Star Trek and History (18 page)

Earlier that month, outside the Republican convention in Miami Beach, a line of tanks had sealed off the entire city and peninsula from Miami itself, where police and National Guard units fought rebelling African Americans in what a Miami police spokesman called “firefights like in Vietnam.”
19
In his nomination acceptance speech, Richard Nixon, after noting that “as we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame,” vowed that “if the war is not ended when the people choose in November . . . I pledge to you tonight that the first priority foreign policy objective of our next Administration will be to bring an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.”
20
Nixon won the 1968 election as a peace candidate.

On January 10, 1969, ten days before Richard Nixon's inauguration and four years before the end of the official U.S. participation in the Vietnam War,
Star Trek
broadcast an aptly titled episode, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.” This episode views the racial conflict of the 1960s in a parable about two races on an alien planet, each half black and half white, who annihilate each other in an increasingly violent struggle between oppression and revolution. The master race, white on the left half and black on the right, has enslaved and continues to exploit the other race, black on the left half and white on the right.

Enraged by millennia of persecution, the oppressed are led by a fanatic militant. In a clear allusion to the disproportionate deaths being suffered by African Americans in Vietnam, the militant leader asks crew members of the
Enterprise
: “Do you know what it would be like to be dragged out of your hovel into a war on another planet, a battle that will serve your oppressor and bring death to your brothers?”

The ultimate end of the mutual hatred of these races is spelled out when the
Enterprise
crew reaches their home planet. Spock reports there are now “no sapient life forms”: “they have annihilated each other totally.” As the last representative of each race continue their fight to mutual doom, behind them flashes actual footage of scenes from America's burning cities. The vision of global disaster projected as a possible outcome of the Vietnam War in “The Omega Glory” has now, less than a year later, literally come home.

The first two of these four episodes, “The City on the Edge of Forever” and “A Private Little War,” had suggested that the Vietnam War was merely an unpleasant necessity on the way to the future dramatized by
Star Trek.
But the last two, “The Omega Glory” and “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” broadcast in the period between March 1968 and January 1969, are so thoroughly infused with the desperation of the period that they openly call for a radical change of historic course, including an end to the Vietnam War and the war at home. Only this new course presumably would take us to a future peaceful Earth that could launch the starship
Enterprise.
Looking backward from the twenty-first century, it's hard to imagine that we are on that course.

Notes

1.
Kathy Sawyer, “Venus Spacecraft Finds Signs of Active Volcano, 2nd Probe Has Photo Session with Asteroid,”
Washington Post
, October 30, 1991.

2.
David Perlman, “Losing Sight of Space,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, September 6, 1981; Richard D. Lyons, “Military Planners View the Shuttle as Way to Open Space for Warfare,”
New York Times
, March 29, 1981; “Air Force Forms Space Command on Military Uses,”
Wall Street Journal
, June 22, 1982.

3.
Rick Worland, “From the New Frontier to the Final Frontier:
Star Trek
from Kennedy to Gorbachev,”
Film and History
24 (February–May 1995): 19–35.

4.
Much of this chapter is developed from the script that I wrote for the “Vietnam” section of the National Air and Space Museum's 1992 exhibit titled “
Star Trek
and the Sixties,” for which I served as advisory curator. As coauthor of the full script, Mary Henderson, art curator of the museum and curator of the exhibit, also contributed to the Vietnam section.

5.
In the fall of 1963, before U.S. troops were officially supposed to be fighting in Vietnam,
The Twilight Zone
opened its final season with “In Praise of Pip,” a tale of a mortally wounded soldier in Vietnam and his guilt-ridden father, who pleads with God to take his life rather than his son's.

6.
Top-secret cables organizing the plot are reprinted in
Vietnam and America: The Most Comprehensive Documented History of the Vietnam War
, Revised and enlarged 2nd edition, eds. Marvin Gettleman et al. (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 225–236.

7.
Ibid., 227–242.

8.
Allan Asherman,
The
Star Trek
Compendium
(New York: Pocket Books, 1989), 9.

9.
The most widely quoted version of this oft-repeated promise was in a campaign speech on October 21, 1964.
Public Papers of the President: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963–1964,
vol. 2, 1390–1391.

10.
Reprinted in Gettleman et al.,
Vietnam and America
, 310–318.

11.
The scripts of May 13 and June 3, 1966, are in the Gene Roddenberry Collection, Arts Library/Special Collection, UCLA; I examined them while they were on loan to the National Air and Space Museum in 1991 to 1992. The June 3 script is reprinted in Harlan Ellison,
Harlan Ellison's The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay That Became the Classic
Star Trek
Episode
(Clarkston, GA: White Wolf Publishing, 1996), which includes a thirty-thousand-word denunciation of Roddenberry by Ellison, two earlier treatments, and afterwords by eight of the participants involved in rewriting, producing, and staging the episode.

12.
Interview with Robert Justman, February 26, 1992.

13.
“Excerpts from Talk by Westmoreland,”
New York Times
, November 22, 1967.

14.
Hanson W. Baldwin, “Vietnam Report: Foe Seeks to Sway U.S. Public,”
New York Times
, December 26, 1967; Hanson W. Baldwin, “Vietnam Report: The Foe Is Hurt,”
New York Times
, December 27, 1967; Hanson W. Baldwin, “Report on Vietnam: Sanctuaries Viewed as a Major War Factor,”
New York Times
, December 28, 1967; and James Reston, Editorial,
New York Times
, November 22, 1967.

15.
Quoted in Worland, “From the New Frontier to the Final Frontier,” 33. Worland analyzes in detail these letters, which he examined in the Gene Roddenberry Collection, Box 18, Folder 2, “A Private Little War,” UCLA Theater Arts Library.

