Dark Carnivals, page 12
While the situation was particularly egregious in the American South, every American region had laws, de facto and de jure, that prevented Black men and women from reaping the G.I. Bill’s benefits. These veterans could, in theory, receive money for college, but most colleges in the United States remained whites only. Under the law, Black veterans could lay claim to home and business loans, but banks could and did refuse them without fear of legal repercussions. So-called covenant neighborhoods collaborated with real estate firms and local politicians to ensure no Black families moved into the new suburbs. Whites who wanted to live in segregated neighborhoods had the support of the Federal Housing Administration. The U.S. government, in a practice known as redlining, made fluid funds available to contractors who agreed to build suburbs that excluded African Americans.29
World War II looked in some ways like the beginning of a new phase in the freedom struggle for African Americans. In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled against state practices that suppressed, or simply denied, Black women and men the right to vote. Veterans of World War II like Medgar Evers brought home from the war a determination to make America live up to its claims of being a bastion of democracy and freedom. During the war itself, A. Philip Randolph, an African American socialist and labor union leader, held a huge rally in Madison Square Garden to protest the treatment of Black soldiers. He would later be the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington.
But, when World War II ended, it would be another twenty years before the 1965 Voting Rights Act laid the groundwork for African American political autonomy. It’s also true that, outside of a general sense that something happened with segregation during the civil rights movements, even most college-educated whites have a limited grasp of the role of thousands of organizers whose experience had been shaped by World War II and their mistreatment by an American army allegedly fighting fascism. We know about Medgar Evers because he was murdered in his own driveway.
James Baldwin thought that World War II meant something very different to African Americans than to whites. “A certain hope died,” he wrote, both because of the treatment even Black veterans received and how little the world changed for all Black people in 1945. In fact, the twin shadows of the Holocaust and Hiroshima seemed a deadly warning to Baldwin, a reminder of what white people would do while claiming to be both Christian and civilized. Baldwin wrote in the evocatively titled The Fire Next Time that “the threat of universal extinction” had entered the world. Wasn’t the bomb part of the logic of white supremacy, an iron logic of nihilism that had created “this void, this despair, this torment” felt all over the world from “the streets of Stockholm” to the “sidewalks of Harlem”?
Terror at what the world had become haunted millions of Americans. The prosperity and eerie optimism of postwar America reached only a large minority of its white citizens. The long period of economic growth, more than a quarter of a century after 1945, came in fits and starts for many families. The larger paychecks many workers began to see did not keep pace with prices. Companies like General Motors and U.S. Steel made tens of millions in profits while refusing Truman’s admonitions to ward off strikes with tiny wage increases.
Meanwhile, a Republican-controlled Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which struck an enormous blow to labor unions, one from which they arguably never recovered. Among other restrictive provisions, the act outlawed unions among supervisors and foremen, effectively severing a large part of the new white-collar workforce from membership in, and sympathy with, organized labor.
The emerging Cold War with the Soviet Union ensured that American foreign policy poisoned discussions about worker’s rights. Republican leaders in Congress insisted on widespread communist infiltration in organized labor and used anti-communist rhetoric to frighten suburban voters who unreasonably connected rising prices and wage slumps with strikes rather than with the powerful corporations that kept wages low and prices high.
The attitude of the United States toward its recent enemies, and its recent friends, seems shocking, but it followed the economic logic of imperial power. It’s difficult, nearly impossible, to imagine a continuing partnership between the United States and the Soviet Union, despite the warmth of the relationship through the thirties and the alliance of the war years. Truman and Stalin didn’t share much in terms of either politics or background. But both did hold a morally blinkered view of the postwar world.
8.Cold Warriors . . . in Space!!
MOST AMERICANS, now and at the time, do not grasp how the Soviet Union interpreted the United States’ embrace of Germany after 1945. The Truman administration’s quick willingness to welcome Germany back into the family of nations, at least American-controlled West Germany, which had received a free market makeover, seemed an astonishing move. Over the next several decades, West Germany became a deadly forward base from which to project nuclear missiles. Medium-range missiles aimed directly at the Soviet heartland remained frightening portents into the 1980s, as much to the western Europeans being “protected” by them as to the Russians.
Anti-communism perhaps made this decision at least as rational, or rather no more irrational, than Stalin’s insistence that the Warsaw Pact nations provide the Soviet Union with “buffer states.” But Operation Paperclip, though little known at the time, proved one of the more shocking decisions by the emerging American national security state. This initiative brought over 1,600 Nazi scientists to the United States, cleared them of all war crimes, and set them to work developing the basis for delivery systems of nuclear weapons.
