals than their Life-tailored public profiles led the public to believe in the 1960s, still, Edgar Mitchell seemed worlds apart from the straight-laced John Glenns and Neil Armstrongs of missions past. Yet what is so remarkable about Mitchell’s ESP tests and his larger interest in parapsychology is how unremarkable they were by 1971. “Normal” had changed significantly in the prior half- decade, and Mitchell was but one of many Americans showing a newfound interest in the paranormal, the irrational, the spiritual, the anti-scientific. Author Francine du Plessix Gray, in fact, writing in the New York Times Magazine, found in Mitchell the quintessential example of the recent “craze to explore the mystic areas of consciousness,” since “few Americans offer a more striking symbol of the newest high in our culture— our shift from outer to inner space, our avidity to explore the mythic and mystic areas of consciousness.”113 Even more than the newly unveiled mysticism of Charles Lindbergh, the shift of an astronaut—that staid, normal, rationalist, all-American breed—away from the study of outer space to a fascination with the mysteries of the mind and the paranormal indicated that such concerns were no longer simply limited to eccentrics. Edgar Mitchell not only shared common ideas on the limits of rational science with Charles Lindbergh, Swami Bhaktivedanta, and countless countercultural youth more 112 Houston Post, 24 June 1965, NCN. 113 New York Times Magazine, 11 August 1974, 13. 315 interested in Tarot cards than outer space, but with millions of other Americans in the rapidly changing culture of the early 1970s. In fact, by 1971 Mitchell’s orientation was not even all that out of place within the astronaut corps itself. Take Rusty Schweickart. In 1969, when he became the first Apollo astronaut to perform a spacewalk, the only characteristic that seemed to differentiate him from the rest of the astronaut corps was that his standard crew cut was bright red. By 1972 he had grown his hair long, adopted pork-chop sideburns and a moustache, had taken up Transcendental Meditation, and was pictured in Time escorting the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi—the era’s preeminent guru, associated most famously with rock musicians like the Beatles and Donovan—on a tour through NASA’s Manned Spacecraft center. “He’s the closest thing to a freak astronaut,” commented one broadcaster on Houston’s hip radio station.114 But the new breed of astronaut was not just limited to a few “freaks” like Schweickart and Mitchell. James Irwin, for example, a lukewarm Baptist throughout the 1960s, returned from his moonwalk and shortly thereafter became a fervid evangelical Christian, quit the astronaut program, formed a ministry, and embarked on several journeys to Turkey to search for the remnants of Noah’s Ark. His crewmate, Al Worden, like most of the astronauts not known for his introspection, began writing poetry in the early 1970s and eventually published a collection of his work in 1974.115 Time labeled these seemingly drastic post-flight personal transformations “The Greening of the Astronauts”—“In spite of their undeserved reputation as unemotional 114 New York Times Magazine, 30 June 1974, 12. 115 Time, 11 December 1972, 43; Omni, May 1984, 98-100; Newsweek, 1 April 1974, 86-87. 316 automatons, many of America’s 32 space travelers have been profoundly moved by their experiences away from earth. In some cases, they have returned to begin entirely different lives.”116 It was a common refrain in the media: these moonmen had been deeply impacted by their unique experiences in outer space, had seen the Earth from a radical new perspective and “somehow in that timeless, lifeless land they found a new understanding of themselves, their earth and of mankind.”117 Few would deny that looking back on the wispy white clouds and glowing blue oceans of a distant Earth from the surface of the desolate moon must have had some impact on the psyches of the astronauts. But another explanation for their professed revelations seems at least as likely. Quite simply, these astronauts evolved in directions similar to millions of other Americans in the early 1970s. After all, Edgar Mitchell had planned his ESP tests before he claimed an epiphany on the moon. Worden had already taken up poetry, and Schweickart had long been recognized as “liberal” and “mildly nonconformist,” which in the straight-laced world of sixties-era NASA made him seem somewhat freakish even before he developed a relationship with the Maharishi.118 Even in the case of James Irwin, who claimed the most acute transformation after intimately feeling the presence of God on the moon, the only notable difference between his course and that of the millions of other Americans who left their mainstream Catholic or Protestant denominations in search of more experiential evangelical faiths was that his fame as an astronaut allowed him to better spread the message on his post-Apollo travels 116 Time, 11 December 1972, 43. 117 Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 30 July 1972, copy in Impact Files: Religion, NHO. 118 Andrew Smith, Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth (New York: Fourth Estate, 2005), 285. 317 and speeches. “Ten years ago,” Tom Wolfe would write in 1976, “if anyone of wealth, power, or renown had publicly ‘announced for Christ,’ people would have looked at him as if his nose had been eaten away by weevils. Today it happens regularly . . . Harold Hughes resigns from the U.S. Senate to become an evangelist . . . Jim Irwin, the astronaut, teams up with a Baptist evangelist in an organization called High Flight. . . . Charles Colson, the former hardballer of the Nixon administration, announces for Jesus, and the man who is likely to be the next president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, announces for Jesus.”119 Even Wolfe could not foresee that by 1980, all three of the main contenders for the presidency of the United States—Carter, Ronald Reagan, and the independent candidate John Anderson—would campaign as “born again” evangelical Christians. And not one of them had ever been to the moon. Edgar Mitchell also offers a compelling example of this cultural shift because, like most Americans who flirted with neo-romanticism at the time, he never fully disavowed his belief in the power and benefits of science. In fact, he believed he was working in the best scientific tradition with his parapsychology experiments—not attacking the merits of scientific inquiry but simply expanding its parameters to encompass new phenomena. Charles Lindbergh likewise believed science was an important tool, though only a basic step, in developing the fuller awareness of the universe and human consciousness he sought. Even the tarot-curious teenager, Paul Goodman noted with irony, would shortly be entering Dartmouth to study physics and mathematics. What these critics had in common was their recognition that although 119 Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” New York, 23 August 1976, 36. 318 science had its value, it also had limits—a marked departure from the social climate of the postwar era that viewed science, in the words of the influential Vannevar Bush, as an “endless frontier” for human progress. By the time of Apollo, it was clear that the modern rationalist science, focused on material prosperity, did not—could not— adequately penetrate the powers of the mind, of consciousness, of God, of the myriad crucial intangibles whose importance were ascending in the new cultural climate. Science, while a worthwhile tool, was asking the wrong questions, and the right questions could not be addressed by sending more rockets to the moon. In the early '70s, a large number of Americans agreed, and grew increasingly wary of claims that science was the only valid avenue to truth. In the quest to explore new, less rational, more personal means for understanding life and humanity’s place in the universe, millions of Americans turned to psychic phenomena, Eastern-influenced and New Age spirituality, superstition, fundamentalist and evangelical religions, and other non-rational approaches, all of which signaled a clear retreat from the secular, rationalist culture of the first few postwar decades. Edgar Mitchell himself believed he was at the forefront of a major change in the very nature of scientific inquiry. “Mitchell is predicting that within 10 years, half of all scientific research will be aimed at measuring and explaining occult phenomena, and that religion will turn its attention in that direction as well,” reported the Detroit News.120 That the future did not ultimately turn out this way does not take away from the fact that in the early 1970s, as NASA 120 Detroit News, 26 April 1973, NCN. 319 struggled to explain the relevance of its exploration program, it seemed like it very well might. It was clear by the late 1960s that a new interest in mysticism and the occult was spreading far beyond the counterculture. In 1968, Nora Ephron reported in the New York Times that “books on parapsychology, mysticism and the subjects that seem to follow inexorably from them—yoga, ESP, clairvoyance, precognition, telepathy, astrology, witches, mediums, ghosts, Atlantis, psychokinesis, prophesy, and most of all, reincarnation—are flourishing. . . . industry sources estimate that there are four times as many books on the subject now being printed as there were five years ago.”121 The nation’s premier public institution of higher education, the University of California at Berkeley, legitimized the trend in 1970 when it awarded its first Bachelor of Arts degree for “studies in the field of magic.”122 A 1974 sociological survey of a random sample of Americans confirmed that, far from being a fringe interest, mystic ideas had penetrated everyday life. Over a third of the study’s respondents reported that at least once they had “felt as though they were very close to a powerful spiritual force that seemed to lift (them) out of (themselves).” Over half reported experiencing some variety of “paranormal experience,” with 59% reporting déjà vu; 58% some form of ESP; 24% clairvoyance; and 27% some contact with the dead. Nearly one in five—or upwards of 36 million Americans, the study’s authors noted—claimed they had experienced more than one of these phenomena.123 121 New York Times, 11 August 1968, BR4. 122 New York Times, 1 June 1970, 24. How things had changed since the era of the University of California president Clark Kerr’s rationalist “multiversity”! 123 Washington Post, 18 January 1974, C10. 320 Author Barry Malzberg, who wrote a series of science-fiction novels in the early seventies criticizing NASA and its technocratic worldview, explicitly linked this trend, which he labeled “commercial mysticism,” to the space program. “Commercial mysticism was invented in the mid-1960s as a reaction against the devices of technology and particularly of the space program,” he wrote, “which gave more and more people the feeling that their lives were totally out of control and that there was no way in which they could stop machines from crushing them to death. The occult, the bizarre, Satanism, astrology, and the factors of chance reached high popularity during this difficult period.”124 Although Malzberg’s description appeared in a work of fiction, it was a fitting portrayal of the alienation many felt toward the technological rationalism of the space program, and the subsequent flight into the irrational during the early 1970s. On the other side of the cultural spectrum, among more socially and culturally conservative Americans who looked with horror upon this growing interest in the New Age and the occult, a parallel trend was nonetheless occurring as millions flocked toward evangelical and fundamentalist Christian faiths. These revitalized evangelical groups tended to stress more experiential forms of Christianity, based more on faith than good works, on revelation over reason, on a direct relationship with God via Jesus Christ as he made himself known in the Scriptures rather than a relativist, interpretive understanding of a distant God accessible only through the mediation of the clergy and reinterpreted to mesh well with modern science and contemporary mores. Their growth over the seventies was astounding, as Tom Wolfe’s earlier anecdotes indicated—by 1978 almost a 124 Barry Malzberg, Beyond Apollo (New York: Random House, 1972), 133. 