16.
Quoted in Worland, “From the New Frontier to the Final Frontier,” 33.

17.
Rick Worland, “Captain Kirk: Cold Warrior,”
Journal of Popular Film and Television
16 (Fall 1988): 109–117. My own analysis owes a considerable debt to Worland's insightful essay.

18.
These ads are reproduced and discussed in H. Bruce Franklin,
Vietnam and Other American Fantasies
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 151–154.

19.
“3 Negroes Killed in New Miami Riot; Policemen Battle Snipers—Troops Hold 100 Blocks Amid Looting and Fires,”
New York Times
, August 9, 1968.

20.
Nixon Speaks Out: Major Speeches and Statements by Richard Nixon in the Presidential Campaign of 1968
(New York: Nixon-Agnew Campaign Committee, 1968), 235.

Michael Lewis

Spock:
Captain, I never will understand humans. How could a historian as brilliant, a mind as logical as John Gill's, have made such a fatal error?

Kirk:
He drew the wrong conclusion from history.

—TOS,
“Patterns of Force”

This exchange occurs at the end of “Patterns of Force,” one of several original series episodes that discuss how historical events create and shape social change. Ironically,
Star Trek
writers could have been charged with the same error, since the original
Star Trek
's historical episodes often ignore the complex social causes that bring about social change. In their place, the show's writers often substituted the conscious choices of an individual or a small group of actors. This chapter explores episodes from the original series that were modeled on developments from Earth's history and compares social change on these “strange new worlds” with those on Earth. My intention is not to nitpick or dwell on every inaccurate historical detail and to take the fun out of viewing the series. Instead, this chapter will explore
Star Trek
's explanations of social change to see if its writers made the same mistake that Kirk accuses John Gill of: drawing the wrong conclusions from history.

In the episode “A Piece of the Action,” the writers of the original series imagined a social world modeled on 1920s Chicago gangsters. “A Piece of the Action” is the first episode in which we see a pattern of simplifying social change.

The episode opens with the arrival of the
Enterprise
on Sigma Iotia II in order to assess and to rectify the effects of a possible “contamination” left by contact with the USS
Horizon
one hundred years earlier. Although the
Enterprise
has no direct evidence that the
Horizon
's visit interfered with the normal evolution of the planet, Spock notes that “reports indicate the Iotians are intelligent and extremely imitative,” making it possible that the
Horizon
crew could have had such an effect (
TOS
, “A Piece of the Action”).

Relying on reports that show the Iotians to be at the beginnings of industrialization, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are surprised to beam down to a planet in which technology, dress, and speech patterns resemble those of the gangsters in 1920s Chicago. More disturbing, every man carries an early-twentieth-century-style firearm, and open warfare between groups, called “hits” by the Iotians, seems all too common.

Upon arriving at the office of the “boss” Bela Okmyx, the landing party soon finds the source of the contamination: a book titled
Chicago Mobs of the Twenties
left by a crewmember from the
Horizon
one hundred years before. Spock and McCoy quickly realize that Iotian society is based on an imitation of this book; Spock calls it “the blueprint for their entire society,” while McCoy refers to the book as “their Bible.” The effects of the Iotians' imitation of gangster life are also readily apparent: a breakdown of law and order, a lack of basic social services, and a moral code based on the maxim “someone hits you, you hit them back.”

Finding no solution to the Iotian dilemma in the
Enterprise
sociological database, Kirk plays a hunch—he will assume the role of a gangster and unify the planet, with the Federation being the head mob boss. After Scotty beams all of the Iotian bosses into one room, Kirk explains that he is cutting the Federation in for 40 percent, and he tells the bosses they need to work together to produce more wealth for the Iotian society and its new boss, the Federation. When the bosses question the Federation's power, Kirk has Scotty do a phaser blast of the area around the building where they are meeting, temporarily stunning many of the gangsters. Impressed with this display of force, the bosses agree to the Federation's terms, and the
Enterprise
leaves, another mission accomplished.

This episode is an excellent example of
Star Trek
's causal view of social change—the assumption that broad changes can result from one single cause. The Iotians were peaceful before the
Horizon
arrived and left the book on Chicago's mobs; after this event, Iotian society changed to resemble 1920s-style Chicago. No other reason is given for the Iotians' behavior; thus it's assumed that had it not been for the book, Sigma Iotia II would have developed differently.

The rise of real Chicago mobs, however, was not caused by a book. Instead, the growth of organized crime in Chicago (and across the United States) can be attributed primarily to the Eighteenth Amendment banning the sale and manufacture of alcohol in 1919, which introduced the period known as Prohibition. What this amendment could not control, of course, was the continued desire of U.S. citizens to drink, and organized crime syndicates made enormous amounts of money supplying Americans with illegal liquor. As these gangs developed, they faced two potential threats: U.S. government agents charged with enforcing Prohibition laws and competing gangster organizations that waged wars to defend or expand the territory in which they would be the lone supplier of alcohol.
1

On Sigma Iotia II, no such reason for gang violence exists. Since alcohol is not illegal, there is no compelling reason for the various gangs to be at war with one another. Further, there is no government on Sigma Iotia II, as Kirk finds out when he questions Okmyx about who is in charge. “What government?” Okmyx replies. “I've got the territory and I run it.” This is also the case for a dozen or so other bosses with their territories. Not only does this have no parallel to the real 1920s Chicago, it also removes another reason for the extreme force used by the gangsters in Iotian society. In 1920s Chicago, gangsters directed violence toward the government forces that were attempting to shut down the trade in illegal liquor (as well as other vices). Without this, it is hard to fathom why the Iotians would need quite so much firepower.