Stranger Than We Can Imagine

by John Higgs

  The United States understood what people wanted. They wanted to see men climb into a spacecraft, land it on the moon, then walk out and hit golf balls around. They wanted to see astronauts drive space buggies across alien landscapes, then send messages of love home to their wives and children. The hard, useful science that Korolev had achieved was all well and good, but what people really wanted was what the B-movies and science fiction comics had promised. The Apollo programme, if it could succeed, would rewrite the nature of the space race in people’s minds. It would redefine it not as something that had been lost, but as something that they were always destined to win. This was extraordinarily risky because what Kennedy asked NASA to do was so difficult that it did not, at the time, appear possible. It was the most expensive ‘Hail Mary pass’ in history.

  As Kennedy’s speech made clear, his reasons were political rather than scientific. ‘If we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny,’ he told Congress, ‘the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.’ The heroic flight of Yuri Gagarin, in other words, might lead people towards communism. If Western democracy was a superior system to the unworkable horror of communism, then what were the Russians doing orbiting the planet and racking up achievements that were, frankly, beyond the ability of American engineers?

  The solution to the problem was to throw money at it, and the aim of Kennedy’s address was to secure massive amounts of taxpayers’ dollars. ‘Our greatest asset in this struggle is the American people,’ Kennedy said, ‘their willingness to pay the price for these programs, to understand and accept a long struggle, to share their resources with other less fortunate people, to meet the tax levels and close the tax loopholes I have requested.’ It is hard to imagine a President using those words today. Kennedy asked for $7 billion, but the final cost was over $25 billion. It is one of the many ironies of the American space programme that, even though it was intended to demonstrate that the American system of freedom and individualism was superior to communism, it could better the achievements of a single-minded Russian genius only through an expensively funded government programme.

  This was von Braun’s hour. While Korolev had toiled away in obscurity, von Braun became the face of the US space programme. His profile had already been boosted by a 1960 film of his life story, somewhat sanitised, entitled I Aim at the Stars. The film was re-titled Wernher von Braun for its British release, possibly to avoid the common joke that the film’s full title was ‘I Aim at the Stars (but Sometimes I Hit London)’. Yet regardless of his past, there was no doubt that von Braun was the man for the job. The towering Saturn V rocket he and his team created was a modern wonder of the world. It rose elegantly into the Florida sky on 16 June 1969, with the comparatively minuscule Apollo 11 spacecraft in its nose. Inside that craft sat the best of the best, the astronauts Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong.

  Mission control began a ‘T-minus’ countdown, with launch occurring when the countdown reached zero. This idea was taken from Fritz Lang’s 1929 film Frau im Mond (Women on the Moon). Von Braun was a big fan of this film, and had painted its logo on the base of the first V-2 rocket launched from Peenemünde.

  Four days later, after a journey of 384,400 kilometres, Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on a celestial body other than the earth. It was one small step for a man but, as he so perfectly summed up the moment, one giant leap for mankind.

  It was also a giant leap for America. In the nineteenth century, it had been the British who led the way in culture, science and progress. In the first half of the twentieth century, Germany and the German-speaking European countries had taken that role. After those nations had been stricken low by the cancer of fascism, two giant superpowers emerged as contenders for the title of the world’s leading nation. In the nuclear-war-poised geopolitics of the Cold War, the only safe arena for them to compete was off-world. When Armstrong’s boot crunched into the fine grey dust of the lunar surface, the world had a winner. The twentieth century became, and will always be known as, the American Century.

  The Apollo programme worked on a level above military, political or scientific advancement. It was not just Jack Parsons, Sergei Korolev and Wernher von Braun who grew up reading pulp science fiction and dreaming of making it a reality. The singular determination that those men demonstrated may have been rare, but their dream was shared by countless others.

  On 14 December 1972, the crew of Apollo 17 left the moon. They did not realise it at the time, but they would be the last people to travel outside the earth’s orbit for at least half a century. There is hope that the Chinese or private companies may visit the moon or even Mars in the twenty-first century, but it is also possible that mankind will never return. Once the political aims of the Apollo project had been achieved, the argument for government funding of space research on that scale collapsed. Ambitions dropped back down to the level displayed by the Russians in the 1950s and 1960s, when unmanned machines performing valuable science was financially justifiable, while the human dream of exploration for its own sake was not. This could be seen as a massive anticlimax, except for one thing.

  In December 1968 the crew of Apollo 8 became the first humans to leave earth’s orbit and travel into space. They launched with the intention of orbiting the moon and becoming the first people to look upon its dark side with their own eyes. They achieved this, but they also saw something else. It was not something that they had been expecting, but it turned out to be something of the utmost importance. When they rounded the dark side of the moon, the crew of Apollo 8 became the first humans to see the whole of planet Earth, hanging alone in space, blue and white and indescribably beautiful. They photographed it, and called that photograph Earthrise.

  In 1948 the English astronomer Fred Hoyle, who coined the term the Big Bang, predicted that ‘Once a photograph of the Earth taken from outside is available, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.’

