Drug abuse

Ladies Home Journal was not, to put it mildly, a political magazine.  Not in the 1960s, not now.

But for the first issue of 1968, that most “political” of years, the chief editors at Ladies Home Journal–every single one of them men, by the way–decided to take a different tack.  As the editor-in-chief, John Mack Carter, wrote in his “Dear Reader” column, this was because “there are more and more problems in our world and fewer and fewer answers– not only national and international problems, but increasing friction about community, family and personal matters.”  LHJ announced that each issue would “be consciously planned not only to entertain and inform you better than ever before, but to be used–to solve your problems, to help improve your life.”  Readers would be offered “the opportunity to participate in the making of each issue . . . to put you in touch with the triumphs and defeats of 13 million other Journal women.”  New features were added:  a “Journal Board of Experts,” who would answer readers’ questions.  The Board included personal finances advisor Sylvia Porter, TV journalist David Brinkley, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, and etiquette maven Amy Vanderbilt.   A new monthly readers’ poll, “The Voice of Women,”  was begun, surveying thousands of readers by mail.

Reaching for relevance

The Journal was, in short, reaching for the most 1960s of goals:  Relevance.  Henceforth, the magazine would serve their readers in new, meaningful ways, to help them make sense of a world that–suddenly– seemed a lot more complicated.   Naturally, the covers would need to reflect this more engaged identity.  Ladies Home Journal “cover girls” in 1967 had been the usual lineup:  Mia Farrow, Jacqueline Kennedy (pre-Onassis), Twiggy and other fashion models, cute kids and Moms.  This one doesn’t feature a celebrity at all, but rather an unidentified woman in a sweater festooned with an array of slogan or campaign-type buttons.  The words announce the issue’s contents: an excerpt from Bobby Kennedy’s new book, To Seek a Newer World, which came out just before he entered the presidential race; a true story, “My Son is On LSD. Is Yours?”; an article by an obstetrician, writing under a pseudonym, confessing that he prescribes birth control pills for unmarried “girls”; and an article on how “We Can Close the Generation Gap.”  The new poll feature concludes that “We’re Scared of Our Kids,” revealing that “many parents are so tyrannized by their children that they are not altogether sure that adults are still running the world.”

A story in need of revision

My personal favorite story in this issue is an excerpt from a forthcoming (1968) biography of Charles A. Lindbergh, The Last Hero, by Walter S. Ross (one of many unauthorized biographies that had appeared since 1927, all of them despised by Lindbergh).   The introduction to the excerpt here says that Lindbergh–who turned 66 in 1968–was “scarred by tragedy [i.e., the kidnapping of his son in 1932], and retreated into a shell of secrecy.  Inside it, however, Lindbergh raised five children to be responsible, self-reliant young men and women.  To him, the Generation Gap was just another Atlantic–and he spanned it with an unusual mixture of fatherly love and iron discipline.”   The cover “button” that calls Lindbergh “America’s Most Remarkable Father” is richly ironic, of course, since we now know that the 1960s were exactly the years that Lindbergh was carrying on three separate extramarital affairs in Europe, and fathering no fewer than seven additional illegitimate children.   Remarkable.

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Generation gap– a Sixties “meme”

Certain phrases migrate from being just a combination of words to something with a little more immortality.  Mundanely, we might call them “catchphrases.” Today we would probably call these virally spreading cultural nuggets ”memes.”  That word probably had little currency in the 1960s, but one of 1968’s most pervasive memes was “generation gap.”  It was the upheavals of the 1960s that gave rise to this term, if not the actual phenomenon, which had been around for centuries.  Sociologist Kenneth Keniston, in his influential 1968 study Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth, found his informants to be “hostile . . . to patterns of power and authority.” No lesser lights than Bruno Bettelheim, Erik Erikson, and Margaret Mead all produced social-psychological studies focusing on generational divides and challenges in this era.

Understanding the gap

Margaret Mead, in the book Culture and Commitment (subtitled “A Study in the Generation Gap”), based on a series of lectures in 1969, turned her anthropologist’s eye to the problem:  ”Today, nowhere in the world are there elders who know what children know, not matter how remote and simple the societies in which the children live. In the past there were always some elders who knew more than any children in terms of their experience of having grown up with a cultural system.  Today there are none.”  Classically, of course, young people define themselves in relation to—if not always in opposition to—the values of their parents’ generation. But the Sixties sharpened this process, compelling one to find a place on one side or the other of a yawning “generation gap.”

To be young again

A national obsession with youth and youthfulness and youthful rebellion was evident throughout the decade.  LIFE magazine, with this May 17 issue, was actually a little behind the curve in finding currency in this concept.  TIME, after all, had declared “Men and Women Under 25″ to be their “Persons of the Year” way back in January 1966.  LIFE’s hook was to document an actual gap, to publish the conflicting views of two men–Richard Lorber (age 20) and his uncle, Ernest Fladell (age 42), both New Yorkers, who decided to write a book together about their experiences when young Lorber moved in with his uncle in 1967.   That’s Lorber’s head on the cover, with his uncle pictured in his right eyeglass lens.  (Of course, it’s not surprising that LIFE’s choice for these stand-ins for “the gap” are both white males.)

Communicating across the gap–or not

The pair have some archetypal adventures together:  Richard turns Ernie on to pot; Ernie enjoys it, but Richard turns resentful when afterwards Ernie professes great insight into the drug’s appeal:  ”It is as if he had crashed a very private party I was having with myself.”   Richie and Ernie hook up with Richie’s friends in Greenwich Village (Ernie wants to meet a “few bona fide hippies”), and it gets a little weird with some girls they hang out with. (Ernie proclaims that “the so-called sexual revolution isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.”) They visit a few head shops in the East Village (e.g., the “Psychedelicatessan”).  They disagree–strongly–about the “Negro riots” which Richie sees as “the most hopeful sign I have seen in the past year;” he understands “exactly” how blacks have been “driven to violence.”  Ernie is appalled:  ”I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about.”  Richie and Ernie (a veteran of World War II) disagree on military service.  After Ernie’s draft board reclassifies him, he gets worried, and tells Ernie that he was “facing one of the most agonizing decisions of his life.”  Ernie says: “I went to war weak with fear but strong in pride. Richard has only fear.”

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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!

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