The Decision, by Jules Feiffer.  Published in Playboy, November 1968

This is an addendum of sorts to the last post, which was a general summary of the November 1968 issue of Playboy.  The magazine always ran a lot of cartoons, most of them apparently chosen because they boosted the monthly quotient of pictures of bare-breasted women.  But this month, there was this rather extraordinary, full-page cartoon by the renowned Jules Feiffer.

A typical Feiffer male is shown packing a suitcase and leaving his wife, telling “Doris” (an intentional reference to that famously wholesome 1960s blonde, Doris Day?) that “marriage is not a natural state for a man,” that he feels his identity “softened, demeaned, eroded.”  ”A man has to feel– FREE!” he tells her.  And in the last panel, as he exits, he says: “I’m going back to Charles.”

Could this be the first gay-themed cartoon in Playboy?   And gay humor that’s not sniggering or demeaning or cruel?   Feiffer’s cartoon also has a thing or two to say about the state of masculinity, marriage, and heterosexuality, too.  But it’s the gay punchline that sticks.  Maybe it’s a sign that by 1968 gay sensibilities were beginning to find their way into mainstream, or at least heterosexual, Playboy or Esquire culture–although admittedly, Feiffer’s affluent, arch urbanites hardly constitute “mainstream.”  There were other milestones in gay cultural history this year, chief among them the phenomenally successful Broadway run of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, which opened in April 1968.  And a few months later, in June 1969, the streets of Greenwich Village would erupt in the Stonewall Riots, the iconic “premiere” of the gay rights movement.

If you’ve got suggestions for other signs of GLBT cultural life in 1968, please post a comment.

I bought this November 1968 Playboy, yes, to read the articles.

Instant electronic democracy?

The cover art reminds us that 1968 was an election year, and since this issue would have appeared on the newstands in October, I thought it would probably have something in it about the hotly contested presidential race.  Although this issue contains few references to the candidates or the race, it does feature

a fascinating article by Washington Post reporter Robert Sherrill speculating on a subject that had gained some currency: the coming era of “instant electronic democracy,” by which the electorate will communicate its demands directly to Congress by “a push-button tie-up with Washington.”    Sherrill uses such predictions as a way of writing critically about Congress, but in the end he concludes that the “instant electorate” would ultimately be disastrous for democracy.

Coming soon: unearthly hedonism

Futuristic (and sometimes apocalyptic) dreaming was popular during 1968.   Here, rocket engineer Krafft Ehricke (one of the group of Third Reich scientists and technicians “imported” to the U.S. in 1945) giddily describes plans for “Astropolis–a pleasure paradise in orbit above the earth,” with hotels, casinos, theaters, ballrooms, a shopping center–not to mention farms and factories for growing all the food and manufacturing all the water and air needed by guests and staff.    ”Science fiction?  Hardly.”  This first space resort is a “completely attainable extension of the science fact of 1968,” and a “frontier of unearthly hedonism.”  Ehricke projects it to be ready by 1999.

More news from the future, this time about pills (again)

Another somewhat futuristic article (which also connects with a previous post on Covering 1968:  http://tinyurl.com/yazrdat) takes up “Pyschochemistry: Personality by Prescription.” Ernest Havemann, a journalist and psychologist, writes:

“There are respected researchers on record as believing that man will soon have drugs that will cure his major mental disturbances, eliminate his fears and anxieties, keep him fat or lean at will, let him decide for himself how long, if at all, he cares to sleep, make him much smarter than ever before and even permit him to live longer.  You name it, and there is somebody–not a wild-eyed visionary but a sane and skeptical scientist–who believes it is just around the corner.”

Entertainment for Men

Of course, as much as PLAYBOY was a source for serious writing on politics and contemporary popular science, it was– it’s right there on the cover–”Entertainment for Men.”   There’s the famous “Playboy Advisor feature,” with advice about sex, etiquette, and hipness; “Playboy’s Party Jokes,” a column of not very humorous humor; and lots of cartoons, most of them about–you guessed it–sex.

But “Entertainment for Men” mostly meant lots of pictures of naked women–and not just in the famous centerfold.  This issue features an article on “Theater of the Nude,” with photos from New York productions of Hair, Tom O’Horgan’s Futz! and Tom Paine, all of them featuring nude actors.   ”The theater, in case you haven’t noticed, has stripped for action.  The nude revolution is underway. . . and it comes just when the theater seemed to dead, killed by its own stuffiness.  But at least–and at last–it’s here.  The taboos about bare breasts, bare buttocks and even exposed genitals have been broken.”

