I haven't been very motivated to celebrate or respond to Star Trek's 60th anniversary. I fear for its future, and am dissatisfied with its present. Besides which, this anniversary seems a little empty, and in this at least I'm not alone (I've heard Jonathan Frakes suggest it on his podcast with Brent Spiner.) Things feel really uncertain.
But then, I can't ignore the history--Star Trek's or my own. I've been writing about Star Trek on this blog for more than 20 years. My first published article about Star Trek appeared in 1976, the 10th anniversary year.
I've felt that I bring a couple of unusual elements to this practice. First, I was an inquiring adult viewer since the very beginning, the first episode sixty years ago. I experienced Star Trek's revival in syndication as it happened, and everything that happened afterwards. I saw all ten of the first regime's feature films in theatres on their first run. Over the years I've met Gene Roddenberry, Majel Roddenberry, James Doohan, George Takei, Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis, among others. I've met and interviewed Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, LeVar Burton and Rod Roddenberry, as well as phone interviews with Rick Berman and Denise Crosby.
But more importantly perhaps, I have done considerable research and writing into the long history of not only Star Trek as television and film and a cultural phenomenon, but on the longer history of what contributed to--what formed--the soul of Star Trek.
The usual histories of Star Trek that have appeared and likely will appear this year tend to cover the same familiar ground, beginning in the early 1960s. The history I've written here goes farther back and deeper, to the likely contributions and origins of "the vision" that evolved into the soul of Star Trek in the lifetime of its originators. It appears on this blog in some detail, some collected under the "Countdown to 40" label (to the 40th anniversary), and the Trek50 (or 50th year) label, which includes detailed analyses of key original series episodes.
Together with the essay I wrote that kicked off the Soul of Star Trek panel I chaired at the 40th anniversary convention in Seattle, here titled "A Passion for the Future," this seems to me to be the most extensive history about Star Trek anyone has accomplished, even if it is lacking in areas of television business and personality clashes. Some would classify it as background. I think of it as essence.
So for this 60th anniversary, I've streamlined some of what I now seem as the main elements of this history of the soul of Star Trek, which goes back not just to the 1960s but at least to the 1930s.
There are many precedents and ancestors to the science fiction elements of the Star Trek universe. But inspirations and precedents to the soul of Star Trek can also be found in the real world. They include not only those from the 1960s (the early space program, JFK, the Civil Rights movement, ecology and Spaceship Earth) but from the 1930s and 1940s, when the principal creators of Star Trek were growing up and becoming young adults.
The Great Depression, FDR and the CCCs
While Gene Roddenberry (born in 1921, same year as my father) was growing up in 1930s Los Angeles, so was Robert Justman in New York, Gene Coon in Nebraska, Matt Jeffries in Virginia, Alexander Courage in Philadelphia, Harve Bennett in Chicago, DeForest Kelley in Georgia and James Doohan in Canada. Even the slightly younger generation crucial to Star Trek were children in the 1930s, including Leonard Nimoy in Boston, William Shatner in Montreal, Walter Koenig in New York, Nichelle Nichols in Chicago, Majel Barrett in Ohio, John D. F. Black in Pittsburgh and D.C. Fontana in New Jersey, among others.
The Great Depression gripped their America beginning in 1930. "It wasn't just the very poor--it was everyone who was affected," recalled historian Julie Willenz. "I think the fact that one grew up in that environment changed your perspective for the rest of your life."
Gene Roddenberry (according to David Alexander's biography) saw some of the effects. He went to school with children who didn't have shoes, and he saw the travails of neighbors or heard his parents talk about them. He also saw the haunted strangers, some of the one million men who rode the rails continuously, or the displaced families that poured into California from Oklahoma when black walls of wind turned their farmland into the Dust Bowl. His father had a modest but steady job as a police officer, and Gene saw that he felt a responsibility to help others because he was able to help them.
This ethic was recognized by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "If I read the temper of our people correctly," he said, "we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we cannot merely take but we must give as well."
FDR was an inspirational leader, who spoke directly to everyone in his fireside chats on the radio. "Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money," he said. "It lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort."
