RESEARCH ESSAY Liberals in space: the 1960s politics of Star Trek
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The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture
Vol. 5, No. 2, December 2012, 185–203
RESEARCH ESSAY
Liberals in space: the 1960s politics of Star Trek
Mike O’Connor*
Independent Scholar, Atlanta, GA, USA
Among television programs of the late 1960s Star Trek was somewhat
anomalous in tackling philosophical and political themes, and in doing so in a
consistently liberal voice. Its statements, however, reveal not only the highest
aspirations of the period’s liberal project, but also the limitations and unresolved
tensions of that approach. This point is exemplified by considering Star Trek’s
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treatment of the two most significant issues of the era: the African-American
civil rights movement and the ongoing crisis of the Cold War. With regard to
the first, Star Trek took a strong and unambiguous stance in favor of what one
might call liberal color-blindness. Yet by the late 1960s, the rise of Black Power
and the growing white working-class backlash against the civil rights movement
had raised questions that liberal color-blindness could not answer. As a result,
Star Trek’s racial politics unintentionally reflected the limitations of the integra-
tionist framework. Star Trek was more conflicted and less confident about the
issues of Vietnam and the Cold War. The series consistently articulated anticom-
munist “establishment” or “Cold War” liberalism, while simultaneously featuring
the equally strong, yet contradictory, message of the pacifist anti-militarism rem-
iniscent of the counterculture and New Left. Yet Star Trek’s undoubtedly con-
flicted position on the Cold War embodied less an unreflective or illiberal spirit
in the show than a broader split within the American left itself, between liberal
anticommunism and countercultural pacifism. Star Trek was unable to provide a
venue, even in a fictional universe, in which these contradictory positions could
co-exist.
Keywords: Star Trek; Gene Roddenberry; liberal color-blindness; Cold War lib-
eralism; countercultural pacifism; Vietnam War
[T]he novel, the movie and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the
sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress. (Rich-
ard Rorty)1
Star Trek is my statement to the world. Understand that Star Trek is more than just
my political philosophy. It is my social philosophy, my racial philosophy, my
overview on life and the human condition. (Gene Roddenberry)2
In May of 2009, Paramount Pictures released the latest film to bear the name of the
1966–9 television series Star Trek. The movie opened to overwhelmingly favorable
reviews, and box office receipts exceeded all expectations. One writer, however,
sounded a note of remorse. Noting on Newsweek’s web page that the “high points
of the series generally involved stories that focused on sophisticated philosophical
*Email: oconnor404@gmail.com
ISSN 1754-1328 print/ISSN 1754-1336 online
! 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17541328.2012.721584
http://www.tandfonline.com186 M. O’Connor
or ethical ideas,” Marc Bain complained that the new film “largely jettisons
complicated ethical conundrums in favor of action sequences and special effects …
[W]hat’s missing,” he lamented, “are the typically progressive politics and moral
dilemmas that made the original ‘Trek’ more than a space-age adventure show and
helped earn it legions of ardent fans.”3
New York Times cultural-critic-at-large Edward Rothstein registered a similar
concern. His review of a museum exhibition on Star Trek, one that opened concur-
rently with the film, charged that in displaying props and costumes, the exhibitors
misread the significance of the original television show. Its influence and popularity
stems not from these objects, Rothstein argued, but from “creating thought experi-
ments in which humanity is the subject.” In the late 1960s, Star Trek had “tapped
into the … utopian passions of countercultural liberalism,” fictionally “spreading
the gospel of liberal understanding,” while it “both championed, and dissented
from, that movement’s peaceful, anti-militaristic vision.”4
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It is telling that these writers, who explain the message and appeal of the origi-
nal series in terms of its “progressive politics” and “countercultural liberalism,”
would find this aspect lacking in a contemporary production of Star Trek. Over the
decades, the show’s politics have become less important to newer generations of
fans. The series’ tremendous commercial success and the concomitant emergence of
its characters, catch phrases, plot devices, actors, and even fan activities as signifi-
cant cultural touchstones have obscured the role of politics in Star Trek’s original
vision. On the other hand, writers who are critical of Star Trek – most often schol-
ars – have not ignored the show’s political outlook as much as they have vilified it.
Contemporary critics who have commented on Star Trek’s politics have generally
not found them to be progressive at all. David Golumbia, a scholar of Media Stud-
ies, referred to Star Trek as a “supposedly liberal program,”5 and the editors of a
collection of academic essays on Star Trek dismiss the show’s “visible attempts at
ethnic and gender diversity” as “liberal chic” that only “superficially validate[s] lib-
eral perspectives on multiculturalism and feminism.”6 Historian Nicholas Evan
Sarantakes, after noting the volume and diversity of Star Trek studies, nonetheless
offered the general impression that “it is safe to say that most academics writing
about this phenomenon have attempted to show that the original series was a mani-
festation of culturally regressive elements of contemporary society.”7 Such charac-
terizations hardly suggest a view of Star Trek as “progressive” or even “liberal.”
