The Beep Generation

Before Herb Caen, another newspaper connected the Beats and Sputnik.

On October 4, 1957, the world changed when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first-ever artificial satellite. It kickstarted the space race and worsened the already tense Cold War.

That very same day, Jack Kerouac was quoted in the Saturday Review, which had interviewed him on the subject of the Beat Generation. The Beats had suddenly entered the public consciousness, with On the Road released one month earlier (September 5) and Howl and Other Poems declared “not obscene” by a judge just the day before (October 3). Kerouac explained this new concept for square America:

I guess I was the one who named us the “Beat Generation” […] This includes anyone from fifteen to fifty-five who digs everything, man. We’re not Bohemians [sic], remember. Beat means beatitude, not beat up. You feel this. You feel it in a beat-in jazz, real cool jazz, or a good, gutty, rock number. The Beat Generation loves everything, man. We go around digging everything. Everything means something; everything’s a symbol. We’re mystics. No question about it. Mystics.[1]

The term “Beat Generation” had been floating around in the press for a few years but it was relatively uncommon until late 1957, after which it became a media obsession. Six months after Sputnik was launched and Kerouac gave the above definition, Herb Caen coined the word “beatnik” in his San Francisco Chronicle column.[2] On April 2, he wrote:

Look magazine, preparing a picture spread on S.F.’s Beat Generation (oh, no, not AGAIN!), hosted a party in a No. Beach house for 50 Beatniks, and by the time word got around the sour grapevine, over 250 bearded cats and kits were on hand, slopping up Mike Cowles’ free booze. They’re only Beat, y’know, when it comes to work...

By 1958, McCarthyism had mercifully died away but anti-communist fears remained and he was merely playing on public sentiment when he connected the rebellious young artists known as “the Beats” to a Soviet satellite.[3] He may also have been playing on the bohemian term “far out.”

The word “beatnik” caught on immediately. It appeared in the Chronicle the very next day as “the Beatnik Generation” and again on April 10. By April 25, poor Lawrence Ferlinghetti—who hated being seen as Beat, never mind beatnik—was described as a “Beatnik poet.” By May, the Chronicle was using the word in its headlines and “beatnik” had all but eclipsed the term “Beat.” The newspaper used the word many dozens more times that year and one search of a newspaper archive shows that it was used more than 3,000 times in 1958 across the various newspapers they have collected. (Not all newspapers are collected, so the real number must have been far, far higher.)

Caen’s genius in creating this term came from the fact that he did it so flippantly yet in a way almost any reader would understand. For six or seven months, the media had been utterly obsessed with two things: 1) the Beat Generation and 2) Soviet satellites. By mentioning the Beat Generation and then referring to “50 beatniks,” almost any reader would understand that the word was a noun referring to a San Francisco bohemian. The suffix -nik meant that most people would infer that these people were not just goofy hipsters but perhaps in the sphere of communist influence.

Interestingly, though, whilst Caen coined the word “beatnik,” he was not the first to tie the Beats and Sputnik together. That happened on October 8/9, 1957, in an article put out by the Associated Press:

Note: Many versions of this article appeared on October 8 and 9, all with different headlines and often with the text heavily edited. In fact, many of them made almost no sense at all. The above is from the Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, October 9. It is more coherent than the others. It has notably been edited to remove reference to Kerouac, however.

This comes from The Sun Herald, October 8. Its headline is pure gibberish but the text includes a reference to Kerouac that was removed from the above article.

The A.P. article appeared in hundreds of newspapers across the U.S., and the editors clearly had fun with the headlines.

In the month before this article, the Beat Generation had gone from a term that relatively few people knew to almost a household name. Reporters across America were frantically churning out articles about the Beats, trying to figure out what the heck this new movement was all about. Their attitudes and art seemed incomprehensible to many and possibly even dangerous. Was the youth of America being corrupted? Certainly, that’s the impression early media accounts gave.

The fact that Herb Caen connected the Beats and the Russian name for their satellite is hardly surprising given conservative attitudes towards these bohemian artists. But of course that was six months later. The Beats had been in the news a lot during that time, as had the Soviet satellite. (In fact, they had even launched a second satellite, Sputnik 2, in November 1957.) It is hardly a great leap to connect two contemporary phenomena. It happens all the time.

What is interesting, though, is the fact that this A.P. writer had so quickly made the connection and that he quoted the Kerouac interview published the same day that Sputnik 1 launched. If we consider that the “beep beep beep” sound of Sputnik orbiting the Earth was only broadcast from October 5, and that the article must have been written the day before it was published, then we can see it only took him a couple of days to connect the Beat Generation and Sputnik.

Of course, “beatnik” was a better creation than “the Beep Generation” and Caen—who later popularised the term “hippie”—had a bit more cultural clout, so the former became widely used and the latter died away. Let’s face it: the A.P. article was pretty ridiculous and Caen at least provided some organic context for his word, letting readers infer the meaning rather than forcing a tenuous connection. “Beatnik” was a short and catchy term, easy to remember and harsh-sounding when spit out in just the right way. No wonder it quickly became the go-to pejorative. The Beats named themselves, but that just wouldn’t do… If you loathed their lifestyles, then you wanted something a bit nastier to throw at them.

The word “beatnik” still lingers like a bad smell all these decades later and many still struggle to disentangle it from the term “Beat.” Hell, even Allen Ginsberg occasionally used it (“re-appropriated” is perhaps a more apt term). It’s hard to see how “The Beep Generation” could’ve stuck around so long, but still it’s interesting to note how little time it took one reporter to make the connection that Caen did six months later.

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Further Reading

The difference between Beat and beatnik is explained in this article and I’ve also gathered more quotes about what the Beat Generation was here. Strange as it may sound, defining “Beat Generation” is a stupidly difficult task, as that article shows.

I’ll also recommend this short article about connections between the Beat writers and Japanese author Haruki Murakami because he wrote a book called Sputnik Sweetheart that briefly discusses the confusion between Beat, beatnik, and Sputnik. If you enjoy Murakami’s books, you may also appreciate Wind-Up Blog, my Substack devoted to Japanese literature.

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Footnotes

[1] You can read this in Empty Phantoms, p.52.

[2] The origins of the word “beatnik” are seldom disputed because Caen was a public figure and newspaper archives are quite easily accessed and searched. Some claim that it originated with Etya Gechtoff, owner of the East and West Gallery, located across the street from the 6 Gallery, but I have yet to see anyone provide any evidence for their claim. All sources seem to provide the same “proof,” which is simply that someone heard somewhere that Gechtoff said it before Caen. If anyone has actual proof of her usage, let me know.

[3] The Beat writers’ interest in socialism, communism, and Marxism is worthy of discussion but not here. It is a vast topic. Likewise, readers may be interested in Gary Snyder’s troubles with the F.B.I. and his blacklisting from U.S. Forestry Service work in the mid-fifties, but that is not the purpose of this essay. (See Poets on the Peaks for the latter.)