The War on Science. Shawn Lawrence Otto
of Topeka. But in reality the trend started several years before Brown.
The idea had first been pushed by a utopian short film called To New Horizons. Shown at the 1939 World’s Fair in General Motors’ “Futurama” exhibit, which imagined a city of 1960, the film first introduced the idea of a network of expressways. “On all express city thoroughfares, the rights of way have been so routed as to displace outmoded business sections and undesirable slum areas whenever possible,” the film said. But the notion didn’t really get traction until 1945, when the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists began advocating for “dispersal,” or “defense through decentralization,” as the only realistic defense against nuclear weapons. Federal civil defense officials realized this was an important strategic move. Most city planners agreed, and the United States adopted a completely new way of life by directing all new construction “away from congested central areas to their outer fringes and suburbs in low-density continuous development,” and “the prevention of the metropolitan core’s further spread by directing new construction into small, widely spaced satellite towns.”
General Motors, a major US defense contractor, heavily supported the idea, as did other auto, tire, glass, concrete, oil, and construction companies that stood to gain. GM’s president, Charles Wilson, became Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of defense in 1953, and, in his Senate confirmation hearing, made the famous blunder of saying that “what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa.” The fifty largest US corporations accounted for a quarter of the country’s gross national product that year, with GM sales alone exceeding 3 percent. Extending the war footing by redirecting resources toward suburban development was good for business and good for the economy, as well as for national defense.
Nuclear safety measures, supported by business interests, drove the abandonment of US cities. After being told that “there is no doubt about it: if you live within a few miles of where one of these bombs strike, you’ll die” and “We can always hope that man will never use such a weapon but we should also adopt the Boy Scout slogan: be prepared,” moving far away from the “target” city seemed wise. Those who could afford to left. Those who remained were generally less affluent, and minorities made up a disproportionate share of the poor.
A far worse development for American urban minorities came in 1954, when the federal Atomic Energy Commission realized that, with the advent of the vastly more powerful hydrogen bomb, “the present national dispersion policy is inadequate in view of existing thermonuclear weapons effects.” The dispersion strategy was akin to “matching a sleeping tortoise against a racing automobile.” By then, however, it was too late; the suburbs were growing rapidly, but offices were still largely downtown. A new strategy was needed—one that had been laid out by General Motors in To New Horizons. President Eisenhower promoted a program of rapid evacuation to rural regions via expressways. As a civil defense official who served from 1953 to 1957 explained, the focus changed “from ‘Duck and Cover’ to ‘Run Like Hell.’”
Cities across the United States ran nuclear-attack drills, each involving tens of thousands of residents, practicing clearing hundreds of city blocks in the shortest possible time. It became clear that this would require massive new transportation arteries in and out of cities. The resulting National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956 was the largest public-works project in history. It created a system that provided easier access from the suburbs into cities, as well as a way to more rapidly evacuate urban areas in case of nuclear war. The new freeways had to be built in a hurry and were routed through the cheapest real estate, which usually meant plowing through vibrant minority communities, displacing “outmoded business sections and undesirable slum areas whenever possible” and uprooting millions of people. Although poverty had been concentrated in these neighborhoods, so was a rich culture and a finely woven fabric of relationships, and the neighborhoods’ destruction ripped apart the social networks that had supported minority communities for years, leading to a generation of urban refugees.
These defense accommodations—with the encouragement and involvement of what Eisenhower would later regretfully refer to as the “military-industrial complex”—brought about immense changes, altering everything from transportation to land development to race relations to energy use to the extraordinary public sums that are now spent on building and maintaining roads. This created social, economic, psychological, and political challenges that are still with us today—all because of science and the bomb.
The Protection Racket
The fear that was changing the nation kicked up another notch with the Soviet launch of Sputnik 1, the first Earth-orbiting satellite, on October 4, 1957. Its diminutive size—about that of a beach ball—made it perhaps the most influential twenty-three-inch-diameter object in history. Traveling at roughly eighteen thousand miles an hour, the shiny little orb circled the planet about once every hour and a half, emitting radio signals that were picked up and followed by amateur radio buffs the world over—but nowhere more closely than in the United States.
Sputnik shocked America in ways that even the 1949 Soviet nuclear test had not. For the first time, the Commies were not just catching up—they were ahead. The fear was that North America stood at risk of being overrun by an authoritarian society. The little orb focused this amorphous fear and placed the entire continent in danger, at least psychologically. In the United States, since the 1949 Soviet nuclear test, debates had been swirling about the need to invest more in education, particularly science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (often referred to as STEM), because of their critical importance to national defense. But until Sputnik, these discussions had foundered on the shoals of congressional indifference. Now those debates came into sharp focus. As historian JoAnne Brown put it:
The struggle for federal aid may have been won in the sky, but it was fought in the basements, classrooms and auditoriums, as educators adapted schools to the national security threat of atomic warfare and claimed a proportionate federal reward for their trouble.
Within a year, the National Defense Education Act of 1958 was passed, with the goals of improving education in defense-related subjects at all grade levels and bolstering Americans’ ability to pursue higher education. The NSF’s budget, which had been quite low, jumped dramatically in 1957 and continued to grow. Science would become a major issue on the presidential campaign trail in 1960. If Americans didn’t recommit to science and technology, it was argued, they might lose the Cold War. Their entire way of life, perhaps their very survival, was at stake, and it all hinged on what they could do to protect themselves by reinvesting in science and technology to beat “those damn Russkies.” American public opinion about science, which, for the twelve years since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had been one of great moral ambivalence, began a new relationship with it almost overnight. Scientists might be sons of bitches, but they were American sons of bitches.
When Science Walked Out on Politics
By this time, it was clear that science was the answer to the twin threats of the arms race and Sputnik—and that America was, in fact, in a science race, as Vannevar Bush had essentially argued in Science, the Endless Frontier. Science had become one of the primary weapons in a new kind of war. The nation that invested the most in science and engineering research and development would lead the world—and perhaps, find safety.
In the span of two short decades, science had attained sacred-cow status enjoyed by few other federal priorities. Gone were the days of scientists needing to reach out to wealthy benefactors to justify and explain their work in order to get funding. The adoption of science as a national strategic priority changed the relationship between science and the public. Over the course of a single generation, government funding allowed scientists to turn inward, away from the public and toward their lab benches, at the very time that the public had developed a love-hate relationship with science.
This love-hate relationship came with the conflicting emotions of need and resentment. Though their work is by nature antiauthoritarian and somewhat artistic, scientists became figures of authority in white lab coats—bland, dry, value-neutral, and above the fray. This new image of science, implanted in baby boomers by hundreds of classroom filmstrips, couldn’t have been less inspiring—or further from the truth. Scientists