This type of criticism, however, typically fails to acknowledge the time and
place in which the series was situated. When viewed in its historical context, as a
commentary on the political discourse of the late 1960s, Star Trek’s status as a “lib-
eral” document is difficult to deny. Yet by the time of Star Trek’s airing in 1966–9,
the relevance and coherence of mainstream liberalism was beginning to decline: lib-
erals had no real vision for how to deal with racial issues after the passage of the
Voting Rights Act of 1965, and they were hopelessly divided in their attitudes
toward the Vietnam conflict and the Cold War. Star Trek solved the first problem
by supporting a color-blind liberalism that, while energetically, forcibly, and coura-
geously expressed, nonetheless seemed to address the issues of an earlier time more
than it did more contemporary concerns. With regard to Vietnam and the nation’s
broader anti-communist foreign policy, however, the show spoke in a confusing and
contradictory voice that embraced both Cold War liberalism and countercultural
pacifism. Star Trek provides an excellent lens into both the triumphs and the con-
tradictions of a declining postwar liberal vision.The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 187
Star Trek as 1960s television
Star Trek chronicled a group of interstellar space travelers in the twenty-third cen-
tury. In the show, Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), his extraterrestrial first
officer and close friend Spock (Leonard Nimoy), and their shipmates serve aboard
the USS Enterprise, a vessel in the “Starfleet” of the United Federation of Planets,
of which Earth is a central member. The ship’s mission has two arguably conflict-
ing components: a scientific and cultural mandate to explore the outer reaches of
space and make peaceful contact with those who live there, and a military and
diplomatic responsibility to represent the interests of the Federation against the
incursions of its two primary enemies: the Klingons and the Romulans. Kirk and
his crew are constantly brought into contact with ideas, cultures, and even species
that are significantly different from theirs; when so confronted, their twin responsi-
bilities are often thrown into conflict. Kirk’s actions in resolving these dilemmas
often, if not usually, imply a fairly strong stance about some moral or political
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issue.
The show’s novel format suggested high ambitions on the part of its producers.
The people who worked on Star Trek, however, were not quixotic visionaries, but
experienced television professionals. Gene Roddenberry was the creator of Star
Trek. He served as its executive producer and is widely viewed as the auteur whose
worldview animated the show. Roddenberry had learned the ropes of the television
industry by writing for a variety of genres while moonlighting as a Los Angeles
policeman. By 1956, the aspiring scribe had met with enough success to resign
from the force and devote himself to writing full time. From that point forward,
Roddenberry sold scripts to dozens of shows, including police procedurals and
westerns; perhaps most notably, he wrote 24 episodes of Have Gun – Will Travel
(1957–63). From there he was able to create and produce his own show, The Lieu-
tenant, which premiered in 1963 and lasted only one season. Though the show was
not a success, Roddenberry’s experience paved the way for Star Trek, his second
show, to make it to the air.
Star Trek’s actors also had a great deal of experience in the television industry.
The two leads, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, were established Hollywood
veterans when they were first cast in Star Trek. Shatner had acted in over 50 differ-
ent series, including some that are quite notable in the history of television: Howdy
Doody, Naked City, 77 Sunset Strip, and Gunsmoke. Nimoy’s equally long (and
overlapping) résumé featured parts on, among others, Dragnet, Rawhide, Bonanza,
and Perry Mason. Similar histories characterize the careers of the rest of the cast
and crew, all of whom could boast of a wide range of experience in the many tele-
vision genres of the time.
The producers of Star Trek viewed their show as a thoughtful one, but the most
successful programs during this period, such as The Andy Griffith Show (1960–8),
The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–71), Bewitched (1964–72), and Green Acres (1965–
71), were often lighter fare. In such an environment, Star Trek had some trouble
even getting on the air: the show’s eventual network home, NBC, had initially
rejected the first Star Trek pilot for being “too cerebral.”8 When he had earlier tried
to sell the series to the studios, Roddenberry had been careful to emphasize Star
Trek’s similarity to other shows, rather than its unique qualities. Pitching the as-yet-
unmade series to Desilu (later bought by Paramount), he described his show as
“Wagon Train to the [s]tars.”9188 M. O’Connor
Yet Wagon Train, an influential western that ran from 1957–65, was not science
fiction. That genre was well known to television viewers, but the expectations that
it generated were ones that Roddenberry generally wanted to escape. Earlier shows
along the lines of Captain Video and His Video Rangers (1949–55), Flash Gordon
(1954–5), and My Favorite Martian (1963–6) established science fiction on televi-
sion as a somewhat silly genre intended primarily for children. (CBS passed on Star
Trek because they had recently signed a science fiction series in this vein: Lost in
Space.) These shows lacked the depth of characterization and storytelling that Rod-
denberry wanted to bring to televised science fiction. More ambitious science fiction
programs such as The Twilight Zone (1959–64) and The Outer Limits (1963–5)
featured ironic, thoughtful, and sometimes scathing commentary on the contempo-
rary moment and, more broadly, the human condition. (Both Shatner and Nimoy
had previously been featured in episodes of each of these series.) But these were
anthology programs that created new characters and situations with each episode.
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This format allowed their writers and producers greater freedom to tell a wide vari-
ety of stories and make observations on virtually any subject. At the same time,
however, it limited their ability to construct permanent features of the show, those
in which the audience are more likely to become invested. Roddenberry no doubt
had in mind the advantages and disadvantages of both sorts of science fiction series
when he presented Star Trek, in his original treatment, as a sort of best of both
worlds. The series, he wrote in the pitch, “will be a television ‘first’… [a] one-hour
science-fiction series with continuing characters … Star Trek is a new kind of tele-
vision science fiction with all the advantages of an anthology, but none of the limi-
tations.”10
In the end, despite the experience of those who worked on the show and their
desire to present ideas in a familiar context, Star Trek was mostly an anomaly in
the world of late 1960s television. While it was on the air, Star Trek had very
devoted fans, but not enough of them. The show’s attempt to engage with political
and philosophical questions in a genre that many associated with children never
caught on with a wide enough audience. Its ratings were poor, and NBC had Star
Trek slated for cancellation after its second season. Only a massive fan letter-writing
campaign saved the show for a third – and final – year. The existence of that last
season, however, meant that after Star Trek had been permanently cancelled in
1969, enough episodes existed to justify interest among local stations in broadcast-
ing reruns of the show. It was these local broadcasts, rather than the initial run, that
spurred the tremendous popularity of Star Trek. The program’s growth into a cult
favorite and, eventually, a bona fide popular entertainment franchise thus dates to
the early 1970s rather than the period in which it was actually produced. The first
Star Trek convention was in 1972, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture premiered in
1979.
