Changing the Map

In a day when statistics no longer surprise, President Kennedy's top scientific adviser found a way to dramatize the $12.3 billion that the U.S. Government is spending this fiscal year on research and development for defense and space. It is, Jerome Wiesner told a congressional subcommittee, more than the Government spent on research and development "in the entire interval from the American Revolution through and including World War II."

The big hunk of money means more than high taxes and the promise of audacious sorties into space. It also represents a Government-sponsored revolution that is creating changes whose full effects are still unreckoned by economists, sociologists or Chambers of Commerce. It is even changing the map of the U.S.

The big money goes primarily for what is unhappily called R.D.T. and E. (Pentagonese for research, development, testing and evaluation). The Government contracts ladled out for this purpose have been concentrated on the two coasts. In fact, 59% of them have gone to just three states -California (41.3%), New York (12.1%) and Massachusetts (5.7%). But there are other gainers. Florida's Cape Canaveral, not so long ago a little-known stretch of sand, is now an international dateline. Houston, near the water route to Canaveral and New Orleans, has lately been awarded the $90 million Manned Spacecraft Center, and the fast-growing city, already the nation's seventh largest at 938,219, now expects to make a quantum jump.

The process has largely been a case of mutual attraction. Government money has gone to those forward-edge communities and plants where the money, brains and manpower already are. Around the great technical schools (M.I.T., Caltech, University of California), the scientific laboratories, the aircraft plants converted to aerospace, have sprung up vast community complexes. From houses to haircuts, prices have rocketed. At Cocoa Beach near Canaveral, beach property that 17 years ago sold for $20 a foot now fetches $1,000 or more. For decades, California advertised its oranges and sunshine to lure inhabitants, and a man could move there with a banjo on his knee. Now the big companies place column after column of classified ads in the Eastern newspapers and talk of the opportunities for good living, but specify the skills they want.

Much of what the seaboards have gained, the vast land area in between has lost -in population and power, in industry, and even in intellect. Michigan, long the symbol of American industrial go-getiveness, last year got only 2.7% of the defense prime contracts (against 9.5% in 1951-53)-Illinois got 2%. The seaboard centers have been a magnet in a selective sense -the populations flocking to California are not merely the sun-seeking oldsters, and certainly not the Okies of the 1930s, but often the youngest and brightest, most proficient and promising, most ambitious and adventurous. The more daring the project, the more attracted they are; and before man reaches the moon (see cover story), the effort to get him there is relocating a lot of people here on earth.

The usual impact of Government spending -on welfare, veterans' benefits, public works and civilian services -can be a powerful force, but it is diffused throughout the nation. And though pork-barrel politics sometimes creates distortions, these civic outlays are usually distributed pretty much as the population is. But defense and space contracts are passed out among a relatively small roster of communities, firms and universities. The past effect of the concentration of Government funds can be seen in the Tennessee Valley Authority, which transformed an entire region at a cost -then thought staggering -of about $2.3 billion.

Already some of the areas losing ground are beginning to get the message. In the Chicago area, Northwestern University and Illinois Institute of Technology are both planning new research centers. In Pittsburgh, six institutions are teamed up to project a huge education center with a by-section devoted to research. Both cities hope to lure talent as well as keep it. Politicians have begun to catch up: both Michigan's Governor John Swainson and Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley have trekked to the White House to protest the slighting of their regions.

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara recently went back home to Michigan to say that the state has been losing defense business because it has failed to provide adequate support for its universities -and "the Defense Department seeks the best brains and goes where they are." But, concerned by the unequal distribution of funds, Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric ordered a survey on the population shifts resulting from defense and space. The conclusion, in characteristic Pentagonese: "Local initiative seeking defense business must direct itself to the creation of capability responsive to the exacting needs of modern warfare. Communities which fail to recognize this fact, and which fail to energize and mobilize their institutions to adjust to it cannot reasonably anticipate a major role in future defense procurement." What all this meant in English was that the have-nots had better get humping.

The scientific revolution, with all its cost and all its promise, was originally inspired and spurred by the tensions and competitions of the cold war. What is now becoming apparent is that the revolution will survive even a relaxation of that strife. The curiosity of science, the adventure of space, the challenge of new problems, new solutions and new products have created their own momentum.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.