This may– or may not– be the only issue of Playboy in which the centerfold article about the Playmate of the Month begins by quoting Henry David Thoreau: “All good things are wild and free,” which, the editors say, is the “perfect capsule summary” of this playmate’s outlook on the world.  Paige Young leads an “untrammeled life style as a free-lance artist.”  ”‘Painting for a living is a struggle,’” she is quoted as saying.  Her studio is in Malibu, but she is not a “fan of the far-out fads and plastic pleasures of California.”  For the record, she’s also enjoys scuba diving and singing folk songs.

Finally, there is a full-page advertisement for one of 1968’s most outrageous and notorious movies:  Barbarella, the futuristic “romp” featuring Jane Fonda in “bizarre sex-ploits.”  Barbarella deserves a closer look– coming soon to Covering 1968.

Comedian and actor Bill Cosby was recently awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor by the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, and that reminded me of this comic book in my possession–a memento of one of his earlier public triumphs, as “Scotty” in the 1960s TV series “I Spy.”

A boatload of Bond spinoffs

Bill Cosby was already a huge pop culture star by 1965, when he was tapped–in a loudly trumpeted publicity campaign–for a new TV series to be called “I Spy,” part of the entertainment industry’s frenetic scramble to cash in on the James Bond money machine, which was in full roar by 1965. That was the year Thunderball hit the big screen, and the TV airwaves were filling up with shows like The Man from UNCLE, Wild Wild West, and Mission: Impossible.

Cosby the comic becomes Cosby the actor

By 1965, Cosby had already appeared many times on television as a standup comic, and had released three albums of his comedy routines.  He was rich, famous, and beloved by both black and white audiences and record buyers.  Although known for the hilarious characters he created for his routines in tales drawn largely from his childhood (e.g., “Fat Albert”), he was untried as an actor when he started on “I Spy.” Cosby played Alexander (”Scotty”) Scott, the trainer and buddy of international tennis bum “Kelly Robinson,” played by Robert Culp.   As the inside cover of this comic tells us:  ”Kelly and Scotty don’t like to use guns. Their chief weapons are brains and ingenuity and their camouflaged identities.”

A first for black America

Cosby was the first African-American actor to be cast in a lead role in an dramatic series on television, a fact that took on added urgency and relevance by the time “I Spy” debuted–September 15, 1965, just four weeks after the shocking and brutal riots in the crumbling black neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles.  ”I Spy,” though featuring a black and a white actor in a close, bantering relationship, was notable for pointedly avoiding references to race and racial differences.  Cosby went on to win the Emmy award for best lead dramatic actor three times, in 1966, 1967, and 1968 (each time edging out his co-star).  The series ended in 1968, just about the time this comic was issued–the same year that Cosby pressed three more comedy albums and became America’s top-selling male recording artist.

Scotty and Kelly take on guerillas–and win, of course.

I know I watched “I Spy” devotedly, but I can’t for the life of me remember a single episode or moment.  I vaguely remember exotic locales and jocular dialogue, and that’s about it.  I didn’t expect much from the story in this comic, but it is interesting in at least one respect.  It features “the guys” on a mission that takes them to Brazil and Venezuela, which are beset by terrorist raids by Communist (though that word is never used) guerillas, using weapons smuggled in from “Iron Curtain” countries.  The leader is a man known as “K. Warra,” who bears more than a passing resemblance to Che Guevara, wearing a beret and sporting a scraggly beard.  He’s actually an American, “Clarence Copperfield,” trained by the Green Berets, who has now joined the “movement to overthrow the people’s oppressors.”   When captured, he dismisses Kelly and Scotty as “paid hirelings of the imperialist government that rules my home,”  and when he escapes (temporarily) he shouts “as long as I am free, the red tide of the future rolls on!”

Classic 1960s agitprop — pretty heady stuff for the kids reading this comic book.

