What do you think of when you think of the 1950s? Black-and-white, bland and boring. And what about the 1960s? Bright colors, rock ‘n’ roll and revolution. But what if I were to suggest that it was the forgotten years linking these decades that planted the roots from which the modern epoch emerged?

SYMBOLON answers this question by examining four episodes in the cultural life of America between the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. An omniscient narrator takes us on an unusual tour of this country ranging from monster movies to the World Series, contemporary classical music to the space program, finding the hidden foundations buried deep beneath the surface that form a bridge between the quiescent 1950s and the revolutionary 1960s, revealing their unique relevance to our contemporary age.

An opinionated, humorous, stylish work of creative nonfiction, SYMBOLON (in progress) will appeal to readers of history, journalism, nonfiction, and historical fiction in the style of Benjamin Labatut’s The MANIAC, Maria Popova’s Traversal, Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, Louis Menand’s The Free World, and W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.

from SYMBOLON

Alan Shepard lay on his back in a warm pool of piss. No longer the first man in space. Now he would be no more than an asterisk. Just a bit over two weeks earlier, Yuri Gagarin smiled into his helmet as Vostok 1 orbited the Earth. Poyekhali!he cried. Let’s go! Alan Shepard slammed his fist so hard against the table he nearly broke it. His fist and the table. Shepard’s flight had been delayed once, twice, three times—then a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth. Systems kept failing. His Redstone rocket wasn’t ready. Now merely the first American manned space flight. Suborbital. A mere hop, skip, and jump to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere, whereas Gagarin had completed almost a full orbit. Shepard’s anger at the failures of Mercury filled him like piss and vinegar and so he resolved, I’m just going to go in my suit, and he did. 

Time passed and the piss cooled a shiver across the small of his back. Shepard became increasingly impatient. Why don’t you guys fix your problems, he snarled, and light this candle. Shepard was the sort of guy that his secretary had two pictures of him she kept on his desk. One, of Shepard smiling, meant, go on in. The other, of Shepard frowning, meant, watch your fucking back. When the countdown finally began, he could feel the missile beneath him alive like an animal. What they were building was not a space program, he understood. What they were building was a nuclear program. Shepard, America’s first human projectile in this, its coldest war. The frigid Chosin Reservoir boiling compared to the Cold War now being waged. Mercury. The wingèd god. The engineers called it a capsule. Like pills. Swallowed by the vastness of space. The astronauts insisted it was a spacecraft. They didn’t like to think of themselves as interlopers. They didn’t like to think of themselves as passengers. We’re pilots, they insisted. We’re astronauts. 

At any rate, a thing can be two things at once. So, everyone agreed: spacecraft. It made no difference to the Nazis in Huntsville, where they were simply trying to launch payloads into space. A capsule, a spacecraft, a warhead, a man, a monkey: so long as it got to where it was going. In one piece. Hopefully in one piece. In one piece, or so everyone fervently hoped. Especially the astronauts. Though they knew, and accepted, the risks. As combat pilots, test pilots, they’d all seen death on its pale horse galloping clockwise around the track. Aspiring kings of the air, these erstwhile test pilots already America’s knights in shining armor. Standing on the cover of Life magazine in silver spacesuits, the twentieth century’s shiny suits of armor. 

Yet in point of fact the Mercury spacecraft could hardly be said to be piloted at all. You could turn it this way and you could turn it that way, to be sure. Like a carousel horse on its track, you could reach for the brass ring. Though the horse never left the track, you could reach for and seize the brass ring. Shepard had been reaching for that brass ring a long time. And now it was within his grasp, though what it was worth after Gagarin was unclear. It’s even more unclear why Director Gilruth chose Shepard. Shepard, of all people! That rough trickster, the very image of Mercury himself. Shepard who loved imitating comedian José Jiménez’s lazy drawl. The only Brown man in the entire space program an offensive comedic caricature invented by a White comedian. Yet at the time a mascot sufficiently beloved he even became an honorary astronaut. What is that called, his routine went, a crash helmet? Oh, Jiménez replied, I hope not. 

More quietly, Jiménez joked that if Shepard had actually fucked all the women he was rumored to have bedded, his dick would have fallen off. Later, even Bill Dana, that fine avatar of comedy who performed as José Jiménez, belatedly realized he was not actually Brown, and held a mock funeral for his ugly creation. Jiménez was dead. Shepard lived on an asshole. Before I went to the moon, I was a rotten SOB, he admitted. Now I’m just an SOB. 

