“I can’t pay no doctor bills, buy whitey’s on the moon…” sang Gil-Scott Heron.
According to this the Apollo program cost the equivalent of $109 billion 2010 dollars. The United States throughout the 1960s and early '70s had big problems - how widespread was GSH’s attitude that the money would be better spent elsewhere? Was there much scientific or scholastic opposition to the idea of a manned moon landing?
(I’m not counting the wingnuts after the event who thought it was faked)
From what I saw, there wasn’t much of this attitude in the 1960’s. It seemed (to me, anyway) that the whole country was solidly behind the program. It wasn’t until we had returned multiple times that the rise in questioning whether the money could be better spent in other areas. I couldn’t find when Gil-Scott Heron wrote that song, but I’d suspect it was 72 or later, once all adventure was gone and it started to appear as a giant show.
Song was released in 1970. I was under the impression that it was written and performed originally by someone else but according to allmusic it was indeed Gil Scott-Heron.
There was a lot of opposition to the space program:
Great link, thanks.
Thanks for finding that article, Wendell.
I’d go back even earlier, though. Despite the efforts of what Robert Heinlein called the “space-happy” community, in which he was prominent, Americans in the 1950s had no real interest in anything connected with rocketry or outer space. Why spend money on worthless toys? That changed overnight after Sputnik. Space became symbolic of the cold war and our superiority over the Communists. We caught up quickly, though, and interest waned again. That’s why Kennedy felt he needed to pump it up, as a direct challenge. “We must beat the Russians to the moon” sounded good and almost everybody approved of it in the abstract. Some people asked why we needed to do this, and no good answer ever came back. And lots of things that people approve of in the abstract are dumped as soon as you ask for money to support them.
It did feel as if the country was solidly behind the program, as excavating said. The media pushed space incessantly. Opposing voices had no airtime. And even if half the country didn’t have much use for it, as cited in that article, half the country did and positive enthusiasm always is much louder than quiet disinterest.
She’s wrong that the book is impossible to find. There are three copies at bookfinder.com.
Maybe if she spelled the name right, it would be easier. It’s Amitai Etzioni, without that extra “i”.
On the same album Mr Heron came out against gays too…
“If they put a man on the moon, why can’t they . . .” was a very common way of complaining about the inability of solving a more mundane (in the original sense of the word!) problem back in the day. Now that we can’t put a man on the moon any more, you don’t hear it so much.
Exapno Mapcase, I think you mean “He’s wrong”, not “She’s wrong”. Alexis C. Madrigal is a man. See the end of the article.
It was common fodder for sitcom jokes in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when television started portraying the wild and crazy antics of the urban poor alongside the wild and crazy antics of upper middle class-Americans. Academic liberals were wont to scoff at the entire idea, as exemplified by Tom Lerher in 1965.
Academic liberals? Please.
For almost the first decade after the war, the government treated von Braun as a potential spy and a current embarrassment. His travel was restricted, his mail studied, and he was followed when he was allowed to go to conferences, which wasn’t often.
Things got better for him when he moved to Huntsville and started making appearances on television, but Eisenhower’s administration was wary about using his expertise. The Navy’s Vanguard program got priority over the more advanced Army rockets precisely because von Braun worked for the Army. Whenever his program achieved anything you could be sure that Soviet propaganda would scream about stolen German engineering. That was only fair because American propaganda screamed that all Russian rocket successes were because of their German engineers, even though we knew they had virtually none.
After Von Braun published his autobiography, I Aim at the Stars, the comeback line was “but sometimes I hit London.” Lehrer is sometimes credited with that and so are a number of other comics of the day. But it appears first in the script of the movie made about the book in 1960.
The success of the Explorer I in 1958 as the first American satellite gave von Braun a reprieve in the media, and he was promoted as an Americanized hero along with the Mercury astronauts. Outside of the official propaganda, he was mistrusted and vilified by everybody at every level of society. You can’t point to academic liberals without noting that conservatives hated him even more, and they were the ones in power in the 1950s.
