Fred Kaplan - 1959: The Year Everything Changed

THE YEAR EVERYTHING CHANGED

Fred Kaplan

author of
Daydream Believers:
How a Few Grand Ideas
Wrecked American Power

Books by Fred Kaplan
1959: The Year Everything ChangedDaydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power
The Wizards of Armageddon
The Year Everything Changed
Fred Kaplan
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Copyright 2009 by Fred Kaplan. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
Credits appear on page 309 and constitute an extension of this copyright page.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Kaplan, Fred M.

1. History, Modern19451989. 2. Civilization, Modern1950 I. Title.
1959 : the year everything changed / Fred Kaplan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-38781-8 (cloth)

II. Title: Nineteen fifty nine.

D842.5.K35 2009
909.825dc22 2008045529 Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Maxine & Sophie, through the next fifty years And, as always, for Brooke
I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goes thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?
Jack Kerouac
I tell you, the New Frontier is here, whether we seek it or not.
John F. Kennedy

What we in hindsight call change is usually the unex

Morris Dickstein
pected swelling of a minor content as it imperceptibly becomes a major one and alters the prevailing mood.
Contents
Timeline xi

1 Breaking the Chains 1

2 A Visitor from the East 8
3 The Philosopher of Hip 15
4 Generations Howling 26
5 The Cosmonaut of Inner Space 39
6 The End of Obscenity 45
7 Sickniks 55
8 Thinking about the Unthinkable 63
9 The Race for Space 72
10 Toppling the Tyranny of Numbers 76
11 The Assault on the Chord 84
12 Revolutionary Euphoria 94
13 Breaking the Logjam, Hitting the Wall 105
14 The Frontiers Dark Side 116
15 The New Language of Diplomacy 125
x contents

16 Sparking the Powder Keg 133

17 Civilizations in the Stars 149
18 A Great Upward Swoop of Movement 157
19 Blurring Art and Life 169
20 Seeing the Invisible 181
21 The Off-Hollywood Movie 188
22 The Shape of Jazz to Come 198
23 Dancing in the Streets 212
24 Andromeda Freed from Her Chains 221
25 New Frontiers 233

Acknowledgments 245

Notes 249
Credits 309
Index 311 Timeline
January 1 January 2
Fidel Castros revolutionaries take power in Cuba. Soviets Lunik 1 spacecraft breaks free of Earths gravitational pull.

Federal judge orders Atlanta to integrate its buses and January 4
States. January 9
trolleys. January 10 on space exploration called The Sky Is the New Frontier. January 12 Berry Gordy borrows $800 from his family to buy a studio for his new record company, Motown.
January 19 Federal judge orders Virginia to desegregate its schools. February 5 Allen Ginsberg returns to Columbia University to give a poetry reading to a packed auditorium.
February 13 U.S. Air Force generals coin the word aerospace to claim military control of outer space in addition to the skies. March 1 Martin Luther King Jr. meets with Vinoba Bhave, the Gandhian walking saint, at the ashram in Ahmedabad, India. March 2 Miles Davis begins to record Kind of Blue.
March 3 U.S. Pioneer IV spacecraft matches the feat of Lunik 1. March 12 C. Wright Mills publishes Culture and Politics: The 4th Epoch, inspiring an American New Left.
March 13 Herman Kahn begins his marathon lecture series on thermonuclear war.
Soviet deputy premier Anastas Mikoyan visits the United
Hayden Planetarium in New York reopens with a show xii timeline

March 17 Excerpt of William Burroughss Naked Lunch appears in Big Table magazine.
March 18 U.S. Postmaster General seizes copies of Big Table for violating obscenity laws.
March 18 Barney Rosset of Grove Press announces he will publish the illegal, uncensored version of D. H. Lawrences Lady Chatterleys Lover .
March 24 Texas Instruments announces the invention of the integrated circuit, or microchip.
April 5 3rd International Auto Show introduces the Datsun and the Toyota.
April 9 Sick comic Lenny Bruce appears on national television.
April 15 Fidel Castro visits the United States.
April 28 Grove Press sues U.S. Post Office for confiscating copies of Lady Chatterleys Lover.
May 4 John Coltrane records Giant Steps.
May 7 Philip Roths Goodbye, Columbus is published.
May 22 Ornette Coleman records The Shape of Jazz to Come.
June 8 U.S. Navy and Post Office launch missile mail experiment.
June 18 Federal court overturns Arkansas school-segregation law.
June 25 Dave Brubeck starts to record Time Out.
June 29 U.S. Supreme Court overturns the banning of a French film of Lady Chatterleys Lover.
July 8 First two U.S. soldiers are killed in South Vietnam.
July 12 Malcolm X travels to the Middle East.
July 13 Mike Wallaces TV documentary The Hate That Hate Produced , about Malcolm X and the Black Muslims, is aired nationwide.
July 21 Grove Press wins court victory and right to publish Lady Chatterleys Lover.
July 23 G. D. Searle applies for FDA approval of the birth control pill.
July 24 Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and Vice President Richard Nixon hold kitchen debate in Moscow.
September 9 U.S. Civil Rights Commission releases its first report detailing racial discrimination in America.
September 15 Khrushchev visits the United States.
September 19 Philip Morrison and Giuseppi Cocconis Searching for Interstellar Communication is published in Nature.
October 4 Allan Kaprow stages the first Happening.
timeline xiii October 5 IBM 1401, first practical business computer, goes on sale.

October 21 Guggenheim Museum, first U.S. art museum dedicated to non-objective art, opens.