What happened to the Future? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

The 1950s in America were firmly in the postwar period -- I don't know if you could say that the broad social attitude was globally one of optimism and progress, and I can't really weigh in on whether similar phenomena to the "in the future we'll have flying cars and cities on the moon" vision of an optimistic future through technology were taking place within the USSR, or in Latin America, or in the areas of Western Europe and Asia that were still recovering from being active battlegrounds. You mention cities and technologies, and I think a lot of how we imagine the 1950s is in terms of its spirit of modernism, optimism, and scientific innovation -- the modernity represented by Disneyland attractions funded by Monsanto and American Motors. Setpieces showcasing the automotive state of the art, or the newest in aviation -- setpieces like Tomorrowland's Aluminum Hall of Fame and even a shop showcasing the newest artificial fabrics and modern methods in automated undergarment construction called, no shit, The Wizard of Bras.

These are enduring images of the 1950s both because there was a substantial amount of technological innovation taking place at this time, and because what our ancestors found fresh and novel seems almost naive to us now. The future as these people conceived of it, so we might say now, was bright and advanced because they possessed an optimistic spirit. Modernity was the name of the game -- modern conveniences would reshape the modern home, modern fabrics would clothe the modern man and woman, modern technologies would make life easier. But this didn't begin in the 1950s -- this didn't even begin with the Second World War. The state of technology was evolving in the American imagination as continuously as it did in reality. By the 1950s, technologies that were the stuff of speculative futurism in newspapers back in 1900 were available in every home. By the end of the 20th century, technologies would be commonplace that were too far-flung even to be readily imagined by the 1950s. This development was continual. But in the 1950s the United States was in a position to recover from wartime scarcity and to rebuild a state of peacetime normality with the technological developments gained during the war. Material resources that had once been funneled chiefly toward military use, like metals and plastics or even artificial fabrics, could now be disseminated more widely into civilian uses, and they had to be advertised in such a way as to capitalize on their novelty and unfamiliarity.

The interstate highway system developed in the United States during this period, and orthodox contemporary conceptualizations of it are downright utopian -- as Ginger Strand tells it in Killer On The Road, early visions of the interstate stress its beauty and its uses for leisure as well as industry. On one hand, this new and modern highway system was relentlessly modern and efficient in a way that would be broadly "good for business"; on the other, it would be a novel showcase for America's natural splendors, and it would make them accessible to average men and women now driving their family automobiles on vacations and picnic outings as well as to work and school. (Can you imagine trying to stress in ad campaigns how beautiful a stretch of highway might be?) This seems hopelessly optimistic and cheerful to us today in the era of greenhouse gases and highway accidents, but it took less than a decade for anxious rumors regarding the interstate's "real" civil defense purposes (to facilitate the movement of troops in the event of a land invasion by the Soviets, to transport weapons, etc.) to begin circulating as well as the prosaic realities of crime seeping in in the form of the modern spree-killer and serial killer. This was as much a part of the 1950s and 1960s as the first flush of optimism preceding it. As medicine proceeded forward by leaps and bounds, so did the seeming hazards associated with it, and so on across areas of progress. Were these hazards real, or were they imagined? This was the era of mass vaccinations, but it was also the era of thalidomide.

In all of this innovation there is a pronounced dark subtext -- Cold War era technological innovations cannot be entirely divorced from the context of Cold War paranoia, not merely the possibility but the seeming certainty that the tensions between the USSR and the USA would boil over. For every commentator remarking on the marvelous technological possibilities of rocketry and aviation, there was another commentator remarking on the possibility for unparalleled violence and devastation these developing technologies also presented. Americans weren't just talking about going to space in the 50s and 60s, they were also building bomb shelters and participating in civil defense maneuvers. One of my favorite illustrations of this dual awareness related from a later 20th century perspective, and one I've been feeling a lot of kinship with lately, is horror author Stephen King talking about his boyhood in rural Maine in his nonfiction book Danse Macabre:

All of which brings us back, I think, to the Stratford Theater on a warm fall afternoon in 1957.

We sat there in our seats like dummies, staring at the manager. He looked nervous and sallow—or perhaps that was only the footlights. We sat wondering what sort of catastrophe could have caused him to stop the movie just as it was reaching that apotheosis of all Saturday matinee shows, "the good part." And the way his voice trembled when he spoke did not add to anyone's sense of well-being.

"I want to tell you," he said in that trembly voice, "that the Russians have put a space satellite into orbit around the earth. They call it . . . Spootnik."

This piece of intelligence was greeted by absolute, tomblike silence. We just sat there, a theaterful of 1950s kids with crew cuts, white cuts, ponytails, ducktails, crinolines, chinos, jeans with cuffs, Captain Midnight rings; kids who had just discovered Chuck Berry and Little Richard on New York's one black rhythm and blues station, which we could get at night, wavering in and out like a powerful jive language from a distant planet. We were the, kids who grew up on Captain Video and Terry and the Pirates. We were the kids who had seen Combat Casey kick the teeth out of North Korean gooks without number in the comic books. We were the kids who saw Richard Carlson catch thousands of dirty Commie spies in I Led Three Lives. We were the kids who had ponied up a quarter apiece to watch Hugh Marlowe in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and got this piece of upsetting news as a kind of nasty bonus. I remember this very clearly: cutting through that awful dead silence came one shrill voice, whether that of a boy or a girl I do not know; a voice that was near tears but that was also full of a frightening anger: "Oh, go show the movie, you liar!"

The manager did not even look toward the place from which that voice had come, and that was somehow the worst thing of all. Somehow that proved it. The Russians had beaten us into space. Somewhere over our heads, beeping triumphantly, was an electronic ball which had been launched and constructed behind the Iron Curtain. Neither Captain Midnight nor Richard Carlson (who also starred in Riders to the Stars; and oh boy, the bitter irony in that) had been able to stop it. It was up there. . . and they called it Spootnik. The manager stood there for a moment longer, looking out at us as if he wished he had something else to say but could not think what it might be. Then he walked off and pretty soon the movie started up again.

Later in the same chapter, King remarks on how the American construction of technological innovation wedded to the American "pioneer spirit" shaped how young people like himself conceptualized science fiction as well as the Cold War. Obviously King is a writer of fiction and this is hardly a documentary account, but it draws a vivid picture. This is not a scene of technological awe; this is a scene of technological fear. In addition to arms-race fears and apprehensions regarding scientific progress, mass media was contending with anxieties about the civil rights movement and the role of children. There is a dark vein in speculative fiction of the 1950s, a landscape of horror fiction marked by Atom Age technological fears as well as the social fears of racial difference, insanity, and sexual deviance. It wasn't all future-forward -- there were ghosts and wolfmen as well as mutants and aliens -- but the face of the future and the new technologies its approach brought with it was not always a happy face.

It would be too broad to describe the 1950s' vision of futurity and modernity as unilaterally positive --I don't think we can overstate the impact of cyclical nostalgia on the popular imagination of the 1950s and early 1960s as a time of technological and social optimism. The defining vibe of the last 20 years, which are all unilaterally outside of the scope of this subreddit's idea of history, might be the post-9/11, War On Terror era. In contrast with that idea of current modernity, the aesthetic of the 1950s and 1960s and even the 1970s and 1980s have all been in and out of vogue as a symbolic state of the American past, the American "before" -- before the sexual revolution, before the Vietnam War, before Reagan, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. I don't envy the men and women alive during these times -- some of the particular doomsday strains of today have their roots in later 20th century developments like environmentalism, which is even further outside my scope. But there was a lot to be pessimistic about in the 1950s as well.