321 quarter of the nation would claim to be “born again,” with a particularly sharp increase in the most flamboyant non-rational groups like charismatics and Pentecostals. The trend was not just limited to Christians either—American Jews of all the major denominations also made a conspicuous turn toward ritual and tradition.125 Considering this massive cultural shift in 1976, Wolfe believed himself to be in the midst of nothing less than a “Third Great Awakening.” Much of this new interest came at the expense of the mainline Protestant and Catholic churches, which almost uniformly experienced either stagnation or marked decline during the same period, as members began looking elsewhere for what they could no longer find in their increasingly modernized, secularized churches. Ironically, in their quests to become more “relevant” to the modern rational society, the major churches had succeeded only in making themselves more irrelevant than ever to a constituency seeking to reinvest their lives with spirituality. “Today it is precisely the most rational, intellectual, secularized, modernized, updated, relevant religions . . . that are finished, gasping, breathing their last,” Tom Wolfe would report by mid-decade. “What the Urban Young People want from religion is a little Hallelujah! . . . and talking in tongues! . . . Praise God! Precisely that!”126 Commentators could not help but contrast the new interest in ecstatic religion to the assured pronouncements just a few years prior that God was dead. “The Death of God thesis had given rise to an atmosphere of antithesis in which theologians of many 125 Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2001), 92-93. 126 Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade,” 35-36. 322 persuasions could be heard speaking of the need to go ‘beyond the secular,’” wrote William Braden. “God talk was in again. So was metaphysics.”127 Even Harvey Cox, who in 1965 had declared the inevitability of the “secular city,” was sharp enough to recognize (and hop aboard) the cultural shift: in 1969, he published The Feast of Fools, a call for a return to religious mysticism and festive ritual that he had just recently declared obsolete. Father Andrew Greeley saw something similar at work in the Catholic Church, which experienced within its ranks a growing movement of Pentecostal Catholics. Taking the new post-Vatican II openness in unexpected directions, the Pentecostals, far from “modernizing” their worship, instead looked backwards and launched an old- fashioned ecstatic religious revival that included speaking in tongues, unfettered emotional displays, communal living, and the belief that every human could communicate personally with a responsive God. The new style was far removed from both the staid traditional Catholic mass and its Vatican II modernization, neither of which offered the spiritual or experiential elements that a number of its members were seeking in the new cultural era. “The Roman Catholic Church has really been caught flat-footed” by the return of the sacred, wrote Greeley in 1971: Its so-called intellectual avant-garde, taking Harvey Cox far more seriously than he ever took himself, have been busy dismantling all traces of the sacred and the mystical. . . . Thus the Roman Church, the master for more than a millennium of a great tradition of liturgy and mysticism, finds itself putting off vestments just when the rest of the world is putting them on, abandoning ceremony just as the neosacralists are beginning to form their own ceremonies, and downgrading the 127 Braden, The Age of Aquarius, 267, 271. 323 sacred precisely at the same time that some students at the elite universities are rediscovering it.128 This turn toward evangelicalism did not necessarily result in hostility to the space program. Rather, it fostered an increasing sense that space exploration and moon landings were less offensive than irrelevant to the truly valuable aspects of the human experience. Consider, for example, the best-selling non-fiction book of the decade, Hal Lindsey’s hugely influential apocalyptic treatise, The Late Great Planet Earth (1970). In the book, which argued that humanity was drawing near the end of history and the moment when Christ would return to escort his true followers to eternal life in Heaven— the “Rapture,” as this event is known to evangelicals—Lindsey actually spoke highly of the Apollo 11 mission. “Science fiction had prepared men for the incredible feats of the astronauts,” he wrote, “but when the reality of the moon landing really hit, it was awesome.” Awesome, perhaps, but not too terribly important compared to the ultimate ascension into the heavens that Lindsey saw forthcoming. “Astounding as man’s trip to the moon is, there is another trip which many men, women, and children will take some day which will leave the rest of the world gaping,” he posited. “Without benefit of science, space suits, or interplanetary rockets, there will be those who will be transported into a glorious place more beautiful, more awesome, than we can possibly comprehend. Earth and all its thrills, excitement, and pleasures will be nothing in contrast to this great event.” 128 Greeley, Come Blow Your Mind with Me, 37-38. 324 Lindsey recognized that his message probably sounded ridiculous to those who put their faith in science and materialism rather than God. But he urged such readers to question the value they placed on earthly material gains and the scientific understanding of existence in light of the glories God promised his dedicated believers. “Have you ever found an electric train, or a bedraggled doll that belonged to you as a child and remembered how terribly important it was to you years ago?” he concluded. “When we meet Christ face to face we’re going to look back on this life and see the things we thought were important here were like the discarded toys of our childhood.” Apollo, as impressive and enjoyable as it was, was but an old ragdoll compared to the real engine driving history—not science, nor human exploration or material advancement, but God.129 If Hal Lindsey sounded a lot like Swami Bhaktivedanta here, it was no coincidence. Though New Age pantheism seemed far removed from monotheistic evangelical Christianity, both trends were components of a larger pronounced retreat away from the secularism and rationalism of the postwar era, toward a new spiritualism that symbolized the larger neo-romanticism of the Apollo era. Sharp observers noted the continuum from countercultural mysticism through the seemingly remote evangelical revival that followed. “The new religious enthusiasts clearly owe a major debt of gratitude to the hippies,” noted Andrew Greeley. “Both emphasize the pre-rational, if not the anti-rational. The quest for the spontaneous and the ‘natural’ in the two dissenting groups is a protest against the ‘hang-ups’ of a society that is viewed as overorganized and 129 Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth (New York: Bantam Books, 1973; orig. 1970), 124-34. 325 over-rationalized, but less than human. Both are a search for ‘experience,’ and for a specific kind of experience—one that ‘takes one out of oneself.’”130 Both, in other words, were searching for a transcendence that neither the rational society nor the modernized mainstream churches could provide. Though so different in so many ways, a common link between evangelical Christians and New Age and occult practitioners in the 1970s has been explained by religious scholar Wade Clark Roof, who examined spiritual trends among the baby boomer generation. What he discovered in this cohort, regardless of its ultimate diverse religious paths, was a “generation of seekers”: a surge of people attempting to find a new “wholeness” in their religion and spirituality—a search, he came to believe, that was “broadly based in contemporary society. . . . among Christians as well as non-Christians, among Protestant mainliners and Protestant Evangelicals, among New Age adherents, at one end of the spiritual spectrum, and fundamentalists, at the other end.” Specifically, Roof came to believe, “this quest involves nothing less than a radical protest against the values and outlook implicit in modernity—the post-Enlightenment, highly rational and scientific worldview of the past several hundred years that has privileged mind over body, technology over nature, innovation over tradition, knowledge over experience, mastery over mystery.”131 Another religious scholar, William G. McLoughlin, agreed, pointing out that “the search for another order of reality in these ‘outlandish’ activities”— both evangelical and occult—“marked the failure of the ordinary religious institutions to 130 Greeley, Come Blow Your Mind with Me, 36. 131 Wade Clark Roof, “Modernity, the Religions, and the Spiritual,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 558 (July 1998): 216. 326 provide satisfactory answers about the mysterious, the unknown, the unexplainable, and of course it also marked the failure of science to do so.”132 Like Tom Wolfe, McLoughlin looked at the spiritual upheaval at the turn of the seventies as a new great awakening—the fourth, by his count, rather than the third, but clearly a new turn in American culture and society. Yet he also recognized that this great awakening could not be understood, like those previous, as merely a Protestant religious revival. The first and most obvious difference was the drastic changes the Catholic Church also experienced during this period. But more challenging to the Protestant model was the non-Christian twist—the Eastern-influenced and New Age spiritualities that, although largely outnumbered by Christians, were nonetheless entering the mainstream and appeared to stem from many of the same root causes as the evangelical turn. When folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie sang, “God is alive, magic is afoot” in 1969, she perfectly captured the spirit of this transformative period when both God and magic found new leases on life in American culture.133 Whether looking forward to the Age of Aquarius or the millennium, millions of Americans—many with little in common otherwise—took part in this encompassing movement away from the secular rationalism of the postwar era. Yet McLoughlin’s religiously focused work did not go far enough in capturing the extent to which this new awakening transcended not just the Protestant faith but religion and spirituality altogether. Indeed, the religious and spiritual developments were but one 132 William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 208. 133 Buffy Sainte Marie, “God is Alive, Magic is Afoot,” Illuminations (Vanguard Recording Society, Inc., 1969), vsd 79300. Lyrics to the song were drawn from a poem in Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (New York: Viking Press, 1966). 327 part of a much larger social and cultural shift that exploded during the Apollo era: the rise of a new romanticism which saw God and magic escape the bounds of the rigidly spiritual and become infused into many aspects of life during this period. This neo- romanticism did much to undermine many of the values and imperatives of the culture that had previously placed its faith in understanding and conquering the universe via science and technology. VII. Catholic historian Philip Gleason was one of the first observers to explicitly recognize the new romanticism in American culture. Though he was writing in the Jesuit journal America, and he discussed the growing Catholic Pentecostalism at his home institution of Notre Dame, Gleason commented more generally on the broader neo- romanticism he saw emerging in the American culture of the 1960s. Looking back to the original eighteenth and nineteenth century Romantics, who “opposed the ‘organic’ to the ‘mechanical.’ . . . detested the ‘dead world’ bequeathed to them by a century of Newtonianism and sought to discover life or a spiritual principle even in inanimate nature,” Gleason saw parallels all around him in his own time, from the hippies’ long hair and drug use to the new academic vogue of primitivism and exoticism; from renewed interest in the holy Bible, folk songs and fantasy literature to the increasing emphasis on 328 “perception” and feeling over reason. “Understanding romanticism has become an imperative need today,” he declared, “for we are in a new age of romanticism.”134 Writing in 1967, Gleason could do little but trace the early stirrings of the new romanticism, which at that point was still most noticeable in the counterculture, on college campuses, and among some religious communities. But even he could not have anticipated the extent to which this neo-romanticism would permeate the wider American culture by the early 1970s. Far beyond just new religious trends, Americans began searching for new spiritual meaning everywhere, all around them—in nature, in their minds, in exotic peoples, even in their home decor—everywhere, that is, except the now demystified moon. At the core of the new romanticism was an effort to recapture nature, God, magic and mystery from a rationalist mindset that, if allowed to continue guiding American progress, would lead to the ultimate destruction of these crucial metaphysical elements of existence. And at the turn of the 1970s, there was no better model for this new, neo- romantic style of living than the American Indian. Indeed, by this time the cult of the Indian had spread beyond the counterculture to a much wider swath of mainstream American culture. Some of the attraction was based on Americans’ growing interest in mystic spirituality, which, like the counterculture’s before, looked not just to the East for inspiration but also to America’s own indigenous cultures. But the interest in native cultures ran much deeper than just its spiritual influence. As important was the American conception of Indians as a people who lived harmoniously with nature—an especially 134 Philip Gleason, “Our New Age of Romanticism,” America (7 October 1967), 372-75. 