Though television of the late 1960s was generally averse to overt political state-
ments, the medium was undergoing changes at that time. Rowan and Martin’s
Laugh-In, whose very title suggested an affiliation with the counterculture, featured
an anarchic style of humor and a willingness to engage political topics. (For many
voters, Richard Nixon’s appearance on the show during the 1968 presidential cam-
paign went a long way toward softening up the candidate’s image.) This popular
show ran for six seasons starting in 1967. Beginning the same year, the Smothers
Brothers Comedy Hour (1967–9) identified much more strongly with the New Left
and the antiwar movement. As a result, it also faced constant problems withThe Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 189
censorship from CBS, the network on which it was broadcast. Despite high ratings,
CBS found the series to be more trouble than it was worth, and abruptly cancelled
the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in the middle of its third season. Within a few
years, however, the most significant trend on television would be the increase in
“socially relevant” programs, such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–7), All in
the Family (1971–9), and M⁄A⁄S⁄H (1972–83). Given the philosophical and politi-
cal ambitions of Star Trek, it is not surprising that it only achieved its greatest
influence and popularity years after it went off the air.
Liberalism as technocratic utopianism
Though Roddenberry set out to produce a show that was thoughtful and philosophi-
cal, rather than explicitly political, the statements that Star Trek made were almost
exclusively liberal ones. The strongest such commentary in the series came from its
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setting, which was characterized by a utopian Earth of the future that embodied
everything that the show’s producers, in particular Roddenberry, deemed to be good
in the world. Scattered references throughout the show suggested that perennial
social problems such as war, hunger, racism, sexism, and even crime have been all
but eliminated in the twenty-third century. In order to free this utopian vision from
the push and pull of contemporary debates, Star Trek’s producers were intentionally
quite vague about how these things had occurred. The Earth of the future would
definitely not feature, say, poverty or racism, but viewers would have no idea if it
had needed redistributionist economic policies or Affirmative Action to arrive at
such a state of affairs. In its instructions to aspiring scribes, the Star Trek Writer’s
Guide made this point explicitly.
References by our characters to Earth will be simply a logical projection of current
scientific and social advances in food production, transportation, communications, and
so on. If you want to assume that Earth cities of that future are splendidly planned
with fifty-mile parkland strips around them, fine. But for obvious reasons, let’s not get
into any detail of Earth’s politics of Star Trek’s century, for example, which socio-
economic system ultimately worked out best.11
The show thus positioned these advances in technological understanding as benefi-
cial and relevant from the standpoint of justice and social utility, but essentially
value-neutral, signifying no particular political content.
Despite this lack of specificity, however, it is difficult to avoid the impression
that the vision of utopia presented in Star Trek was a particularly progressive one. In
this vision of the future, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union existed any
longer, both having been subsumed by a benevolent worldwide planetary govern-
ment. The vision of the Cold War peacefully coming to a close without the United
States emerging as the victor would have seemed “utopian” only to a liberal sensibil-
ity. Moreover, the Earth of Star Trek is a member of what is essentially a galactic
United Nations,12 in which the individual members are planets rather than mere
countries. Except for the villains, nearly every character introduced in the series was
affiliated in one way or another with the Federation, suggesting the liberal fantasy,
and conservative nightmare, of an all-encompassing technocratic state. This dynamic
combined with the virtually complete lack of private enterprise13 to suggest to the
politically minded viewer that the specter of socialism might haunt the Federation.190 M. O’Connor
Star Trek was also aggressively secular. Roddenberry frequently and publicly
identified as a humanist, believing that greater scientific and technical understanding
would render religion obsolete. “[S]upernatural” accounts of the world, he claimed
in 1991, “just don’t make sense,”14 and Star Trek reflected this viewpoint. In sev-
eral episodes, alien cultures were depicted worshipping gods who were in actuality
only scientifically advanced races or technologies. In one such instance, Earth’s
own ancient Greek gods were revealed to have been space-faring aliens, and in
another, Kirk himself was worshipped as a god by the inhabitants of a less techno-
logically accomplished society.15
Finally, in its dealing with other civilizations, the Federation trucks in a form of
cultural relativism. The “Prime Directive” of Starfleet – its General Order Number
One – forbids personnel from interfering in the normal development of any civiliza-
tion that it might encounter. “[T]he highest of our laws,” Kirk tells the leaders of
the planet Capella IV in the episode “Friday’s Child,” “states that your world is
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yours and will always remain yours.”16 The Federation’s highest values are to
respect the values of others. This formulation served as a rebuke to much of
American foreign policy history – westward expansion, the Mexican War, the
Spanish-American War, the 1954 Guatemalan coup, and so on – as well as to the
contemporary Cold War attitude in which the great powers viewed smaller states
only as pawns in their geopolitical strategy. Additionally, as college and university
students took over their campuses and demanded courses and departments featuring
material from outside of the traditional western canon, the relativism that under-
wrote many of these demands struck conservatives as an attack on their own
heritage and values. Star Trek’s setting, in short, suggested that the principles
around which society will be organized in the future look suspiciously similar to
those of 1960s liberals.
