Introduction
This thesis project examines the post-Second World War period up through the space race and the initial years of the 1970s duringwhich the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) saw immediate defunding by President Richard M. Nixon. The primary purpose is to consider how visions of the future changed from previous eras through the space race. This involves examining the public perceptions of technology during the arms race of the 1950s and the space race of the 1960s. In doing so this thesis highlights how Americans' conflicting opinions of science and technology following the world’s introduction to superweapons was addressed through national marketing campaigns that encouraged consumerism as a way to support the nation during the Cold War. Images of the future played a key part in this marketing campaign in a way that previous iterations of futurist imaginings had not been used before. For the purposes of this project, the term futurism will be used to describe specific examples or the body of work, whether it be visual or literary, created with the intention of distributing to the public a specific vision of the future.[3] Additionally, futurist describes individuals or collective entities who created or were involved in the process of creating concepts, images, stories, and visions of an imagined future.[4] Futurist imaginings were not unique to the era but the proclamation of successful space travel in the late-1950s as a political move for scientific and intellectual dominance during the Cold War provided higher stakes for success than the routine predictions of economists, scientists, and creative futurists in the distant past and post-space race era.[5]
As tensions rose between the United States and Soviet Union after the Second World War the prevalent fear that capitalistic systems would crumble had increased. Media outlets and government sponsored propaganda perpetuated this dystopic vision. Futurist images had been used throughout the 1950s as a tool to spur on American consumerism in an anti-communist effort. Businesses and government agencies used this fear to push the citizenship into spending to uphold a show of nationalistic pride. Even as anti-communist interest started to decline, the marketed materials of futurists during the Cold War were an integral part of keeping the national patriotic interest alive during the years of the space race. Examples of futurism were seen in various forms of popular entertainment, common advertisements, and at special national events such as the successive World’s Fairs, and through the promotions of influential individuals like Walt Disney. Recent arguments demonstrate that NASA’s accomplishments in the 1960s were not only a scientific achievement but a marketing and public relations triumph. Only through an aggressive marketing campaign and through cooperative efforts with film and television companies, did NASA successfully capture the attention of the public.[6] This argument highlights the conflicting historical memory on the space race and demonstrates how heavily the American public was impacted by futurist imagery.
By the early 1970s, NASA’s projects and the representations of scientists in futurism seemed to have lost their appeal to the American public. Part of this can be attributed to federal budget cuts which immediately followed the American victory against the Soviets in the final leg of the space race.[7] Before the launch of Sputnik into orbit in 1957, anti-Soviet rhetoric was on the decline. However, that rhetoric was revitalized as the space race kicked off and remained in the subtext of the marketing campaign pushing consumerism through futurism. By the end of the Apollo missions the American and Soviet Cold War had cooled into détente and the economy was beginning to be hit with war influenced stagflation. Dreams of the future were hard to sustain without a unifying goal, while marketing and futurism parted ways. While individuals continued to present futuristic concepts, generally the ideas of specialists such as scientists, engineers, and tech professionals were kept within industry boundaries. Additionally, as the Cold War endured, the early panic of the looming nuclear threat ebbed away for the average citizen. Futurism also shifted course as technology evolved through computer advancements and the old visions were replaced with talk of artificial intelligence and the promise of "big data." Dystopian and science fiction themes solidified as a marketed genre by the 1970s, with the catalogue exemplifying entertainment and narrative storytelling, rather than cautionary tales, predictions, and contemporary allegory, which defined the work in the early to mid-century.[8]
Scholarly work on the topic of futurism is spread throughout many disciplines. Futurism as a topic is viewed through the lens of the intellectual movement focusing on government funded think tanks, through economist predictions, and through literary and film critics who focus on the growth and divergence of the science fiction genre during the mid-twentieth century. Additionally, there are numerous collections in publications and online databases showcasing images of the future from the mid-twentieth century. However, they are generally presented with a pop-culture enthusiasts’ interest in mind and lack deeper analysis beyond the subtext commentary on the contextual background.[9] The scholarly work available also has yet to take a close look at futurism through any particularly defined scope. The written work on the subject generally takes a broad look at the topic and covers a vast time period which aims to focus on the psychological relationship of technology’s impact on societies.[10] Some scholars attempt to tell the grand narrative of humanity’s relationship with the future. Those that focus on the middle of the twentieth century largely view the interwar years with the beginning of the Cold War as marking the end of the futurist movement. Existing scholarship on futurist images has not given the primary focus to the Cold War years which this thesis aims to cover.[11]