329 appealing trait as fears of impending ecological disaster grew in the early 1970s. As has happened so often in American history, the Indian came to be seen once again as the “noble savage,” representing a purity that had been lost in Western rationalist culture, but which was now being reclaimed by a new generation of neo-romantics. Primitivism sprouted up far beyond the counterculture in this period, including within the academy, where a new generation of anthropologists began offering undeveloped, pre-capitalist indigenous societies as models of sustainability that the West should learn from rather than merely conquer or exploit. Looking critically at the history of his profession, anthropologist Adam Kuper has pointed out that the old Rousseauian notion that “primitive societies lived in a self-regulating symbiotic relationship with nature” was again on the upswing by the Apollo era: “In the 1960s, a whole school of American anthropologists tried to show that social arrangements, rituals, beliefs and economic practices formed a perpetual motion machine that miraculously maintained a perfect balance between human beings and the natural environment. Shamans knew all about it. Any untoward developments were written off as the fault of outsiders.”135 This attraction to more “primitive” lifestyles flowed throughout intellectual culture, and in several cases was used to comment directly on the space program. Philosopher William Barrett, for example, ruminating on the significance of two films, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Sky Above Mud Below (a documentary on the “savages” of New Guinea), admitted that if he were forced to choose between the two lifestyles— spaceman on a technological voyage through the universe or archaic man in his primitive 135 Adam Kuper, The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth (New York: Routledge, 2005), 220. 330 society—“my preference would incline toward archaic man,” for although Barrett had little attraction to their primitive lifestyle, these savages nonetheless invested importance and meaning in their arts and rituals, which he could relate to as a fellow human. On the other hand, he saw little future for human expression or ritual or sustainability in the alienating technological world of the spaceship.136 Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist René Dubos likewise considered Apollo in terms of the new primitivism vogue. “People were immensely excited by the first lunar landing but had become almost blasé by the time of later Apollo missions,” he pointed out. “In contrast there is increasing interest in African safaris, archeological digs all over the world, and efforts to discover eternal wisdom in prehistoric remnants or in ancient astrology.” Dubos saw such ventures as expressions of “modern man’s desire to recapture a richer mode of response to the enigma of existence; they constitute an acknowledgement that the secrets of life can often be reached not so much by what we learn as by what we half remember with the biological memory of the human species.” Here Dubos summed up well one major aspect of neo-romanticism—the increasing faith in intuition at the expense of the rationalist model of scientifically acquired knowledge.137 It is not surprising that intellectuals’ widespread suspicions of Apollo were influenced by the larger primitivist romanticism that was intellectually trendy at the time. “Intellectuals are wed to a romantic dream of the past and never want to abandon it,” explained Tom Wolfe in a jaundiced but nonetheless perceptive jab. “What characterizes a man as an intellectual today differs very little from what characterized a man, in a 136 Barrett, Time of Need, 360. 137 René Dubos, A God Within (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 62. 331 slightly earlier age, as a theosophist, an upland Baptist, or a Swedenborgian”—in other words, a hopeless mystic.138 But by the Apollo era, similar signs of primitivism and the search for lifestyles more harmonious with nature could be seen throughout American society, far beyond countercultural and intellectual circles. In movie theaters, for example, new revisionist Westerns began presenting an image of the Indian that was strikingly different from the treacherous, uncivilized savage of earlier heroic cowboy movies. In several new westerns that appeared at the turn of the 1970s, in fact, the Indian served as a moral counterpoint that highlighted the flaws in the Western rationalist, progress-oriented society. For the first time in American cinema history, Indians were not only portrayed as the heroes of the stories, and white Americans the villains, but were further shown to possess an altogether superior culture. Although historians who have examined these revisionist westerns have often presented them as critiques of the contemporaneous American aggression in Vietnam (which received its own share of primitivist attention from radicals who glorified the Vietcong’s peasant communism), the films actually offered a much broader critique of modern Western civilization. Movies such as Little Big Man, A Man Called Horse, Soldier Blue, and Billy Jack, which all appeared within a two-year period from 1970-71, not only showcased the brutality of white conquest, but also offered white (or, in the case of Billy Jack, a white actor playing a “half-breed”) protagonists who came to prefer the Indians’ natural, harmonious, spiritual, and often sexually open lifestyles over the expansionist, progress-oriented Western society that would come to prevail across the 138 Tom Wolfe, foreword to Arnold Beichman, Nine Lies About America (New York: The Library Press, 1972), xvi, xxv. 332 continent by the twentieth century. “What seems to me remarkable about the film,” wrote one reviewer of A Man Called Horse, “is that it suggests the grandeur, the magnificence of a savage, primitive culture.”139 The same could be said of the rest as well. This contrast between the stifling oppression of modern Western life and the idyllic lifestyles of primitive societies was perhaps best portrayed in a movie that looked for inspiration not to American Indians, who by anyone’s count had lost much of their autonomy and lifestyles to white encroachment by the mid-twentieth century, but, like the primitivist rock group the Up, to the remaining Aborigines of central Australia—Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 Walkabout, which, according to its promotional sheet, purported to offer viewers “the truth, magic, beauty and joy of the natural life.”140 The film opened with shots of the bustling modern city, a jungle of brick, concrete, and glass through which hordes of people and cars somehow managed to navigate. After leaving his office in the city, a man returned home and watched his son and daughter swim in their in-ground pool, even though their modernist flat was not more than a few meters from the vast, beautiful ocean—a blatant display, like the city itself, of the triumph of artificiality in modern life. The film then cut to the barren Australian Outback, where the father had driven his two children for a picnic. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the father, who has suffered a mental breakdown that obviously stemmed from the pressures of modern urban living, pulled out a pistol and tried to kill his son. The daughter helped the boy escape 139 Film Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Autumn, 1970), 60. On these movies and other “countercultural Westerns,” as well as the more general “cult of the Indian,” see Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 628-33. 140 New York Times, 18 July 1971, D11. 333 before the father torched the car and turned the gun on himself. Stranded in the desert, lost, clueless as to how to survive in the wild, the children were lucky enough to encounter a lone Aborigine, who took them under his wing and helped them find their way back to civilization. Throughout the film the Aborigine’s harmonious existence with the land was contrasted sharply with the West’s removal from and exploitation of nature, nowhere more so than at the end of the movie. After the young man helped the two children find a road that would take them home, the girl explained how she could not wait to take a warm bath, put on clean clothes, sleep in a real bed, listen to records, and generally resume a civilized life in the big city. Yet some years after her return, the girl, now a married woman, was essentially reliving her mother’s life. The final scene, a replay of a scenario earlier in the movie depicting her parents, found her in her mother’s old kitchen preparing food when her husband arrived home from work. As he told her about some sort of complex reorganization at the office, a look of profound sadness washed over her face as she recalled her time in the Outback with her Aborigine friend—the freedom of the open land, living from the Earth, frolicking naked without shame. It was nothing less than paradise, lost forever to modernization. To ensure the point was not missed, a narrator read from an A.E. Housman pastoral-themed poem as the film drew to a close: “That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain; the happy highways where I went, and cannot come again.”141 141 Walkabout, DVD, directed by Nicholas Roeg, 1971 (The Criterion Collection, 1998). 334 Beyond movie theaters, the cult of the Indian flourished in a variety of public venues. In 1971, for example, Life presented a special 30-page section on “Our Indian Heritage,” which not only corrected myths about white heroism and Indian treachery in the Old West, but also explored Indian spirituality as a distinct alternative to Western secular rationalism.142 Better remembered is the 1971 anti-pollution television commercial that featured an Indian drawn to tears as he looked upon the abundance of litter produced by the modern industrial society. “Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country,” a narrator gravely announced as the Indian landed his canoe on a waste-strewn shoreline—“And some people don’t,” as a white American threw a bag of fast-food trash at the Indian’s feet from a car driving by on a congested highway. Like the movies from this period, the ad explicitly linked Indians to a more harmonious relationship with nature, perhaps even a superior way of life given the mess Americans were making of their environment. Given these positive (if stereotyped) portrayals of Indians’ lifestyles in contrast to the destructive tendencies of the modern technological society, it was natural that commentators would use the theme of the Indian to comment directly on the moon landing. In the run-up to Apollo 11, for example, Newsweek’s Joseph Morgenstern travelled across America interviewing a variety of people for their thoughts on the upcoming moon landing, including several Pueblo Indians in “some out-of-the-way village” in New Mexico. The reactions he received from the Pueblo were all negative. Apollo was “prying into great nature,” complained one woman. The moon is “a sort of 142 Life, 2 July 1971, 10-11, 38-67. On the page immediately following the Indian section, Life ran a story on Edgar Mitchell’s ESP experiments. 335 sacred ground,” pointed out another man, upon which white men had no business treading.143 More hostile was the white author William Eastlake, whose long poem entitled “Whitey’s on the Moon Now” offered the perspectives of two Papago Indians on the moon landing. “White wild men,” he charged, “savages with blue eyes, pink asses and guns erected Royal Crown Cola signs, massacred the Indians, shit in the creek, left for the moon without so much as a thank you for the use of this planet.”144 A similar, though less strident theme appeared in a number of editorial cartoons featuring moon aliens or even actual Indians warning about the pollution and destruction these Americans would inevitably bring to the moon. The most revealing connection between Indian spirituality, neo-romanticism, and Apollo, however, came from the singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, a Cree Indian who was inspired to write about Apollo in her 1972 song, “Moonshot,” after “a conversation with Christian scholars who didn’t realize that indigenous people had already been in contact with the Creator before Europeans conquered them.” Like the Swami Bhaktivedanta and Charles Lindbergh, Sainte-Marie placed little faith in technology-based moon ventures, and she chided NASA and the culture it represented for assuming its rationalist approach was the only way to touch the stars. While NASA and its backers touted the advanced communication technologies it employed to communicate with astronauts a quarter- million miles away, for example, Sainte-Marie pointed out, “I know a boy from a tribe so primitive, he can call me up without no telephone.” Bon voyage, she wished the moon 143 Newsweek, 7 July 1969, 66-67. 