This ethically purblind decision transformed the global balance of power. It’s difficult to imagine that the United States would have charged so far ahead of the Soviet Union in the arms race without the help of Wernher von Braun, a fact admitted by a number of NASA scientists from that era. Von Braun had joined the Nazi Party when Hitler came to power, and he rose through the ranks of the SS to become a major. In his early thirties he’d been given the title of professor, a particular honorific in German, by Hitler himself. During the war, he led the V-2 rocket building program, which employed slave labor from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Victims who survived the camp have testified that von Braun selected workers personally. He even handpicked prisoners for torture, seemingly for no purpose other than sadistic pleasure. At the end of the war, von Braun claimed he wanted to surrender to the Americans rather than the Soviets. The Americans would make the best captors, he asserted, because “they believed in the Bible.”30
By 1948, the CIA went even further in enlisting former Nazis, including members of the Waffen-SS who had played a central role in the Holocaust and related war crimes. A few such figures provided alleged intelligence about Soviet activities in eastern Europe that facilitated the move toward the Cold War. A retired CIA agent later admitted that this provided the American security establishment with the “Russian boogeyman junk” that Truman’s national security state loved rather than a meaningful picture of geopolitics.31
The American public might have been even more shocked to learn that the CIA worked closely with Nazi collaborators in the Soviet Union itself after 1946. Not only had many of these groups aided in the German invasion of the Soviet Union but they also had, by the agency’s own admission, “been linked to Nazi atrocities on the eastern front.” The mass murder of Poles, Jews, Red Army POWs, and communists represented this “link.” In the fall of 1949, the CIA parachuted guerilla squads of war criminals back into Ukraine in what became known as Operation Nightingale. Although Russian special forces quickly annihilated these cells, the reader should imagine the American reaction to Soviet-sponsored guerrillas dropped into, say, Nebraska to take lives, destroy critical infrastructure, and generally wreak havoc.32
Perhaps Americans would not have been appalled by their government. Mainstream white America became convinced that their pastel middle-class dreams could turn Marxist red, so much so that even the worst crimes of the Nazis faded for a time out of American memory. The famous, mostly infamous, General George S. Patton, whose failures and inconsistent performance as a military thinker have been overshadowed by legend and the 1970 film, provides an interesting case study in American attitudes. After touring the Ohrdruf death camp with Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, Patton wrote that the victims appeared to him to be “a subhuman species without any of the cultural or social refinements of the time.” Patton had no sympathy for the dead, using his celebrity to insist the United States immediately rearm the Nazis and launch a preemptive offensive against the Soviet Union.33
Historians spill gallons of ink over the origins of the Cold War. There’s no single answer to why the United States and the Soviet Union, former allies against the Axis, turned on one another so quickly. Numerous commentators have suggested that both great powers needed the Cold War. Stalin and his successors, with an occasional notable exception, could set aside hopes for a worldwide revolution and settle into what Noam Chomsky described as the dominance of “a military-bureaucratic elite” over Soviet foreign affairs. For the United States, the Bolshevik threat gave legitimacy to the new, expansionist American foreign policy and a highly militarized economy.
However one feels about the nuances of the debate, it’s impossible to chalk it up to Soviet aggression. Communist revolutionaries around the globe—from Vietnam to Ghana and Greece—found the Soviets decidedly drowsy on the matter of proletarian revolution. While convinced of Moscow’s influence everywhere, Americans lived in ignorance of the steps their government took to ratchet up tensions between the two powers. No one wanted to think much about foreign policy after V-J Day, and when told a new enemy had appeared, only a small number questioned the state’s assurances that “the American way of life” faced an implacable foe or had any idea of a longer history that helped explain Soviet suspicion.
The relationship soured in 1917. The United States invaded Russia at the end of the First World War, largely in support of the British effort to prevent Lenin’s communist revolution from succeeding. A thaw in relations came in the 1930s and many Americans admired the undeniable economic miracle taking place in the Soviet Union as socialism sent Russia’s essentially medieval economy barreling into the twentieth century.34
A darker picture emerged for those who paid the closest attention. Increasingly, even American leftists grew nervous about the emergence of Stalin as he consolidated the Soviet Union into a dictatorship, repressed dissent at home, made small and devious land grabs in the Baltics, and, ironically, gave up on precisely what the Anglo-American right so deeply feared: the spread of an international worker’s revolution around the globe.
Instead, Stalin insisted on a theory he called “socialism in one country,” an idea that confronted Marxist dissidents, or anyone who actually read Marx, with a bizarre formulation. Stalin gave half-hearted support to the fight against fascism in Spain and no attention at all to the emerging communist revolution in China. Meanwhile, he murdered his fellow communists in enormous numbers and even sent his dreaded secret police, the NKVD, to assassinate left-wing dissidents from Stalinism around the globe.
The United States entered a cold war with Stalin’s Russia, despite having little to fear from the wounded giant. Uninterested in spreading Lenin’s revolution and leading a country decimated by a world war that killed nearly twenty-seven million Soviet soldiers and civilians, Stalin spent the remaining years of his life (d. 1953) watching American westerns, eating enormous meals with his flunkies, and ensuring he remained in power.
The Soviet Union did have cause to worry about America’s space program. By the late forties, von Braun worked on rocketry for the U.S. military and converted to evangelical Christianity. Transferred to NASA on its founding in 1958, he played an integral role in the development of the launch vehicle for the Apollo program. His ambition grew, seeing rocketry as a path to the exploration of Mars. By 1960, von Braun received enough adulation for his work in the United States and Britain that a biopic appeared entitled I Aim at the Stars. Comedian Mort Sahl suggested that But Sometimes I Hit London would make a fine subtitle.