But FDR also acted boldly. His New Deal programs put people to work while it built new infrastructure and elements of the future. For those who were young in the mid-1930s, the most relevant program--and perhaps the most successful in history--was the Civil Conservation Corps. Millions of young men (and later, young women as well) were organized and employed in state parks and other conservation projects, as well as other public improvement projects. (In one five month period, its workers built or improved 255,000 miles of roads and 40,000 schools, among other infrastructure.)
In a time that invited despair, these examples and inspirations offered hope--especially to the young. Historian William Manchester wrote that in contrast to their elders, the 1930s young had a different look. "There is an intensity to their expressions. They are leaning slightly forward, as though trying to see the future. And they are smiling."
There's more here about the 1930s and their relevance to Star Trek.
The World of Tomorrow
Science fiction had come to the movies as well. The more advanced ones came from Europe, like Fritz Lang's Woman in the Moon and Metropolis from Germany, and especially the H.G. Wells/Cameron Menzies Things to Come from England. But Saturday matinees at the local movie palace were beginning to be a part of growing up in America, and their young audiences watched Buster Crabbe's Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials, among others. These and others were also on radio, and some were in the newspaper comics.
In 1938 science fiction took a new and more serious direction when John W. Campbell became editor of a prominent pulp, Astounding. According to writer and s/f historian Lester del Rey, "he wanted them [his writers] to live in their futures. And he wanted those futures to be livable."
The writers responded by becoming "future-oriented" (del Rey continued), "with the sense that the present was not the permanent center of everything: to them, the future was a real place. It was three-dimensional."
Then very soon, one vision of the future did in fact become three-dimensional. The future in this way entered the real world. And millions of Americans experienced it.
Many nations of the world built pavilions, though many of the most impressive attractions were made by American corporations. The architecture was stunning. The gleaming white buildings, dominated by the slender Trylon (fifty feet taller than the Washington Monument) and the global Perisphere (with space inside adequate to two Radio City Music Halls), all reminded more than one observer of the Cameron Menzies images in Things to Come, which may well have been an inspiration.
Inside the Perisphere was the Democricity exhibit of America in 2039. In the Futurerama exhibit, fairgoers sat in plush chairs with individual sound systems that moved them into another future--America in 1960--a place of green suburbs around gleaming cities, with multi-lane highways. They left that dynamic experience with a button that said, "I have seen the future."
That future was otherwise hard to imagine. At the time almost half of American families did not own a car. There was no four lane highway without crossing lights anywhere in the country. The first would be a 160 mile stretch of what became the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which opened just as the Fair was closing. But this future didn't have to be entirely imagined. For the people who visited the Fair, it was right there.
They saw it, they heard it, they walked around in it, interacting with new technologies (like robots, space rockets and television) and new visions, such as the exhibit which admitted that FDR was right, one third of the country was ill-housed and ill-fed, and a full 90% had incomes insufficient for "the good life." But the power to raise the incomes of the entire population to the good life was not science fiction: "With modern technology and power production, it is no longer physically impossible...we need now to discover a workable formula for its distribution to 'three-thirds of a nation.'"
This was the spirit of the Fair. "The tools for building the world of tomorrow are already in our hands," said the Fair's science director. "Action is our slogan...If the world is awry we can change it."
And why not? In the depths of the Depression they had already built parts of the future, from the TVA dams bringing electricity to millions, to the Golden Gate Bridge and the Cathedral of Learning; from highways to airports and national parks.
It was a powerful place for many. Young Carl Sagan visited as a child and it inspired him. In a survey, 90% of Americans said they wanted to see it. A lot of them did--in its two years, the Fair drew some 44 million people (which counts the many who went more than once.) They came by ship, car, train and special long-distance buses. Among them were my mother. The power of a future you could walk around in cannot be overestimated.
But the real world was also turning darker. The New York World's Fair closed in 1940, as German bombers and British fighters battled in the English skies. The Trylon and Perisphere and most of the other buildings were torn down. Their steel was used to make weapons for World War II.
Superman
Superman appeared in a comic book for the first time in 1938. When he first started dreaming about the character four years earlier, Jerry Siegel was influenced (as he later recalled) by "President Roosevelt's fireside chats...being unemployed and worried during the Depression, and knowing hopelessness and fear. Hearing and reading of the oppression and slaughter of helpless Jews in Nazi Germany...seeing movies depicting the horrors of privation suffered by the downtrodden..."