144 William Eastlake, “Whitey’s on the Moon Now,” in A Child’s Garden of Verses for the Revolution (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1970), 63-82. 336 explorers, but “when you get there we will welcome you, and still you’ll wonder at it all.” What use did Sainte-Marie and her people—Indians, the counterculture, artists, and all those Americans attempting to integrate neo-romantic values into their lifestyles in the early seventies—have with the form of space travel offered by NASA, when they could travel much further (and deeper) than the moon through their own “primitive” means?145 This veneration of the Indian in American culture was indicative of a much wider cultural shift away from rationalist exploitation and toward a more naturalistic appreciation of nature; away from looking to the stars for salvation and instead looking at Earth anew. Indeed, it was one of the ironies of the space program that the greatest gift it offered humanity was not new knowledge of the moon, but a new perspective from which to view the Earth. It was thus no coincidence that this period also saw the rise of the modern environmental movement. After Apollo 11, Senator Everett Dirksen had proposed that each July 20 become a national holiday—“Moon Day.”146 This idea went nowhere, and in a sign of the new neo-romantic orientation of American culture in the Apollo era, the first Earth Day was instead celebrated on April 22, 1970, less than a week after the near-disastrous Apollo 13 mission hobbled back to Earth. “Organizers of the event see it as not only a massive alert to public awareness,” reported the New York Times, “but also as the dawn of a new era of ‘ecological politics.’” It was, supporters urged, “a day to re-examine the ethic of individual progress at mankind’s expense.” And no matter how much Apollo was framed as an advancement “for all mankind,” it simply 145 Buffy Sainte-Marie, “Moonshot,” Moonshot (Vanguard Records, 1972), VSD-79312. 146 NASA Current News, 20 August 1969, 10. 337 could not square with Earth-Day sentiments that pushed for the achievement of a “‘no- growth society’ keyed to quality rather than quantity.”147 The rise of Earth Day over the quickly forgotten Moon Day was but one sign of the increasing preference for the natural over the artificial in Apollo-era American culture, and of a new skepticism toward the artificial future that had seemed so promising during the earlier Space Age. This trend could be seen in many of the dystopian movies of the 1970s, which directly contrasted the glories of the natural world with the dehumanizing environments they predicted for the technological future. Both THX 1138 and Logan’s Run, for example, ended with their heroes escaping their fully artificial, technocratic totalitarian worlds only to be staggered by the sublime beauty of the natural world that they had never been permitted to experience.148 These movies were science fiction, warning about the dangers of the fully technological future, but they offered natural extensions of the contemporary themes presented first in Walkabout, where children raised their whole lives in the modern city were awed by a natural world they had never before really known. 1971’s Silent Running more directly used the theme of space exploration not to extol the benefits of the Space Age, but to damn the misuse of Earth’s resources by the technocratic order. In the movie, set in the near future, the Earth had become completely defoliated (though somehow not depopulated), and the only remnants of plant life were confined to several domes attached to a space freighter. Yet even these last traces of nature were no longer valuable to the men calling the shots on Earth—shortly into the 147 New York Times, 21 April 1970, 36. 148 Logan’s Run, DVD, directed by Michael Anderson, 1976 (Warner Home Video, 2007). 338 movie, instructions came to destroy them in order to open up more room on the freighter for commercial use. At least one historian has argued that Silent Running was a pro- space movie, since it was a spaceship that offered the last hope for the survival of natural earthly life.149 Yet the reality is that the only person in the movie at all interested in preserving the plant life on the ship was a half-mad loner who ended up killing the rest of the crew to keep them from following orders, and then killing himself and destroying the ship shortly after shooting the one remaining plant-filled capsule on an unknown course into the depths of the solar system. It was hardly an optimistic outcome, and it did not speak too highly of the technocrats in charge of the space-faring future.150 All of these movies extrapolated from current trends to portray the technological world of the future—it would be the artificial life promised by the Space Age, dominated by plastics, automation, efficient synthetic foods, neon- rather than sun-lit living spaces, computer intelligence, impersonal telecommunications, and routine space travel. Yet whereas these futuristic devices had seemed promising in the 1950s and 1960s Space Age, by the end of the Apollo era they seemed terrifying. If this new reverence for the natural elevated values more important and powerful than the manipulation of nature for the benefit of immediate human satisfaction, a concurrent cultural trend went a step further by challenging the core rationalist idea that humanity was even responsible for its own course through history and into the future at all. The Apollo moon landing was largely presented as an important step in human- 149 Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1997), 102. 150 Silent Running, DVD, directed by Douglas Trumbull, 1971 (Universal Studios, 2002). 339 driven history, a testament to the power of humanity to steer its progress through its rationalism and ingenuity as it opened formerly sacred grounds to experimentation and exploitation. This was the aspect of Apollo celebrated by rationalists like Ayn Rand and in countless newspaper editorials extolling the power of rational man, and it was the idea that led one overzealous senator to declare humans the “masters of the universe.” Yet in the Apollo era, even this assumption of human-driven progress came under fire as anti-rational counter-narratives of human progress arose and attained widespread publicity. Two such counter-narratives, for example, were offered in the two best-selling non-fiction books of the entire 1970s: Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods?, each of which directly challenged the notion that humans were in any way the masters of the universe, or even their own history and future.151 Although the literati was not sure what to make of the premillennial biblical prophesy in Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, it clearly struck a chord with tens of millions of Americans, easily outselling any other nonfiction book of the decade. Lindsey spoke highly of the Apollo mission, but it was clear to him who was really driving the course of history—not rational man with his science and technology, but God, the real master of the universe. Von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? also downplayed human achievement as the core driver of history. Echoing a theme presented by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey, von Däniken purported to prove that extraterrestrials had long ago visited 151 On sales of both books over the decade, see New York Times Book Review, 30 December 1979, 3. 340 ancient cultures on Earth, and supplied them with the knowledge that would guide human progress over the ensuing millennia. “The time has come to admit our insignificance,” he announced early in the book. Von Däniken, like Lindsey, was enthusiastic about continued space exploration, but his model of human insignificance, even when it came to its own history, was at odds with the rationalist NASA model that stressed the grandeur of man the explorer. Although he presented his case as a rational, scientific study, his anti-rationalist attack on the sciences to explain the origins of life, human knowledge, and culture found wide acceptance in this neo-romantic era.152 Devout believers of Lindsey’s message would no doubt be deeply offended by Chariots of the Gods?, which chalked up all religious notions of gods, angels, and other supernatural beings to ancient visits from space aliens. Yet in the context of the neo- romantic 1970s, the two books shared important similarities. Both downplayed the agency of rational man as the shaper of history, and instead emphasized the extent to which humans were mere pawns in the designs of much more powerful beings. At the same time, both looked for salvation not in the problem-solving abilities of rational man, but rather in some all-powerful supernatural or alien force without which human life would have been directionless and meaningless. Lindsey placed God in control of both the past and the future, while von Däniken credited aliens, but neither interpretation of history spoke highly of rational humanity’s ability to control its own fate. 152 Erich von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods? (New York: Bantam Books, 1971; orig. German, 1968; orig. American, 1970), 6. The idea that human history had been guided by extraterrestrials, or even that the human species had extraterrestrial origins, was not unique to von Däniken, This theme had already been explored in numerous H.P. Lovecraft stories, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s The Sirens of Titan, the 1967 movie Quatermass and the Pit, and by Kubrick and Clarke, to name a few predecessors. None of these previous works, however, claimed to be non-fiction, and none, with the possible exception of 2001, attained the popularity that Däniken’s would in the 1970s. 341 The popularity of both of these anti-rationalist books in the Apollo era revealed the extent to which Americans had rejected the Space Age vision of a rational exploration of the material universe as the next step in human “progress.” In fact, it suggested that millions of Americans at this time did not necessarily even want to live in a Newtonian universe susceptible to full rational understanding, in which there was little room for unsolvable mystery, magic, revelation, or a spiritual realm outside the material. More than anything, it suggested how little Americans felt like “masters of the universe” by the Apollo era. This feeling of powerlessness was widespread in the early 1970s, extending far beyond evangelical and UFO buff communities, and although its origins can be traced to a number of important factors, including the defeat in Vietnam, the increasingly troubled economy, and all the social turmoil the country had faced in the late 1960s, it also had profound roots in the larger neo-romantic reaction against rationalism—in the recognition that humanity was not all powerful, that there were in fact forces all about, from God to nature to other unfathomable natural and preternatural powers, that were infinitely more powerful than even space-faring man. If there was a movie from the era that best captured this aspect of the zeitgeist, it was undoubtedly The Exorcist. A story of demonic possession, the movie showcased the powerlessness of modern science and medicine to effectively deal with problems rooted in the supernatural. “You just take your pills and you’ll be fine,” the possessed girl’s mother told her, just before her bed started shaking violently in the first undeniable sign that something beyond the realm of the physical was happening to the poor child. 342 Nothing from cutting-edge brain scans to the latest cocktail of sedatives and antipsychotic drugs was able to halt this strange power that was afflicting the young girl—as in other horror movies from the era, like Night of the Living Dead and The Andromeda Strain, science was all but useless against the more mysterious forces of the universe. Instead, it took an immense leap of faith into the irrational—an exorcism, a Catholic rite that had been all but forgotten in the era of modern medicine and psychiatry—to cure the child. “The power of Christ compels you,” two priests chanted over and over as they tried to drive the demon out of the girl—not the power of science, or medicine, or any other scientific tool harnessed by rational man, but the immaterial power of God.153 Unlike the numerous popular movie genres of the early 1970s that showcased the risk of human technology advancing beyond control—the disaster-caused-by-human- folly movie, technological dystopias, computers-gone-evil plots—movies like The Exorcist offered yet another perspective that suggested a more encompassing human powerlessness, not just in the face of its own creation, but even more so against the immense, ultimately unknowable forces of nature (or, in the case of the Exorcist, the supernatural). This film trend (it was too diverse to be considered a “genre”) was related to the new ecological consciousness, which argued that nature was something not only to be taken care of, but also respected, even sometimes feared for its almost boundless power which dwarfed anything humanity was capable of imagining for itself. This idea manifested itself in a slew of films in the 1970s, ranging from silly B-movies to summer blockbusters to sober foreign art-house dramas. 