Esquire magazine

“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.

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Any single edition of a magazine or a newspaper is, self-evidently, a kind of undifferentiated anthology of events and attitudes of its particular day.  Jarring juxtapositions are to be expected.  But rarely have I found an “coincidence”(?) like the one in the July 1968 Esquire that I just wrote about yesterday.  The cover and the cover article (an interview with James Baldwin) are about the sharp polarities between black and white in America. It’s hard to imagine another mass-market magazine of its day — or even any magazine or newspaper today– publishing something as bitter and pointed and extended as the comments by Baldwin in this piece.  Yet, less than 10 pages later there appears an article “A Whiter Shade of Black,” by Lawrence Lasker, which documents the work of one Dr. Robert Stolar of Washington, D.C., a dermatologist who claimed to be able to Negroes into white people, at least those with the pigmentation disorder of vitiligo.  He’s quoted:  ”I don’t just turn anybody white.  I guess two hundred Negroes have asked me to do it for them, but I usually don’t take them unless they have vitiligo. . . I wish I could take them all, but I just can’t. . . If it were easy to do, to turn white, I think a large number of Negroes would do it.  Black skin is their badge, and they suffer for it.”

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THE COVER: Esquire magazine, July 1968.  ”James Baldwin tells us all how to cool it this summer.”

“The long, hot summer.”  Americans heard a lot about that as the summer months approached in 1968, and it filled them with dread.  By 1968, just the word “summer” was conjuring not just beaches and vacations and re-runs on TV, but also what were almost universally known as “race riots,”  events that today, with more circumspection, we call “urban rebellions.”  Large swaths of Los Angeles were devastated in summer 1965; much of Newark and Detroit (and Buffalo, and Milwaukee, and Minneapolis) went up in flames in summer 1967.    Experts who might be called meteorological criminologists were coming forth with pronouncements about the “temperature-humidity crime index,” a bogus predictor of violence and lawlessness that added a layer of “science” to the accumulating lists of causes of civil disturbance.

As it turned out, by the time the summer of 1968 rolled around, urban America had already been convulsed by the serious, destructive riots that occurred in the wake of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in early April.  Still, the fears of “worse to come” were there when the editors at Esquire planned the issue that would appear at the height of the summer.  The now-legendary art director George Lois conceived this brilliant photo shoot to announce the magazine’s editorial coup of nailing an interview with no less a light than James Baldwin about what to expect in the summer of 1968.

Seven young black men–anonymous, black-jacketed, smoking, staring at the camera–are assembled in an ice warehouse.  George Lois and photographer Carl Fischer pressed these men (actors? models? guys pulled in off the street?) into a single role, one with a long history in American popular culture–the Black Man who Terrifies White People.   Cool.  Insolent.  Arrogant.  Tightly wound.  ”Powderkegs,” each of them.  Still, the photograph manages to control them:  they are inside; trapped, in a way, in a space that could pass for a prison; like animals or carcasses in a meat locker; isolated from each other, not part of a larger group.  Not part of a community at all: no women, no children.  Just black male-ness, an immense threat to white American males, overwhelmingly the readership of Esquire, “The Magazine for Men,” as it says just above the head of the black guy on the far right.

James Baldwin’s 1962 book The Fire Next Time had been widely noted for its disturbing warnings about the “cosmic vengeance” that black America was soon to wreak on white America, a prediction that seemed to come to pass a few years (summers) later.  Esquire, which had first published Baldwin in 1961, returned to him at “a time of fresh tragedy”:  his typically contentious, take-no-prisoners interview was conducted just two days after the King’s funeral, when several American cities were still burning.   Baldwin had famously said a few years earlier, when asked in general terms about “the Negro problem,” that: “It’s not the Negro problem, it’s the white problem. I’m only black because you think you’re white.”  His long interview here bears up extremely well, even 40+ years on.  Calming the waters, cooling the heated situation?  No, neither.  Baldwin’s eloquent, two-fisted answers probably left few people reassured about the summer of ‘68:  ”When you, in the person of your President, assure me that you will not tolerate any more violence, you may think that frightens me.  People don’t get frightened when they hear that, they get mad.  And whereas you’re afraid to die, I’m not.”

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