The term “polite society” fell into disuse because society wasn’t polite any more. The increasing use of first names was extraordinary. Once it had been limited to family and friends. Then it was extended to colleagues at work and the neighborhood. At office parties and neighborhood cocktail parties finding out who you were talking to became increasingly difficult. Last names were used only in introductions; afterward everyone was Al, Debby, Chuck, or Beth. Eventually the circle of first-namers widened to include virtually everyone who knew who you were: doctors, tradesmen, the children of others, etc. The suburbanite who arrived home to find her bathroom being used by a strange boy might be greeted, “Hi, Doris.” In suburbia this was looked upon as just friendliness. Any objection to it would be regarded as snobbish and resented.
One option closed to the suburbanite was scolding someone else’s child—in the idiom of earlier generations, “correcting” him. Any correction had to come from his own parents, and there wasn’t much of it. Children were special people in the new communities. Whether or not they benefited from their status was a question which would later be debated nationally. Certainly they weren’t neglected. Permissiveness took time and patience, and the parents in the developments were among the most permissive in the country. Children made other demands on their time. A mother was expected to plan her youngster’s activities and then chauffeur him to them. At times this required the energy and ingenuity of a Grossinger’s social director, for suburbia’s children were busy all the time. Sociologists were struck by the remarkable degree to which their lives were organized for them. After school and on Saturdays, hurrying station wagons crisscrossed suburbia, carrying their charges to dancing lessons, Little League practice, tennis lessons, sailing lessons, play groups, parties, piano lessons, Cub Scouts, dramatic school—schedules which returned them home just in time for dinner and evenings in front of the television set. So occupied were they, Henry A. Murray protested in Daedalus, that their chances of growing into individuals were being curtailed sharply, if not crushed altogether; “parents make their babies play with other babies,” he wrote, “as soon as they can toddle.” The swing generation wasn’t much interested in individuality. Though older executives still paid lip service to it, their juniors were more anxious to raise children who, as they put it, could “get along with other people.” They admired that quality in one another, sought to develop it in themselves, and saw it becoming the key to success in the next generation.
The upshot was that millions of pupils approached the age of awareness equipped with marvelous radar but no gyroscopes. They were well instructed about society’s need for morale but hadn’t been told what it produced; they knew a great deal about achieving popularity but very little about achieving anything else. “Give me a boy for the first seven years and he will be a Catholic for life,” a prelate had said. The apostles of adjustment had more than seven years, and it is doubtful that even the church could have done a more thorough job than they did. First mothers instilled in children the necessity for wooing their peers. Next came practice workouts in sandboxes and on swing sets. Activities followed: Brownies, Little Leagues, etc. The propaganda for good fellowship was relentless. Sunday schools in the modern churches taught that God was really just a pal; that religion was fun, like the movie nuns who played softball and rode around in helicopters. Any fledgling Luther who felt inclined to cultivate his own identity was exhorted not to by the mass media, while the last layers of goodguymanship polish were zealously applied in the new suburban schools.
The character and quality of classroom instruction in America varied from one community to another. In some, McGuffey readers and rote memorization were still prevalent. One-teacher public elementary schools were on the way out, however; their number dropped from 143,391 in 1932 to 59,652 in 1950, and at the end of the Eisenhower era they would be down to 20,213. The leaders in the profession, honored at teachers’ conventions and teachers colleges and extolled by the National Education Association, were advocates of what was called progressive education. It wasn’t really progressive. It had been that, in its beginnings as a movement, when it was dedicated to freeing the imaginative child from lockstep classroom discipline and encouraging him to develop his own individuality. Then, as educators became more enthusiastic about developing social skills, teachers replaced the old stress on intellectual attainments with the even greater constraints involved in turning a child into what Gesell profiles suggested he should be.
