The magazine was a typical girlie book of the mid-1930s, straight out of the Great Depression. I came across the reproduction of its cover while searching the web for something else entirely. The publication’s title was Cupid’s Capers, and it cost a quarter. The cover art was a Vargas-style pinup girl doing an anatomically implausible headstand while wearing a smile and lingerie that was all but transparent. Basically Cupid’s Capers was the Depression-era equivalent of soft porn. Even in those hard times folks would fork over 25 cents for some cheerful—if extremely modest—erotic thrills.
I would have thought nothing more of Cupid’s Capers if I hadn’t spotted a small blue eagle logo on the right-hand side of the cover and red initials NRA. Today we think of the NRA as the National Rifle Association, but back in the days of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, it meant the National Recovery Administration. That NRA was the central federal agency empowered to develop voluntary agreements on work hours, pay rates and retail prices. It played a crucial role in the nation’s recovery after that first 20th-century economic collapse, and was extremely popular with the working poor and the unemployed.
Much of the success of the NRA was that, in its negotiations, it not only attempted to give all those involved a fair shake, but it was seen to be evenhanded and trustworthy. The NRA blue eagle (in fact a stylized thunderbird) became the trusted logo of the New Deal all across the country. Stores displayed it on their doors and in their front windows to show they supported Roosevelt and his efforts to save the nation. Manufacturers began using the blue eagle on their products and packaging. It became a powerful symbol of the trust and loyalty that FDR enjoyed among American workers in the hungry 1930s, and created the impression that everyone, on all levels of society, was united in a common purpose as they crawled out from the economic wreckage. Even the publishers of Cupid’s Capers were pitching in and doing their soft-porn bit for the national recovery, if only by keeping the working stiff happy.
The same thing seems almost unimaginable today. We may have saturation 24-hour news, but here in this 21st-century depression, everything is deceptively normal. No Okies, no railroad bums, no soup kitchens, none of the stuff from the ancient newsreels and black-and-white photos. While friends and acquaintances lose jobs, and look increasingly more desperate, the modern world goes on as if there’s no cause for concern.
If a recovery is under way, we are not being shown that it’s happening. We’re three-quarters into the first year of the Obama presidency and very little of what was tacitly promised during the 2008 campaign is particularly visible. No awe-inspiring public works, no dramatic job creation, no easier consumer credit—no clear and present hope for the unemployed and evicted, or millions of small and shaky businesses.
And just imagine if some porn operation copied Cupid’s Capers, and displayed a logo declaring the producers’ support for Barack Obama’s national economic recovery. All hell and worse would undoubtedly break loose. The story would generate a prime furor on cable news, with the religious right screaming bloody murder and prophesying the destruction of family values. Keith Olbermann would editorialize, and Bill Maher would use it as part of his monologue. The porn producer would be quietly pressured into removing the endorsement, and anything but a sense of national solidarity would be achieved.
Yet, national solidarity means exactly that. It means the entire country working together, not just the parts that moralists and bigots deem acceptable. Sure, we need truck drivers and factory workers, customer-service employees and marketing execs, all patriotic and pulling, but we also need the efforts of strippers, rock musicians, writers and porn stars. We are also Americans. We have all been included in the problem, and we all have to become part of the solution. The publishers of Cupid’s Capers realized this three generations ago. Shame on us, if it can’t be accepted now.
Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com.
This article originally appeared in the September 2009 issue of AVN.
