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6. Reverberating Symbols
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CHAPTER 6 Reverberating Symbols 92 t wo events charged with intense symbolism came to dominate the global news system at the opening of Eisenhower’s second term in 1957: the school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, the first earth-orbiting artificial satellite . Unrelated in almost all respects, Little Rock and Sputnik nevertheless reverberated against each other as powerful symbols, partly because one came on the heels of the other (Little Rock in September and October, Sputnik in early October), and partly due to the damage they inflicted on America’s international stature. Little Rock, to which U.S. troops were sent to restore order and help compel obedience to a federal court order, was the most serious confrontation between national and state authority since Reconstruction. Moreover, it unfolded before a world community already censorious of white racism in America. Sputnik also shattered American complacency in and the world’s awe of U.S. technological prowess. Another blow soon followed the first. Less than a month later, Sputnik II was launched, the impact of which was increased by the failures that dogged the U.S. space program into 1958. Each side attempted to put its own propaganda spin on the events. But the United States was at a disadvantage: Little Rock was not simply a legal case debated in the hushed atmosphere of the federal judiciary, but a violent encounter in the streets during which mobs screamed for the blood of black students. A further handicap was that it was all but impossible for the United States to disparage the Soviet achievement, which represented the fulfillment of a dream of humanity. Yet so pressing was the perceived necessity to divert attention from Soviet successes in space, American officials even entertained a proposal to explode an atomic bomb on the moon.1 REvERBERATING SYMBOLS 93 It also caused the USIA to step up its public opinion polling to measure the effectiveness of its propaganda, although one did not need poll results to know the effects of Sputnik and Little Rock. The world’s peoples could not miss the contrast between vicious racism on the one hand and great scientific progress on the other. Vicariously they witnessed black children harried by white mobs or surrounded by soldiers either barring them from school or holding their tormentors at bay with bayonets. To the people of the world, the Russians extended an invitation to look, figuratively, to the heavens, distributing schedules when Sputnik could be glimpsed scudding above various cities. The world press helped the process along. Japan’s Asahi, for instance, advised readers when the “Red Star” could be seen from Tokyo and vicinity. And echoes of the Cold War were heard even in seemingly innocuous announcements, such as one about Sputnik passing in orbit above both Little Rock and the Indonesian city of Bandung, the latter being the site of the 1955 conference of nonaligned Asian and African states courted by capitalist and communist powers alike. The Soviets even sent a copy of Sputnik on a propaganda tour of Latin America with the Moscow Circus.2 Derision appeared in some quarters of the American press (Newsweek, for one, jeered about “Nikita Khrushchev’s tub-thumping about missiles , rockets, and Sputniks”), but there was no denying the magnitude of the achievement. Nor, Newsweek conceded, could it be disputed that “Moscow’s . . . gains in the Afro-Asian countries are impressive.” Millions of people there regarded Sputnik as a “triumph of the ‘have-nots’ over the ‘haves,’” that beckoned poorer nations to take the Soviet Union’s “short cut to greatness”—hardly what Washington desired. The future might hold even worse news: The socialist organ Pedoman of Indonesia predicted the Russians would beat the Americans to the moon and would “make a Red moon out of it.”3 Whatever the interpretation, Little Rock and Sputnik were closely followed . U.S. Consul General David M. Maynard quipped that the press of Genoa, “like spectators at a tennis match, alternat[ed] between Washington and Moscow datelines.”4 So did much of the global press. And the world media had already trotted out numerous embarrassing stories about racial outrages that bore American datelines. There was, for instance, coverage of Autherine Lucy’s breaking the color barrier at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1956. A mob pursued her after class, hurling eggs and stones, smashing the windows of the vehicle in which she rode, and chanting: “Lynch the...