Star Trek and civil rights
In addition to the rather broad message communicated by its setting, Star Trek also
issued specific statements on the political issues of the day. The series voiced one
particular value most clearly and strongly: an unequivocal support for racial equality
and opposition to any form of segregation. Rodenberry simply found it inconceiv-
able that racism could exist in the future. “Intolerance in the 23rd century?” he
asked. “Improbable! If man survives that long, he will have learned to take a
delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures … This infi-
nite variation and delight, this is part of the optimism we built into Star Trek.”17
More than mere tolerance, Star Trek invited appreciation for racial and cultural
differences.
Though Brown v. Board of Education had been decided 12 years before Star
Trek took to the air, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of
1965 had both passed Congress by comfortable margins, racial segregation
remained a national political issue. By establishing private “segregation academies,”
white southerners avoided sending their children to the integrated public schools
required by Brown. Alabama governor George Wallace first made national headlines
in 1963 by unsuccessfully attempting to physically block black students from
enrolling at the University of Alabama. African Americans routinely encountered
threats and violence when seeking to purchase homes in white neighborhoods, evenThe Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 191
though the Civil Rights Act made discrimination in housing illegal. Many business
owners refused to serve African-American customers, again in defiance of the Civil
Rights Act. One such proprietor, Lester Maddox, became a hero for segregationists
when he and his sons brandished axe handles at African Americans who tried to
desegregate his Atlanta fried chicken restaurant. In 1967, he became the governor
of Georgia.18 The next year Wallace ran for president on a third party ticket and
carried five states. Segregation and racial equality were still very live issues during
the period on which Star Trek was on the air.
Star Trek took a strong stand on these matters. The crew of the Enterprise pre-
sented a glimpse of what the idealized future Earth might look like: on the ship’s
bridge were not only a Russian navigator, but also an ethnically Asian helmsman
and a black female communications officer.19 Considering the racial tumult in the
United States during the period in which Star Trek aired, its cast alone made a pro-
gressive statement on race and gender relations that few in the late 1960s would
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have missed.
Beyond the racial characteristics of the cast and the characters they played, the
specific plots of many episodes, and comments from characters within them,
expressed in a direct way that the show strongly supported racial integration. The
show’s heroes consistently invoked an ideal of what might be called liberal color-
blindness. Their comments and actions suggested that there is something deeply
unjust about holding a person’s physical characteristics against him/her, and many
episodes presented characters offhandedly mentioning the fact that bigotry has been
eradicated from twenty-third-century Earth, and is frowned upon throughout the gal-
axy. In the episode “Plato’s Stepchildren,” for example, Kirk tells Alexander the
dwarf, who is belittled and dominated by the other, taller members of his group,
“Where I come from, size, shape or color make no difference.”20 Though conserva-
tives have since used the ideal of color-blindness to reject, minimize, or delegiti-
mize demands for racial justice, Star Trek never downplayed the claims of those
who suffer from discrimination. Having the advantage of a fictional, created uni-
verse, the Star Trek writers were able to pit their egalitarian, color-blind ideal
against an overtly bigoted alternative in order to make a statement against racism,
segregation, and stratification. Indeed, this was one of the more prominent themes
of the series.21
More metaphorically, Star Trek took on racial issues by using alien species from
other planets as allegorical stand-ins for contemporary human groups. The most
prominent statement in this regard was the character of Spock, whose pointed ears,
upswept eyebrows, green-tinted skin and sober demeanor mark him as having an
unearthly origin. The residents of his home planet, Vulcan, have adopted a philoso-
phy of stoicism that forbids displays of emotion, in contrast to the more passionate
humans. Spock’s literally alien presence on the ship serves as a constant reminder
of the Federation’s inclusiveness; his people’s highest honor is one that recognizes
“Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.”22 In the episode “Balance of Terror,”
a Lieutenant Stiles (who, significantly, never again appeared in the series) exhibits
blatant prejudice toward Spock on the basis of his Vulcan heritage, before being
upbraided by Captain Kirk: “Leave any bigotry in your quarters. There’s no room
for it on the bridge. Do I make myself clear?”23
The episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” goes so far as to mock the rac-
ist mindset. It portrays the last two survivors of a dead species, both literally half-
black and half-white, whose racial hatred motivates them both to want to kill one192 M. O’Connor
another. The crew, however, is puzzled: even the observant, analytical Spock notes
that the “obvious, physical evidence” suggests that the two are of the “same breed.”
Exasperated, one of them has to explain the distinction. “Are you blind, Com-
mander Spock? Well, look at me. Look at me! ... I am black on the right side …
All of his people are white on the right side.”24 The distinction is so trivial that oth-
ers outside of that culture do not even notice it, yet it has served as the basis for
generations of hatred and destruction. This episode argues, none too subtly, that all
such racial distinctions are equally ludicrous. Additionally, Star Trek often went
beyond allegorical treatments of the late 1960s US racial situation to challenge
deep-seated human prejudices that link virtue with beauty, and danger with outward
appearances that come across as frightening or ugly.25
Because of Star Trek’s relative lack of popularity, very little was written about it
when it was on the air. The available evidence, however, suggests that contempo-
rary audiences clearly understood Star Trek to be taking a strong position about
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racial equality. In 1967, one television critic praised “the image of an integrated
crew representing diverse races,” and the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP) presented Roddenberry with an Image Award.26
Nichelle Nichols, the African-American actor who played communications officer
Uhura, reported that Martin Luther King was a “fan” of the show. Nichols had
considered quitting the series after the first season: her character’s few lines offered
her only limited opportunities for professional growth, and she faced hostility and
mistreatment from whites at the studio who resented her presence on television.