High Art– and high-class erotica

Wander through cyberspace looking for “Avant-Garde,” and you’re likely to encounter more about it as the name of the typeface invented for this magazine than for the magazine itself.  Neither the typeface nor the magazine lasted very long:  Avant-Garde (the hyphen was not in the logo, but was in the fine print) began publication in January 1968 and ended just 15 issues later, in July 1971.  So to call 1968 the “high-water mark” of Avant-Garde would be kind of obvious.  It’s also described as a “hardbound” periodical, which is not quite true–more like a thick version of a paperback book cover.  But that was enough to set it apart from, say, LIFE or Time or Art News, and to mark it as High Art, something to save and display on a coffee table, next to the water-pipe, perhaps.  There is real art, in abundance:  one of Avant-Garde’s most famous issues included a vast survey of Picasso’s erotic drawings.  The September 1968 issue (pictured here) features work by American artist George Tooker, including his 1965-66 “Landscape with Figures” on the cover–as haunting an image of modern alienation as ever produced.  And thrust onto the cover of a later 1968 issue is an astounding pair of breasts by Pop-Art star Tom Wesselman.

Knowing it when you see it?

The man behind “Avant-Garde” the Typeface was famed graphic designer Herb Lubalin.  The man behind Avant-Garde editorially was Ralph Ginzburg, a great Sixties character who had by this time served eight months in federal prison on a conviction (1963) of distributing obscene literature through the mails in a case that had gone all the way to the Supreme Court.  (The original indictment had been brought by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.)  The conviction involved previous publications (such as his EROS magazine), but that doesn’t mean that Ginzburg, in Avant-Garde, gave up on material that many people probably considered at least soft-core (did we even have that term in 1968?) porn.  There’s a color-photo story in this issue on New York’s “Playhouse of the Ridiculous,” a very downtown avant-garde theatrical troupe, who engaged in wild “happenings”-like performances and onstage sex simulations.  Another color spread spotlights a ”Voodoo ritual dance,” executed by a voluptuous Caribbean dancer, nude save for well-placed props (live chicken, a human skull).   There’s a story by a female writer about a spectacularly endowed “Haitian Negro” male performer in a sex exhibition she saw in Cuba in the 1950s.  And there’s a calendar for 1969 that consists of 12 different cleverly set up photo shoots, each of them with bare-breasted women on prominent display.

A hawk’s story of why he wants to kill

But the most arresting story has nothing to do with sex. It’s “The Battle Hymn of Jeffrey Weinper,” a non-fiction article by “a young hawk who tells why he quit college to slaughter in Vietnam.”   Jeffrey enlisted in the Airborne in July 1967, and writes:  ”Curiosity was a major reason for my enlistment . . . I am not enthused over the Vietnam War, but it is the place where I can go and kill people and they me. . . . The persistence of human violence . . . leads me to doubt the condemnation of war more than the phenomenon itself. . . . It may be that at some time, man will lose all his aggressiveness, rip off all his clothes, and spend his day dragging pot and sticking his finger in his navel.  The day of Hippie Heaven and Universal Love may come, but when they do, man will no longer be man but something else.”

A black box on the same page announced that “as this issue was going to press,” Avant-Garde learned that Pfc. Jeffrey Weinper had been killed near Hue in South Vietnam.

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dead

Sooner or later, this blog was going to have to get around to MAD, right?  We could have done the 1968 election issue, with all of the candidates’ pictures scrambled (and maybe we’ll get to that one eventually).  But this issue — this cover, at least– is priceless:  Alfred E. Neuman– by this date universally recognized as the archetypal dope–decked out as a “hippie,” with a decorative border incorporating some distinctive five-part leaves and a classic MAD motto:  ”Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dead.”  (”Drop dead” was a favorite MAD expression.) Here, Al is sporting a scraggly beard and longer red hair than usual, but he has the familiar gap-toothed grin, freckles, jug ears, and vacant expression.  Plus beads, flowers in the hair, cowbell and bear-claw necklace– like, wow.

“The Hippie”: Becoming a laugh line and a stereotype

To land on the cover of MAD in the 1960s was to achieve some sort of pinnacle of pop-cultural notoreity; MAD editors wouldn’t have bothered with you if you weren’t somehow culturally “of the moment.”   But the famous individual, or trend, or icon, or sacred cow had to have attained enough breadth of recognition to allow for sufficient pungency as a MAD lampoon.  And so the arrival of the hippie get-up on MAD in April 1968 tells us quite a lot about the hardening and the codifying of this stereotypical “Sixties” character.