Pupils in these schools were not told what they must learn. They were asked to choose their own electives. To avoid fixed standards of performance (“straitjackets,” they were called), grades were often limited to “satisfactory” and “unsatisfactory.” Courses in “family living” replaced algebra, geometry, grammar, and foreign languages. At times the attitude of the new educators toward the traditional academic disciplines bordered on outright hostility. Eric Baber, superintendent of the Park Forest, Illinois, high school, which in 1954 was chosen one of the five winners in the “All America Schools” contest of the National Municipal League, deplored the stubbornness with which college admissions offices clung to entrance requirements. “The so-called ‘bright student,’” he said, “is often one of the dumbest or least apt when he gets away from his textbooks and memory work. This is evidenced by the fact that many $20,000-to-$100,000 jobs in business, sales, sports, radio… are held by persons with I.Q.s of less than ninety.”
Alert to signs of what was denigrated as “maladjustment,” teachers in schools participated in their pupils’ choices of friends, their games at recess, their very fantasies. Instead of visiting national monuments, classes visited dairies or grocery stores. Learning to become consumers, they gathered information that, they were told, would be useful to them in later life. In such “doing” sessions, supervisors explained at PTA meetings, pupils were participating in actual situations. Abjuring what was called “elitism,” they were concentrating not on what changes might be made in life, but how to make them “without upsetting human relationships.” “Ours is an age of group action,” Dr. Baber told a teachers’ workshop, stressing the need to emphasize the extroverted side of their pupils’ nature. So the children were taught, and so they learned to be “well-rounded”—people who understood that the goals of the individual and the goals of society were identical. If uncertain about a problem, they polled one another.
Some parents objected. They wanted to bring back Latin, chemistry, integral calculus—courses that colleges and universities also wanted. Smiling principals shook their heads and replied, “We teach the child, not the subject.” They believed that in preparing pupils for participation in the consumer world they were taking a practical, realistic, hardheaded approach which would be vindicated by the future.
***
On October 4, 1957, Tass, the Soviet news agency, had an interesting item for the American public. “The first artificial earth satellite has now been created,” it announced. “This first satellite was successfully launched in the USSR…. Artificial earth satellites will pave the way for space travel and it seems that the present generation will witness how the freed and conscious labor of the people of the new socialist society turns even the most daring of man’s dreams into reality.”
To grasp the full impact of this announcement, it must be remembered that in 1957 the United States was still regarded as the home of scientific innovation. It was a running joke of the postwar years that from time to time Moscow would announce that this or that Russian—usually some Ivan or Ilya no one had ever heard of—was responsible for a discovery which everyone outside the Soviet Union knew had been made in the United States. Americans had grown up believing they held a virtual monopoly on technological ingenuity. Now the proud were fallen. In addition they were mortified. Nikita Khrushchev was crowing, “People of the whole world are pointing to the satellite. They are saying that the U.S. has been beaten.” And so they were. Tass called the space vehicle a sputnik; literally a “traveling compa
nion” or, more appropriately, a “fellow traveler.” It instantly won the attention of the world. To the United States it came as a shock on the order of the Crash.
TWENTY-FOUR
Beep Beep
The first word that a Russian sphere the size of a beachball was circling the earth once every 96.2 minutes, traveling at a speed of 18,000 mph and emitting beeping sounds as it did so, had reached Washington, quite by chance, during a cocktail party in the Soviet embassy at 1125 Sixteenth Street. Scientists from twenty-two countries were observing 1957–58 as an International Geophysical Year, or IGY as they called it—a general sharing of data—and Russian diplomats were entertaining fifty IGY luminaries that historic Friday evening when one of the guests, Walter Sullivan of the New York Times, was called away for an urgent telephone call. At the phone he learned of the Tass announcement. He hurried back and whispered to an American scientist, Dr. Lloyd Berkner, who rapped on the hors d’oeuvre table until the hubbub quieted. “I wish to make an announcement,” he said. “I am informed by the New York Times that a satellite is in orbit at an elevation of 900 kilometers.1 I wish to congratulate our Soviet colleagues on their achievement.”
