Coronet Magazine, August 1960

     Coronet Magazine, August 1960. Reading old magazines reminds us how much popular culture can change. The assumptions which we use in our daily lives, in our interpretation of everything from advertising to political news, change far more thoroughly in some respects than we like to admit.
     Consider the cover story: “Can Catholics Ever Accept Birth Control?” The author, William Clancy, says no, on the grounds that birth control violates objective natural law, which the Catholic Church has always accepted as God-given. He means objective moral law, of course, not natural law as we generally understand it. His argument was published as a serious contribution to the debate. It would probably not be published in a general interest magazine nowadays, based as it is on the arrogant assumption that his moral law is the only objectively true one. But it does explain why the hierarchy still opposes all conception control, while it accepts conception avoidance, on the grounds that the latter is more natural than the former. Why taking advantage of the fertility cycle of a woman to prevent conception is natural while taking advantage of mechanical or chemical processes to achieve the same end is not, is a question that I have long puzzled over. [Note 2013: even in 1960, many Catholics had already "accepted" birth control, and now a majority have done so. The hierarchy still uses Clancy's arguments to condemn it.]
     The general tone of articles on technical and scientific topics is very positive. Science and technology will improve our lives; side effects can be fixed easily with more science and technology. Even though Carson’s Silent Spring had been published some years earlier, and was still a best seller in 1960, its effects on general attitudes to the environment were still small. In particular, there seems to have been no sense of the inter-connectedness of things: That a solution over here will cause a problem over there. It took a few real disasters, such as Bhopal in India, repeated oil spills, and real effects on people’s health from pollution, to make her message real to most of us. The optimistic and hopeful attitudes toward science have been replaced by suspicion and hostility, an equally irrational response to what is after all the only means we have of knowing how the world really works, and figuring out ways to protect ourselves from its dangers. But I suppose I should keep in mind the rah-rah hyping of genetic engineering: it eerily echoes the happy acceptance of the wonders of the plastics and chemical industries in the 1950s and 60s. Think of the scene in The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman’s character is told to get into plastics if he wants a great future.
     The feminist revolution had as yet no effect in August 1960, if this magazine is evidence. There are a couple of articles about how to be a good wife. They were presumably amusing then, but they don’t strike me as amusing now. But they do explain Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. The implicit and sometimes explicit patronising of tone towards “the little woman” in these articles (and in a photo story about Zsa Zsa Gabor), and even more obviously shown in the ads, must have offended many women even back then, and certainly offended any woman who thought about her status.
     The political articles don’t come close to the kind of stuff people published a mere three or four years later. 1960 was really still the 50s, and there is a respect shown towards politicos that no one feels any of them deserve nowadays. On the other hand, the kind of journalism that exposed the Watergate scandals isn’t possible anymore either, not since the media have been “consolidated” into ever greater conglomerates, and “convergence” has blurred the lines not only between the media, but also between advertising, information, and entertainment.
     The ads are the most telling. They are straightforward, and the longer ones, with lots of text, take a sensible tone, as of one man speaking to another. I was charmed by the ad for The Empire Builder, a streamlined train, which depicted a senior executive who is taking the train from Chicago to Seattle so as to have time for reflection about a big deal that his underlings have been negotiating, underlings who have flown to Seattle in order to have everything ready for the great man when he arrives
     All in all, what strikes me about this (and other magazines from the same time) is the naivete and hopefulness. Most of the articles are puff-pieces of one kind or another, or are designed to create an image of America the Good and Beautiful and Fun To Live In. People had not yet become as utterly cynical and almost hopeless as they have nowadays. Looking back, we can see the mistakes we made back then; but our reaction to those mistakes will certainly lead us to make equally bad or even worse ones. ** (2002)