It all happened pretty quickly.  Etymologists generally point to an early-1965 usage of “hippie” (in TIME magazine) as the first “conventional” use of the word, as opposed to earlier, more marginal uses– as variants of the beatnik-era “hipster,” for example.  So throughout 1965 and 1966– and especially by the January 1967 “Be-In” in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and, later that year, the “Summer of Love”– the hippie moved rapidly from being “sub-cultural,” socially detached, and “different” to being an utterly familiar archetype–AND a figure of nearly bottomless hilarity.  I would not be surprised if there were “hippie” Halloween costumes in stores by 1968–as there are today.   I wonder when the first sitcom hippies appeared– 1968 again would be a pretty good bet. ( I know that some kind of nadir was reached the following year, when Lawrence Welk showed up in wig and full hippie regalia on his show:  not hard to find–but hard to watch–on YouTube.)

A “weird sub-culture”

So here’s MAD, throwing its considerable weight behind this process of Stereotype Formation.  I remember this issue well (I was 17 when it appeared on the newstands, its price now “30 cents– Cheap” instead of 25), not so much because of the cover but because of the hilarious (well, maybe you had to be there) send-up of one of my favorite TV shows, “Mission: Ridiculous.”   But the issue also includes an extensive “cover story”– a mock magazine called “Hippie: The Magazine that Turns You On (if you’re cool enough to light it up and smoke it!)”  The introduction says:  ”There’s a wild new group of people who have become prominent in America recently.  They have their own unique language, their own strange behavior, and their own bizarre philosophy which is commonly misunderstood by many oldsters.  The group is known as ‘Moderate Republicans.’”    It goes on to explain that there’s another “weird sub-culture” kn0wn as hippies, and MAD is going to explain them in this magazine as a public service.

For sentimental hippies?

The magazine includes fake movie ads (”The Wild Freakout Acid Trip at the Hippie Teeny-Bopper Love-In Orgy on the Strip”); classifieds (”Help! I’m being held prisoner in my Hi-Fi and TV-equipped own room in the suburban home of my materialistic, conformist parents”); a takeoff on the Peanuts “warm puppy” bestseller, this one called ”Uptight is a Dry Sugar Cube”; a gossip column (”Drachma the Digger has made arrangements for starving N.Y. orphans to receive food packages from Vietnam War Orphans”); and a gift guide for “sentimental hippies who want to collect relics of the past:  shoes, ties, soap, bras, draft cards, combs.”

You get the picture.

Finally, it’s been so long since I looked at MAD that I forgot that they carried no advertisements–except gag ads, like this takeoff on ads for “100 millimeter” cigarettes from the back cover of this issue:

In one of its first issues of the new year in 1968, LIFE magazine tackled one of the day’s most widely discussed issues:  America’s “drug problem.” But here–for a change–the narrative about drug abuse was not about hippies going on “acid trips,” but about co-eds and housewives popping diet pills.  And they were doing so armed with prescriptions from doctors.

“Filling-station operations” dispensing speed

The drugs–mostly some form of amphetamines, or “speed”–were not contraband, and did not involve shady cartels or exotic locales.  They were dispensed by white-coated, licensed, mostly male doctors to — at the time– most female “patients.”  LIFE reported that the FDA estimated that there were 5,000 to 7,000 “fat doctors” working in the U.S. at that time.  Most of them were “osteopaths” (not M.D.’s), but maybe a third were board-certified medical doctors.  Many of them, LIFE reported, “run filling-station, cash-and-carry operations, see 100 patients or so a day, give only cursory physical exams or none at all, and carelessly send off their ‘customers’ with sacks of potent–and possibly deadly–pills.”  The longest feature in the magazine  was the report by “slender LIFE reporter” Susanna McBee (5′5″, 125 pounds), who visited ten “fat doctors” in various parts of the country to discuss her concerns about her weight, and was given diet pills by “every last one of them– a ‘haul’ of 1,479 pills.”  Another article documented the collusion of pharmaceutical companies bent on pushing their “weight-control products” with greedy and unethical doctors, some of were said to be making $1 million dollars a year (!)

Who was getting fat in 1968–and why?

The LIFE series–in focusing on unethical medical practices and the “industry”–missed the larger contours of this phenomenon, which perhaps we can see clearly now only with hindsight.  The increasing willingness of people to place their trust in “science” (especially in the form of little rainbow-colored pills); the spiking social/pop cultural pressure on women to be “slim” (the favored word of the day); the increased affluence and leisure time–much of it spent sitting on couches watching television–which led almost inevitably to more eating and drinking by both men and women.

But amidst so much else that was happening in 1968, it is amazing how clearly diets and dieting stand out as cultural obsessions that year.

