Description
Collector's Note – Why This Issue Matters
The Saturday Evening Post's January 30, 1965 issue arrived at one of the most consequential moments in the American civil rights movement, publishing roughly six weeks before the Selma to Montgomery marches would draw the nation's attention to Alabama and just months after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had become law. The issue's cover feature, "The K.K.K.: 'We Got Nothing to Hide,'" by Harold H. Martin and Kenneth Fairley, offered Post readers a contemporary journalistic examination of the Ku Klux Klan during a period when the organization remained an active and violent presence in parts of the South. The article's authors concluded that the Klan functioned less as a coherent organization than as a state of mind reflecting the despair of poor white Southerners who found no respected place in the surrounding society, describing its members not as the folk heroes they imagined themselves to be but as the bitter rejects of that society. Collectors building an archive of magazines from 1965 will find this issue a genuinely significant primary-source document of how a major national magazine approached one of the era's most urgent and dangerous subjects at a pivotal moment in the civil rights struggle.
This issue's cover photograph was the work of Lynn Pelham, and the Martin and Fairley piece itself continued the Post's longer history of covering the Klan across multiple decades, a history stretching back to coverage of the organization's 1920s resurgence and its renewed growth following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. The Post's willingness to send reporters to investigate and report on the Klan's internal culture and self-justifications, rather than simply condemning the organization from a distance, reflects a journalistic approach aimed at explaining a dangerous phenomenon to a national readership rather than merely denouncing it. For collectors researching the history of The Saturday Evening Post and its coverage of American social and political conflict, this issue documents the magazine's engagement with the civil rights era at one of its most volatile and consequential junctures.
The issue's broader contents reveal the Post's characteristically wide editorial range even within a single consequential week. Alongside the Klan feature, this edition carries a piece by Joan Didion, then early in her career as a journalist and essayist, profiling author Helen Gurley Brown during her national tour promoting "Sex and the Office," a book that continued the cultural conversation Brown had ignited with "Sex and the Single Girl" a few years earlier. The issue also includes a piece by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower on the future of the Republican Party, published roughly two months after the 1964 presidential election in which Eisenhower's preferred moderate wing of the party had lost decisively to Barry Goldwater's insurgent conservative campaign. Together, these pieces situate the Klan feature within a broader issue actively grappling with the political and cultural realignments reshaping mid-1960s America.
About the Publication
The Saturday Evening Post traced its origins to the early nineteenth century and had, by the mid-1960s, established itself as one of the most widely circulated general-interest magazines in the United States, known for a weekly mix of investigative journalism, celebrity profiles, political commentary, and serialized fiction. Its editorial format regularly placed feature journalism on difficult or controversial social subjects alongside lighter entertainment and lifestyle content, reflecting an effort to serve a broad national readership with genuinely substantive reporting on the era's defining issues. By 1965, the Post's willingness to publish extended investigative pieces on subjects like the Klan, alongside contributions from prominent political figures and emerging literary voices like Didion, demonstrated the magazine's continued ambition to be a serious venue for American journalism even as television news was beginning to reshape how many Americans followed major national events.
Key Highlights Inside
- The cover feature "The K.K.K.: 'We Got Nothing to Hide'" by Harold H. Martin and Kenneth Fairley, an investigative report on the Ku Klux Klan published during a pivotal stretch of the civil rights movement. The piece's documented conclusions characterized the Klan's membership through the lens of social marginalization rather than organizational coherence.
- A profile by Joan Didion of author Helen Gurley Brown, written during Brown's national publicity tour for her book "Sex and the Office." The piece captures Didion early in her journalism career, several years before the essays that would establish her broader literary reputation.
- A political essay on the future of the Republican Party written by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, published roughly two months after Barry Goldwater's decisive loss in the 1964 presidential election. The piece offers a contemporary perspective from a leading moderate Republican figure during a period of significant internal party realignment.
- A political column by Stewart Alsop titled "Blandness in the White House," part of the Post's regular "Affairs of State" feature examining the Johnson administration during the early months following Johnson's own decisive 1964 election victory.
- Three works of short fiction, including pieces by Noel Mostert, Walter Meade, and Morton Fineman, alongside additional feature articles spanning subjects from medical fraud to African travel writing, reflecting the Post's standard practice of balancing serious journalism with fiction and lighter feature content in a single issue.
Condition & Rarity
Surviving copies of mid-1960s Saturday Evening Post issues are evaluated using standard periodical grading criteria: the condition of the cover, the completeness of interior pages, and the soundness of the original binding, all factors that face meaningful pressure after sixty years of potential handling and storage. This issue is described as a newsstand edition with no label in good condition, with minor wear noted across the entire magazine, placing it within a typical range for a periodical of this vintage that has survived without significant damage or loss of content. Given this issue's documented historical significance, particularly its Klan feature published during such a consequential period of the civil rights movement, collectors evaluating any surviving copy should prioritize whether the cover photograph remains clear and whether the full Martin and Fairley article is intact, since this content carries particular historical weight beyond the issue's general collectible value.
A plastic protective covering, as included with this issue, provides an effective ongoing barrier against further deterioration from handling and environmental exposure, though it cannot reverse wear accumulated since the magazine's original 1965 printing. Issues documenting major civil rights-era journalism, particularly contemporary investigative reporting on organizations like the Klan, draw sustained and specific interest from collectors and researchers focused on civil rights history, a category that extends beyond general vintage magazine collecting into more specialized historical and academic interest. Collectors and institutions evaluating this issue should recognize its value as a primary-source historical document, since contemporary press coverage of the Klan during this specific period offers genuine research value independent of the magazine's broader collectible appeal. A good-condition copy with full interior content intact represents a meaningful piece of civil rights-era print journalism.
Looking for More Issues Like This?
Saturday Evening Post issues documenting major civil rights-era journalism, particularly investigative features published during the movement's most pivotal years, are of significant and ongoing interest to collectors and researchers of American civil rights history alike. If this particular issue is currently unavailable, the Saturday Evening Post collection at OriginalMagazines.com is the most direct resource for collectors tracing the publication's journalism and feature reporting across its long run. The broader 1965 magazine archive is equally worth browsing for anyone building a multi-publication record of that pivotal year in American civil rights history and journalism.