Reader's Digest

TOO MUCH STUFF

I’ve been on a campaign to reduce the massive buildup of STUFF in our house, and my garage is filling up with decades of flotsam and jetsam.  A garage/yard sale is imminent.  So the plague of too much stuff has been very much on my mind here in 2010, but I was surprised to see that people in 1968 were beginning to have similar feelings.

Here’s an illustration from an article entitled “How Do You Lose a Swimming Pool?” from the April 1968 Readers’ Digest.  It was condensed (”digested”) from a somewhat longer piece in the Denver Post Sunday magazine called Contemporary.  The Digest (published in Westchester County, outside New York City)  cast a fairly wide net for its articles, gathering them in not just from readily recognizable cosmopolitan magazines, but also from the American heartland.   In this way, Digest editors were able to keep their finger on the pulsebeat of America, especially for “lifestyle” articles.

I’ve already written once about this issue of the Digest– way back in August 2009, when I remarked on the list of articles, which reads in retrospect almost as a catalogue of 1968 themes:  the Pill, civil rights, grim news from Vietnam, homefront protests, recreational drug use, the crisis in the nation’s inner cities, even a “pre-echo” of 1970s environmentalism (Charles Lindbergh’s “Wisdom of Wildness”).   Add to this catalogue this article.  At first glance satirical and “light-hearted’ (the Digest was well known for leavening each issue with wholesome humor), this piece actually sounds themes that were beginning to be heard in 1968, a violent and divisive year, yes, but also a year that was the high-water mark of the postwar “age of affluence.”   Consumer goods proliferated wildly after the war, and the pace of production and consumption only accelerated in the turbulent 1960s, especially in suburbia.

The prosperity brought with it new pressures and new anxieties about class and status, and the tidal waves of consumer goods produced a problem that probably felt pretty new in 1968, but 42 years later no longer does.  The problem is well stated here in the first paragraph by the writer, Will Stanton:

“I happen to be a member of the new affuent middle class.   My neighbors are in the same bracket and we all have the same problem– one unique to our country and time.  There’s no place to put anything.”  The article’s tagline restates it:  ”There’s no limit to what money can buy– and that’s the root of the problem.”    The author elaborates:  ”There used to be rich people and poor people.  The poor had no room to keep things in, but they didn’t have anything to keep anyhow.  The people that owned all the stuff had castles.  It worked out fine.  But the new middle class . . .”    Stanton says that when he and his wife, Ethel, bought the house “the thing that impressed us was the size. . . . We had always lived in an apartment.  Then suddenly we had all that space and all the beautiful catalogues and charge accounts everywhere.”   They also had two kids, then three (that’s when they bought a station wagon and then a second car); they develop hobbies, all of which consumed space and demanded more consuming (restoring furniture, photography, gardening); they buy a boat, “because the children would only be young once,” but they have to keep it in their now-shrinking yard.

They buy a large, portable pool, with a folding metal frame and a plastic liner, that somehow gets lost one year when it’s packed away amidst all the rest of the stuff.  Will doesn’t want to tell anybody, because he’s worried that people won’t understand:  ”The trouble is some people are 50 years beyond the times.  They just don’t understand the problems of the affluent middle class.”

Where does all this lead?  You guessed it:  the creation of the U.S. self-storage industry (”U-Store-It,” “Stor-More,” and so on), which begins in the mid-1960s and rapidly expands in the 1970s.  Today, rentable self-storage units in the United States account for more than 2.35 billion square feet of storage space.

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A virtual checklist of 1968 preoccupations: From Vietnam to urban violence to “The Pill” and why kids smoke pot: All “digested” and ready to read:  it’s Reader’s Digest.

Reader’s Digest is one of the most durable institutions in American publishing. Founded in 1922, the magazine still claims to be the most widely read magazine in America, a claim that it has been able to make for decades.  Its formula for years was familiar, and was stated inside every month above the lead article:  ”An article a day of enduring significance, in condensed permanent booklet form.”  Reader’s Digest (unlike National Geographic: see earlier “Covering 1968″ post) was very much a part of my middle-class family’s life in the 1950s and 60s, a virtually indispensable back-of-the-commode companion.

Unlike today, Reader’s Digest in 1968 was still being published monthly, so theoretically I had 12 possible choices to write about.   This April issue fell into my lap by chance, but it turns out to contain an especially impressive collection of stories, covering the waterfront of 1968 issues almost as if following a checklist:

• Former president Dwight D. Eisenhower writes an original, copyrighted piece on the war in Vietnam and the protests against it. “In my long life of service to my country, I have never encountered a situation more depressing than the present spectacle of an America deeply divided over a war.”  Predictably, he harkened back to World War II:  ”Neither I nor any other military leader had to lie awake nights wondering whether the folks back home would stick with us to the end.”
• Pearl S. Buck–at the time the only American woman to hold the Nobel Prize in Literature–writes about “The Pill” (she doesn’t mention the words “birth control”), which has a “potential effect on our society . . . even more devastating than the nuclear bomb.”
• “Hell Week in Vietnam,” a condensation of Time magazine reporting on the Tet Offensive
• A piece by arch-conservative RD editor William Schulz on Martin Luther King’s planned “Poor People’s Army”  march on Washington — “a matter of grave concern.”  He writes: “The nation faces international humiliation,” and “Communism’s worldwide propaganda apparatus is set for a field day.”  (King had been assassinated on April 4, 1968, after this issue was printed.)  In a related article also printed here, “Is Insurrection Brewing in the United States?” the answer is “Yes, it is quite possible.”
• An article by “Anonymous” (”a recent college graduate”) on “Why Students Turn to Drugs”:  ”The true ‘pothead’ may turn on with marijuana every evening.  Consciously or not, he has renounced the ’straight’ world, divorcing himself from reality.”

A couple of other observations:

“The Wisdom of Wildness,” by famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, originally published a few months earlier in Life, is condensed and reprinted here.  Lindbergh was well into his years of self re-invention as an environmentalist and spokesman for conservation movements.  The environmental movement is more often associated with the 1970s, and with liberal politics.  Here it is, however, in the 1960s, and in one of the most politically conservative magazines on the market.

I was once again surprised about the growing interest, to judge by the plethora of advertisements, in dieting and weight-loss products, such as Metrecal, Ayds, and Instant Breakfast–not a trend I expected to find in 1968.   (See my earlier post about 1968 bestsellers–Rod  McKuen poetry vying with diet books.)

And 1968 appears to have also been the breakthrough year for color television, to judge by the number of ads.  (Statistics bear this out:  the percentage of U.S. households with color TVs went from just under 10 percent in 1966 to nearly 25 percent by the end of 1968, according to the comprehensive website, tvhistory.tv)

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