153 The Exorcist, DVD, directed by William Friedkin, 1973 (Warner Home Video, 1997). 343 At the ridiculous end of the spectrum were the numerous B-grade “revenge of nature” movies, like Night of the Lepus, Frogs, Squirm, Phase IV, and Willard, which variously saw angry ants, rabbits, frogs, worms, and rats turning against and attacking powerless humans. In 1975, one of the most popular movies of the decade (and of all time), Jaws, brought this basic idea to the blockbuster level. The related niche of natural disaster movies offered all the thrills of the technological disaster films, but they further removed the agency from humanity by flaunting its helplessness in the face of every powerful natural force imaginable, from earthquakes to avalanches to tidal waves. Meanwhile, audiences with more refined tastes were treated to Peter Weir’s intellectual drama, Picnic at Hanging Rock, which showcased a volcanic rock formation that one day devoured three visiting schoolgirls without any logical explanation. The haunting presence of Hanging Rock highlighted the unfathomable powers that nature possessed, powers that would never be fully tamed by rational humanity. Far more than the fun “animals-run-amok” movies of the early 1970s, Picnic at Hanging Rock called into question both the rightness and even the possibility of humanity’s quest to conquer nature, and by implication, that much larger, much more daunting rock in outer space, the moon.154 These films, along with all the others examined in this chapter, captured some of the flavor of the neo-romanticism of the early 1970s, but one need not rely on science fiction and dystopian movies to judge the extent to which Americans had come to reject the Space Age vision by the early 1970s. In fact, one need look no further than the 154 Picnic at Hanging Rock, DVD, directed by Peter Weir, 1975 (Criterion Collection, 1998). 344 choices they made when designing their own, present-day living spaces, as new trends in interior décor took a drastic turn away from the futuristic Space Age flavor of the 1950s and 1960s in favor of a new 1970s pastoralism. Indeed, the newfound appreciation and preservation of nature was not merely limited to the outdoors, but in fact moved indoors, inside the home, where a paradoxical mix of new technology and neo-romanticism similar to the preference-for-the-natural-over-the-artificial-without-necessarily-giving- up-the-artificial that was first seen in the counterculture had penetrated into the homes of middle America by the 1970s. VIII. That the Space Age influenced design and fashion in the 1950s and 1960s is undeniable. Everything from cars to clocks, couches and clothes began to adopt distinctly “Space Age” designs, usually emphasizing some combination of bold primary, secondary, or metallic colors and sleek, smooth, usually plastic surfaces that emphasized fluidity and motion. The triumph of humanity over nature and gravity was celebrated as plastics were formed into shapes that would have been impossible to design with natural materials, and that often shot upwards as if gravity did not exist at all. Futuristic new televisions appeared that looked more like astronaut helmets and visors than the old wood-encased hulks of the earlier 1950s, while car designers made the jump from the Jet Age to the Space Age by further exaggerating their new models’ enormous tailfins. Lamps began to look like flying saucers, clocks like stars, vacuum cleaners like sputniks, 345 and parabolas were integrated into the designs of everything from bowling alley signs to backyard grills. Meanwhile, manufacturing technologies and a hearty consumer culture combined to create an environment in which it was cheaper and easier (and certainly classier) to simply replace old furniture and appliances rather than refurbish them. The message announced by these design trends was clear: movement—constant acceleration into the optimistic future. “Everything from a T-bird to a toaster took on a shape that made it seem to lean forward, ready to surge ahead,” wrote Thomas Hine of what he termed the “Populuxe” era in American culture and design from 1954-64.155 Futuristic as they may have appeared, these Space Age design trends were all but dead by the Apollo era, remnants of an earlier period when it seemed like science and technology really would foster a utopian future of comfort and prosperity for all. If intellectuals had warned throughout the 1960s of the alienating, dehumanizing qualities of the space-faring future, with its artificial environments, artificial food products, artificial gods—artificial everything—by the early 1970s the larger culture had caught up, and the “Space Age” lifestyle became a future that few Americans any longer embraced. On the contrary, far from being made obsolete by Space Age technologies, interest in the “natural” made a huge comeback. This new orientation of style and thought was seen not just in the obvious form of the burgeoning environmentalist consciousness, but perhaps even more dramatically in the interior environments in which Americans chose to live their everyday lives. The new wave of neo-romantic design that 155 Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 12. On the space age design trends discussed here, see Hine, Populuxe; and Sean Topham, Where’s My Space Age?: The Rise and Fall of Futuristic Design (Munich: Prestel, 2003). 346 became popular during the Apollo era looked backward rather than forward for inspiration: a rustic, rather than a plastic look ruled the typical 1970s home interior. Gone were the bold, solid or two-tone colors of Space Age interiors, replaced by more natural-looking earth tones like “avocado green,” “harvest gold,” and sundry shades of ochre. Various textures, from shag carpets to ornate tapestries to carved wood furniture began to supplant the sleek surfaces of the Space Age as a hand-crafted vogue overtook the mass-produced plastic look. Wood-paneling or exposed brick walls surrounded living rooms to offer a warmer, more organic-feeling interior environment, although in many cases these walls could barely be seen behind all the houseplants that also began appearing in the early 1970s. This explosion in houseplants, in particular, “was part of an enormous change in the way people thought about, furnished, and decorated their homes,” explained Thomas Hine: What happened was a great deal more than a change of lifestyle; it was a complete change of sensibility. . . . Midcentury homes were understood as part of a wider world of shared progress. . . . It had its origins in the celebration of technology and of the social and material progress that made it possible. . . . In the late sixties, however, people’s houses began to change. The clean, uncluttered look of midcentury confidence was not simply out of style. For many, it was wrong, a symptom of a cold, technocratic culture of death.156 The American home—the centerpiece of family life, solace from the hostile world and believed essential to the American character—had clearly turned its back on the Space Age by the early 1970s. 156 Thomas Hine, The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies (New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2007), 162-63. 347 Similar trends prevailed elsewhere in American culture, as the Space Age’s boldness of style and vision faded rapidly. The colorful hippie and mod fashion styles of the 1967-era, for example, had by the early 1970s evolved into a look of dull, denim plainness. Commenting on this trend among the youth in The Greening of America, Charles Reich noted that the “first impression is of drabness—browns, greens, blue jeans.” This was to be commended, Reich believed, for the new look was “a deliberate rejection of the neon colors and plastic, artificial look of the affluent society.” Indeed, unlike the “plastic” styles of the Space Age, these clothes were “earthy and sensual. They express an affinity with nature; the browns, greens, and blues are nature’s colors, earth’s colors, not the colors of the machine.” More practically, for the growing number of nature-lovers in the early 1970s, the clothes “have a functional affinity with nature too; they don’t show dirt, they are good for lying on the ground.”157 In popular rock music, too, where 1967-era psychedelia had rivaled the moon program and political violence for the title of “most excessive phenomenon of the era,” the trend was toward a more subdued style, as a number of formerly edgy and innovative musicians stripped down toward a more rustic, laid back, country-influenced “roots” rock sound. “1967 and 1968 meant huge advancements in forty-seven flavored pizzazz rock & roll,” wrote one rock critic in 1970, whereas “1969 was a return to simplicity.”158 More broadly, it seemed like nearly every hyped-up, large-scale project promoted by technocratic experts as a taste of the glorious future was turning out to be a fiasco by the early 1970s, from disaster movies like The Poseidon Adventure, in which the most 157 Reich, The Greening of America, 252. 158 Chris Holdenfield, Rock ’70 (New York: Pyramid Books, 1970), 9. 348 modern, gigantic, unsinkable ocean liner ended up capsized due to human arrogance and greed, and The Towering Inferno, where the world’s newest, tallest skyscraper went up in flames due to a shoddy electrical system, to the real life Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, an enormous modernist public-housing complex that was constructed in the 1950s and envisioned as a model for futuristic urban living, but which had degenerated to the point of being virtually unlivable by the early 1970s, and was finally demolished with the blessings of its few remaining residents in 1972.159 Each of these cases, fictional or all- too real, showcased the problems inherent in large, visionary, technocratic ventures that failed to consider the crucial questions of quality and human relevance. But no popular culture trend revealed the decline of Space Age ideals better than the evolution of the automobile over the course of the 1960s. At the beginning of the decade, mammoth cars sported sharp, often two-toned color patterns, elongated, forward- leaning bodies, and ridiculously large tailfins meant to suggest the soaring rockets of the Space Age. By the Apollo era, cars had not only begun to shrink dramatically, but the one consistently large style of passenger car that remained, the station wagon, began to adopt that staple of the neo-romantic era, wood paneling, a decidedly un-futuristic style which had all but disappeared from automobiles during the Space Age. Even more telling was the rise of smaller imported cars. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, American automobile manufacturers had explicitly used space imagery to advertize their huge, heavily adorned, tail-finned gas-guzzlers, tying these powerful behemoths to the Space Age promise of ever-forward progress and a lack of concern over 159 Hine, The Great Funk, 32; Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House (New York: Bantam Books, 1999), 62-64. 349 limited resources. To advertise its 1963 Fairlane model, for example, Ford showed drawings of a child in an astronaut uniform “exploring” the car’s roomy interior—and the sixteen-plus foot Fairlane was only Ford’s midsize model that year.160 Yet by 1969, the most effective space-related ad would not showcase an American car that celebrated any kind of futuristic rocket-esque, high-horsepower, sleek, luxurious embodiment of limitless progress. In fact, the most telling space-related spread of the Apollo era would not feature an American car at all, but rather the tiny, bulbous, austerely designed, environmentally conscious Volkswagen Beetle. Displaying a model of the Apollo lunar lander—a strange-looking four-legged module that many likened to some sort of grotesque bug—the ad’s text was as simple as the car itself: “It’s ugly,” it read, above a Volkswagen symbol, “but it gets you there.”161 If the Space Age was characterized by flaunting excess, was all about pushing beyond the limits, moving forward full-speed- ahead regardless of the cost (monetary or environmental)—“the itch was to accelerate,” Mailer pointed out, “the metaphysical direction unknown”—the neo-romantic Apollo era was rapidly shaping up to be one of thrift, of diminished expectations, of getting the most pleasure with the least amount of damage to the natural world: all trends that did not bode well for a program like Apollo and the culture it symbolized.162 Yet there is an obvious paradox here. Just as the counterculture used electricity, modern amplification systems, and vinyl records to damn technological America, so too did mainstream America lose its faith in the space-age technological future without really 160 Jim Heimann, ed., All-American Ads: 60s (Köln: Taschen, 2003), no page numbers. 