It’s known Gilruth was saving John Glenn for the first orbital flight, and to this day it’s Glenn most Americans remember. Shepard, in exquisite contradistinction to that fair-haired hero, was a bit of a wild card, a bit rough, a bit uncouth, a bit of a ladies’ man. A bit. Unlike many of his fellow astronauts he’d never chased MiGs across Korea, only women across the Med. Then, eventually, like the rest of them he’d been a test pilot. Tiger, Demon, Crusader, Cutlass, Skylancer, Skyray. They certainly thought a great deal of their planes, everybody involved, if those ridiculous names are anything to go by. Despite the Cutlass, for instance, spinning out of control sometimes, or how the Skylancer’s engines occasionally simply cut out, stopped working entirely. All par for the course, the test pilot course, the carousel, the brass ring.

It was intended Mercury’s dive should be much more controlled than the Cutlass’s. No lancing the sky this time. Insofar as plunging through the atmosphere at five thousand miles an hour until the parachutes burst open at ten thousand feet can be said to be controlled, which cannot entirely be said. Better than what Gagarin endured, at least. He had to bail out at twenty-three thousand feet. That’s how the Soviets did it. They got through the stratosphere, then jumped. A bit rough on the knees, parachutes, though at least they ended up on land, an advantage Gus Grissom, for instance, would not enjoy. This little detail was kept a secret for decades. As if not landing with the spacecraft meant the flights were not entirely a success. Nevertheless, just to make sure they got all the credit everyone now admits they deserved, the whole parachuting thing was kept quiet for a long time. Despite wide knowledge that Valentina Tereshkova, for instance, got her job by dint of her skill as a skydiver, a specialty she’d need, as it turns out.

And Gagarin got all the way to orbit, a nearly complete orbit of the entire globe. Shepard would enjoy no more than a quick suborbital jaunt of some fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes and twenty-eight seconds, to be precise, as it transpired. A not particularly eventful fifteen minutes, either, from the astronaut’s point of view. Thankfully, a not particularly eventful fifteen minutes. Most of what happened, happened automatically. The engine fired, the engine shut down, the escape tower flew off, the spacecraft separated, and Shepard was free. Fellow Mercury Seven astronaut Deke Slayton called up from below. You’re on your way, José! 

Shepard could roll Freedom 7 from side to side, up and down, and yaw. Not that this changed his trajectory in the slightest, or so he thought. Little more than a projectile, a common cannonball, fired like Jules Verne’s Columbiad from the Florida coast, Shepard sailed through apogee and back down again. He took the opportunity to extend his periscope—Mercury Mark I had a couple of windows, but they were tiny, and little could be seen through them—and through the periscope’s extended eyeball managed to identify a few of Earth’s more prominent features passing below: Lake Okeechobee, the Bahamas, the Florida shore from whence he’d departed. It’s true that after those otherwise minimal course corrections he’d let Freedom 7 drift a little—not that it made much of a difference, or so he’d thought—but when he undertook to correct his error, this correction led to further error, as they’d been in error on the ground as well, it turned out, and the errors compounded, leading to the only serious objection to Shepard’s safe return.

When the retrorockets covering the heat shield were jettisoned, Shepard heard a loud bang. Except the little light on his control panel said the retrorocket package was still attached, hadn’t jettisoned at all—which was bad, which was very bad, as the heat shield was there to protect Shepard from reentry’s, well, heat, and it wouldn’t be so good to heat up rockets still attached to the bottom of the spacecraft—no, that wouldn’t be ideal. Luckily, Shepard had heard them jettison—there may be no sound in space, but there’s sound in spacecraft—he heard them banging away and actually saw the pack fly past his miniature windows, so Slayton in Houston suggested they go ahead on Shepard’s perspicacious observation: a gutsy call and a good one. The water was not too hard, and the spacecraft survived well enough to fly again, although it never did fly again, excepting on wires above the floor of the National Air and Space Museum later to rise on the Mall a dim concrete obelisk to America’s mighty accomplishments in flight, from the Wright Brothers to Apollo 11 a mere seven decades later.

Our accomplishments, they insisted, our common goal achieved against a common foe. Look out, Soviets! We’re coming for you! As if the racism, sexism, hunger, and homelessness plaguing the cities were not our true common foe. As if the Civil War had ever really ended. The Civil Rights Act still awaiting the splintering of Kennedy’s skull. Forty acres and a mule. Manifest destiny extending its tentacles in every direction—out; and up.