ABSTRACT
In October 1957 the Soviet Union launched sputnik, the first manmade satellite, which it followed a few weeks later with another satellite carrying an animal wired for monitoring on Earth. Hastily, America responded in 1958 with the launching of Explorer I in January, the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Agency in July, and the establishment of the National Defense Education Act for improved training in the sciences and mathematics in September. The fear of a “missile gap” between America and the rival Soviet Union prompted the placement by America of Jupiter and Thor missiles in Britain, Italy, and Turkey during 1958. The globalization of the Cold War, begun in the immediate postwar years, quickened its pace in the 1950s and thereafter as science and technology were increasingly harnessed by governments for purposes of “defense.” In his farewell address of 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower, an Army general and war hero, warned Americans: “In the councils of governments we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex.” Eisenhower hoped to avert the control of policy by “a scientific-technological elite.” From the dawning of the Atomic Age, technology and science were increasingly felt to be potentially life-threatening as well as aweinspiring. The triumph of science in the postwar period was symbolized positively by
the discoveries of DNA, polio vaccine, and antibiotics. The success of technology manifested itself most dramatically in the computer machinery that enabled space flight. Worldwide systems of communication as well as nationwide telecasting testified also to the achievements of science and technology, though on less fearful terms than the new atomic weaponry and rocketry. In the domain of theoretical science, astrophysics in particular brought to dramatic realization the post-Einsteinian universe with disclosures of startling new concepts and phenomena: big bang, expanding universe, curvature of space, black holes, supernovas, pulsars, quasars, antimatter, quarks. Closer to Earth, American homes and offices reaped the benefits of technology and science in the form of numerous gadgets and innovations, ranging from
televisions to air conditioners, from dishwashers to push-button phones, from automatic car transmissions to electric typewriters. By the late 1960s American society was three-fourths urban and one-fourth
rural in population. A century earlier the figures were the exact opposite. Ninty-seven percent of the population increase from the 1940s to the 1960s was an urban phenomenon. Disguised by such highly publicized figures was the reality of growing suburbanization, which especially characterized American social life during the expansive years of the Atomic and Space Ages. From 1950 on, the Census Bureau included suburban figures in urban statistics. Not only did rural society experience loss during the postwar period, but so, in fact, did strictly “urban” centers. By the late 1960s 76 million Americans dwelled in suburbs and 64 million lived in cities. Suburban sprawl brought freeways, shopping malls, and isolated pockets of inner-city poverty. While the Gross National Product went from $58 billion in 1932 to $504
billion by 1960, the expanding national wealth did not filter evenly through society. In 1960, for example, the top 5 percent of the population received approximately 13 percent of the wealth whereas the bottom 20 percent received 6 percent. More than 20 million people lived below the government poverty line during the 1960s. The postwar image of an “affluent society,” composed of suburban, well-heeled, comfortable consumers, left out the reality of widespread poverty, devastated cities, and decaying rural communities. The increasing massification of postwar society, epitomized by growing
“Levittowns” and “Daly Cities,” with their homogenized houses and lifestyles, was manifested not only by the suburbanization of the expanding population, but also by the spread of systems of mass transporation, mass communications, and mass marketing. Despite the apparent mobility, comfort, and wealth of American life, many intellectuals saw in contemporary mass society as well as postwar technological science much decadence and danger, much alienation and absurdity, much repression and sickness. Numerous influential sociological studies offered grim portraits of early Cold War America, including David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), C. Wright Mills’ White Collar (1951) and The Power Elite (1956), Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955), William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957), John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1958), Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death (1959), and Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd (1960). What emerged from such analyses, among other things, was an urgent historical narrative about the dispossession of rugged individualists in favor of outerdirected conformists who were manipulated by government bureaucracies and corporations and stripped of political and psychological potency. Mass man was puny, weak, dependent, repressed, controlled, and absurd. The subduers of man were corporate capitalism, big government, mass advertising, rampant technology, rigid social conventions, coopted science, and total administration-all of which tamed forms of opposition and fostered docile conformity.
