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I retired from a long teaching career a few years ago, but during my later years in the classroom, I offered a course on the Cold War and American pop culture, to try to help younger students understand the fears that dominated so much of American life in the 20th century. When my students saw how many times images of nuclear devastation (and references to Ronald Reagan) popped up on MTV back in the day, they started to get it. We also discussed The Twilight Zone, a series full of barely disguised allegories about the Cold War; the series’ head writer and creator, Rod Serling, a World War II veteran, explored traumas from his past and his worries about the future in many of the episodes he wrote.
But the students were surprised—as you might be—to find that Star Trek, one of my childhood favorites, was an ongoing and intentional commentary about the Cold War during its three original seasons from 1966 to 1969.
A number of science-fiction luminaries wrote for Star Trek, including Norman Spinrad, Theodore Sturgeon, and Harlan Ellison. But the creator and executive producer of the series, Gene Roddenberry, was the show’s moral center. Roddenberry was a former Los Angeles police officer who, like Serling, served in World War II and shared his preoccupation with issues of war, peace, and social justice. As the writer Marc Cushman documents in These Are the Voyages, an exhaustive multivolume history of the series, Roddenberry often drove these famous writers to fury with his heavy-handed rewrites. (He and Ellison, for one, remained enemies to the end of their lives.)
To be sure, some Star Trek episodes were just fantasy and fluff. (“Spock’s Brain,” in which the first officer has his brain stolen by a planet of gorgeous but apparently daft women, is often regarded as the worst episode, but there are several contenders.) Others commented on American social problems, such as racism, with thuddingly obvious symbolism: “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” describes an endless war between two races on the same planet, one black on the right side of their body, one black on the left side, and … well, you get the picture.
But to appreciate the Cold War setting of Star Trek, you need only to understand that the Earth-led United Federation of Planets (a free and democratic association committed to equality among all beings) was NATO. Captain James T. Kirk—born and raised in Iowa, according to the show—commanded its finest flagship, the USS Enterprise. The bad guys, standing in for the Soviet Union, were the Klingons, whose empire was a brutal and aggressive dictatorship.
Two Cold War themes run through Star Trek: the risks of great-power confrontation, and the danger of ultimate annihilation. In “The Omega Glory,” a mediocre episode that Roddenberry pushed to have produced, the Enterprise finds an underdeveloped planet where Asian-looking “Kohms” oppress the white “Yangs.” Turns out it’s a planet that developed just like Earth in every way—there is some sci-fi hocus-pocus to explain how planets sometimes do this—including an America and a Red China (Kohms and Yangs, Communists and Yankees, get it?), and then wiped itself out with biological warfare.
Other episodes were a bit more sophisticated. In “The Return of the Archons,” Kirk encounters a society that is run like a beehive by a single leader named Landru, who demands that all citizens be “of the body.” (Spoiler: He’s a computer. Out-of-control computers were another common theme.) As Cushman notes, the crushing of the individual for the good of the collective was an intentional statement about life under communism.
Likewise, just as the U.S. and the Soviet Union competed against each other in the developing world of the 20th century, the Klingons and the Federation were often at odds with each other over developing planets in the future. In “The Trouble With Tribbles,” a famous episode and one of the show’s few comedic attempts, the Klingons and the Federation are competing to develop and win control of a neutral planet. The Federation’s bid is to offer to plant wheat; the Klingons respond by secretly poisoning the seeds. And in “Errand of Mercy,” the Enterprise races to stop a Klingon takeover of Organia, a strategically located planet seemingly run by annoying pacifist simpletons. But the Organians, it turns out, are actually super-advanced, nearly omnipotent beings who have had enough of all this conflict, and they impose a peace treaty on both sides, thus averting an interstellar war. (“It would have been glorious,” the disappointed Klingon commander says at the end.)
In 1968, Star Trek made one of its most obvious comments on the Cold War in “A Private Little War,” an episode written about the Vietnam War. Once again, the Federation and the Klingons struggle over an underdeveloped and internally divided planet, but this time the Klingons start shipping weapons to one of the warring sides. The script went through various changes as the writers wrestled with whether Kirk should intervene and arm the planet’s more peaceful faction—which he finally does, with deep sadness.
The original Star Trek often fudged the question of whether Earth experienced a nuclear war. (Later entries in the show’s canon, including the Star Trek movies, confirmed that a nuclear World War III did, in fact, take place.) But nuclear weapons were often on the writers’ minds. Spinrad, for example, created the “Doomsday Machine,” an alien device that devours entire planets; when it wanders into our galaxy, Kirk ruminates on how Earth once foolishly thought of thermonuclear bombs as an ultimate weapon.
At times, the producers responded directly to Cold War events. In early 1968, the U.S. Navy ship Pueblo was captured by the North Koreans, who claimed that it was in their waters on a spy mission. They held the crew prisoner for nearly a year. The Star Trek writer Dorothy C. Fontana decided to put Kirk and Spock in a similar situation, with the Enterprise trapped after entering Romulan territory. The episode, titled “The Enterprise Incident,” aired while the Pueblo’s crew was still in captivity.
One function of popular culture is that it helps artists and audiences work out their anxieties. The Cold War was a terrifying time, and its themes dominated American culture, whether in spy send-ups such as Get Smart or the weekly adventures of the Mission: Impossible team in fictional locales that were barely disguised representations of Communist countries. Science fiction is an excellent medium for allegory, and Star Trek promised that, somehow, we were all going to get through the 20th century and eventually live under the wise aegis of the Federation.
Unfortunately, it also suggested that mankind was going to have to live through another Cold War all over again—at least until the Organians put a stop to it.
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Evening Read
Millennium Images / Gallery StockWhy Rich People Don’t Cover Their Windows
By Michael Waters
Walk down the block of a wealthy neighborhood at night, and you might be surprised by how much you can see. One uncovered window might reveal the glow of a flatscreen TV across from a curved couch; through another, you might glimpse a marble kitchen island and a chandelier. Of course, some of the curtains are closed—but many are flung open, the home’s interiors exposed, like you’re peering into a showroom.
Uncovered windows have quietly become a fixture of high-end homes across America … Although this phenomenon is most visible in cities, the link between wealth and exposed windows extends across the United States. Most people do still close their shades, but Americans who earn more than $150,000 are almost twice as likely to leave windows uncovered as those making $20,000 to $29,000, according to a large 2013 study for the U.S. Department of Energy—nearly 20 percent of the first group compared with just over 10 percent of the second. The line isn’t smooth as you slide up and down the income scale, but the overall trend is clear: The choice to draw or not draw the curtains is in part driven by class.
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Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.
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