National Geographic

American magazines have been one of the minor (but significant) indicators of class since their beginning in the 19th century.  That is, one doesn’t acquire magazines only as reading material, but also as visible markers of status and as a legible codes of identity.    Coffee tables may not even function primarily as tables for coffee, but as platforms for the display of attainment (or at least aspiration), as indicated by the magazines artfully splayed across them.

In 1968, as indeed it had been for much of the 20th century, the unchanging, unmistakeable cover of a National Geographic magazine in ones living room was a powerful icon of class.  There weren’t many homes in the working-class neighborhood of postwar tract homes where I grew up in the 1950s and 60s where National Geographic was lying around, certainly not my family’s.  In the 1960s, one had to be “recommended for membership” by another National Geographic Society “member” (i.e., subscriber) in order to be allowed the privilege of sending in your $6.50 for a year’s subscription (6 issues).  It was (and is still, sort of) a classy magazine, filled with its famously brilliant color photographs, thoughtful (well, at least lengthy) articles, and stunning fold-out maps.  Paper-bound but book-like in its “perfect” (not stapled) binding, each yellow-bordered issue was a little masterpiece, and demanded to be neatly stacked and saved, forever.

During the 1960s, National Geographic changed little in outward appearance, and continued to publish articles with titles that are the stuff of parody:  ”Finland: Plucky Neighbor of Soviet Russia,” or “The Incredible Salmon,” or “Brazil’s Stone-Age Tribes.”  The relatively few ad pages were filled with immense station wagons and Cadillacs; airlines; the occasional ocean liner; foreign countries; cameras and stereos. The classified ads were dominated by boys’ military schools, prep schools, and summer camps.

But National Geographic did not back away from international politics in this turbulent decade.  As early as October 1961, the magazine was reporting on the conflict in Southeast Asia (”South Viet Nam Fights the Red Tide”), and they had re-visited it at least three times before the issue pictured here.  This cover story is an exhaustively reported and lavishly illustrated story piece the “Montagnards” of Vietnam–the “primitive” mountain tribes caught between the Viet Cong and the South Vietnamese and U.S. military troops.  The writer was Howard Sochurek, who at the end of 1967 visited Vietnam at the end of 1967 for  ”the eighteenth time in eighteen years . . . not, this time, to report on a maddening war, but to live for a time with a people trapped in its terrible jaws.”  Those two adjectives are just about the only editorializing the reporter allowed himself, but they are indicative of the general weariness and despair about the war that had come to characterize American popular opinion of the war by 1968–the worst year of the war in terms of the numbers of American casualties.

At first glance, the cover photograph of the boy appears to belong to that recognizable genre of NG photos:  ”Third-World-person-doing-something-strange.”  But inside one reads that this scene, too, has a back story rooted in the ongoing military conflict.  ”Hard way to hold a fish: A Mnong grips one with his teeth while hands reach for more. When fishing became poor, tribesmen discovered a new method–tossing grenades into the water.”

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