Star Trek and History (20 page)

Unlike the episodes discussed previously, which focus on one individual's actions as the cause of social change, “Bread and Circuses” explains a “modern” Roman Empire, which persists for thousands of years on planet 892-IV, because (as Kirk concludes) the absence of Christianity means that the Empire did not decline. This is another example of how the original
Star Trek
series often got history “wrong” by explaining complex changes as being the result of one single factor (or its absence, in this case).

“Bread and Circuses” begins when the crew of the
Enterprise
discovers the empty wreckage of the SS
Beagle
, a merchant ship that has been missing for six years, drifting near planet 892-IV. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to investigate, and they encounter a group of runaway slaves. As Kirk describes the scene in his log, “They dwell in caves not far from a large city, wear rags, live under primitive conditions. But they are creatures of a heavily industrialized twentieth-century-type planet very much like Earth, an amazing example of Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development. But on this Earth, Rome never fell. A world ruled by emperors who can trace their line back two thousand years, to their own Julius and Augustus Caesars” (
TOS
, “Bread and Circuses”).

These slaves, called the Children of the Sun, are captured along with the landing party, and while they are in prison the slave leader, Septimus, explains to Kirk that the Children of the Sun teach peace and brotherhood, and for this the authorities persecute them. This was not the first slave rebellion on 892-IV: a previous one had been suppressed two thousand years ago, after which the slaves acquired certain basic rights such as medical care and old-age support, and they became content with their lot at the bottom of 892-IV society. It was only when they began to worship the sun and refused to fight as gladiators for the entertainment of others that the persecutions began again.

The landing party attempts to escape, and after they are recaptured, they are taken to Merikus, the Roman ruler. Kirk quickly realizes that Merikus is actually Captain Merick of the
Beagle
. After refusing to beam down the
Enterprise
crew to fight as gladiators, Kirk is condemned to be executed. Just prior to the execution, Scotty successfully disrupts the power and communications on the planet, thus rescuing the landing party. Back on the
Enterprise
, Uhura (who has been monitoring radio transmissions from the planet) explains the true nature of the slaves' worship. “Don't you understand?” she asks. “It's not the sun up in the sky. It's the Son of God.” Kirk replies, “Caesar . . . and Christ; they had them both. And the word is spreading only now. Wouldn't that be something to watch. To see it happen—all over again” (
TOS
, “Bread and Circuses”).

With this final scene, the show's writers are suggesting that the future of 892-IV will parallel Earth history: the rise of Christianity will cause the fall of Rome. In making this claim the scriptwriters were not entirely wrong; historians, most famously eighteenth-century's Edward Gibbon in
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, have argued that Christianity contributed to a loss of civic virtue in Roman society by making the populace less interested in the worldly here and now because it was willing to wait for the rewards of heaven. This loss of civic virtue supposedly led the Romans to gradually entrust the defense of the Empire to barbarian mercenaries, who eventually turned on them. Unfortunately for Gibbon (and
Star Trek
's writers), this thesis is not supported by historical fact, as the eastern Roman Empire, which was resolutely Christian, did not fall until 1453, nearly a thousand years after the western Roman Empire slowly imploded. If Christianity was inherently anti-Roman or anti-Imperial, then it should have been the eastern empire that fell.

Subsequent historical accounts have generated a long list of explanations for the western Roman Empire's decline; among the most prominent are monetary inflation, military decline, disease brought about by the increased concentration of people in cities, Germanic expansion, and reduced tax revenue, which prevented the Roman government from adequately providing for its citizens. The causes were complex, and they can't be explained by the emergence of Christianity, regardless of how Kirk interpreted Roman history. Here again,
Star Trek
is doing it wrong when it comes to historical causation.

The last original series episode discussed in this chapter is not technically a historical one, but it is nonetheless an example of how
Star Trek
can get historical cause-and-effect “wrong.” Written in 1968 against the backdrop of the Cold War and fears of nuclear attacks, “Assignment: Earth” was very much a contemporary episode when it initially aired. It was similar to some of the other examples discussed here, however, because it, too, featured a story about one individual altering the course of human history.

“Assignment: Earth” begins with the
Enterprise
traveling to 1968 Earth to do historical research. Their mission is interrupted by a transporter beam that accidentally lands Gary Seven, a human being from the future, on the
Enterprise
. Seven explains that he has been sent to intercede on Earth and to help it avoid a nuclear holocaust by first launching an armed warhead that will bring Earth close to nuclear annihilation, and then disarming it at the last possible moment, causing people to rethink the nuclear arms race. After subduing Seven and detaining him, Kirk and Spock consult the
Enterprise
computer and find that Seven's story is accurate: the United States is scheduled to launch a suborbital platform containing nuclear weapons on this date. Despite this confirmation, Kirk remains suspicious of Seven's motives, wondering whether he intends to destroy Earth rather than to save it.

What ensues is a game of cat and mouse, with Seven trying to escape the
Enterprise
and to fulfill his mission on Earth, while Kirk and Spock try to prevent him from doing so, as they are unsure of Seven's true motives. All three eventually wind up in a New York City office that includes a sophisticated computer hidden behind a bookcase. Using this computer, Spock first tries, unsuccessfully, to destroy the nuclear missile, which has not been disarmed (as Seven had planned) and which will now detonate after it reaches its target. When Spock's attempts fail, Seven pleads with Kirk to let him fulfill his mission—destroying the missile at a safe altitude to scare the world's leaders out of their arms race. Left with few other options, Kirk accedes, and Seven safely detonates the warhead only four miles above the safe minimum, thereby preventing the start of a nuclear war.

