Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Retrospective Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2000 The future's not what it used to be: the decline of technological enthusiasm in America, 1957-1970 Lester Louis Poehner Jr. Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd Part of the American Studies Commons, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Poehner, Lester Louis Jr., "The future's not what it used to be: the decline of technological enthusiasm in America, 1957-1970 " (2000). Retrospective Theses and Dissertations. 12385. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/12385 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. 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Bell & Howell Information and Learning 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Artxjr, Ml 48106-1346 USA 800-521-0600 The future's not what it used to be: The decline of technological enthusiasm in America, 1957-1970 by Lester Louis Poehner Jr. A dissertation submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Major: History of Technology and Science Major Professor: Alan I Marcus Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2000 Copyright © Lester Louis Poehner, 2000. All rights reserved. UMI Number. 9990512 Copyright 2000 by Poehner, Lester Louis, Jr. All rights reserved. ® UMI UMI Microform 9990512 Copyright 2001 by Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microfonm edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Bell & Howell Information and Leaming Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. 80x1346 Ann Arbor. Ml 48106-1346 ii Graduate College Iowa State University This is to certify that the Doctoral dissertation of Lester Louis Poehner Jr. has met the dissertation requirements of Iowa State University Signature was redacted for privacy. /Iajor Professor Signature was redacted for privacy. For the Major Program Signature was redacted for privacy. For the Graduate College iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1. IMPENDING APOCALYPSE 17 CHAPTER 2. NUCLEARMITOPHOBIA 42 CHAPTER 3. THE RADICAL CRITIQUE 75 CHAPTER 4. RADICAL ALTERNATIVES 100 CHAPTER 5. THE STRANGEST TECHNOLOGICAL ENTHUSIASM 126 CHAPTERS. NATURAL ALTERNATIVES 157 CHAPTER 7. ECOLOGY TRANSCENDS ENTHUSIASM 201 CHAPTERS. EARTH DAY 236 NOTES 253 BIBLIOGRAPHY 315 DISOGRAPHY 365 1 The future's not what it used to be: The decline of technological enthusiasm in America, 1957-1970 Lester Louis Poehner Jr. Major Professor Alan I Marcus Iowa State University Modem America's manifestation of progress depended on widespread eagerness for technological and scientific solutions to social and cultural problems. During the decade of the 1960s, this system of beliefs, notions, and underlying values was attacked by detractors who offered a very different version of a better future. Using standard sources, underground press articles, and the song lyrics of Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and The Doors, the work focuses on the fear of nuclear war immediately after Sputnik, which led people to build personal bomb shelters as a civil defense against atomic bombs and fallout. This fear spilled over into the Atoms for Peace program, as public protests stopped construction of a nuclear reactor at Bodega Bay in Sonoma County, California. The Free Speech Movement at U. C. Berkeley protested the dehumanization of the students in the "multiversity." A fuller realization of anti-technological attitudes originated in the Haight-Ashbury hippie counterculture, which first came to public attention through the Human Be-In and the Summer of Love, ushered in a short lived Age of Aquarius. The hippies promoted a new spirituality based on LSD, first advocated by 2 Timothy Leary. Ken Kesey, aided by his Merry Pranksters and acid by Owsley, sponsored public Acid Tests and Trips Festivals to promote the new experience. Feeling alienated from modem civilization and seeking a natural lifestyle, some hippies went back to the land, forming communes like Morning Star and Wheeler Ranch. Tne Whole Earth Catalog of Stewart Brand expounded technological self-sufficiency while proclaiming a vision of a holistic planet, brought home by the "Earthrise" pictures from the Apollo program. These natural and holistic expressions found form in the ecology movement with the apocalypse theme underlying it clearly illustrated by Rachel Carson in Silent Sprino and Paul Eriich in The Population Bomb. Earth Day brought these concerns together, kicking off the ecology movement, the longest lasting achievement of the sixties rebellion, which focused on the end of unreasonable expectations and sought to promote appropriate technology with a view toward the limits of both progress and nature. 1 INTRODUCTION The pumps don't work 'cause the vandals took the handles^ Modern industrial America's particular manifestation of the vision and promise of progress, which was labeled technological enthusiasm, depended on widespread eagerness for technological and scientific solutions to social and cultural problems. This specific social notion, that all problems, or at least the only problems worth working out, are solvable though invention, production, and management, permeated American society and provided the intellectual heart of the Progressive movement and the overall promise that motivated the progressive faith in a better future. Emerging shortly after the Civil War and popularized and promoted by Edward Bellamy and other public thinkers, it envisioned a future Utopia where technology freed humans from drudgery. King Camp Gillette and a wide number of other progressive planners at the fin de si^le advocated a wide variety of technological solutions and organizations as the chief means for resolving pressing social problems ranging from war to poverty. The technologies of electricity, and later, as the twentieth century progressed, the automobile, the airplane, and a growing chemical/pharmaceutical industry, were each in turn hailed as harbingers of a new and better age where specific technical developments would advance the greater common good.^ 2 This enthusiasm for technological solutions continued unabated through the Second World War. Indeed, by the end of the war, many commentators hailed the victory over fascism as a technological triumph, a conquest of production, as much as a victory earned by our brave young men. The new inventions produced by wartime technology, radar, sonar, and the atomic bomb, certainly lent credibility to this interpretation, particularly in light of the rash of "now it can be told stories" published in the popular press following the war. "World War li reaffirmed America's technological strength" in a mighty and easily demonstrated manner but, in a manner just as powerful, the war reaffirmed Americans' social faith in that technology. This faith surged though the early postwar years, when there proved to be no shortage of experts extolling the efficacy of scientific and technological salvation and deliverance. One of the most prominent. Dr. Vannevar Bush, flatly and succinctly decreed that "science won the war, and science would win the peace."' One widely regarded historian, Thomas Park Hughes, wrote extensively on the rise and triumph of technological enthusiasm. He described his 1989 work, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm. 1870-1970. as a book "about an era of technological enthusiasm In the United States, an era that is now passing into history." Summing up the historical trends in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hughes concluded, "Historians looking back a century from now on the sweep of American history may well decide that the 3 century of technological enthusiasm was the most characteristic and impressively achieving century in the national history.'"* Hughes described these social trends in sweeping fashion. Yet the demise of this "characteristic and impressively