Siegel was also reading about crusading heroes and seeing them in movies. He wondered what he could do for these victims of the 1930s. "How could I help them, when I could barely help myself? Superman was the answer."
This became the key to Superman's character that has endured many reductions and perversions over the years but has somehow survived. His first adventure in Action Comics involved saving an unjustly condemned woman from the electric chair. His next stop was a wife beater.
In his 1930s adventures, he rescued miners in a cave-in, battled stock market manipulators and munitions manufacturers fomenting wars to sell their wares. He fought crime, but also poverty and unsafe labor conditions. He battled crooked politicians and lobbyists, slum lords and corrupt industrialists and corrupt labor leaders alike. He came to the aid of individuals in trouble, and was devoted to the common good. He was a compassionate, high-spirited and humorous hero of the people.
Superman became so immediately popular that he appeared at the 1939 New York World's Fair: the "man of tomorrow" at the World of Tomorrow.
Later the radio introduction would describe him as a "champion of equal rights, valiant, courageous fighter against the forces of hate and prejudice."
In 1946 a 16-episode series had Superman battling an organization based on the KKK ("The Clan of the Fiery Cross." Reputedly based on descriptions by an actual reporter who infiltrated the still basically mysterious Klan, it exposed its secret rituals as well as its crime. The series was credited with reducing KKK recruiting. Notably, it related this domestic racism to Nazi racism.
Of course he also rescued Lois Lane a lot, but this particular Superman was the one that young people knew in the late 1930s and 1940s.
The Real War--and What Came After
In 1940 young Gene Roddenberry was learning to fly. He'd been recruited for a pilot training program instituted by a U.S. Army Air Force General. Aviation was still so new that the General (Henry "Hap" Arnold) had himself been trained by the Wright Brothers.
Even though the US was not yet in the war, Roddenberry knew what he was training for. After joining the Army Air Force, he flew B-17 bombers on missions in the Pacific. He was one of many of those who created and worked on the original Star Trek who were veterans of that war--who saw battle, were wounded, taken prisoner, including one who as a child was taken prisoner by his own government, in the U.S.
World War II was the most destructive war in history. It involved an estimated 100 million people in 30 countries on every continent on Earth except Antarctica. In just six years, some 36 million died as a result of the war--many of them because this war was the first to employ as policy repeated large scale bombing of cities and civilians.
They knew the enormity of war, and the intimacy of war. According to Alexander's biography, Roddenberry was enraged by incompetent orders by a high officer that resulted in needless deaths of those in his command.
It is important to realize this, and to note that decades later that while they made some tense episodes of armed confrontation, this group of Star Trek creators created episode after episode which showed the grim folly of war, and the need for alternatives. The space wars in later Star Trek were created by those who had never seen a moment of real war.
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Corwin wrote about "the little guy" in America, who proved his mettle and judgment in the war, and who could do great things when given the opportunity, including good housing, health and education.
He noted the international cooperation that won the war, as well as the nature of a war that spread around the world, and soldiers overseas who experienced different cultures. "Before this war all of our countries were islands, each one of us cut off in spirit from the rest of the world," he wrote. "But now we're together..." Interdependence was a fact of future life.
These sentiments entered the real world in a big way. As the war ended, the attempt to create the United Nations began. It was not the world government that H.G.Wells and others had advocated for years, but it was a step towards recognizing interdependence, and solving problems and settling differences peacefully.
The exterminations of the Holocaust became dramatically apparent immediately after the war. But that immense crime against Jews in Europe was not the full extent of the suffering there. During the war in Europe, anywhere from half to two-thirds of the housing in major cities had been destroyed. Some 30% of houses in Great Britain were reduced to rubble, and 40% in Germany. The war in Europe had created from 13 to 20 million displaced persons. Some cities and villages in Italy were bombed repeatedly by airplanes from four or five nations on both sides. "There has never been such destruction, such disintegration of life," wrote Anne O'Hare McCormick of the New York Times.