In fact, von Braun dreamed not only of Mars but also of an orbital space platform that could rain down destruction on the Soviets from the skies.35
The reality was that the United States, a superpower with global reach, defined the Soviet Union, a regional power with limited ambitions, as a mortal enemy. Americans became fearful, uncertain, and anxious in an age of increasing abundance, indeed in a society that had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world. It also became a society wracked by anxiety, over the bomb, over change, over fear of the Soviets, even over the idea that they belonged to a generation that seemed so stable and secure in relation to that of their parents. Wouldn’t it all be taken away?
9.Noon on Doomsday
MILLIONS OF men and women who had seen the worst of World War II were not ready for the American empire’s slugfest with another enemy. Rod Serling, for example, brooded over what he’d seen in the Pacific at a time when discussion of postwar trauma, both physical and mental, had no place in American society. Discussion of the wounded, including the psychologically wounded, veteran remained verboten in American culture after the first months of peace. Indeed, popular magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal and Life ran articles directed at soldiers’ wives, suggesting that their homebound husbands likely needed “a few weeks” (!) to adjust to the civilian experience.36
One of Serling’s first successes in television revealed his growing social conscience. His 1956 script Patterns became a huge hit for NBC’s Kraft Television Theatre. A boardroom drama that placed big business maleficence and cultural conformity in its crosshairs, Serling’s film tapped into a widespread American fear of corporate life revealed in the success of novels like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Revolutionary Road. Patterns aired twice due to its popularity and a film would be produced from it. Serling seemingly had found a way to write about the dangers of fascism in his own country without being called a communist. Indeed, he could do it and be highly successful all at once.
Or so he thought. Serling, like many whites, found himself shocked out of his complacency toward the treatment of Black Americans by the vicious murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. In August of 1955, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J. W. Milam beat, mutilated, and shot Till, dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi. They believed the young child had “whistled” at Carolyn Bryant, Bryant’s wife. Less than a month after Till’s murder, an all-white jury found the accused not guilty. Carolyn Bryant claimed Till not only whistled at her but grabbed her around the waist. Decades later, Bryant admitted she’d lied about the entire story. Black death has meant very little to a country steeped in white supremacy.37
Till’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, sent the young boy to live with his grandparents in the Mississippi Delta because she believed it safer than her southside Chicago neighborhood. After his death, she insisted on an open casket funeral, revealing the torture inflicted on his body. Major magazines and newspapers carried the story, and while many treated it as a singular incident, at least some used it to tell the wider history of ongoing violence against African Americans.
Moved to anger by the racist violence, Serling attempted to reimagine the tale in a teleplay he called Noon on Doomsday, alternatively titled A Town Has Turned to Dust. However, fear of offending the American public caused corporate sponsors to demand radical changes to the script, a somewhat odd decision since they allowed Patterns to mock the very corporate environment they now sought to protect. White supremacy, and any challenges to it, clearly remained the hill the country’s ruling class would die on.
The changes to Noon on Doomsday made it unrecognizable as a comment on the Till lynching. CBS insisted that the murdered character have a Mexican background rather than being African American. Also, and at the network’s insistence, hints of advances toward a white woman as the cause of the killing were dropped. To completely erase any political commentary, studio executives moved the setting out of Mississippi and the contemporary period and into a generic “Old West” setting. Disgusted, Serling watched as a network beholden to advertisers reduced his clarion call for racial justice to little more than a police procedural with an excruciatingly vague message about tolerance.
Serling never forgot his anger over what he considered one of his more important works. In what was supposed to be a promotional interview for a new anthology series helmed by Serling, network executives gritted their teeth as he barked at Mike Wallace that it was “criminal” that television execs simply refused to allow writers to explore “social evils.”
His new show, he wrote in TV Guide, “probes into the dimension of imagination but with a concern for taste and for an adult audience too long assumed to have IQs in negative figures.”
10.What the Martian Said
THE PILOT for The Twilight Zone aired on October 2, 1959. Serling wrote more than ninety scripts for a series that ran 156 episodes. It became the first show on television to imagine fascism coming to America, to challenge the red baiting woven into the culture after World War II, to question how the Japanese were stereotyped after Pearl Harbor, and indeed the first to show the mushroom cloud and wonder about the morality of atomic weapons. But, as Serling once noted, you can get away with anything “if a Martian says it,” or even if you throw a flying saucer or two into the story.
Serling used alien invasions and nightmare scenarios to ask hard questions of an America used to horror from the stars shaping how they understood the terror of the real world. An expert on the science fiction and the politics of postwar America, Steffen Hantke, described “the amalgamation of science fiction with the horror film” in these years. This new way of thinking about monsters would attempt a marriage, doomed to divorce, between the fifties’ fascination with the American empire creating “the World of Tomorrow” and the dystopian realities the tomorrow being built for Americans promised.38
