"Will I Succeed?"

Anyhow, the U.S. had one full-blown boom to report. The nation's 25,000 practicing astrologers were doing their biggest business ever.

Plain people were willing to pay seers up to $50 a session to learn how to get rich, and rich people sent their secretaries to find out how to stay that way. (One Boston chartist reportedly took in $50,000 in 1945 from Wall Streeters alone.) Customers included top diplomats who wanted to know world-policy trends, and movie stars curious about 1946 box-office statistics.

Applicants for personal readings, mailorder horoscopes, etc. waited from four to six weeks for their answers. At least 162 big-town newspapers printed daily horoscopes. In offices, halls, parlors and tents across the nation, whole classes studied scriggly zodiac charts with the intensity of savants seeking a cure for baldness. One astrological annual, the Moon Sign Book, sold at least 1,000,000 copies of its 1945 issue for $1 a throw. The five leading astrological periodicals (priced from 10-c- to 25-c-) boasted a combined circulation of nearly a million.

Jumping Professors. Understandably, the astrologers were loath to discuss their boom. Said a Chicago seeress: "If I say anything about business, those professors will jump on us again." But they eagerly claimed that astrology ("the study of life's reactions to planetary vibrations") was a science that should be taught in U.S. colleges. Some stepped right up to write 1946's news stories in advance releases--a practice that was old in 1640, when William Lilly, the "English Merlin" (see cut) fascinated Parliament with his political predictions.

Since most of them could tell a hawk from a handsaw, most picked Russia (an Aquarian) as the new No. 1 European power. For the U.S. (another Aquarian), they saw the No. 1 Western Hemispheric spot, all mixed up by an annoying wave of accidents, sex poaching, labor strife, inflation and political ferment, caused by the unfortunate fact that Uranus is moving through the sign of Gemini.

On the personality front, Harry Truman (Taurus) seemed in for a rise in prestige and a decline in health, Winston Churchill (Sagittarius) for a "permanent change of residence," the C.I.O.'s Phil Murray (Gemini) for "a churning year," Crooner Frank Sinatra (Sagittarius) for "increased power." Things were not going so well--astrology-wise--with Generalissimo Stalin (Sagittarius). The current opposition of Uranus to the Sun in Stalin's chart pointed inexorably toward the end of his trail, certainly by 1947.

Astounding Aquarius. The biggest astrological news was that the world was moving out of the brawling, nationalistic age of Pisces (the fish) and into the new, 2,156-year-cycle of Aquarius (the water-bearer). That meant a new era of "world brotherhood, flight and ether." ("We'll be weekending on the planets.") Said one astrologer: "It is here ... the developments will astound the world." Said another: "We are going to have rule by the masses."

Why did some 3,000,000 Americans thus search the heavens so avidly? One guess was that war and The Bomb had hit the nation right in its lunar plexus. But people were still asking the same old questions: "Will I succeed?" "Will I get married?" "Where is William?" Only Southern California seemed worried about the future. Out of 42 letters received in a month by one fashionable Hollywood horoscopist, 14 asked: "Where is a safe place for me to move?"

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