Transcript
6939
1965
Flushing Meadows, Queens October 16, 1965
On October 16, 1965, the day before the World's Fair closed. Westinghouse lowered a steel torpedo into Queens. The one over the pavilion was a replica.
It went fifty feet down, ten feet due north of the capsule buried in 1938. Both are to be opened in the year 6939.
Westinghouse meant it to explain America to people five thousand years from now. A committee chose what went in. The list is a source about 1965.
It included a Nobel Peace Prize winner, the co-discoverer of plutonium and the painter Andrew Wyeth. They packed a bikini. It also held credit cards, birth-control pills, tranquilizers and a Beatles record.
The 1938 capsule came with a book that told the future where to dig. It included a key to the English language, in case ours was lost.
The capsule was built to last five thousand years. The Beatles broke up in 1970.
A time capsule is a bet on what will last. So pack one for 1945 to 1980.
Then check your bet. How much did those thirty-five years change what it meant to be an American?
The Attic
1980
You know this street.
Fifteen years later and about twenty miles east, it's Election Day in Levittown.
You've been in this house. A family moved in here in the spring of 1950. They've sold it. They're moving to Florida.
Millions of Americans moved too. Florida more than tripled between 1950 and 1980. New York lost about six hundred eighty thousand people in the seventies. This spring's census will take five seats in Congress from New York and give Florida four.
The last room to clear is the attic. In 1956 it was the daughter's bedroom. Now it holds thirty years of things nobody threw away.
Somebody kept the brochure from the World's Fair.
Today is also one year since students in Tehran seized the American embassy. Fifty-two Americans are still held there.
Pack It
1945–1980
Two boxes. Thirty-five years. Pack them.
The Answer
1945–1980
Here's how a historian might write the same letter. A capsule is a source, too. It shows what its packers wanted the future to see.
From 1945 to 1980 the Cold War held the frame of American identity steady. Inside it, the fight for equal rights and a collapse of trust changed who counted as a full American and what Americans expected of their government.
Claim. The Cold War held the frame steady for thirty-five years. Inside it, the fight for equal rights and a collapse of trust changed nearly everything else.
Every president from Truman to Carter promised to contain Soviet power. Détente eased the Cold War in the 1970s. The invasion of Afghanistan ended it.
At home, the argument changed targets. In 1950 it was about hunting Communists. By 1968 it was about Vietnam.
In 1945, segregation was law across the South. By 1965, federal law banned it in public places and protected the right to vote.
Women, Latinos, American Indians, Asian Americans and gay Americans took up the same tools. The Supreme Court widened the rights of the accused, of voters and of speakers.
A 1965 law changed who the next Americans would be. In the 1950s, most immigrants came from Europe. In the 1970s, three in four came from Latin America and Asia.
Now qualify it. The laws changed faster than people's lives. The things across the flaps belong in both boxes.
In 1980, Levittown was still about ninety-nine percent white. It had fewer Black residents than in 1960.
The Great Society and a growing economy cut the poverty rate in half by 1973. Then it rose again, to 13 percent in 1980.
Trust collapsed. In 1964, three Americans in four trusted Washington most of the time. By 1980, one in four did. Vietnam, Watergate, inflation, gas lines and the hostages did that.
Now modify the question. It assumes Americans shared one identity. A New Left said liberals did too little. Evangelicals organized, and conservatives since Goldwater's 1964 campaign said too much.
Maybe the biggest change was the argument itself.
The Street
1950–1980
Here's the street in 1950.
One kind of house. One kind of family allowed to buy it.
Critics called these houses identical. By 1957, the New York Times reported that hardly one was unaltered.
By the 1970s, a Japanese car sat in a Levittown driveway. The world economy America built after 1945 had come home.
The trees grew taller than the roofs. The faces on the street changed much less. Tonight, Americans will give their own answer to this film's question. Unit 9 begins with it.
The two Westinghouse time capsules are still buried in Flushing Meadows. They are to be opened in the year 6939.
Somewhere under Queens, a bikini is still waiting to explain us.