The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism (49 page)

World War II again involved the government in plane design and production. Like much else, air travel took off after the war. Jets took over from propeller planes in the 1960s, replacing such planes as the four-engine Constellation and the DC-3, which had carried cargo or twenty-one passengers for six decades. Jets could carry more passengers and get them where they were going faster. Greeting the new planes at Dulles Airport was a magnificent building designed by Eero Saarinen that looked as though it might take flight itself. At first jets were such a novelty that people went out to their local airport to see them land and take off.
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The Federal Aviation Administration took over safety issues and air traffic control in 1958.

Novelties didn’t end with television and flying. In the 1967 hit movie
The Graduate,
a family friend assails the hero at his graduation party with “I just want to say one word to you: plastics.” And he was right; there was a great future in plastics. Developed originally as a substitute for ivory in billiard balls, cellulose had intrigued chemists in England, the United States, Switzerland, and France for almost a century. Plastics took off after World War II.
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Then nylon stockings replaced silk ones, Bakelite dinnerware filled kitchen cabinets, and vinyl found its way onto sofas and lounge chairs. Manufacturers used polyethylene, the number one selling plastic, for soda bottles, milk jugs, storage containers, and dry-cleaning bags. Soon plastic Silly Putty hit the toy stores; Velcro came along later to replace buttons, snaps, and shoelaces. Very much a triumph of chemistry, plastics carried synthetics to a new commercial high.

The Push in American Higher Education

The most profound scientific influence on American thinking came not from the United States but from the Soviet Union. In 1957 the Soviets launched a 184-pound satellite into outer space. A month later a heavier Russian spaceship went into orbit with the dog Laika on board. Both transmitted a beep, beep, beep that was heard around the world. Americans were stunned; they had been beaten to the punch. Within four months the United States joined the Soviet in space with
Explorer 1,
but
Sputnik
had already done its public relations work, dispelling the notion that the Soviets were backward. The American reaction to this spectacular milestone in technology is what makes
Sputnik
so important to the history of capitalism. Pundits and politicians agreed that the United States had to make a gargantuan effort to excel in science and engineering; they agreed as well that American universities, not government research facilities, held the key.

Within a decade, public and private universities embarked on expansion programs that had the effect of changing the nature of higher education here and elsewhere. Because sending
Sputnik
into space represented the acme of achievement, there was no question of watering down college offerings, even with hundreds of thousands of new students. Besides, the GI Bill had shown how students from modest or even poor backgrounds had thrived in college. Women too entered universities in larger numbers in the postwar decades and often moved into nontraditional fields. The push for the inclusion of minority students came a bit later, but the post-
Sputnik
expansion provided the template for that effort. Enlarging higher education put special pressure on graduate programs to prepare more scientists and scholars for faculties all across the country.

The president of the University of California Clark Kerr played a major role in shaping public opinion. In a famous Harvard lecture of 1964, Kerr laid out a vision of a college education as a general right, not as something reserved for the privileged few. When he was born in 1911, only 5 percent of America’s eighteen-year-olds went beyond high school. Now Kerr insisted that the country must make room for every able student. He also called on universities to turn themselves into multiuniversities, offering a broad range of knowledge, theoretical and practical, ancient and current.
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Sputnik
acted as a catalyst, but it had also become increasingly obvious that capitalism’s growth was dependent upon engineers, physicists, business experts, and skilled mechanics.

Responding to this challenge, the California legislature passed the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, which developed a three-tiered avenue for students: The top eighth of California’s high school graduates could enter the University of California, the top third of graduates had a guaranteed place in one of the campuses in the state university system, and others could go to community colleges to prepare for later entrance into four-year institutions. Many states followed this model with multiple campuses radiating out from the original state university. In the East, where private education dominated, Massachusetts and New York started their first public university systems.

Expanding American universities rather than institutes of technology like those in California and Massachusetts, the U.S. government became a patron of the liberal arts as well as of the sciences. This is because in the United States, the first two years of college are dedicated to what is called general education, unlike other national systems, which have students specializing in secondary schools. So along with all the newly minted scientists who found good jobs in higher education there were thousands in literature, philosophy, history, political science, and sociology who did so as well. With tenured positions within the academy, much of the country’s intelligentsia lost the acerbic tone of skeptical outsiders, common in Europe. The economist Joseph Schumpeter feared that capitalism would fail because of its cultural opponents. The American public has resoundingly supported capitalism and its demands on society in part because they have not been exposed to the withering commentary of critics.

State legislatures and private philanthropists got behind the monumental effort to build university systems by opening up their purses. For that, they expected gratitude from the students. Instead campuses throughout the country and Europe became hotbeds of hotheads. Under the law of unintended consequences, the larger intake of students shaped by a liberal education in a conformist society, as that of the United States was at the height of the Cold War, produced protests and demonstrations over free speech, civil rights, and the war that the United States was fighting in Vietnam. The regents of the University of California removed Kerr in 1967 because of their unhappiness with student activism. By that time he had presided over the expansion of the university to nine campuses. Kerr, who then became head of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, commented that he had entered and left office “fired with enthusiasm.”