Furthermore, work on futurism and the view of progress that was advertised during the Cold War remains dependent on a wave of interest, current space agency goals, and other current events. This thesis emphasizes how Cold War sentiments provided a new direction for futurism and that it was not until this period that visions of the future had been fully embedded into American culture.[12] While there were many individuals making various predictions on the impact of future technologies and economic prosperity for the previous century, many of those were kept within particular sectors of influence. Marketing capabilities reached new heights with the home television following the Second World War. Additionally, during the mid-twentieth century Americans experienced an unprecedented pressure to increase consumer habits which replaced long traditions of frugality and habits formed through periods of scarcity.[13]
Works on the public perception of the space race are still significant to this study in their consideration of the historical memory in terms of how impactful futurism was on the public. Monographs such as Jesse Lee Kercheval’s Space: A Memoir, published in 1998, and Marina Benjamin’s Rocket Dreams: How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World Beyond, published in 2003, combine historical context, journalistic investigation, and memoir to tackle the question of what happened to the public interest in space exploration, which was a significant part of futurist visions during the Cold War. In considering the sentiment of the age it remains important to question the legitimacy of nostalgic reflection, particularly from young space age enthusiasts of the time, and then of the following generations rooted into a heavier science fiction boom. These reflections bring forward the questions in regards to promised, or more accurately marketed space age technologies.[14] The large answer to that is expanded in David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek’s, Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program, which highlights the argument that the public interest in the space program has been exaggerated in historical memory and only seemed highly prevalent due to an aggressive nationwide public relations and marketing campaign.[15]
In placing visions of the future in the context of the historical period this thesis also examines shifts in culture, attitudes, and perspectives regarding the place of science during the atomic era. This thesis answers two questions: first, why visions of the future were so prolific in the public sphere during the Cold War and, second, why that era is unique for its proliferation of futurist visions in terms of the type of predictions and the scope of the audience for those specific messages and imagery. Through that examination this thesis will explain why these visions retreated so abruptly from prominence following the Apollo missions. In some ways the overt optimism and idealism of these marketed visions contributed to their decline in frequency and in the public interest. Changes in production techniques, influencing both standardized quality and increased quantity outputs, created a new kind of American consumerism. Advertising and marketing increased in prominence to move products into consumer hands. Additionally, the changing role and views of science immediately following the introduction of nuclear technology is a significant aspect under examination in order to understand the public’s relationship with marketed innovations. In considering the ethics behind their profession, some scientists, particularly those directly involved with the Manhattan project, pushed to refocus their work on creating plausible ways of improving daily life for Americans.[16] This resulted in an increased focus among those in the applied sciences, such as engineers, to work with companies and agencies who sell directly to the public. As such, science and marketing worked together utilizing futurism to promote a shared vision of tomorrow’s ideal society and communities. This thesis looks at the ways visions of the future were marketed to the American public forming unique conceptualizations of progress rooted in the context of the Cold War. This manufactured concept of progress was centered on a show of economic power which would be made a reality through new consumer centered technologies and through the financial support of science and technology industries contributing to the national infrastructure.
[1] The Cold War environment encouraged the future studies movement through the contemplation of threats and solutions which trickled down to social aspects and consumerism. Government funded agencies such as RAND Corporation and the Stanford Research Institute, contracted futurists to come to develop military based strategic solutions to combat a variety of potential social issues. Kaya Tolon, “Future Studies: A New Social Science Rooted in Cold War Strategic Thinking,” Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 45-62.
[2] Neil Armstrong, 1969, https://www.nasa.gov/wav/62284main_onesmall2.wav.
