A Fast Buck on Sputnik/part 1

While the rocket seen ’round the world symbolizes a revolutionary new image of Soviet scientific capacity, the reactions to it of the American business community symbolize the anti-intellectualism that has dampened our own technological growth. For, at the same time that responsible Americans responded to the Russian advance with a high seriousness as unusual as it is welcome, the gray-flannel mouths went right on working the angles. To the American business community, and the wizards of wish and whimsy who batten on its chronic malaise of under-consumption, Sputnik was but another gimmick with which to “get” the mass consumer.

The entire country is crawling with Soviet satellites. An Atlanta restaurant comes out with a Sputnik-burger with small dog, the “dog” being a cocktail sausage on a hamburger garnished with “Czarist Russian dressing” topped by a “satellite olive." A canny Philadelphia grocer, moved his overstocked, undersized potatoes by dubbing them “spudniks.” A new potato peeler is, inevitably, a Spudnik. Ronson rushes a TV commercial on the air for its new buton-fueled pocket lighter; the ad has a beeping radio background, zooming rocket ships, animated space figures.

Even staid Rand McNally, with a solid reputation, for keeping its feet on the ground, stoops to conquer in its latest advertising space ’ by suggesting: “. . . When the rockets take off for outer, space . . . it would seem only natural to stop off at your nearest moon and ask the man for a free Rand McNally space chart?’ And Wallachs, a sedate New York City clothier, got into the right orbit with a full-page ad in the Times (Nov. 7) showing the Muttnik’s parachuted canine touching down amidst a group of blase, Wallach-appareled members of the Madison Avenue aristocracy. The copy was tongue-in-cheek:

New Yorkers take anything in their stride . . . not the least of it, the most unpredictable weather this side of Outer Space. Today’s balmy temperatures aren’t fooling anyone. Why not get the jump on the first big breeze by choosing your new Hart Schaffner & Marx coat--now. You could circle the globe and find no greater selection of fine fabrics, new patterns and distinctive styles than you’ll find today at your nearest Wallach store.

Now there’s more to this kind of au-courantist wit than there is in the grim jokes about Sputnik which mask our fear (e.g., the Sputnik cocktail: one part vodka, three parts sour grapes). For the gay-dog, devil-may-care mentality which is the advertiser’s stock in trade is revealed by things like Sputnik for what it is--an adolescent, anti-intellectual pose that is supposed to solve some of the production dilemmas of a machine society. The adult answer to sticky sales would be a long-range effort to raise the tastes and intellectual aspirations of the American people so that their deepening desires might take up the slack of factories.

Madison Avenue’s facile solution of bigger and bigger advertising budgets to hornswoggle the consumer into action makes the adult goal ever more difficult to achieve. Every time we allow ourselves to use a Sputnik-type bandwagon to marshal public awareness of a product, or cause, or set of values, we make it that much more difficult to appeal to men rationally and for more than trivial purposes. The search for gimmicks that will move goods, instead of the search for mature uses of technology that will satisfy the ad-suppressed desire for the good life, is at the heart of American anti-intellectualism.

Take the motion-picture industry. A jaded Variety reporter recently observed that “the road to riches is partly paved with gimmicks.” Hollywood 1957 has been the year of “inexpensive exploitation products,” “horroramas” and outer-space movies. Sputnik is just the latest of the Monsters to be exploited. The Red star has, for example, proved a “convenient trailer in the sky” for a movie version of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, the filming of which has been pushed up from next year to within the next four to six weeks.

Crash programs (even in nineteenth-century rocketry) are a commendable display of America’s intellectual and imaginative vigor. Sputnik also “cued a quick booking” of Walt Disney’s Man in Space for a local New York theater. It further prompted the movie moguls to dust off film cans labeled When Worlds Collide, Conquest of Space, This Island Earth, It Came From Outer Space and Satellite in the Sky.

Hollywood’s handsome contributions to our pre-Sputnik intellectual development thus give the American teenager’s mind another witless spin. Is it any wonder the adolescent in our society is at loose ends, and academically childish? While Russian children have been absorbing up to ten years’ rigorous scientific training by the end of high school, ours have been watching these parodies of science. This is a horror story that Hollywood would find little money in.

--from The Nation, November 23, 1957