The room burst into applause. Eminent scientists are indifferent to national loyalties, and the Americans there were particularly generous. Dr. Joseph Kaplan, chairman of the U.S. IGY program, called the Russian achievement “tremendous” and added, “If they can launch one that heavy, they can put up much heavier ones.” The White House, however, was momentarily speechless. The advent of the first sputnik astounded U.S. intelligence even though the Soviets had made no great secret of their satellite plans. At an IGY planning conference in Barcelona Russian delegates had spoken openly and confidently of their plans to launch a space vehicle. As early as November 1954, Defense Secretary Wilson had been asked whether he was concerned over the possibility that the USSR might win the satellite race. He had snorted, “I wouldn’t care if they did.”
That continued to be the Republican line now that Sputnik was an accomplished fact. Administration spokesmen seemed to suggest that the press was making molehills out of molehills. Hagerty issued a statement describing the satellite as a matter “of great scientific interest” but adding that “we never thought of our program as one which was in a race with the Soviet’s.” Wilson, now in retirement, called the Russian feat “a nice technical trick.” Rear Admiral Rawson Bennett, chief of the Office of Naval Research, wondered why there was so much fuss over a “hunk of iron almost anybody could launch.” White House adviser Clarence Randall described the space vehicle as “a silly bauble”—thereby infuriating the President—and Sherman Adams said disparagingly that the government wasn’t interested in “an outer-space basketball game.” (In his memoirs Adams regretted this. “I was only trying to reflect the President’s desire for calm poise,” he wrote, “but I had to admit on reflection that my observation seemed to be an overemphasis of the de-emphasis.”)
Others in Washington were in no mood to dismiss Sputnik so lightly. Trevor Gardner, who as former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force had tried to mediate interservice quarrels over who should run the American space program, said bitterly, “We have presently at least nine ballistic missile programs, all competing for roughly the same kind of facilities, the same kind of brains, the same kind of engines and the same public attention.” Electronics and airframe experts recalled Wilson’s casual attitude toward space research. “The basic reason we’re behind the Russians,” a major defense contractor said, “is that we haven’t gone all out.” One of the President’s closest aides said he felt an urge to “strangle” Budget Director Percival Brundage. Knowland privately warned Ike that the worldwide impact of the Soviet accomplishment had all but nullified the value of America’s Mutual Security program, and some publicists were actually suggesting a negotiated peace with the Russians “before it is too late.”
The Democrats, predictably, were indignant. Senator Henry Jackson of Washington wanted the President to proclaim “a week of shame and danger.” Missouri’s Symington demanded a special session of Congress. Fulbright of Arkansas said, “The real challenge we face involves the very roots of our society. It involves our educational system, the source of our knowledge and cultural values. And here the Administration’s program for a renaissance of learning is disturbingly small-minded.” Majority Leader Johnson saw cosmic implications in the Russian success. “The Roman empire controlled the world because it could build roads,” he said. “Later—when men moved to the sea—the British Empire was dominant because it had ships. Now the Communists have established a foothold in outer space. It is not very reassuring to be told that next year we will put a ‘better’ satellite into the air. Perhaps,” he concluded sarcastically, “it will even have chrome trim—and automatic windshield wipers.”
This was more than partisan oratory. Periodically Americans feel a need to agonize over why the country has gone soft. The last time it had happened had been in the spring of 1940, when France was falling and the older generation thought American youth too engrossed in swing to hear the Nazi jackboots. Now, as then, the press was aroused. “It is downright terrifying with [Sputnik] staring down at us,” the Portland Oregonian said, and Time said that “the U.S. takes deep pride in its technical skills and technological prowess, in its ability to get things done—first. Now, despite all the rational explanations, there was a sudden, sharp national disappointment that Americans had been outshone by the Red moon.” John Kenneth Galbraith had been awaiting publication of The Affluent Society. Neither he nor his publishers had expected much of a sale. “Then, in the autumn of 1957,” he wrote in an introduction to the second edition, “the Soviets sent up the first Sputnik. No action was ever so admirably timed. Had I been younger and less formed in my political views, I would have been carried away by my gratitude and found a final resting place beneath the Kremlin Wall. I knew my book was home.”
