Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (69 page)

Finally, Eisenhower, to defend the sovereignty of the federal court, had to order 1,100 paratroopers from the 101st Airborne to Little Rock and place the state national guard under his direct orders. For the first time since Reconstruction, U.S. troops were in the South to protect the rights of blacks. Eisenhower had not acted out of concern for the students’ rights or safety, but because he believed that he couldn’t allow the force of federal law to be ignored.

The troops remained in Little Rock Central High for the rest of the school year, and eight of the black students stayed through the year despite curses, harassment, and abuse. Whatever else it proved, Little Rock showed that the civil rights movement was going to need the full force of the federal government to enforce the laws that the Supreme Court had created.

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MERICAN
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From “The Southern Manifesto” signed by ninety-six congressmen from the South in response to the
Brown
decision (March 12, 1956):

This unwarranted exercise of power by the court, contrary to the Constitution, is creating chaos and confusion in the states principally affected. It is destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through ninety years of patient effort by the good people of both races [emphasis added]. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.

What was Sputnik?

On the educational Richter scale,
Brown
had been the equivalent of the Great San Francisco Earthquake. It leveled everything. While
Brown
’s tremors sent shock waves across the country, America got another tremendous jolt that shook the country to its foundations. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I (whose name in Russian meant “little companion”), man’s first artificial satellite.

Weighing in at about 185 pounds, Sputnik was a little bigger than a basketball and traveled 18,000 miles per hour some 560 miles above the Earth, emitting a steady
beep-beep-beep
radio signal. The launch was not only an unexpected technological achievement but a work of propaganda genius. The Soviets had given Sputnik an orbit and trajectory that sent the satellite over the earth’s most populous areas and low enough that it could be seen at times with the assistance of powerful binoculars. Ham radio operators could pick up the distinctive message it beamed back to Earth.

The Sputnik shock was redoubled in November when the Russians lofted a second satellite, dubbed Sputnik II. Not only was this a substantially larger satellite, weighing more than 1,100 pounds, but it carried a passenger. A small dog was strapped into the satellite, hooked up to monitoring equipment that relayed information about the physical effects of space travel. The space pooch, a terrier named Laika (“barker” in Russian), was also the first sacrifice to the space race. In the rush to get the dog into space, the Russians had not planned for reentry, and the dog was put to sleep with a radio-controlled injection.

These two events brought a wave of shock, fear, and panic in America. It was unthinkable, but the Soviets had beaten the United States into space. The paranoia that the twin Sputnik launchings induced was extraordinary, and it worked on two levels. In the early frosts of the Cold War, the Soviet achievement was more than a publicity coup. Sputnik was frightful evidence that the USSR might possess missiles powerful enough to reach America. More realistically, it meant that the Soviets had taken the lead in development of the intercontinental ballistic missile, thereby fundamentally altering the balance of power between the two competing powers. Sputnik obliterated the American assumption of its nuclear superiority. It was all the more reason to dig that fallout shelter in the backyard.

The fear of the bomb merged with the reality of man moving into space and the constant drumbeat of anti-Communist hysteria to produce a paranoid pop culture that blossomed in the science fiction books and films of the fifties. Before World War II, science fiction had been a respectable sort of fantasy, most popularly practiced by H. G. Wells or the pleasant utopian visions of Edward Bellamy’s novel
Looking Backward.
Radio’s Buck Rogers gave new life to notions of space travel and futuristic death rays, but that was mostly child’s play. The specter of totalitarian police states in Germany and the Soviet Union, heightened by the threat of the bomb, had turned science fiction darker. The trend began with such classics as George Orwell’s
1984
and Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World,
and was later reflected in such books as Ray Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451,
the classic about a futuristic society in which all books are burned, which was written in the midst of Senator McCarthy’s witch hunts and a movement to purge American libraries of “subversive” works. In the movies, the paranoia was reflected in films like
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

A more serious but equally hysterical fear rocked the American education system, reeling under the pressures of desegregation. Already struggling against the Soviets in an arms race, America now found itself left at the starting line in the new “space race.” Worse than that, America didn’t even have its sneakers on. To all the wise men in the land, the reason for America’s sad technological performance while the Soviets had leaped into space was obvious: the American education system was falling down, while the Soviet system, which rigorously drilled its children in math and the sciences, was producing a superrace of mathematicians and scientists who would rapidly outdistance American children in their achievements.

The decline in American standards was blamed on that favorite of whipping boys, “progressive education.” In the late 1950s, “back to basics” was the call to arms. It is a story that was replayed in the mid-1980s, when it was determined that America’s schools were falling prey to a “rising tide of mediocrity.” The eighties also produced a new archvillain who was out-educating America’s children. Instead of the Soviets, the new bogeyman was the Japanese, and the media were filled with reports of the superiority of the Japanese educational system, an uncanny reprise of the debate in the late fifties. Once again, “back to basics” was the simplistic answer to the problems of the miserable American school systems.