What
Star Trek
's writers propose in “Assignment: Earth” is that one person's creation of an incident in which a nuclear attack is barely averted could cause countries to abandon the Cold War–era nuclear arms race. Leaving aside the unlikely possibility that a human from the future could create such a scenario, the broader question we must answer is whether a nuclear detonation that almost took place on Earth could have changed the direction of the Cold War, so let's examine the complex social forces behind this conflict.

Historians generally agree that the Cold War had several causes, including the ideological differences between capitalism and communism. Even during the 1920s and 1930s, American leaders had often condemned and opposed the Communist regime in the Soviet Union, although this opposition was set aside during World War II, when the Soviets were celebrated as American allies.

After Germany's defeat, however, the Americans and the Soviets became fiercely competitive in Europe (and elsewhere), as each side sought to expand its sphere of influence and control. In this competition, anticommunism was used by American leaders to justify to the American public the continued military expenditures and confrontations with the Soviets; the Soviet leadership, for its part, was determined to occupy and control Eastern and Central Europe indefinitely to prevent any future invasions. Postwar fears on both sides led to the physical and ideological division of Europe, open warfare in Korea and Vietnam, and a global system in which each side sought allies that would help it to expand—or at least maintain—its sphere of influence around the globe.

To support this global Cold War, both the United States and the USSR relied on bureaucracies that, once put into place, would prove to be difficult to dismantle. In the United States, the National Security Act (1947) created a military-industrial complex of bureaucratic agencies (the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency) and increased defense spending from $13 billion in 1950 to $60 billion in 1951.

By the time “Assignment: Earth” aired in March 1968, events such as the Cuban missile crisis had heightened citizens' fears of nuclear attack, and it was this paranoia, combined with ideological and bureaucratic forces, that drove the continued buildup of weaponry deplored by
Star Trek
's writers in this episode. Given these conditions, it's hard to imagine that even a rogue nuclear warhead could change the course of events and end the Cold War, as “Assignment: Earth” suggests it would.
8

As we've seen,
Star Trek
's writers often described social and historical changes as having one single cause, and often from one individual's actions rather than as the results of complex sets of social forces. This emphasis is not surprising, since
Star Trek
's writers are themselves products of the mid-twentieth-century American society in which they lived. Even as they sought to transcend aspects of this society and to offer different visions of war and peace, poverty, race relations, and other social issues,
Star Trek
's writers left unquestioned more basic American notions that emphasize individual decisions over social context when explaining why events, past and present, occurred. This failure to explore the “final frontier” of their own assumptions is ultimately where
Star Trek
's writers do it wrong when it comes to exploring historical change.

Notes

1.
Among the best sources on Prohibition are John J. Rumbarger,
Profits, Power and Prohibition: Alcohol Reform and the Industrializing of America, 1800–1930
(New York: State University of New York Press, 1989); Jack S. Blocker,
Retreat from Reform: The Prohibition Movement in the United States, 1890–1913
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976); and Norman H. Clark,
Deliver Us from Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1976). For information on Prohibition and the criminal underworld, see Kenneth Allsop,
The Bootleggers: The Story of Chicago
'
s Prohibition Era
(New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1970); and John Kobler,
Capone, The Life and World of Al Capone
(Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2003).

2.
Gallup poll, 1941, 307.

3.
Ibid., 309.

4.
On a personal note, I recall giving a talk on Franklin Delano Roosevelt's “day that will live in infamy” speech and having a World War II vet remark that the quality of the speech was really immaterial to the reaction. As he put it, “FDR could have gotten on the radio and read the phone book and it wouldn't have mattered—no one I knew was not in favor of going to war with Japan after Pearl Harbor.”

5.
William Sheridan Allen,
The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922–1945
(New York: Franklin Watts, 1984); and Mary Fulbrook,
A Concise History of Germany
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

6.
The most famous of these was done by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, both of whom not only produced excellent and very readable studies but also have actual film footage, so you can see the results for yourself. If you haven't seen these (and if you've taken an Introduction to Psychology class you probably have), you really should check them out. Milgram is on YouTube under the heading 1962 Yale University obedience, the Milgram Experiment,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpGJjNUbmpo
; Zimbardo is at
www.prisonexp.org
.

7.
An excellent source for the buildup of anti-Semitic thought prior to the Nazis in Germany is Howard M. Sachar,
The Course of Modern Jewish History
(New York: Vintage Books, 1990).

8.
On the origins of the Cold War, see John Lewis Gaddis,
The Cold War: A New History
(New York: Penguin Press, 2005).

Amy H. Sturgis

Since the birth of the
Star Trek
franchise, one of its trademarks has been its ability to project a vision of the future while offering commentary on the present day. The main credit for this goes to creator Gene Roddenberry, who, as author and editor Michael Shermer puts it, “was an enlightened storyteller who baldly addressed the deepest issues in science, religion, philosophy, politics, and current events.”
1
According to Roddenberry's own account, however, he persuaded network executives to bring
Star Trek
to life by appealing not to a relevant present or hopeful future, but rather a mythic past, pitching his idea as a Western in space: “
Wagon Train
to the stars.”
2

Star Trek
came of age during a time of social unrest and political change. While its episodes portrayed the adventure and excitement of twenty-third-century space travel, they also responded directly to contemporary U.S. events, from the Vietnam conflict (
TOS
, “A Private Little War”) to racial tension (
TOS
, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”). Despite the fact that the original series used Native American subjects as part of its storytelling, it set the precedent for later
Trek
shows and films by being significantly less aware of and engaged with similar contemporary events involving Native Americans.