Americans were learning humility—and humiliation. They had become an international laughingstock. At a scientific conference in Barcelona Leonid I. Sedov, Russia’s chief space scientist, taunted a U.S. colleague: “You Americans have a better standard of living than we have. But the American loves his car, his refrigerator, his house. He does not, as we Russians do, love his country.” Anti-Americans were derisive. RUSSIANS RIP AMERICAN FACE, read a headline in Bangkok’s Sathiraphab, and a Beirut professor said dryly of his students, “You would have thought they launched it themselves.” The editors of London’s Economist saw the Russians scoring a brilliant psychological triumph in the Afro-Asian world. French journalists saw the catch, the price the Soviet masses had paid. Thierry Maulnier wrote in Le Figaro, “The Russian people can… see in the sky a brilliant star which carries above the world the light of Soviet power, thanks to millions of pots and shoes lacking,” and Combat commented: “We ourselves would like it if the Russians would put some of their pride into the evolution of a better world—an end to the world of concentration camps.” But in all Europe only the London Express, faithful to Britain’s old ally, predicted that somehow the United States would muddle through: “The result will be a new drive to catch up and pass the Russians in the sphere of space exploration. Never doubt for a moment that America will be successful.”
Americans themselves had plenty of doubts, and the more they knew about the implications of the Soviet achievement the more apprehensive they became. In those first days virtually all the details about the man-made star came from Tass and Pravda; the Smithsonian Institution was building an astrophysical observatory in Cambridge to track precisely this sort of phenomenon, but it was unfinished and unable even to correlate visual observations being phoned to it by widely scattered moonwatchers. The Russians disclosed that their first sputnik was a polished steel ball twenty-two inches in diameter, weighing 184.3 pounds and equipped with four radio antennas. Its orbit was higher than U.S. scientists had thought possible. Because of that height it would avoid the atmosphere and could keep circling the earth
for years. Sputnik’s weight was also stunning; the directors of America’s Vanguard Project, still in the theoretical stage, had been hoping to send a 21.5-pound Navy Viking research projectile to a maximum of 300 miles. That would have required 27,000 pounds of rocket thrust. The Russian catapult had used 200,000 pounds—an incredible figure, clearly indicative of a new source of power.
As new data came in and were digested by MIT computers, American appreciation of Soviet technical virtuosity soared. The orbit was stunning. It was elliptical, of course, carrying the sputnik from an apogee 583 miles above the earth to a perigee 143 miles down, but since both of these distances were added to the radius of the earth (3,960 miles) the ellipse was almost a circle, showing that the Russians had precise control as well as power. Moreover, the launch had been daring. The simplest way to orbit the satellite would have been to aim it eastward from the equator, taking advantage of the earth’s rotation to give the object about 1,000 mph of free speed—in effect, a tailwind. Vanguard’s planners had expected to do this; according to their calculations the Viking rocket, rising due east from Florida, would have had a 914 mph boost. But Vanguard rocketeers working under lights those first nights were astounded to learn that the Russian course was 65 degrees the other way. That indicated that they had power to burn. It had another significance. Vanguard’s course would have kept it south of Europe and most of Russia. Sputnik’s journey took it over most of the inhabited earth, meaning most of the world’s peoples could see it, as well as hear it and read about it—a propaganda coup in itself.
Americans would be among the last to have a clear view of it, owing, perhaps, to a sly bit of Muscovite humor. The launch had been timed so that during its first weeks the satellite would pass over the United States during the day, when it would be invisible against the glare of the sun, or at night, when the shadow of the earth would hide it. The curious—and there were tens of thousands of them—had to peer up at daybreak and twilight, when the object could be briefly glimpsed against the gray sky. That would change. The orbit was shifting around the earth at four degrees a day, Dr. Joseph A. Hynek of the Smithsonian observatory explained; on about October 20 the sputnik would come into view overhead for those with binoculars or small telescopes. But Americans, impatient as always, wanted to know everything now. They had been huddling over their radios and television sets since that Friday night when an NBC commentator had told them, “Listen now for the sound which forevermore separates the old from the new.” Then they had heard it for the first time, alternating between 20 and 40 megacycles—an eerie A-flat beeping from outer space.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 118