  The earth that Apollo 8 left was massive and entirely dependable, yet there it was, infinitely small and shockingly delicate. The sixty-two miles of atmosphere, which had looked an insurmountably massive barrier to engineers like Parsons, Korolev and von Braun, were seen as a fine, delicate wisp hugging the surface, a simple line separating the wet ball of rock from the void.

  In the twentieth century mankind went to the moon and in doing so they discovered the earth.

  Live performance art in Soho, New York, 1970 (Jill Freedman/Getty)

  TEN: SEX

  Nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me)

  In turbulent periods of history a person can go from being a conservative, to a dangerous radical, to an embarrassing reactionary, without once changing their ideas. This is what happened to the English palaeobotanist Dr Marie Stopes in the early decades of the twentieth century.

  Marie’s mother, the Shakespeare scholar Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, was the first woman in Scotland to take a university certificate. This was at a time when women were not allowed to attend lectures or receive degrees. Charlotte wrote many academic works on Shakespeare but her most successful book was British Freewomen: Their Historical Privilege (1894), which was an inspiration to the twentieth-century suffragette movement. Charlotte was a strong feminist who campaigned for women’s suffrage.

  Unlike her mother, Marie Stopes didn’t initially appear to be academically inclined. Her formal education only began at the age of twelve, when she was sent away to a suffragist-founded Edinburgh boarding school. But despite her late start she applied herself and eventually enrolled at the Botanical Institute at Munich University. She was, at first, the only woman among five thousand men. From here, at the age of twenty-four, she surpassed her mother’s academic achievements and attained her doctorate. Dr Stopes be
came a recognised expert in plant fossils, and seemed on course to a life dedicated to the study of coal.

  Like her mother, Marie was a great believer in female education and political equality. But while Charlotte was in favour of the radical activism promoted by Emmeline Pankhurst, Marie preferred more conservative suffragists. Pankhurst was exasperated by the failure of the women’s suffrage movement to produce tangible results in the nineteenth century, so she advocated the confrontational approach now known as direct action. Her followers shouted down politicians, chained themselves to railings, and committed arson. They threw stones through the windows of Buckingham Palace which were attached to notes explaining that ‘Constitutional methods being ignored drive us to window smashing.’ The death of Emily Davison, who was trampled to death at the Epsom Derby after stepping in front of a horse owned by King George V, became the defining image of Pankhurst’s direct-action movement.

  For Marie Stopes, this was all a bit much. Both she and her mother agreed that women needed the vote. They understood that this would lead to equality in a whole range of areas, from female-instigated divorce to tax status. Their difference of opinion was down to temperament. Marie did not think that direct action was in any way ladylike. She was not initially persuaded by her mother’s argument that a lady who found a burglar in her house would be quite correct in hitting them over the head with a broom, so this was also correct behaviour for women who had been robbed of their political rights.

  Yet there was one area where Marie was more radical than Charlotte, and that was sexually. Charlotte was the product of a society where wives were obliged to submit to their husbands for procreation, but were on no account to admit any sexual feelings themselves. After providing her husband Henry with two children, as was deemed proper, Charlotte believed she had fulfilled her wifely duties and withdrew physically from her husband. Henry Stopes found this lack of intimacy difficult. In an 1886 letter he wrote of his hope that they would next meet ‘with the scales taken from your eyes as to the effects and need of greater love existing between us … Dearest, will you put from you the teachings of your splendid brain and look only into the depths of your heart and see if you can but find there the love that every woman should hold for the father of her babes? We would put from us the seven blank years that are ended and commence the truer honeymoon.’ But from the formal tone of her letters to him, it appears that such pleas had little effect. Henry’s letters after this point gradually give up hope of a more emotional and physical marriage. He died an early death a few years later.

  Marie, in contrast, was more passionate. The poetry she wrote throughout her life constantly skirted around the borders of erotica. She saw physical union in spiritual terms, and viewed love between heaven-matched equals as the pinnacle of Christian society. This perspective was purely theoretical, at least in the first half of her life. She claimed to be entirely ignorant of the existence of homosexuality and masturbation until the age of twenty-nine, and she was still a virgin at the age of thirty-eight when she wrote her most famous book, the million-selling Married Love, which was eventually published in 1918.

  Married Love was the result of the failure of her unconsummated first marriage in 1911, which only lasted two years. Her husband Reginald moved to Canada after the relationship failed, and Marie instigated divorce herself. Finding herself in the position of having to properly construct her legal case, and not knowing how unusual an unconsummated marriage was, she headed to the library to research human sexuality. Science and academia, she soon realised, had very little to say about the sex lives of husbands and wives. As someone who herself had written about reproduction in extinct plant life, she found this surprising. It struck her that writing about human sexuality might be socially useful.

