MEMO FROM THE EDITOR
MEMO from the Editor Ozone Something peculiar happened at The Progressive in the summer of 1975. Suddenly we began receiving insertion orders from one of the leading advertising agencies in New...
...Maybe his followers will be able to sell the capitalists the rope with which to be hung one of these days...
...A few asked us to cancel their subscriptions...
...The ad asserted, "Some say that these useful, normally safe compounds will cause a health hazard by attacking the earth's ozone layer...
...Some subscribers were quick to take offense...
...We thought he was entitled to his opinion, but we did feel obliged to point out that the proper usage was "hanged," not "hung...
...Stranger things have happened...
...That sort of thing is routine at most magazines, of course, but not at The Progressive...
...The readers of this magazine, he protested, are "about 180 degrees away from anything that could be described as support for free enterprise...
...We ran the ad, but we also ran an editorial in the same issue accusing Du Pont of engaging in "serious misrepresentation" in its advertising...
...The panel said that it had detected a significant reduction in the thickness of the ozone layer that might be linked to CFCs...
...As it turned out, the ads in The Progressive aroused concern in other quarters, too...
...The NASA scientists concluded that the damage to the stratosphere will linger for decades, and may prove irreversible...
...We believe this is an oversimplification...
...He was between jobs then—retired from the governorship of California, not yet retired into the Presidency of the United States—but he was distributing a regular radio commentary to some 300 stations around the country, and he devoted one broadcast to the outrage of corporate advertising in The Progressive...
...We didn't know how to account for the windfall (and we still don't), but we had a couple of theories: Perhaps a computer at the ad agency had gone haywire and inadvertently placed The Progressive on a list of publications in which ads were to be placed, or perhaps we had a secret friend at the agency...
...The right-wing weekly Human Events complained, under the dramatic headline How GM and AT&T Support Socialism, about "the astonishing decision by both companies to place large advertisements in The Progressive," a publication Human Events described as "anti-business, pro-Socialist—and frequently pro-Communist...
...Suddenly we began receiving insertion orders from one of the leading advertising agencies in New York City for full-page and even two-page ads placed on behalf of major corporations—the likes of General Motors and AT&T...
...We replied, more or less patiently, that we thought we could expose our readers to corporate ads without jeopardizing their—or our—immortal souls...
...It was a defense of aerosol sprays containing fluorocarbons, a leading Du Pont product...
...And solemnly he concluded, "Maybe Karl Marx was right...
...It also said that whatever caused a previously detected 'hole' in the ozone layer over the Antarctic seemed to be thinning the layer in other parts of the atmosphere...
...The insertion orders stopped coming as mysteriously as they had begun...
...On March 24, 1988, Du Pont announced it was getting out of the fluorocarbon business and called for the imposition of worldwide controls on the substance...
...And an article in our October 1975 issue was headed, What's Good for E.I...
...It took Du Pont only a little more than a dozen years to arrive at the need for "rethinking...
...After that, strangely enough, we received no more ads for Du Pont—or for any other major corporation...
...MEMO from the Editor Ozone Something peculiar happened at The Progressive in the summer of 1975...
...The Progressive was going through a cash-flow crisis—it almost always is—and the unexpected advertising revenue helped a lot...
...Du Pont May Be Catastrophic for the Stratosphere...
...In that period, the damage to the ozone layer has caused, and will continue to cause, an indeterminate number of cases of skin cancer...
...They wrote angry letters demanding to know why The Progressive had sold out to big business...
...Even Ronald Reagan got into the act...
...Over the next few months, we published more than a dozen pages of corporate advertising...
...A panel of scientists assembled by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration issued new findings that day on the chlorofluorocarbons, known as CFCs...
...The New York Times reported: "The rethinking at Du Pont began on Tuesday, March 15...
...That fall, our anonymous benefactors at the New York advertising agency sent us a two-page ad placed by the Du Pont Company...
Vol. 52 • May 1988 • No. 5