King, however, urged her to stay on. He insisted that the presence of a regular
black character on the show was of vital significance to constructing a more racially
just society. “Don’t you realize this gift this man [Roddenberry] has given the
world?,” he asked her. “Men and women of all races going forth in peaceful explo-
ration, living as equals … For the first time, the world sees us as we should be
seen, as equals, as intelligent people – as we should be.”27
Despite the two landmark laws and gradual change in public attitudes toward
overt racism and segregation, Star Trek’s ideal of liberal color-blindness did repre-
sent a strong stand on the issue. Many NBC affiliates in the south, for example,
refused to air Star Trek, or did not broadcast specific episodes of it, such as the one
in which Kirk and Uhura engage in what is often called American television’s first
interracial kiss.28 But Star Trek’s unambiguous, principled stand came at the cost of
avoiding some of the complexity surrounding the racial issues of the time period.
By the late 1960s, the civil rights ideals of integration and non-violence no longer
defined the agenda of many who fought against racism and discrimination. Five
days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, African Americans in
the Watts section of Los Angeles rioted for several days in response to a case of
police brutality. It was the worst instance of urban violence in the nation’s history:
34 people were killed and property damage was estimated in the tens of millions of
dollars. Over the next several years, similar conflagrations would engulf Chicago,
Detroit, Newark, Atlanta, Cleveland, and many other American cites. The nonvio-
lent, integrationist ideals of the civil rights movement seemed inadequate to an
influential minority of African Americans who called for “Black Power” as some-
thing distinct from racial equality, and who sometimes avowed violence as a tool of
self-defense and political pressure. In turn, many whites, most of them working
class, saw the civil rights movement as oriented toward punishing them. Believing
that blacks had already been given plenty, and noting a turn toward violence and aThe Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 193
demand for “power,” many of them were losing any sympathy they might have had
for the movement, and turning toward a more conservative politics of resentment.29
This was the situation that held on planet Earth during the period in which Star
Trek was on the air. The show’s strong and even moralistic stand against overt rac-
ism and legalized segregation was not conceptually equipped to address the more
subtle and nuanced issues raised by the racial situation of the late 1960s. Are whites
who move away from integrating neighborhoods actually doing something wrong?
Is violence justifiable as a tool against oppression? Might innocent members of a
dominant group be hurt by policies intended to bring about racial equality? To what
extent should victims of racism be held responsible for destructive behaviors that
might stem from frustration or the lack of opportunity? Should society bear the
responsibility for the unequal economic opportunities that are rooted in the racial
inequality of the past? Star Trek did not have answers to these questions. In its tele-
vision universe of liberal color-blindness, bigotry was a personal or social flaw akin
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to a mistake in judgment. Once corrected by the good people of the starship Enter-
prise, the scales fell from the offenders’ eyes, the social policies were appropriately
changed, and the formerly subjugated group emerged, none the worse for wear, to
take its rightful place in society. In viewing social stratification as a problem that
could be addressed with changes in beliefs and policies, rather than one based in
traditions, emotions, and interests that might take generations to overcome, Star
Trek was essentially arguing, in the late 1960s, for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The show’s passionate but slightly out-of-phase championing of civil rights,
however, is entirely understandable when one considers the liberal position on racial
issues after the movement peaked. As African-American activists and white student
groups declared themselves to be in a revolutionary posture, and the working-class
whites whose unions made up the backbone of the Democratic coalition began to
resent the civil rights movement itself, the path forward on racial issues for estab-
lishment liberals was not in any way clear. By the beginning of the 1970s, wrote
Jefferson Cowie in his history of that decade, “the liberal ‘Democratic Party faced a
dilemma that it could not solve”. It had to simultaneously “maintain support within
the white blue-collar base that came of age during the New Deal and World War II
era”, while simultaneously’ “servicing the pressing demands for racial and gender
equity arising from the sixties”30
Star Trek could allegorically square that circle, but only by relying heavily on
its ability as a fictional program to create dramatic problems as well as their solu-
tions. Those episodes that made the strongest statements about civil rights often fea-
tured conflict that was narrowly tailored to highlight the specific attitudes and
policies that the show recommended, without exploring the more difficult issues
that had appeared in the immediate aftermath of the great triumphs of the civil
rights movement. The real liberals of the late 1960s had no such luxury.
Liberals and the Cold War
Yet the civil rights movement was not the only significant political issue that con-
fronted Americans in the late 1960s. Equally important was the question of what
posture the United States should take toward the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
On this issue, however, Star Trek took a position that was far more complicated
and less consistent than its stance on racial integration. The series suggested at194 M. O’Connor
some points that the United States had a clear and justified obligation to oppose the
USSR. Yet other moments found it taking exactly the opposite position, strongly
opposing the militarism and brinksmanship that characterized the Cold War era in
which Star Trek was produced.
This ambivalence or equivocation, however, mirrored the internal fissures of
American liberalism itself. This split was represented most clearly by a growing
divergence between liberals and the “New Left” over the Vietnam War. While the
war itself was a product of the “Cold War” or “establishment” liberalism practiced
by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, those who opposed it were most
likely to do from the perspective of the countercultural politics of the Yippies or
the vaguely defined leftism of Students for a Democratic Society. In struggling to
present a consistent philosophy on the issues of the day, Star Trek replicated the
confusion inherent in the declining American liberalism.
The philosophy known as “Cold War liberalism” was not only the defining
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strain of liberalism in the postwar period, it was the dominant public philosophy in
the United States. In a mood christened the “liberal consensus” by British journalist
Godfrey Hodgson, both Democrats and Republicans exhibited a widespread agree-
ment regarding the necessity of not only fighting communism abroad, but also pre-
serving the welfare state bequeathed to the postwar generation by the New Deal.31
Thus Cold War liberals saw themselves as both tough-minded (internationally) and
compassionate (domestically), an attitude reflected in Star Trek’s depiction of an
idyllic Earth devoid of social problems combined with an unpredictable, and fre-
quently dangerous, outer space.