  In common with many in her class, and even with the benefit of her education, Stopes had embarked on her first marriage blind to the realities of sexuality. Such ignorance was then seen in terms of the desired quality of ‘innocence’, and hence widely promoted. But ignorance, she discovered, was not bliss, and her marriage failed to live up to her romantic dreams of true union. Not wishing others to go through the same experience, she began to write a manual for newlyweds based in part on what she learnt in biology textbooks, and in part on what she felt in her romantic heart.

  Stopes argued that sexual fulfilment was necessary for the physical, spiritual and emotional wellbeing of women. It was of vital importance, therefore, that husbands learnt to properly seduce their wives, and understand their monthly cycle of arousal. The responsibility fell to men, Stopes explained, because it was in no way proper for women to instigate sex, or drop their husbands hints.

  Married Love was followed by an even more controversial book, Wise Parenthood: A Book for Married People (1918), which dealt with contraception. While sexual intimacy between spouses had value in itself, it could lead to women having a child a year for much of their adult life, whether they wanted to or not. For many women, this amounted to a form of physical and emotional slavery. The answer, as now seems obvious, was birth control. But this was at the time a highly contentious position. While Married Love had been attacked on the grounds that unmarried people might read it and be corrupted, Wise Parenthood faced a far greater range of enemies.

  Promoting contraception wasn’t officially illegal in Britain, but it risked prosecution under obscenity laws. At the time, Holland was the only country in the world where birth control was approved by the state. The first Dutch birth control clinic had opened in 1882. In contrast, the American nurse Margaret Sanger opened the first American birth control clinic in New York in 1916 and was promptly arrested. She was charged with distributing contraceptives and ‘running a public nuisance’.

  The average UK family had 2.8 children in 1911, compared to 1.7 in 2011. Large families were considered admirable. In the twenty-first century, tabloid newspapers routinely condemn large working-class families, but in 1921 the Daily Express ran a competition to find Britain’s biggest family. It offered a £25 prize for the winner. Politicians, doctors and members of the public – particularly women – spoke out loudly against birth control. Doctors made a good deal of money from attending pregnant women, which the widespread adoption of contraception threatened. It was socially safer to adhere to the established cultural position, namely that sex was allowable for the purposes of procreation within marriage but was otherwise obscene. A person departing from that script risked the implication that they themselves found pleasure in sexual intimacy, and hence were some form of deviant.

  The wave of opposition that faced Marie Stopes and other birth control pioneers reminds us how much our understanding of our place in the world changed in the early twentieth century. In an age of individualism the idea that women have the right to make decisions about their own bodies appears self-evident, but in the imperial world it was the social hierarchy which dictated what should happen. And as the state religion is a mirror of existing social structures, it should be no surprise that the greatest opposition to Stopes’s work came from the Christian Church.

  Contraception was condemned by most Christian sects. In 1920, the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops called for the removal of ‘such incentives to vice as indecent literature, suggestive plays and films, the open or secret sale of contraceptives, and the continued existence of brothels’. The strongest condemnation came from Catholicism. P.J. Hayes, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, claimed in 1921 that contraceptives were worse than abortion. ‘To take life after its inception is a horrible crime,’ he argued, ‘but to prevent human life that the Creator is about to bring into being is Satanic.’

  The controversy came to a head when Stopes sued Halliday Sutherland, a Catholic doctor, for defamation, following criticism in Sutherland’s 1922 book Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine against the Neo-Malthusians. Sutherland’s defence was financially supported by the Church, so the case was widely seen as a fight between one woman and the Catholic Church.

>   Here Stopes’s conservative nature came into play. Her appearances in court showed that she was clearly not the major threat to public decency that her opponents made her out to be. She was opposed to abortion and sex outside of marriage. She was charming and graceful, and her mode of dress was discussed in the press at length, to much approval. She avoided criticism that she was unladylike or a radical, so there was nothing to distract from her argument that women had the right to control their own reproduction. When she later gave a talk organised by a railway worker in Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall, that worker afterwards wrote to say that ‘I would not like to meet you too often or I should fall in love with you – even if you are a Tory – because I admired your voice, your pluck and the way you handled your audience … Permit me too to compliment you upon your eloquence and the timbre, I mean sweetness, of your voice; it carries with it all that the word “feminine” ought to mean.’

  The press interest in the case achieved what she had previously failed to do. It brought her crusade for birth control to the attention of the working class. Her books had sold well, but it was only the middle classes and above who could afford to buy books. When Stopes opened her first birth control clinic in 1921, it was significantly situated in Holloway, a working-class area of North London, and she wrote pamphlets specifically aimed at the poor as they, she felt, were the section of society who most needed to adopt contraception. Part of Stopes’s argument was that middle-class doctors, clergy and journalists who opposed her were hypocrites: birth rates for the middle class were lower than for the working class, indicating that they had knowledge of birth control which they were denying to the poorer sections of society. It was thanks to press interest in her trial that Stopes’s name and mission became widespread among the poorer section of society. It was even immortalised in a playground rhyme, ‘Jeanie, Jeanie, full of hopes / Read a book by Marie Stopes / Now, to judge by her condition / She must have read the wrong edition.’