The Contribution of German Scientists to American Technology

Sputnik
did more than promote higher education. It turned the exploration of space into a Cold War competition for which Congress obligingly spent billions of dollars. The United States may have demobilized its armed forces quickly, but it retained a major research and development program for new weaponry, as did the Russians.
Sputnik
, like America’s
Explorer
, drew upon German wartime developments. These in turn built on the work of America’s Robert Goddard, Russia’s Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and Germany’s Hermann Oberth. Goddard had succeeded in firing a rocket using liquid fuel in 1926, but this aroused little interest in the United States. Quite the contrary in Germany. A young Wernher von Braun became fascinated by the possibility of space travel through the writings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. He joined a rocket society when he was seventeen in 1929 and learned about the work of Goddard, Tsiolkovsky, and, of course, Oberth. Three years later, von Braun entered the army. With a doctorate at age twenty-two he headed up the so-called rocket team that developed ballistic missiles. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels named the first model “Vengeance Weapon No. 2.” Von Braun’s V-2 could deliver a two-thousand-pound warhead five hundred miles at a speed of thirty-five hundred miles per hour. Fortunately, it did not become operational until late in 1944.

But this is where the story of rockets gets really interesting. Although the Germans had relied upon many American patented devices such as gyroscopic controls, they alone possessed the knowledge of how to make liquid-propelled rockets. This pushed the American and Soviet military into a race to locate and bring back home as many scientists as possible once they entered Germany. Von Braun had seen the end of the war coming and was determined to place his work in the hands of the Western powers. He had actually arranged for the surrender of some five hundred German scientists along with lab papers and testing apparatus. Simultaneously in the summer and fall of 1945, the occupying armies were hunting down former Nazis to bring them to trial for war crimes. And here was the rub. The sought-after scientists were Nazis; no one could have worked on such sensitive programs without joining the party or one of its affiliates. Worse, some of them could also be charged as war criminals since they used slave labor in the Baltic factory that produced rockets.

The American State Department considered most of the German scientists unsavory applicants for admittance into the United States. A fight with the War Department ensued. The two departments agreed to a compromise to bring a select group of German scientists to the United States for debriefing. This revealed how extensive and profound German science had been during the war, ranging from work on rocketry to studies of the effects of radiation on the human body. The American military wanted these scientists to continue working in the United States, safe from any prospective enemy. “Ardent” became the relevant adjective to disqualify someone from entrance to the United States. Had he been an ardent Nazi? Another compromise was worked out. Only the scientists whose work appeared vital to U.S. interests would be allowed to emigrate. More than a hundred German physicists and engineers passed this screening. They were labeled “paperclip scientists” because the military reviewers had put paper clips on their papers to signify their importance. Lasting into the 1970s, the Paperclip program brought a total of seventeen hundred German scientists to America, where they laid the foundation for the American space program at White Sands, New Mexico, and Huntsville, Alabama.

This educational push greatly influenced the economy because it represented a huge investment of money and provided the intellectual infrastructure for the new wave of innovations in computers, pharmaceuticals, and aeronautics. Americans got a wonderful system of higher education, but they also took on the burden of paying for an accelerating program of research and development for military hardware from hydrogen bombs and atomic submarines to a full-fledged space program. The goal of security seamlessly succeeded that of winning the war, but wartime attitudes lingered. Secrecy sometimes cloaked inefficiencies in procurement, and members of Congress proved overly accommodating, especially if an item was made in their state. Aware of this, the Defense Department in the 1980s managed to parcel out the parts of the B-2 stealth bomber to every state in the Union.

During the war the army and navy, working on different tracks, developed the machine with the greatest future, the computer. Engineers and mathematicians had been struggling to design a device that could quickly do the complex calculations of modern mathematics. After Pearl Harbor, such an invention became even more imperative to compute firing and bombing tables. By June 1943 the first electronic, digital computer had emerged from the labs of the University of Pennsylvania, working on an army contract. The navy followed with a computer designed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This one had a greater memory. The navy was about to abandon the project because of its prohibitive expense when the Soviet Union set off its atomic bomb in 1949. Now there was no turning back. The army’s pioneering ENIAC was a behemoth weighing in at thirty tons! Could anyone then have imagined that in another sixty years, people would be able to buy inexpensive handheld computers with vastly more power, speed, and versatility?

Spending on military research only increased during the long Cold War of 1947–1991. Institutionalizing this new security concern, Congress in 1947 combined the old War, Navy, and Air Force departments into a new Department of Defense. The computer introduced a revolutionary concept with widespread applicability, digital transmission. Here information or voices are converted into streams of binary digits (the bits we hear about). Analog transmission sends information as a continuous modulated wave form. During the Second World War the U.S. government funded the research that converted analog voice signals to a digital bit stream and in the 1970s installed the first fiber-optic cable system for digital data transmission.
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Contracting with universities, the government invested heavily in the research and development that corporations had already found to be the key to economic success. It took the lead in research in electronics, communications, aerospace design, and materials testing done by physicists, chemists, and ceramicists. The government did the heavy lifting, and in time companies like International Business Machines found commercial uses for much of this research. The American Telephone and Telegraph Company ran its own Bell Laboratories, and pharmaceutical companies also maintained first-rate research facilities of their own.
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Three days before he left office, President Dwight Eisenhower warned about the dangers of something he dubbed a military-industrial complex. Calling attention to the permanent war footing of the country and the vastly more complicated weaponry involved, he asked Americans to be alert to “the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific, technological elite.” After noting that the United States annually spent more on military security than the net income of all U.S. corporations, Eisenhower urged “the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty might prosper together.
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Only the catchphrase “military-industrial complex” caught on; the warning went pretty much unnoticed. Those corporations that benefited from the government’s largess formed themselves into a powerful lobby to ward off any cuts in the Defense Department budget. Eventually American military spending surpassed the total military expenditures of all other nations.