Perhaps the most forceful expression of the philosophy and strategy of interna-
tional Cold War liberalism came in the Truman Doctrine, a 1947 statement that
would define American geopolitical aims and policies until the Reagan Era. In it,
President Harry Truman contrasted the two “ways of life,” between which “nearly
every nation must choose.” While the first (implicitly that of the western democra-
cies) is defined by freedom, the second (presumably an unnamed communism) is
“based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority.” With com-
munism thus positioned as that which, by definition, cannot reflect the will of the
people, it can only be instituted by an unjust and forceful imposition, “through ter-
ror and oppression.” Under these conditions, then, the United States must discard
its tendency toward isolationism and “support free peoples who are resisting
attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” to “assist free
peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.”32 By closing off the
possibility that people could freely choose communism, the Truman Doctrine
allowed the United States to inject itself into the affairs of other nations while still
rhetorically affirming the traditionally liberal position that peoples should be able to
determine their own political fates.
By the late 1960s, however, many were finding the ideology of the liberal con-
sensus to be stale and hypocritical. The right had long doubted the liberal commit-
ment to fighting communism, and the Vietnam War was exposing the growing
fissures within liberalism itself. During this period, many college students and
young adults were attacking liberal anti-communism from the left, increasingly
viewing it as little more than an apologia for the pursuit of American interests
abroad, one that expressed no regard for the prosperity or self-determination of
other nations. “In the name of freedom,” read one leaflet from the most prominent
organization of young people, Students for a Democratic Society, “America isThe Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 195
mutilating Vietnam. In the name of peace, America turns that fertile country into a
wasteland. And in the name of democracy, America is burying its own dreams and
suffocating its own potential.”33 Others, again mostly in their 20s, embraced the
“counterculture,” characterized by the liberating power of eastern spirituality, psy-
chedelic drugs, free love, and rock music. This movement rejected politics itself as
too “establishment,” which amounted to a repudiation of Cold War liberalism as
insufficiently revolutionary. By 1968, relations between these two camps had
become so strained that Democratic president Lyndon Johnson had drawn an anti-
war challenger, Senator Eugene McCarthy, in his party’s primary, and soon with-
drew entirely from the race. This tension was manifested physically at the Demo-
cratic National Convention in Chicago, where police beat protesters outside the
convention hall, as inside the party nominated stalwart anti-communist liberal
Hubert Humphrey as its new presidential candidate.
As a product of the late 1960s, Star Trek struggled with these contradictory lib-
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eral impulses no less than did the Democratic Party during the same period. The pro-
gressive utopianism represented by the Federation and the twenty-third-century Earth
suggests a technological humanism characterized by the faith that people, if left free
and untrammeled, can create a society in which everyone has an equal opportunity
to develop their talents and interests in the pursuit of a meaningful life. Yet Star Trek
also shows the influence of its times in manifesting a significant concern with the
forces that endanger the conditions necessary for such flourishing. Among the most
significant of these threats are violence, tyranny, and totalitarianism, and the show
took a consistent line in suggesting that every step should be taken to safeguard
human potential against them. Like Cold War liberalism, then, Star Trek asserted that
war can be one of the costs of maintaining this liberal utopia. Yet the show also bore
the mark of pacifist anti-war countercultural liberalism in simultaneously lamenting,
and at times rejecting, violence itself.
Star Trek’s countercultural pacifism
Many scholars have emphasized Star Trek’s Cold War liberalism while ignoring or
minimizing the show’s very prominent anti-militarism. In his seminal 1988 article
“Captain Kirk: Cold Warrior,” Rick Worland concluded that “[i]ts progressive
humanism aside, Star Trek neatly duplicated the configuration of international Cold
War politics of the 1960s.”34 He argued that the show continually positioned Kirk
and his crew as representatives of Federation interests against those of the Klingons
and Romulans, thereby allegorically legitimating the Cold War pattern of thinking
that viewed any American actions as justified by the evils of communism, and less
powerful nations as pawns in the struggle between the great powers. When touching
on this issue, most scholarly commentators have seconded Worland’s initial insight.
Mark P. Lagon wrote that “the zealous desire of James T. Kirk … to spread the
Federation’s way of life serves as a mirror to observe the American style of foreign
policy,” while Daniel Bernardi has suggested that Star Trek seeks to “rationalize
NATO’s agenda of deterring Soviet expansion.”35
Such analyses undoubtedly capture something important about the show. Yet
scholars have consistently minimized or ignored in Star Trek a consistent anti-mili-
tarist posture whose critique of the Cold War, geopolitical brinksmanship and
militarism resonates more broadly with left-liberal countercultural values than with196 M. O’Connor
Cold War liberal ones. A consistent trope of the show features the ruins of
advanced societies that have been destroyed through some sort of catastrophe, usu-
ally self-inflicted.36 Though not all of these civilizations were specifically destroyed
by a nuclear holocaust, Star Trek clearly evoked the end-of-all-that-we-know as a
very live possibility, and typically presented the cause of this Armageddon as
humanoid hubris rather than the designs of an evil enemy. Moreover, Star Trek’s
characters often cast aspersion on the actual Cold War of the 1960s. As Lagon
noted, “[f]requent references in the series to the aggressive era of thermonuclear
weapons in the late twentieth century are cast as expressions of thankfulness for
having transcended a period of pointless conflicts.”37 Typical in this regard is the
episode “Assignment: Earth,” in which the Enterprise is accidentally thrown back
in time to 1968. The crew meets one Gary Seven, a human who has been trained
by aliens to surreptitiously keep Earth on the right track. Seven observes that “Earth
technology and science has progressed faster than political and social knowledge,”
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and takes on the mission, of which Kirk approves, “to prevent Earth civilization
from destroying itself before it can mature into a peaceful society.” Referring to an
upcoming US nuclear satellite launch, intended to maintain the balance of power,
Seven observes, “[t]hat’s the same kind of nonsense that almost destroyed planet
Omicron IV.”38
More centrally, Star Trek’s characters often express oppositional attitudes toward
violence and war itself. Episodes such as “Arena” or “The Corbomite Manuever”
find Kirk refusing to kill an adversary who has threatened to destroy the Enterprise,
even offering assistance to one in the latter case. In “The Devil in the Dark,” Kirk
and Spock have to forcibly stop a group of miners from killing a being whose non-
humanoid appearance prevents them from recognizing her intelligence and compas-
sion.39 Additionally, many individual episodes carried a moral that expressly
decried institutionalized violence. In “A Taste of Armageddon,” Kirk and his crew
encounter two planets that have been at war with each other for 500 years. To
enable themselves to continue in this state of affairs, the two governments have
constructed massive computers that simulate virtual attacks; after the requisite calcu-
lations, those citizens “killed” in the attacks are to report to the “disintegration
chamber.” Kirk expresses to the leader of one of the planets his disgust with this
arrangement. “Death, destruction, disease, horror: that’s what war is all about.