Diet books:  A banner year in 1968

A glance at Publisher’s Weekly non-fiction bestseller list for 1968 — and “Covering 1968″ has been there before– reveals a couple of remarkable trends:  a relatively new vogue for poetry (well, at least poetry written by the warm and sensitive Rod McKuen, who had three books on the list that year), and the popularity of diet books.  ”Popularity” is an understatement:  three of the top ten bestsellers were diet books, a phenomenon unmatched before or since.  (In recent years, the New York Times Book Review and other lists have begun separating out cookbooks, diet books, and other advice manuals from general non-fiction, making comparisons harder.)  Cookbooks–as opposed to diet books–had been big sellers consistently for years.  In fact the number-one book that year was the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book.  The top diet books of the year were The Doctor’s Quick Weight Loss Diet, by Erwin Stillman, which popularized the “Stillman water diet;” the Weight Watcher’s Cookbook; and Better Homes and Gardens Eat and Stay Slim (BHG seems to have figured out how to do this; the year before, their Fantastic Ways with Chicken was tied with Phyllis Diller’s Marriage Manual for tenth place.)

More on those cookbooks and dieting later– It would be great to hear thoughts from readers!

1968: THE END IS NEAR

The opening this coming weekend of the world-ending apocalypse movie 2012 makes me wonder–what did Apocalypse look like in 1968?  There were many people–”many” may be a gross underestimate–in 1968 who thought that the year was full of evidence that the End Was Near.  I ran across this advertisement for . . .  for what?  On its surface, it’s an ad for The Plain Truth magazine, and a book, The Wonderful World Tomorrow, which was also the name of the radio show featuring evangelist Garner Ted Armstrong.

Born again– in 1968?

“Garner Ted”:  That great combination of names– so redolent of all radio evangelists, of Southern good-ole-boys–has stuck with me all these years, though I didn’t really remember who he was until I started this research.  (Unlikely that I would have remembered him from his appearances on Hee-Haw, the country-music knockoff of Laugh-In.)  Garner Ted’s brand of evangelism calls to mind the “Born Again” movement, and evangelists Jerry Falwell, Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker– in other words, something more associated with the 1970s, rather than the Sixties. But–here he is, Garner Ted,  in full cry in 1968, in a full-page, full-color ad in LIFE magazine, of all places, not something marginal and weird.  And he and his ministry (at the moment in partnership with his father, the even better-known Herbert W. Armstrong, a partnership that would go off the rails in just a few years) are seizing on the day’s headlines to offer proof positive of the coming of the end times. Here are the opening salvos of the ad:

“It was never like this before”

“All of a sudden what’s happened? It was never like this before.

“Unsafe to walk on streets–in city or in town!  Your house may be broken into if you’re away! Crime rampant, even in residence areas!

“Student revolt in 20 countries–violence on campuses.  Disheveled hippies lolling about aimlessly.

“Unhappy marriages–increasing divorce– juvenile delinquency!  WHY this sudden breaking down of family life?

“Racial strife, mass demonstrations, riots, looting, VIOLENCE!  And threat of nuclear war!”

. . . “Many scientists are frightened!  They and even military leaders are now using such phrases such as ‘Armageddon’–and ‘the end of the world.’  Humanity’s BIG problem, now, is SURVIVAL!”

Here’s a subject that’s ripe for investigation:  the roots of 1970s charismatic Christianity, “televangelism,” and the “born-again” movement in the Cold-War anxieties and social turmoil of the 1960s, especially the upheavals that came in 1968.   “Covering 1968″ would be happy to hear any thoughts about this– the sooner the bettter.  Time is running out.

1968:  When movies mattered

In 1968 I considered myself an aficionado of movies–and that particular foreign word was one that I was no doubt tossing around.   That was the year, in fact, that I declared to my dorm mates at college that “movie critic” was my life’s ambition.  (I got shot down pretty fast, but that psychological wounding is another story.)  By the mid-1960s, I had become one of those millions of Young People who were discovering the illicit pleasures of watching foreign films–Jules and Jim, Blow-Up, Darling, 8-1/2, a slew of depressing Bergman movies–as well as the new, cutting-edge American movies that were also learning from foreign film.   We were beginning to understand movies as art forms, as vehicles of personal and cultural expression that really mattered.  Or, to put it another way, as another means of defining ourselves as outside of the mainstream, as we were also doing with language, dress, and music.

