Want to get a bit of social history insight from Americans on the board; been reading Stephen King’s 22.11.63 - paints quite the picture of life in the late '50s/early '60s. The above things come up and the characters in the past are equally incredulous.
But say hypothetically I gave a survey to every United States citizen over the age of 18, in January 1950. It has one question - which is more likely - that in 1969, two Americans will walk on the moon and safely return, or that in 2008 the man on the right will be elected president, and reelected in 2012, the woman on the left being his first lady?
What do you think the majority would answer? Poll to follow!
I’d say it would depend on where you asked the question (and the racial makeup of those you asked) as to what answer you’d be likely to get. In the deep South I’m fairly sure you would get more people who would go with a manned space flight to the moon within 20 years than a black president within less than 60 years. The idea of men going to the moon wouldn’t be totally beyond the public’s imagination in 1950, since there was plenty of fictional writings on the subject, as well as news reels of things like V2 rockets during WWII and both the Navy and Air Force experimenting with rocket technology after the war.
ETA: I went with 60% Apollo 40% Obama (though in my mind I’d phrase the question as ‘men landing on the moon’ or ‘a black president’). My WAG though is that both things would have been seen as fairly unlikely to happen in the time frames given, but then I wasn’t born for 10 more years and things had changed quite a bit in that time.
I voted Apollo over Obama 90 - 10%. WWII combined with the science fiction of the day convinced people that we could invent brand new, impressive technologies really quickly. In many cases, they were way too optimistic about what technology could achieve and how quickly. However, Apollo was well within the collective dreams and technology expectations of 1950.
OTOH, Obama basically came out of nowhere on the national political stage. Very few people believed that we would have a black president today as late as say, 2005 and a significant percentage, perhaps a majority, did not even think it would happen in their lifetime. The smart money was that a woman would be POTUS before a black man.
I was in the third grade in 1950 and had no clue about either event’s likelihood.
I had to temper my vote here by the prefix, “Well, neither one is likely, BUT…”
I fully believe that you could move it up to 1960 and get a better spread than my 70/30 vote, but I would also feel comfortable with the tendency of “man on the moon” before “black president” up until American interest in the space program began to fade.
A parallel thought nowadays would Unlikely Event A vs. Woman US President.
I voted the same way. It was the American Century, we won the war, we could do anything. Amazing technological achievements, including the moon, were in reach. OTOH, not much progress had been made on civil rights since Reconstruction. In the North as well as the South, race relations were status quo and not great. The Federal government and the courts were only just beginning to make some rulings about the rights of African-Americans (desegregation of the military; requiring law schools to admit blacks, etc.) I’m sure there were a few people who could see the arc of history, but it would not have been visible to the vast majority.
Interesting question. I went 80-20 Apollo. We hadn’t even gone through school desegregation yet in 1950. In the north you might get a third of the people to go for Obama over Apollo, but I wager a lot of southerners would have said “over my dead body”. I did have a high school teacher who told us in the early 1970s that we’d see a black man be president before a white woman. Guess he was either astute or lucky, if it was a three way question if you include Hillary as an option, I’d say Apollo 75 Hillary 15 Obama 10.
In my all-white elementary school in the early 1960s, in a civilized part of the country, I had friends who believed Negroes were more closely related to our simian ancestors than whites were. And these weren’t the ones who were hostile towards blacks, or threw the n-word around. It had to be even worse nearly a decade and a half earlier. 90-10 in favor of Apollo.
I voted 80/20 Apollo. I don’t even think any realistic non-racist of the era would expect a black man to be president. Hell, Jackie Robinson had just been the first black ball player only three years earlier, civil rights for blacks through a whole bunch of the country probably seemed almost as far away as 2008 to many of them. Meanwhile, World War 2 is fresh in everyone’s minds, we’ve just seen nuclear power and missles. Science fiction gains quick ground in popular culture.
Frankly, I bet if you asked which was more likely by 2008, that we’d elect a black president or that we’d been to Mars, that most people from 1950 would vote for the latter.
I did 70/30 Apollo just because those who grew up in a Star Trek/Star Wars culture don’t realize how looked down on sf was back then. Except for Things to Come there were no respectable sf movies, and the push to educate America on space was still in the future. By 1955 it might be 90/10.
Yeah, that’s kind of where I was at as well. The space race and Sputnik were still in the future, and my thought is that because of the compressed timeline and lack of public awareness a lot of people who would be polled might have discounted men on the moon in less than 20 years. While 60+ years for a black president, depending on who you asked, might have seemed just possible. Again, I think both things would have seemed almost equally unlikely to most Americans in 1950.
I don’t know how anyone (like me) born way after this time period who doesn’t have some specialized knowledge could even begin to guess the answer.
I’ve never known a world where man walking on the moon was hard to imagine, but I have lived in a world where a black president was hard to imagine. But not everything changes at the same rate, and I don’t know how the average person would have felt about it back then.
I would be interested to know the real answer though!
I went 70/30 for Apollo. By 1950 people had seen newsreel footage of V-2 rockets and Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier, so they could at least imagine a series of steps that would get a man on the moon in 20 years.
At that time,Ralph Bunche was just about the only African-American in government that anyone could name. Hell, I remember the 1960 election and the debate was still going on about whether a Roman Catholic could ever be elected President.
There is a mistake, in some of the above responses, in thinking that a bigoted person would rate a lower likelihood (as opposed to desirability) of a black person becoming President.
Many bigots, in my experience, believe that the object of their derision is already way too powerful and on point of taking over everything. I can easily see the white Southern bigot saying, “Yeah, of course. They’re already getting all uppity and playing major league baseball and wanting to vote and run for office and everything. By 2008 they’ll have taken over the country.”
Whereas the open-minded person would be more likely to say, “There’s a lot of bigotry in this country, and we’re not making much progress, so I don’t see a black President within 500 years.”
90/10 in favour of Apollo. I think in one of Ray Bradbury’s stories from the '50s, black people are moving to Mars via rockets to flee racial oppression at home.
I did have a bit of difficulty understanding the poll, though… due to the fact that in the linked ‘Obama picture’, the “man on the right” is in fact Michelle Obama, and the “woman on the left” is the President. Perhaps you meant to link to a different photo?
For what it’s worth, after years as Governor of the US Virgin Islands, in 1950 Harvard Law grad William Hastie went from having been the first African-American federal judge to becoming the first African-American appellate judge – and in the '60s, that former professor saw his star pupil get referred to as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall well before anyone had set foot on the moon.
Voted somewhat arbitrarily but looking forward to more responses. Also, now have REM song “Man on the Moon” stuck in my head for at least a week. Cheers.
I voted 80-20 Moon over Obama. I was born in 1949 and can recall Sputnik, so I may be a bit too high on the moon relatively.
But if you had polled, I’d think the answers would more like 8% a black president first, 30% man on the moon first, 50% neither one will happen for a thousand years if ever, 12% won’t be able to understand the question.