The practical response to Sputnik was a total overhaul of American education, with a new commitment on the part of the federal government to aid public schools, along with an overhaul of research and development in the rocketry field, spearheaded by a compelling urgency to overtake the Soviets in the area of missile delivery systems. Sputnik had been the space equivalent of the Russian atomic bomb. In the years ahead, the United States would devote enormous resources to victory in the new space race.

The country responded with backyard bomb shelters and “duck and cover” fallout drills. But the government also unleashed a massive wave of federal funds to improve science and math education while launching a full-court press to surpass the Soviets in technology. Learning calculus was now an act of patriotism. The space race was off and running.

Success would be built on failures. And the first of these was nearly devastating. On December 6, 1957—uncomfortably close to the anniversary of Pearl Harbor in many minds—a Vanguard rocket that was to carry America’s first satellite into space blew up on the launching pad. It was an inauspicious beginning to America’s race for the moon. (Recently released Oval Office tapes of President Kennedy discussing the Apollo program show that he was primarily interested in demonstrating America’s superiority over the Soviets. And many military men from the early generation of the space program, which would continue to be dominated by military projects, thought that the Moon might provide a launching site for missiles that could be aimed at the Soviet Union.)

Someday—say 500 years from now—October 4 may become Sputnik Day and occupy the same place that Columbus Day does in modern times—a date that marked the opening of a dramatic new era in history, for better or for worse. The spirit of the ancient quest for the stars has always been about human curiosity, the desire to know the unknowable, to move out, to create. And if Sputnik and the space race era have a message, it may be that combining technical wizardry with sheer courage and determination can produce the best of the human spirit.

When Sputnik was launched, the idea that American astronauts and cosmonauts of the former Soviet Union would someday be living and working together on a space station would have been implausible. But that is the reality. Once enemies, now colleagues and friends. Beyond that, it is worth remembering that the shock of October 4, 1957, just like those of December 7, 1941, and November 22, 1963, eventually passed. The nation survived the knockdowns, stood up, and was strengthened.

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From
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER’S
farewell address (January 17, 1961):

[The] conjunction of an immense military establishment and large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for the development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

As the leading proponent of Cold War containment, Eisenhower had presided over the rise of this “military-industrial complex,” created to give the United States the military might it needed to carry out the containment policy, a policy that continued to dictate American decision making in the White House and Congress in the decades ahead.

How did a doll in stiletto heels and a Chicago publisher change America?

In 1959, wearing a zebra-striped swimsuit and tall stiletto heels, Barbie made her debut at the American Toy Fair in New York. Created by Ruth Handler, the youngest of ten children of Polish immigrants, Barbie became an instant icon of popular culture and one of the world’s best-selling toys. Ruth Handler had founded Mattel in 1945 with her husband, Oscar, a specialist in plastic design. Inspired by their own daughter’s fascination with paper dolls, the Handlers wanted to produce a doll that looked more like a real teenager. The doll Ruth Handler created was actually modeled on a German sex toy called Lilli, which Handler had seen on a European trip. Barbie was named after the Handlers’ daughter, and her later male counterpart, Ken, was named after their son.

Needless to say, there aren’t many teenagers who look like Barbie. In fact, it was later determined that if Barbie were five feet six, her measurements would be 39–21–33. But that did not matter. After battling prudish male executives at Mattel, Handler launched the doll into history. At the time, the doll business was dominated by baby dolls, from a far more innocent time. Barbie flew off the shelf in the postwar baby boom years. In a 1977 interview, Ruth Handler told the
New York Times,
“Every little girl needed a doll through which to project herself into her dream of her future. If she was going to do role playing of what she would be like when she was 16 or 17, it was a little stupid to play with a doll that had a flat chest. So I gave it beautiful breasts.”

Although feminists would later object that Barbie gave young girls an unrealistic body image and others would criticize Barbie as overtly sexual, that didn’t stop Barbie from becoming a phenomenon. A half-billion Barbies later—more than one billion counting sales of her sidekick dolls—and the statuesque young girl with platinum hair and blue eyes was still going strong by 2002.

Barbie’s grand entrance came just a few years after another American icon arrived on the scene. In 1953, a twenty-seven-year-old man from Chicago, with some advertising experience, had pasted together a magazine on his kitchen table. He printed 70,000 copies, hoping to sell at least 30,000 of them at 50 cents an issue. The magazine included a nude calendar shot of America’s hottest starlet, a young model who had taken the name Marilyn Monroe. Born Norma Jean Mortenson, Monroe had been discovered by a
Yank
magazine photographer doing a wartime shoot of women at work in munitions factories. He launched Monroe’s modeling career, which led to a break in Hollywood in a crime film called
The Asphalt Jungle.
As her film career was about to take off, a man called her studio, Twentieth Century–Fox, asking for $10,000 or he would release a nude photo of Monroe. The studio wouldn’t pay, but Monroe decided to let the story out herself. Hugh Hefner learned about the photo, paid $500 for the rights to publish it, and
Playboy
became an overnight American sensation.

Hefner originally titled his new magazine for men
Stag Party
until the publisher of a hunting magazine called
Stag
forced him to change it.

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H
UGH
H
EFNER,
in the first issue of
Playboy
:

We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.