The NOW Movie

I remember, too, that I was a subscriber to Saturday Review in 1968. It was like a badge of middle-brow sophistication.  Reading it made me (teenager in the boondocks) feel in-touch, East Coast, informed—cultured, if only vicariously.   And so it is a particular pleasure to rediscover this issue of SR from the end of the year, with a huge section on “The NOW Movie.”  With photos (not very many, and not very good– remember, this was not a vulgar magazine) and pedigreed articles about what the editors clearly saw as the year’s seismic shifts in the world of moviedom.

Who are the NOW people in the movies?

The Op-arty cover hints at who is “NOW” in the movies:  Godard (the horn-rims on the left); Kubrick (beard on the lower right); Dustin Hoffman (twice); Dunaway and Beatty; Mia Farrow; Rod Steiger (Oscar-winner in 1968, but not his co-star Sidney Poitier); Christopher Jones (lower right; he starred in the cult classic Wild in the Streets that year); the youthful stars (upper right) of Romeo and Juliet.   (By the way, that’s not Julie Christie in the center; it’s Joanna Shimkus, a hot actress at this moment, who later married Poitier.)

Where are the young audiences? “On a trip”

Film professor Anthony Schillaci sets the tone straight off in his piece, “Film as Environment”:  ”The better we understand how young people view film, the more we have to revise our notion of what film is. Whether the favored director is ‘young’ like Richard Lester, Roman Polanski, and Arthur Penn, or ‘old’ like Kubrick, Fellini, and Bunuel, he must be a practicing cinema anarchist to catch the eye of the young.  If we’re looking for a young audience . . . we will find they are on a trip, whether in a Yellow Submarine or on a Space Odyssey . . . careening down a dirt road with Bonnie and Clyde or sitting next to The Graduate as he races across the Bay Bridge.  Hyped up on large doses of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, and Mission Impossible, they are ready for anything that an evolving film idiom can throw on the screen.  And what moves them must have the pace, novelty, style, and spontaneity of a television commercial.”

“Falling Stars”

Another contributor, critic Hollis Alpert, chronicles the phenomenon of “Falling Stars”:  ”The signs are all too apparent that the star system, on which the film industry once rose to its financial and mass-appeal glories, is crumbling, if not already defunct.”  He cites the steady failures of once-bankable stars like Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor; the success of neophytes Hoffman, Beatty, Dunaway, and Farrow; and the fact that director Kubrick gave one of the major roles in 2001 to a “non-human,” HAL, the computer.  He sees an trend in which “the film itself becomes a star, becomes the attracting force for the public.”

In today’s movie landscape–littered with bloated high-gloss Oscar-bait, “surefire” biopix, inane romantic comedies, numbing special-effects orgies, and teen gross-out flicks–it’s easy to get a little nostalgic about the excitement and sheer hopefulness that the movies of the late 60s and early 70s engendered.

“Life may turn out to be worth living after all.”

In the July 1968 issue of Esquire (the one with the cover shot of black men “staying cool” in an ice warehouse–see this blog’s first post), the editors ran a full-page ad promoting its upcoming Anniversary Issue.  Instead of touting the roster of star writers who would be appearing, the ad is a simple, striking black page, with a couple of blocks of type.  Here’s the headline, blocked in yellow:  ”If you can muddle through the next three months, America, we’ll save you in October.”  And it’s followed by this list:  ”Your cities are crumbling.  The masses are in revolt.  The economy is shaky.  Your children are unwashed and living in sin.”  The ad goes on to say that Esquire would be publishing a special issue on the theme, “Salvaging the Twentieth Century.”  ”Stick around,” the editors advise: “Life may turn out to be worth living after all.  (Consider the alternative.)”

Of course, the ad is not entirely serious.  It’s arch and hip in that jaded-sophisticate way so dear to Esquire readers.  But beneath the ad’s somewhat bemused tone is a sense of bleakness and fatigue that seems altogether appropriate in the waning months of 1968.

Martin, Robert, and John

And when October 1968 finally did roll around, the artwork chosen by George Lois and Carl Fischer for the cover of this 35th Anniversary Issue was anything but droll:  the two martyred Kennedy brothers joined by Martin Luther King, standing in the midst of endless rows of uncarved white stone gravestones, suggesting the immense and mounting body count of the 20th century’s latest war.  It’s sobering to remember that in October 1968, JFK had been dead less than five years; he would have been just 51 that year.  RFK and MLK had been dead for just a few months.  This triumvirate of loss would be joined together in countless other renditions–in black velvet, on commemorative plates–but probably never so powerfully as here.