In the United States, the federal government instituted two crucial programs: the G.I. Bill which enabled millions of veterans to obtain higher education in institutions of their choice. The federal housing program helped them and others afford to buy their own homes. (There was obvious prejudice against black families in this program, though there was no racial discrimination in the G.I. Bill.) A third program in the 1950s led to coast to coast highway construction. Together they helped to move the country towards the future envisioned at the World of Tomorrow.
The contributions from the 1960s are perhaps more familiar. The early space program began to bring science fiction space travel into the real world. I still remember the thrill of those first Vanguard launches on live TV, so much like the Rocky Jones blast-offs I'd watched just a few years before. Then came the manned flights, including John Glenn becoming the first American in orbit. At least for awhile, a future in space seemed like a realistic possibility.
President John F. Kennedy became an obvious model for a future leader, not only because of his style but for the inspiration of his words. In accepting the Democratic nomination in Los Angeles--where Gene Roddenberry was writing for TV--he pretty much stated the premise of Star Trek when he began: "From the lands that stretch 3000 miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world...Their motto was not 'every man for himself' but 'all for the common cause.'..We stand today on the edge of a new frontier..."
In his Inaugural he stated the new reality: "For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life." He challenged the Soviet Union to join in creating a better future. "Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce."
His later efforts paid off in the nuclear test ban treaty, the first success in limiting the madness of the arms race. He started this process with a remarkable speech at American University, when he again stated the new reality. "For in the final analysis our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."
By then there was growing awareness of the implications of inhabiting one planet, in the concept of Spaceship Earth of Buckminster Fuller and others, and in the beginnings of an environmental movement and a more focused science of ecology.
From the mid 1950s through the early 1960s, the Civil Rights movement brought awareness of racial injustice and action to establish racial justice and equality, obviously reflected in Star Trek sixty years ago, and not only in the matter of race. Other social changes of the late 1960s concerning equal opportunity and equal humanity, war and peace and human fulfillment were also reflected in original series stories.
So from the 1930s through the 1960s, the first part of the journey explored possibilities as at least glimpsed in the real world, resulting in a better future. And even when reality fell short, the ideas and ideals came alive for all to see.
The soul of Star Trek is infused with these ideals--of a united Earth with adequacy for all, of an end to war as the reflexive choice when in conflict, of the value of all life, of interdependence and equal standing and opportunity, of doing big things to solve problems together and work for a better future. While it is also expressed for many simply in the way people treat each other on the Enterprise, these elements were in the lifetimes of Star Trek's creators represented not only in hopes and fictions but in the real world.
As for the science fiction elements of the Star Trek universe, they also had ancestors in the 1940s and primarily in the 1950s. Major elements of it were derived--or at least had appeared--in Saturday morning space shows on 1950s TV and even earlier in written science fiction. Those 50s shows (Space Patrol, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet; Rocky Jones, Space Ranger) all had the equivalents of the Federation of Planets, Earth united under a single government and an idealistic Starfleet for defense and exploration. Space Patrol explicitly had the equivalent of warp drive (as well as something called Time Drive.)
Other Trek technology had many precedents: transporters and phasers with stun settings appeared in the Buster Crabbe Buck Rogers movie serials beginning in 1939. Even some favorite plots had ancestors, like the one that appeared several times in the original series and began several later Star Trek series: earthlings on trial by a more advanced alien civilization. Examples of that story go back at least as far as the early 1940s Captain Future novels.
While the tech in Star Trek set some standards and fascinated many fans, and character interaction played its part, these were not what most distinguished the saga, nor what drew so much attention, inspired so many people around the world, and led to its 60 years of existence. It was the soul of Star Trek. Star Trek orchestrated that sci-fi tech and stories, and imbued the Enterprise with soul.
And right now, just as American democracy is assaulted and wounded and deeply damaged, but stubbornly kept alive by the activism of ordinary people, the soul of Star Trek is also under assault by some of the same forces, along with the usual foolishness of corporate Hollywood. But it too is being defended by the knowledge, the loyalty and the stubborn idealism of those who watched it, many of whom throughout the decades knew that the soul of Star Trek helped transform their own lives, bringing a future into their present.
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