“For All Mankind”: The Global Rhetoric of America’s Space Age

Throughout the 1960s, U.S. government elites, from President Richard Nixon to foreign affairs officers to astronauts, projected an image of the Apollo Program as a global effort, undertaken ‘for all mankind,’ through the use of rhetoric, symbolic gestures and a series of U.S. Information Agency (USIA) programs designed to make the world public “participants” in the American led effort. In 1957, widespread popular reactions to the launch of Sputnik, had prompted government officials in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to see spaceflight as the preeminent means for demonstrating power and national values in an international landscape that was upended by the Cold War, the postwar collapse of colonialism, and the emergence of newly independent nations.  Space accomplishments, more than weapons or military conflict, came to serve as potent symbols of technological capability, national strength, and the efficacy of political systems.

American policymakers quickly adopted the phrase, ‘for all mankind,’ as a rhetorical tool, utilized to frame the Apollo Program as a U.S. led global undertaking. What does the circulation of the expression, ‘for all mankind’ reveal about Cold War strategies and the relationship between the U.S. and the world in the late 1960s?  This paper will address this question by tracing how and why this phrase- first codified by Congress in the 1958 National Aeronautics and Space Act- populated dozens of Presidential speeches, international exhibit panels, and was famously engraved on plaques that were left on the lunar surface.  In addition, this paper considers the various appropriations of this phrase, by foreign heads of state, the press and the international public, to both compliment and criticize the United States’ relationship to the world.