Yes, but conservatives were very different in those days. They had no presence in the south and weren’t interested in preserving segregation. They supported extremely high taxes (top marginal rate 91%). They opposed war. Modern conservatives had their first success in 1964 nominating Goldwater (who wanted to nuke everybody). But they really came into their own with Reagan. Incidentally, it would be as accurate to call Obamacare Nixoncare, since he was the original proponent.
The South was by far the most conservative area of the country, and had been for the entire century. Their opposition to the New Deal was bought off by the feds averting their eyes to Jim Crow, but their causes and rhetoric needs little modernization to be used today. William Buckley and the National Review printed some outrageous pieces on blacks that their disciples would like to forget today. Conservatives wanted to impeach Warren for his pro-Negro rulings. Taxes were high because of the two recent wars, but they opposed all spending on anything other than the military budget. That’s because conservatives loved war. Loved, loved, loved war. They hated, hated, hated Commies. Eisenhower had success in reining in their war-cries, but their howled for war at every moment during the 50s. It’s a myth that Goldwater conservatives were any different from the Taft conservatives of the 50s or the McCarthy conservatives. The Republicans in Congress were consistent throughout this period. Goldwater, of course, lost in 1964 partly because he was considered a madman warmonger. Nixon got into office in 1968 by sabotaging peace talks in Vietnam. Nixon was a prime conservative from the moment he took office - in Congress in 1946, and the only way you can call him anything other than a conservative in office is the same way people can call Reagan not a conservative in office, to attempt to make a ludicrous point. Both were conservative, and were lifted by a widespread movement that also included the paleo-conservatives in the South who merely switched from calling themselves Democrats to calling themselves Republicans without changing anything else.
Other than that…
Personally, as I grew up watching the 1960s manned space program on my TV, I saw in it nothing but excitement and inspiration. Still, for a long time I’ve wanted to read up on the opposition, and it’s been difficult to find. In the year it was published, I read where Amitai Etzioni’s book Moondoggle was mentioned, but was never able to find a copy. You’d think somebody would have put up a copy on Amazon or something, just to discuss it if nothing more, but I have never seen it. Popularity =/= literary quality or scientific objectivism, but I can’t help think that Etzioni’s thesis proved in the end to have little merit, or it would have been better remembered, and more copiously printed. I mean, if the public was “overwhelmingly” against the program, as the Atlantic Monthly article suggests, right?
And “Whitey On The Moon”? That had about as much impact as an album by Yoko Ono. Granted I was only 11 years old on July 20 1969, but I can assure everyone here that the song was in no way a hit single that laid bare supposedly overwhelming opposition. As young as I was had my ears pricked for suc h opposing commentary, given that I was getting such a big kick out of the space program myself. Like any other government project, some were for the space program it and some were against it, and of the latter, a few were quite angry about it–enough to write songs and letters to newspapers.
Although it may have gone up in cybersmoke–seeing as I can’t find it now–I did comment on the Atlantic article just now, so maybe it will appear if it passes moderation. I used the nom de plume Dark Penguin.
ETA:Thanks to the OP for bringing this up, and to Wendell Wagner for providing this link.
(Missed the edit window)
I don’t mean to deny that Etzioni is a respected scholar, or that his opposition to the space program fits coherently into his overall communitarianist position. Still this book seems to have fallen flat.
Perhaps he doth protest too much?
For the record, the whole Apollo program cost about $20 Billion in 1960s dollars, but scrubbing the last three Moon landings, Apollos 18, 19 & 20, only saved about a whopping $20-$30 million! In other words for an extra 1% more spent we could have had 50% more landing missions. That was the biggest waste. Tyranny of democracy.
Also, women spent more on cosmetics during the same period…
Damn their oily hides!
And dry hides, too. And combination, I guess.
Actually, I got the decimal point wrong. It would have only cost an additional 0.1% for those last three, extra landings!