That’s what makes it a thing to be avoided. You’ve made it neat and painless – so
neat and painless you’ve had no reason to stop it.”40 The captain destroys their
computers in the hopes that the threat of real war will bring about the desire for
peace. Kirk’s strenuous opposition to an endless war between two equally matched
powers would have clearly resonated with late 1960s audiences as a statement
opposing the Cold War.
Perhaps the strongest message against war and violence occurs in “Day of the
Dove.” In this episode, the Enterprise is assigned to investigate the destruction of a
Federation colony. Upon arrival, the crew finds a group of angry Klingons, whose
captain, Kang, insists that it was they who were attacked. Neither side believes or
trusts the other, but since their ship was destroyed, the Klingons are forced to hitch
a ride on the Federation vessel. When a shipboard accident traps the majority of the
Enterprise crew behind a bulkhead, the Klingons move to take over. As the level of
tension and hostility increases, Kirk, Spock, and Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott
begin to snap at each other and even threaten violence. At this point, Kirk realizes
that something is deeply wrong. “What’s happening to us?!” he exclaims. “We’veThe Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 197
been trained to think in other terms than war. We’ve been trained to fight its causes
if necessary. Then why are we behaving like a group of savages?!”
Kirk and Spock eventually learn that a formless, powerful being of great energy,
capable of altering a person’s mind, had stowed away on the ship. It feeds on the
emotions generated by hostility and violent actions, and is attempting to keep itself
perpetually nourished by arranging a never-ending war: the sides evenly matched,
the weapons limited and equal, the ship destined never to arrive at a destination,
and even the casualties perpetually resuscitated. Again, the parallel between this sit-
uation and the Cold War would have been obvious to any contemporary viewer.
Kirk’s comments throughout this episode decry the futility of war generally, but he
seems particularly discouraged at the permanence and perpetuity that characterize
their situation. “Two forces, aboard this ship, each of them equally armed. Has a
war been staged for us? ... complete with weapons and ideology and patriotic drum-
beating?” His only hope to end the situation is to convince the Klingons to cease
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hostilities in order to deprive the alien entity of its power. In confronting Kang with
this proposition, his description of the situation that they both should want to avoid
could double as a very cynical take on the Cold War itself: “For the rest of our
lives, a thousand lifetimes … It goes on – the good old game of war – pawn
against pawn, stopping the bad guys, while somewhere some thing sits back and
laughs.” Kang eventually and reluctantly agrees to a truce, asserting that “only a
fool fights in a burning house.”41
Though this strain against violence seems to have largely escaped the attention
of scholars, it was intentional on the part of those who worked on the show, and
was quite apparent to contemporary fans and critics. A year before the show pre-
miered, Roddenberry stressed in a memo the need to make clear to series writers
the “inner conflict between humanist and military commander” in the character of
Captain Kirk.42 In a 1968 interview, Leonard Nimoy (described by the reporter as
“openly a dove on the Vietnam conflict and a supporter of Senator Eugene J.
McCarthy”) lauded the show’s “healthy restraint in the areas of violence and milita-
rism.”43 Roddenberry even spoke in the countercultural language of opposition to
mainstream commercialism, telling Newsweek in 1968 that “we dig the show and
what we’re able to say,” and that Star Trek’s low ratings trouble him because “what
we see on TV depends only on whether it will sell deodorant.”44 A few years after
Star Trek had gone off the air, another Newsweek article described the program as
“optimistic about the future, sending its spaceship through a cosmos where war is
abolished on earth and all mankind is united in keeping peace in the universe.”45
Criticism of the Cold War was a significant part of the message of Star Trek.