161 Life, 8 August 1969, 4A. 162 Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 48. 350 giving up its technology to any significant extent. Few Americans outside of a small number of hippies actually set out to live like the Indians they so glorified, after all, and although evangelical preachers may have expressed dismay at many aspects of modernity, they, like the counterculture, eagerly embraced technologies like radio, vinyl LPs, and television to spread their messages. And if Americans may have begun to switch to smaller, more efficient automobiles, this switch was spurred more by gas prices than ideology, and few willingly gave up their cars altogether. In fact, the wood paneling that adorned the sides of Apollo-era cars, so clearly symbolizing the decline of previous Space Age stylings, was generally made of plastic, as were many new “wood” television cabinets, dressers, and other large items of furniture, a good portion of the earth-tone- colored clothes of the polyester era, and even some of the houseplants that sought to offer a more natural environment inside the home, including, perhaps most absurdly, Christmas trees, which had traditionally symbolized the vitality of life during the dead of the cold, dark winter solstice.163 Even in its more extreme manifestations, the new romanticism did not simply disavow science and technology. In fact, it embraced certain technologies that supported its quest for enhanced spirituality and a more transcendent existence. For example, recall that Edgar Mitchell believed he was practicing good science by testing ESP from his space capsule. He was also a regular user of a portable biofeedback training (BFT) machine, a device that became popular in the early 1970s among the increasing numbers of Americans interested in parapsychology or the quest for enlightenment via meditation. 163 On the imitative use of plastics, see Meikle, American Plastic, 253-59. 351 These machines, which cost a couple hundred dollars, attached via electrodes to the head and purported to read users’ brain waves in order to alert them when they had achieved the optimum level of relaxation for effective meditation. “Enhanced states of consciousness easily attained!” promised an advertisement for one such machine, next to a picture of Buddha with electrodes stuck to his head. “I know a person who’s used an Alpha Wave headset for nine months, and he’s almost enlightened,” enthused the famous artist Peter Max.164 The BFT machine, product of the same overarching twentieth-century technological drive that also brought Americans the Apollo moon program, offered nothing less than enlightenment via technology, yet it was a fundamentally different type of knowledge advancement than that offered by Apollo—not the discovery of new material worlds “out there,” which the space dreamers yearned to explore in the belief that only the continuing quest for new knowledge of the universe could push humanity to its full potential and thus bring true enlightenment, but rather a journey into the less tangible, as-yet-unknown terrains of the human mind. All this is to say that there was something much more profound occurring in American culture during the Apollo era than just a simplistic rejection of technology. In fact, what came to be questioned was not technology itself, but what it symbolized during the Space Age—a rationalism that stressed the power of humanity over nature, that offered science as the best, or really the only way to understand the mysteries of life and 164 Sara Davidson, “The Rush for Instant Salvation,” Harper’s, July 1971, 52; On Edgar Mitchell and his BFT machine, see Francine du Plessix Grey, “Parapsychology and Beyond,” New York Times Magazine, 11 August 1974, 13. An example of a BFT machine can be seen in Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). 352 the universe, that accepted any and all advancements in scientific knowledge and technology as inherently good, indeed as the very definition of “progress,” and that insisted that the universe was completely knowable, and therefore at the mercy of humanity to shape as it pleased. Apollo could survive the fairly superficial reaction against technology at the turn of the 1970s—it was, after all, a mostly beneficent technological project that, for all the bellyaching over its cost, was undeniably exciting, at least the first time around. What it could not survive—did not survive—was the large-scale skepticism of the rationalism that it, more than anything else in the 1960s, symbolized. Moon landings had given Americans good entertainment (though boredom set in quickly), a sense of pride (though tempered by the recognition that a Cold War contest was a childish reason to go to the moon), new scientific knowledge of the moon (though scientists griped about the manned nature of the program), and, regardless of the ultimate demystification of Earth’s mysterious satellite, contributed a sense of awe to the vast universe, as well as humanity’s fragile-looking home floating alone in the void. But what did it really offer in the way of human progress? By opening up access to the moon, the Apollo program may have contributed to a clearer picture of the physical origins and material makeup of the universe, but it offered the public little in the way of furthering knowledge of the meaning of the universe and, more important, unlike the best science it did not offer much in the way of new mysteries to ponder. Contemplating a beautiful sunset one Christmas evening in the mid-nineteenth century, Henry David Thoreau could not help but to decry the pernicious effect that 353 rationalist science had on the human imagination and soul. “I, standing twenty miles off, see a crimson cloud in the horizon,” he wrote in his journal: You tell me it is a mass of vapor which absorbs all other rays and reflects the red—but that is nothing to the purpose. . . . If there is not something mystical in your explanation, something inexplainable to the understanding, some elements of mystery, it is quite insufficient. If there is nothing in it which speaks to my imagination, what boots it? What sort of science is that which enriches the understanding, but robs the imagination? . . . if we knew all things thus mechanically merely, should we know anything really?165 A century later, during the Apollo 8 mission, someone from Houston lightheartedly radioed the spacecraft to ask, “who’s driving up there?” Astronaut Bill Anders responded, “I think Isaac Newton is doing most of the driving right now.”166 Newton’s clockwork-like conception of the universe’s natural laws was indeed the origin of the modern knowledge of gravitational forces that laid the basis for the successful mission. He was also a prime inspiration for the Enlightenment quest to understand the universe in rational, scientific terms. Yet by the Romantic era, his scientific approach had come under fire by philosophers like Goethe and John Keats, who damned Newton’s scientific theory of color as the “unweaving of the rainbow.”167 As it was in the Romantic era, so it was in the neo-romantic Apollo era: trying to comprehend the mindset of the young student who found the mysteries of tarot cards so much more important than touching the moon, Paul Goodman asked him, what about Newton? “Isn’t it remarkable that everything, the escape velocity, the curves of the orbit, the one-sixth gravity, and all, is 165 Thoreau quoted in Zajonc, “Goethe and the Science of His Time,” 18. 166 Washington D.C. Evening Star, 1 January 1969, in NCN, 3 January 1969, 7. 167 Keats quoted in Zajonc, “Goethe and the Science of His Time,” 17. 354 just as [he] said?” No, the student replied, “that’s science; science always works out; that’s what’s wrong with it.”168 To NASA’s immense credit, most everything worked out as close to perfect as could be expected on its Apollo 11 mission, allowing it to fulfill Western Civilization’s age-old dream of one day touching the moon. But this very perfection was ultimately what was wrong with the whole endeavor—it showed that humanity could, through its rational intellect, develop technologies that could perform almost unimaginable tasks with great predictability, yet in the end, for all the anticipation, this grand technological feat did little to alter the human condition, or even inspire the world to continue searching outward for answers. In fact, what remained over the long haul was not more moon trips followed by ever farther journeys of discovery to other planets and solar systems, but simply the good old moon itself, which persisted as it had always been, ultimately no less enthralling despite its immediate demystification. Just as it was still possible for Thoreau and Keats to enjoy a sublime rainbow or sunset, even knowing its scientific origins, so it still remained possible in spite of Apollo to wonder at the glowing moon, for its true beauty and awe came not from touching it, but from experiencing it in much the same way Thoreau experienced his sunset—with perception, imagination, and the sense that it can tell us something from afar that is beyond the capacity of science, technology, or even the near-miraculous feat of walking on it to explain. 168 Goodman, New Reformation, 34. 355 Epilogue The American space program has never gotten back on track after its peak in the 1960s. Though by the Reagan era it had recovered to some extent from its post-Apollo doldrums with a robust shuttle program, critics could not help but point out that the shuttle—an even more impressive feat of machinery for being reusable—had little purpose other than itself; was, in fact, the perfect symbol of NASA’s aimlessness after Apollo’s relentless pursuit of the moon. As Walter McDougall aptly put it, “Apollo was a matter of going to the moon and building whatever technology could get us there; the Space Shuttle was a matter of building a technology and going wherever it could take us.”1 And “wherever it could take us” turned out to mean “not very far,” as the shuttle has sent scores of astronauts no farther than Earth’s near orbit for reasons that a vast majority of Americans almost certainly cannot explain, other than perhaps some vague notion of “science.” The primary cause of this stagnation was not NASA’s failure to dream up ambitious adventures in the Apollo mold. On the contrary, if the program had had its way, Americans would have long since walked on Mars and would be headed to the outer planets and their moons by now, as Arthur C. Clarke imagined while he was writing the 2001: A Space Odyssey script. NASA’s real problem is that never again since Apollo have Americans put much stock in the rationalist manned exploration of the universe. The moon landings achieved most everything they promised—America beat the Soviets 1 Walter A. McDougall, ...The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1985), 423. 