[3] It should be noted that this project is not attempting to lay claim that futuristic visions in all the potential variations (utopic, dystopic, technologic prediction, economic projection, etc.) were unique to the Cold War. It aims to highlight the specific context of the period which facilitated the dissemination of futurist visions to the general public in order to be utilized in such a way to encourage support for endeavors that could not show results with short-term progress such as the promise of viable space travel and colonization (for more see NASA and the Futurism Space sections).
[4] David Nye, “Technological Prediction: A Promethean Problem,” in Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies, ed. Marita Sturken, Douglas Thomas, and Sandra J. Bal-Rokeach (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 159-176. David Nye classifies variations of futurism to define the different purposes for a given futurist vision. However, his argument that visions are more about the dreams of possibility than the reality support the reasoning for why popular futurist visions that were embraced by the public during the Cold War began to decline following the space race (a question which is pondered in slightly outdated works, which predate contemporary space agency timelines of Extraterrestrial space missions, such as Marina Benjamin’s Rocket Dreams, 2003).
[5] John Perry Barlow, “The Future of Prediction,” from Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies, ed. Marita Sturken, Douglas Thomas, and Sandra J. Bal-Rokeach (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 177-185. Barlow states in his article, attempting to distill historical futurism, “the best way to invent the future is to predict it—if you can get enough people to believe your prediction, that is,” 178.
[6] David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek, Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014).
[7] NASAs budget cuts coincided with a minor recession towards the end of 1969 as well as an increasing call to redirect funds for immediate social concerns. Robert Heilbroner, Visions of the Future, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 88.
[8] The 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of many new works and styles that impacted how the genre would be transformed in later decades. The speculative fiction produced through the space age focused on dystopian themes in relation to Cold War big brother fears, AI technologies, and imagined space colonies. The 1970s saw a transformation of the genre building upon itself with epic space operas like Star Wars.
[9] In a brief essay published to introduce a collection of futurist images titled Future Perfect: Vintage Futuristic Graphics, Bruce McCall argues that optimistic futurism ended in the early 1950s and the public interest in the topic was over. He also argues that the 1920s-1950s era of futurism contained no examples of pessimism or dystopian themes which were more prevalent during the Cold War years. While there is definitely a shift he fails to account for the marketed images which were still pushed on the public to stimulate consumerism and raise support of the space program. Additionally, his statement on dystopia ignores the existence of arguably the most significant works in the genre which were all published before 1950.
[10] Robert Heilbroner, Visions of the Future, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Heilbroner attempts to tackle the concept of mankind looking towards the future from the beginning of recorded history to the present. The primary purpose serves as an introductory work to the study and a call for further scholarship which could aid in understanding the pattern of humanity’s fascination with predicting tomorrow. See also, Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies, ed. Marita Sturken, Douglas Thomas, and Sandra J. Bal-Rokeach (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004).
[11] Joseph Corn and Brian Horrigan, Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Corn and Horrigan's work is a publication that provides commentary alongside the primary source images. He draws from various print ads such as Popular Mechanics but also considers commissioned works, such as was seen for vehicle designs, city planning, and military technology. However, aside from going into potential military schematics during the Cold War he largely avoids that period and focuses on the previous decades as well as the aftermath of the reception of science fiction in the 1980s.
[12] A distinction which can be witnessed by examining the evolution of the science fiction genre, as it grew as a niche amongst different avenues in the arts and as works broke the genre lines into the mainstream.
[13] Langdon Winner, “Sow’s Ears from Silk Purses: The Strange Alchemy of Technological Visionaries,” in Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies, ed. Marita Sturken, Douglas Thomas, and Sandra J. Bal-Rokeach (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004) 39.
[14] Robert Heilbroner, Visions of the Future, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Jesse Lee Kercheval, Space: A Memoir, (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Press, 1998); Marina Benjamin, Rocket Dreams: How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World Beyond (New York: Free Press, 2003).
[15] David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek, Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014) 34-53.
[16] Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 124. Also, for further reading see Futurism in the Past page.