Star Trek’s Cold War liberalism
This is not to argue, however, that Star Trek was never a vehicle for Cold War lib-
eralism. Many episodes – dramatically, both effective (“Balance of Terror”) and less
so (“The Enterprise Incident”) – served as straightforward allegories in which the
strong but innocent Federation crew must respond to the incursions of the ruthless
and unprincipled Klingons or Romulans.46 Despite the noble sentiments of the Fed-
eration’s Prime Directive – ensuring that less-developed planets are not pawns for
the galactic powers – in every one of the dozen or so episodes in which it applies,
Kirk breaks it. Though many of these violations are attempts to mitigate previous198 M. O’Connor
interference from an earlier Federation crew,47 others feature Kirk deliberately
upending a stable society, in the style of the Truman Doctrine, on the basis of his
belief that its inhabitants are not truly free.48 Though in these fictional narratives
Kirk’s reasoning is justifiable – an uncanny number of these cultures turn out to be
controlled by a soulless computer – the initial choice to construct those particular
stories and grapple with these specific issues does suggest a preoccupation with the
presumptions of Cold War liberalism. Most clearly, the episode “A Private Little
War” served as an intentional and obvious apologia for American actions in Viet-
nam.49 In that episode, Kirk is portrayed as measured, reluctant, and tortured over
his decision to provide one side of a local planetary conflict with only the weapons
that would maintain the balance of power – originally disturbed by the Klingons –
between the two equally matched forces. Thus commentators who find Cold War
liberalism in Star Trek are certainly not mistaken. But they tend to overlook the
show’s continual articulations of countercultural themes opposing militarism and
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violence, as well as the fact that Star Trek’s support for Cold War liberalism was
often more complicated than their analyses suggest.
The episode “Errand of Mercy” provides an excellent example. It finds Kirk and
Spock visiting the planet Organia, home to a pre-industrial and nonviolent people,
with the mission of preventing the approaching Klingons from establishing a beach-
head there. Kirk speaks to the planet’s “Council of Elders” about the great danger
threatening their planet, but Ayelborne, their leader, informs him that their “way of
life” forbids them to fight back, or even allow Kirk to fight on their behalf. The
captain becomes more and more exasperated in the face of the Organians’ placid
demeanor, relating how the Klingons will turn the entire planet into a vast slave
labor camp. Soon enough, all of his predictions come true, as the Klingons arrive,
take over the planet, and institute martial law.
In this episode, wrote Worland, “the Klingons and the Federation were firmly
established as two ideologically opposed superpower blocs that compete for the
hearts and minds of Third World planets,”50 which, he argued, declared a Cold
War allegory as a defining attribute of the series. While this analysis is true as far
as it goes, it ignores the clear import of the episode, as revealed in its dénoue-
ment. When a fleet of Federation ships arrives to do battle with the Klingons
above the planet, both sides find that their instruments have become too hot to
touch. The Organians then reveal themselves to be powerful beings who abhor
violence, and forbid the warring parties to continue in their conflict. Ayelborne
informs Kirk and Kor, the Klingon military governor, that they will no longer be
allowed to fight:
As I stand here, I also stand upon the home planet of the Klingon Empire, and the
home planet of your Federation, Captain. I’m putting a stop to this insane war …
Unless both sides agree to an immediate cessation of hostilities, all your armed forces,
wherever they may be, will be immediately immobilized.
Kirk, who had been pushing for violent resistance to the Klingon occupation since
he arrived on Organia, resents this inhibition on his freedom of action. He exclaims
in angry tones, “Even if you have some power that we don’t understand, you have
no right to dictate to our Federation” (“… or our Empire …” adds Kor defiantly)
“how to handle their interstellar relations. We have the right …”The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 199
At this point Ayelborne interrupts. “… to wage war, Captain? to kill millions of
innocent people? to destroy life on a planetary scale? Is that what you’re defend-
ing?”
The soundtrack plays climactic and even ironic sounding music, and Kirk’s
expression changes. He stammers. “Well, no one wants war … but there are proper
channels. People have a right to handle their own affairs. Eventually, we … will
…”
Again Ayelborne interrupts. “Oh, eventually you will have peace. But only after
millions of people have died.”
The moral impetus of this episode becomes apparent only after this exchange.
What originally appears as the Organians’ unwillingness to recognize the signifi-
cance of the Klingon threat, and their lack of appreciation for Kirk’s noble sacrifice,
shifts to a perception of Kirk himself (and, presumably, the Federation he repre-
sents) as being far too quick to pull the trigger. The Organians reveal Kirk, who
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claimed that it was only the militaristic impulses of the Klingons that force him to
advocate violence, to be as primed for war as his enemies. Later on, the captain
tells Spock that he is “embarrassed. I was furious with the Organians for stopping a
war I did not want.” 51 In this episode, it is Ayelborne, not Kirk, whose values are
most worthy of the viewers’ respect. Kirk is positioned as the hero not because he
is willing to fight for Federation values, but because he grows beyond that position,
which is to say, beyond Cold War liberalism.
With regard to the American prosecution of the Cold War, there is no “true”
position to be found in the analysis of Star Trek. The series consistently justified
the need to resist the incursions of violent and tyrannical enemies while at the same
time criticizing the militaristic mindset and decrying violence itself. Each of these
messages is absolutely essential to the meaning of the show; without one or the
other, Star Trek would have articulated a very different set of values. As allegorical
stances on American foreign policy in the late 1960s, however, these two statements
were simply incompatible. Yet they were faithful representations of the two
impulses that were tearing apart what remained of the liberal coalition: Cold War
liberalism and countercultural pacifism. No mere television show could coherently
represent the views of a movement that was no longer able to speak with one
voice.
The confusion of late 1960s liberalism
The politics of Star Trek were unabashedly liberal. Yet by the late 1960s, liberal
values themselves were increasingly difficult to define. The series championed racial
equality when it was still controversial but becoming less so, and consequently Star
Trek had little to say about the more relevant issues of what such egalitarianism
would actually require. The show’s advocacy of the muscular prosecution of the
Cold War and the US intervention in Vietnam sat inconsistently alongside its pos-
ture of pacifist anti-militarism. Yet liberals in the real world of the late 1960s were
hardly more consistent, being unable to agree among themselves which positions
most effectively embodied their views. In boldly taking its political stands, Star
Trek brought into relief both the most noble and the most contradictory aspects of
late 1960s liberalism.You can also read