Pulling out the stops

Inside the issue, Esquire pulled out all the stops, as you might imagine.  There are contributions by a extraordinary spectrum of observors: from F. Scott Fitzgerald (a never-before-published essay called “My Generation”), William Styron, Frank Conroy, Truman Capote (on capital punishment); Gore Vidal, Daniel Boorstin, and William F. Buckley, with smaller contributions from Billy Graham, Stokely Carmichael, Moshe Dayan, Barry Goldwater, and Mickey Rooney, not to mention Popeye, Pogo, and L’il Abner and Daisy Mae.   We’ll get to some of those in future “Covering 1968″ posts.   Stick around.

An inflammatory book of black rage

Eldridge Cleaver (1935-98) made one of the 20th century’s more unusual journeys through public life–youthful criminality and prison, radical politics, literary celebrity, presidential political campaigning, exile, born-again Christianity, conversion to Mormonism and then to conservative Republican politics, embarrassingly provocative clothing design.   American popular culture has seen its share its share of “one-book wonders,” and Cleaver fits the description.  Soul on Ice, some of which had been excerpted in Ramparts magazine (where the masses presumably had not seen it) was an extraordinary, inflammatory book of black rage, poured like gasoline on the fire of white anxiety and fear in the summer of 1968.

“A formidable analytical mind.”

White people, especially white intellectuals of the New Left, were looking for avatars to guide them through the dense thicket of black anger, for ways of knowing and thinking about black “demands” and expectations.  Here, suddenly, was the eloquent guide they were looking for.  The blurbs excerpted on the back of the book are, with one exception, by “literary” white people:  Geoffrey Wolff (praising Cleaver’s “moral energy”); Thomas Lask (”an exceptional volume”); Robert Coles (”He is full of Christian care, Christian grief and disappointment . . .”); and radical critic Maxwell Geismar, whose introduction to the book is quoted on the back:  ”Cleaver is simply one of the best cultural critics now writing. . . .”    The sole black critic is Julian Mayfield, writing in The Nation:  ”Beautifully written by a man with a formidable analytical mind.”

“What does the Negro want?”

“Cultural critic.”  ”Formidable mind.”  ”Moral energy.”  Unexpected praise for someone who writes (dated October 1965, in Folsom Prison):  ”I’m perfectly aware that I’m in prison, that I’m a Negro, that I’ve been a rapist, that I have a Higher Uneducation.”   But Soul on Ice, with its short, punchy chapters and outrageous pronouncements that somehow also ring true (”That growing numbers of white youth are repudiating their heritage of blood and taking people of color as their heroes and models is a tribute not only to their insight but to the resilience of the human spirit”) was absolutely riveting to hordes of readers, both black and white.  For blacks, here was a new literary hero–articulate and learned, but speaking in a voice that “sounded like ‘right now.’”  For whites, Cleaver was a hip, edgy answer to that desperate Sixties question:  ”What does the Negro want?”   In some ways, especially in retrospect, Soul on Ice looks like the kitchen sink.  As perhaps befits the man who became the “Minister of Information” for the Black Panthers, Cleaver has something to say about everyone and everything: Baldwin and homosexuality (he’s against it), King, Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones, the United Nations, Elijah Muhammed, LBJ, FDR, JFK, Vietnam (”The black man’s interest lies in seeing a strong Vietnam which is not the puppet of white supremacy”), Norman Mailer, Castro, Muhammed Ali, Stepin Fetchit, the New Left, beatniks and Ginsberg, World War II, colonialism, Frederick Douglass and the Civil War.  There’s even a strikingly astute riff on Ian Fleming’s James Bond, who is “offering the whites a triumphant image of themselves.”  The book ends in a couple of chapters–I’m guessing most readers skipped these–that offer meandering and deeply misogynistic rantings about white women and black women.

A summertime 1968 bestseller

Soul on Ice was a sensational publishing phenomenon.  It showed up–in hardback–in the top ten of the New York Times Best Seller List (10th, to be exact) twice in late summer 1968–not a gigantic blockbuster, but still remarkable given its fellow occupants on the list (diet books, books about rich people and money, The Naked Ape).  It was in paperback–the version depicted here– that the book’s influence was most strongly felt.  Here, indeed, is a true icon of 1968:  the Black Man with Afro and furrowed brow, liberated from prison (in the background), posed with a clutch of white lilies, symbolizing . . . well, who knows?