356 in the space race, brought back invaluable scientific information from the moon, and established a workable model for the future expansion into the rest of the solar system, perhaps even the wider galaxy and universe. Yet they failed to offer the most important bounty in terms of sustaining public support: the kind of emotional returns that would inspire Americans to invest not just their money in a continuing program of aggressive exploration, but their hopes and dreams as well. Revealing the geological structure of the moon was no small feat, but neither was it a substitute for a greater understanding of humanity’s place in the mysterious universe—a question attracting much interest in Apollo-era American culture, and a concern that NASA claimed its moon missions could address. But ultimately they did not—in fact, could not. As a result, the space program has floundered ever since, offering spectacular views of Mars and the outer planets with its mechanized missions, but ever subject to the frustrating vagaries of federal funding, which make it almost impossible to plan for the long-term ventures at which the agency excels. The blame for these budget fluctuations cannot solely be placed on opportunistic politicians who use the space program to bump up their poll numbers when convenient and ignore it otherwise. Rather, the program itself simply does not attract the devotion of the American public necessary to make it a priority, and thus the dreams of galaxial expansion that peaked in the Space Age—dreams of mastering the universe—have festered ever since. All the same, this study has not been about the space program, but rather the cultural compulsions that led to its greatest triumphs, and the reactions that crippled it soon after. And in offering one final consideration of these two forces, a nearly four- 357 hundred page study of space exploration and American culture would be remiss if it did not at least mention one of America’s most popular space-related cultural phenomena, the Star Trek franchise. If any one figure from the Apollo era best embodied the cultural conflict between rationalism and neo-romanticism discussed herein, it was undoubtedly Spock. A hybrid creature—half emotional human, half rationalist Vulcan—Spock struggled constantly to reconcile his rationalism with his more human passions and instincts, most often relying too excessively on one or the other at any given moment, approaching touchy moral situations with a chilling logic or, on the rare occasion when his human side prevailed, lashing out in frightening irrational bursts of violent emotion. But Spock was more than just an entertaining television figure during the transition from the Space Age to the Apollo era. In fact, Americans during this period were asked to choose between the rationalism and neo-romanticism he represented, between the Vulcan and the human. So which side ultimately prevailed to carry America through the subsequent decades? As one might suspect when Star Trek metaphors are utilized to frame a question, the question itself is too simplistic. In reality, confronted with these two visions of progress, Americans largely decided not to choose at all. In fact, unlike the vigorous, inspiring manned space program, which did not survive the Apollo era, both the rationalism and technology that propelled aggressive exploration and the neo- romanticism that helped derail it continue to live on strong, and, aside from occasional outbursts of hostility toward one another (in the conflicts over teaching Darwinian 358 evolution to public school children, for example) the two competing orientations of thought have for the most part come to peacefully coexist. Consider our current culture. If it is tempting to view the biofeedback training machines embraced by Edgar Mitchell and so many others in the Apollo era as ridiculous in hindsight, a quintessentially seventies piece of ephemera that our more sophisticated modern culture should justifiably scoff at, flip through cable-television channels at any given moment in the year 2010—it is nearly impossible to avoid eventually stumbling across a program featuring a team of self-proclaimed experts searching for ghosts in a purported haunted house, using the latest in high-technology ghost-hunting tools (many with direct roots in Apollo-era space-technology spinoff).2 Or walk by any of the ubiquitous urban or suburban yoga centers across the country—it is equally hard to miss dedicated devotees of this once-esoteric but now popular practice leaving the buildings with iPods velcroed to their arms, the better to relax while getting in touch with one’s spiritual side (that is, if Americans have not given up on public tranquility venues altogether in favor of the yoga training applications available for their iPhones or their Nintendo Wii video-game consoles). Roman Catholic? Then you’ve undoubtedly followed to some extent or another the radiocarbon-dating tests performed on the Shroud of Turin in order to determine whether it is indeed the face of Jesus Christ that miraculously appears on the cloth. Looking back, it is clear that neither side won—that although there are enough partisans of each perspective to carry on a lively debate, both rationalism and neo- 2 Don’t have cable? As of April 2010, PBS will be getting in on the act with its Haunted Texas series. 359 romanticism continue to prosper within the same larger cultural body. Americans embrace technology like never before. Yet they also believe in God, the Devil, ghosts and spirits, telepathy and tarot like never before in the modern era, and apparently see no conflict between the two. Although Apollo fell victim, at least in part, to skepticism over its rationalist vision of the universe at a moment when neo-romanticism was growing particularly strong, the march of technology continued undeterred, as did the rationalism upon which it was based. But the rationalism that emerged from the Apollo era was no longer the all-encompassing worldview envisioned by its most extreme partisans in the postwar decades, a rationalism that would ultimately supplant all other value-systems and finally unlock the true meaning to existence. Rather, it was tempered by the neo- romantic explosion of the 1970s—not eradicated, nor replaced, but softened, made more malleable, to the extent that the two forces have become largely reconciled to one another; indeed, to the extent that each has found ways to supplement the other in manners that would have horrified either side’s partisans during the Apollo era. 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New York: Time Incorporated, 1967. Brzezinski, Zbigniew. Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. New York: Viking Press, 1970. Cirino, Robert. Don’t Blame the People. New York: Random House, 1971. Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey. New York: Signet, 1968. ______________. The Lost Worlds of 2001. New York: Signet, 1972. ______________. The Promise of Space. New York: Pyramid Books, 1970. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. 10:56:20PM EDT 7/20/69: The Historic Conquest of the Moon as Reported to the American People by CBS News over the CBS Television Network. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., 1970. Cooper, John Charles. Religion in the Age of Aquarius. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1971. 365 Cox, Harvey. The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective, Revised Edition. Toronto: The Macmillan Company, 1966. Crichton, Michael. The Andromeda Strain. New York: Ballantine Books, 1969. Dos Passos, John. Century’s Ebb: The Thirteenth Chronicle. Boston: Gambit, 1975. Douglas, Jack D., ed. The Technological Threat. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971. Dubos, René. Reason Awake: Science for Man. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970. ___________. A God Within. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972. Dyson, Freeman. “Human Consequences of the Exploration of Space.” In Image and Event: America Now, edited by David L. Bicknell and Richard L. Brengle. New York: Appleton-Century-Crafts, 1971. Eastlake, William. A Child’s Garden of Verses for the Revolution. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1970. Eiseley, Loren. The Invisible Pyramid. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970. ____________. “The Inner Galaxy.” In Image and Event: America Now, edited by David L. Bicknell and Richard L. Brengle. New York: Appleton-Century-Crafts, 1971. Etzioni, Amitai. The Moon-Doggle: Domestic and International Implications of the Space Race. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1964. Fallaci, Oriana. If the Sun Dies. London: Collins, 1967. ____________. Nothing, and So Be It. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1972. Ferkiss, Victor. Technological Man: The Myth and the Reality. New York: George Braziller, 1969. Florman, Samuel. The Existential Pleasures of Engineering. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976. Francis, H.E. “Ballad of the Engineer Carl Feldmann.” Michigan Quarterly Review 18, no. 2 (Spring 1979): 245-64. 366 Fromm, Erich. The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1968. Fuller, Buckminster. “Vertical Is to Live—Horizontal Is to Die.” American Scholar 39, no. 1 (Winter 1969-70): 27-47. Goodman, Paul. New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative. New York: Vintage Books, 1970. Greeley, Andrew M. Come Blow Your Mind with Me. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971. Heuvelmans, Martin. The River Killers. Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1974. Hoffman, Abbie. Woodstock Nation: A Talk-Rock Album. New York: Vintage Books, 1969. Holdenfield, Chris. Rock ’70. New York: Pyramid Books, 1970). Hougan, Jim. Decadence: Radical Nostalgia, Narcissism, and Decline in the Seventies. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1975). James, William. The Moral Equivalent of War and Other Essays. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1971. Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: Warner Books, 1980. Levy, Lillian, ed. Space: Its Impact on Man and Society. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1965. Lindaman, Edward B. Space: A New Direction for Mankind. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Lindbergh, Anne Morrow. Earth Shine. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1969. Lindsey, Hal. The Late Great Planet Earth. 1970. Reprint, New York: Bantam Books, 1973. Lipsyte, Robert. Liberty Two. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974. Lowell, Robert. History. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. 367 Lukacs, John. The Passing of the Modern Age. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1970. Mailer, Norman. The Armies of the Night. 1968. Reprint, New York: Plume, 1994. _____________. “Looking for the Meat and Potatoes—Thoughts on Black Power,” in Existential Errands (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 287- 304. _____________. Miami and the Siege of Chicago. 1968. Reprint, New York: New York Review Books, 2008. _____________. Of a Fire on the Moon. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970. _____________. Why Are We in Vietnam? New York: G.P Putnam’s Sons, 1968. Malzberg, Barry N. Beyond Apollo. New York: Random House, 1972. Marine, Gene. American the Raped: The Engineering Mentality and the Devastation of a Continent. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969. Marty, Martin E. “The Spirit’s Holy Errand: The Search for a Spiritual Style in Secular America.” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967): 99-115. Mazlish, Bruce. “The Idea of Progress.” Daedalus 92, no. 3 (Summer 1963): 447-461. Mazlish, Bruce, ed. The Railroad and the Space Program: An Exploration in Historical Analogy. Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1965. McReynolds, David. We Have Been Invaded By the 21st Century. New York: Grove Press, 170. Miller, Walter M., Jr. A Canticle for Leibowitz. 1959. Reprint, New York: Bantam Books, 1976. Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1970. Phillips, Robert, ed. Moonstruck: An Anthology of Lunar Poetry. New York: The Vanguard Press, Inc., 1974. Pichaske, David. A Generation in Motion: Popular Music and Culture in the Sixties. New York: Schirmer Books, 1979. Prabhupada, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami. Easy Journey to Other Planets. 1970. Reprint, Los Angeles: The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1997. 368 Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. Reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1995. Rabinowitch, Eugene, and Richard S. Lewis, eds. Man on the Moon: The Impact on Science, Technology, and International Cooperation. New York: Basic Books Inc., Publishers, 1969. Rand, Ayn. The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. New York: New American Library, 1971. Reich, Charles. The Greening of America. New York: Bantam Books, 1970. Rossman, Michael. The Wedding Within the War. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture. Garden City: Anchor Books, 1969. _______________. Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1972. Rubin, Jerry. Do It: Scenarios of the Revolution. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970). Schrag, Peter. The End of the American Future. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973). ___________. The Decline of the WASP. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971. Scott-Heron, Gil. Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. New York: The World Publishing Company, 1970. Sinclair, John. Guitar Army: Rock & the Revolution with MC5 and the White Panther Party. 1972. Reprint, Los Angeles: Process Media, 2007. Slater, Philip E. The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point. Boston: Beacon Press, 1970. Slomich, Sidney J. The American Nightmare. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1971. Smith, Patti. Just Kids. New York: Ecco Books, 2010. Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures: And a Second Look. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963. 369 Tillich, Paul. The Future of Religions. New York: Harper& Row, 1966. Updike, John. Rabbit Redux. 1971. Reprint, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. ___________. Rabbit is Rich. New York: Penguin, 1982. Vas Dias, Robert, ed. Inside Outer Space: New Poems of the Space Age. Garden City: Anchor Books, 1970. von Däniken, Erich. Chariots of the Gods? New York: Bantam Books, 1971. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1969. _____________. Between Time and Timbuktu, or Prometheus-5. New York: Delta, 1972. _____________. The Sirens of Titan. New York: Delta, 1959. _____________. Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (Opinions). New York: Delta, 1974. _____________. Welcome to the Monkeyhouse. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1970. Wilford, John Noble. We Reach the Moon: The New York Times Story of Man’s Greatest Adventure. New York: Bantam Books, 1969. Willis, Ellen. No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1992. Winner, Langdon. Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1977. Wolf, Leonard, ed. Voices from the Love Generation. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1968. Wolfe, Tom. Foreword to Nine Lies About America, by Arnold Beichman. New York: The Library Press, 1972. __________. The Right Stuff. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1979. Wollheim, Donald A, ed., Men on the Moon. New York: Ace Publishing Corporation, 1969. 370 Young, Hugo, Bryan Silcock and Peter Dunn. Journey to Tranquility. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1970. Secondary Readings André, Laura M. “Lunar Nation: The Moon and American Visual Culture, 1957-72.” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2002. Atwill, William D. Fire and Power: The American Space Program as Postmodern Narrative. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1994. Bell, David and Martin Parker, eds. Space Travel & Culture: From Apollo to Space Tourism. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Benjamin, Marina. Rocket Dreams: How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World Beyond. New York: Free Press, 2003. Binkley, Sam. Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Borman, Frank, with Robert J. Serling. Countdown: An Autobiography. New York: Silver Arrow Books, 1988. Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Brick, Howard. Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Brower, Kenneth. The Starship and the Canoe. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1978. Bulkeley, Rip. The Sputniks Crisis and Early United States Space Policy: A Critique of the Historiography of Space. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Burrows, William. This New Ocean: A Story of the First Space Age. New York: Random House, 1998. Byrnes, Mark E. Politics and Space: Image Making by NASA. Westport: Praeger, 1994. Carter, Dale. The Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American Rocket State. London: Verso, 1988. Chaikin, Andrew. A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts. New York: Viking, 1994. 371 Christianson, Gale. Fox at the Wood’s Edge: A Biography of Loren Eiseley. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990. Clowse, Barbara Barksdale. Brainpower for the Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis and National Defense Education Act of 1958. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981. Cook, David A. Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2000. Corn, Joseph J. The Winged Gospel: America’s Love Affair with the Airplane, 1900- 1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Dearborn, Mary V. Mailer: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999. DeGroot, Gerard. Dark Side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Deloria, Philip. “Counterculture Indians and the New Age.” In Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, edited by Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, 159-88. New York: Routledge, 2002. Dickson, Paul. Sputnik: The Shock of the Century. New York: Walker & Company, 2001. Divine, Robert. The Sputnik Challenge. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ____________. “LBJ and the Politics of Space.” In The Johnson Years, Volume Two: Vietnam, the Environment, and Science, edited by Robert Divine. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987. Ellwood, Robert S. The Sixties Spiritual Awakening: American Religion moving from Modern to Postmodern. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Engelhardt, Tom. The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Farber, David, and Beth Bailey, eds. The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Farber, David, ed. The Sixties: From Memory to History. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994. 372 Forman, Paul. “How Lewis Mumford Saw Science, and Art, and Himself.” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, vol. 37, no. 2 (March 2007): 271- 336. Frum, David. How We Got Here: The70’s: The Decade that Brought You Modern Life- For Better or Worse. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Gaddis, John Lewis. Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1987. Goodman, Fred. The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce. New York: Times Books, 1997. Goldstein, Laurence. “‘The End of All Our Exploring’: The Moon Landing and Modern Poetry.” Michigan Quarterly Review 18, no. 2 (Spring 1979): 192-217. _________________. The Flying Machine and Modern Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Hale, Jeff A. “The White Panthers’ ‘Total Assault on the Culture.’” In Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, edited by Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, 125-156. New York: Routledge, 2002. Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. Hansen, James R. First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005. Heimann, Jim, ed. All-American Ads: 60s. Köln: Taschen, 2003. Henriksen, Margot A. Dr. Strangelove’s America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Hine, Thomas. The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies. New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2007. ____________. Populuxe. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986. Hoberman, J. The Dream Life: Movies, Media and the Mythology of the Sixties. New York: The New Press, 2003. 373 Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Isserman, Maurice and Michael Kazin. America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kauffman, James. Selling Outer Space: Kennedy, the Media, and Funding for Project Apollo, 1961-1963. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1994. Kay, W.D. Defining NASA: The Historical Debate Over the Agency’s Mission. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Ketterer, David. New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature. Garden City: Anchor Books, 1974. Kirk, Andrew G. Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007. _____________. “‘Machines of Loving Grace’: Alternative Technology, Environment, and the Counterculture.” In Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, edited by Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, 353- 378. New York: Routledge, 2002. Kilgore, De Witt Douglas. Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Krug, Linda T. Presidential Perspectives on Space Exploration: Guiding Metaphors from Eisenhower to Bush. New York: Praeger, 1991. Kuper, Adam. The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth. New York: Routledge, 2005. Launius, Roger D. “The Historical Dimension of Space Exploration: Reflections and Possibilities.” Emailed from Roger Launius to author, 8 March 2006. _______________. “Interpreting the Moon Landings.” History and Technology 22, no. 3 (September 2006): 225-255. _______________. “Perceptions of Apollo: Myth, Nostalgia, Memory or All of the Above?” Space Policy 21 (2005): 129-139. _______________. “Public Opinion Polls and Perceptions of US Human Spaceflight.” Space Policy 19 (2003): 163-175. 374 Launius, Roger D. and Howard E. McCurdy, eds. Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Lavery, David. Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. Logsdon, John. The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Mangus, Susan Landrum. “Conestoga Wagons to the Moon: The Frontier, the American Space Program, and National Identity.” Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1999. Manso, Peter. Mailer: His Life and Times. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. Marx, Leo and Bruce Mazlish, eds. Progress: Fact or Illusion? Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996. McCurdy, Howard E. Space and the American Imagination. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997. McDougall, Walter. The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1985. McLoughlin, William G. Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978. McMillen, Ryan Jeffrey. “Picturing a World Alive: American Cultural Responses to the Photographs of Earth from Space.” Master’s thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1998. ____________________. “Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization.” Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2004. McNeil, Legs, and Gillian McCain. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. London: Abacus, 1997. Meikle, Jeffrey. American Plastic: A Cultural History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Monaco, Paul. The Sixties: 1960-1969. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001. Neufeld, Michael J. Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War. New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 2007. 375 Noble, David F. The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1997. Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994. ___________. “Don’t Fly Us to the Moon: The American Public and the Apollo Program.” Foundations: The Review of Science Fiction 66 (Spring 1996): 69-81. Opt, Susan K. “American Frontier Myth and the Flight of Apollo 13: From News Event to Feature Film.” Film and History 26, 1-4 (1996): 40-51. Outram, Dorinda. The Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Parrett, Aaron. The Translunar Narrative in the Western Tradition. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2004. Patterson, James T. Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Roland, Alex. “Barnstorming in Space: The Rise and Fall of the Romantic Era of Spaceflight, 1957-86.” In Radford Byerly, Jr., ed., Space Policy Reconsidered. Boulder: Westview Press, 1989. Roof, Wade Clark. “Modernity, the Religions, and the Spiritual.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 558 (July 1998), 211- 224. Schulman, Bruce J. The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2001. Seamon, David, and Arthur Zajonc, eds. Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum, 1992. Smith, Andrew. Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth. New York: Fourth Estate, 2005. Smith, Merritt Roe and Leo Marx, eds. Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. Smith, Michael L. “Selling the Moon: The U.S. Manned Space Program and the Triumph of Commodity Scientism.” In Richard Wrightman Fox and T.J. Jackson 376 Lears, eds. The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film, 2nd ed. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Spigel, Lynn. “From Domestic Space to Outer Space: The 1960s Fantastic Family Sitcom.” In Constance Penley, et al, eds. Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. ___________. “From Theatre to Spaceship: Metaphors of Suburban Domesticity in Postwar America.” In Roger Silverstone, ed. Visions of Suburbia. London: Routledge, 1997. ___________. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. ___________. “White Flight.” In Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin, eds. The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict. New York: Routledge, 1997. Steigerwald, David. The Sixties and the End of Modern America. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Swanson, Glen E., ed. “Before This Decade is Out…”: Personal Reflections on the Apollo Program. Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1999. Tabbi, Joseph. Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Tamarkin, Jeff. Got a Revolution!: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane. New York: Atria Books, 2003. Topham, Sean. Where’s My Space Age?: The Rise and Fall of Futuristic Design. Munich: Prestel, 2003. Van Riper, A. Bowdion. “From Gagarin to Armageddon: Soviet-American Relations in the Cold War Space Epic.” Film and History 31.2 (2001): 45-51. Wang, Zuoyue. In Sputnik’s Shadow: The President’s Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Weart, Spencer. Nuclear Fear: A History of Images. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. 377 Weber, Ronald. Seeing Earth: Literary Responses to Space Exploration. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985. Wilson, Charles Reagan. “American Heavens: Apollo and the Civil Religion.” Journal of Church and State 26, no. 2 (Spring 1984): 209-226. Wolfe, Tom. From Bauhaus to Our House. New York: Bantam Books, 1999. Zimmerman, Robert. Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8. New York: Dell, 1998. 378 Vita Matthew David Tribbe was born and raised in southern Ohio. After graduating from the University of Cincinnati in 2000, he worked briefly at the kind of ridiculous Internet job that contributed significantly to the market crash of 2000-2001, then worked for the phone company for a few years before entering the history graduate program at the University of Texas at Austin in 2003. Permanent email address: tribbe407@hotmail.com This dissertation was typed by the author.