CHAPTER FIVE:
Two Hundred Years of Growth Through Crisis - 5

The period ending in 1965 witnessed two world wars, and between them, the Great Depression. The progressed Sun having crossed the U.S. Ascendant in the spring of 1929 — when Europe was already feeling the weight of such a depression — the progressed New Moon Of 1935 came on the 20th degree of Sagittarius. This was not far from an opposition to Mars in the natal U.S. chart, and it foreshadowed World War II, as Mussolini and Hitler had consolidated their power in 1936 and Japan had attacked Manchuria. As Mars squares Neptune in the U.S. chart, this progressed Sun to Mars opposition also implies a square of the progressed Sun to Neptune in the ninth House. I should note here also that the Progressed Mars and the progressed Neptune were conjunct in 1935-1936.
      The midpoint between Uranus and Mars in the U.S. chart falls at Gemini 15o39', so the progressed Sun opposed this rather explosive midpoint in 1932, during the early months of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal; the progressed Mercury opposed it as the President was preparing the country for a nearly inevitable war. At the same time, the progressed Moon was returning to its natal place, emphasizing the need for financial expenditures, and the semiquintile of the progressed Sun to Pluto evoked a dependence upon the creative organizing talent of business leaders. On September 1, 1939, the progressed Mercury of the U.S. chart crossed the natal Ascendant as Hitler invaded Poland. Diplomacy might have prevented World War II, but the so-called democratic nations were all involved in Neptunian dreams.
      The progressed Mars reached the Mid Heaven — the first angle of the U.S. chart it crossed — as Roosevelt died and the successful completion of the atom-bomb project gave the United States a tremendously effective and aggressive power, a striking confirmation of the zodiacal degree of this Mid Heaven. The continuously reappearing problem was what should be done with that power. America's response, as has often been the case, was an ambiguous one, implicitly accepting a compromise between world domination and the comforts and pleasures of the abundant life at home under the canopy of moral rectitude. The world was seen divided into the good people versus the bad people, and this dualistic approach, combined with very practical business considerations, led to the moralistic policy, of the containment of "evil" in the form of the "Communist powers" instead of the clarification, purification and radiant assertion of the "good and the true" represented by our institutions and our way of life. Unfortunately both these institutions and the American way of life had been increasingly perverted for more than a century, with the result that the type of interpersonal and political relationships that existed in 1776 were no more. The progressed Sun of the U.S. chart, now in Capricorn, was beginning to oppose the natal planets in Cancer — Venus in 1949, Jupiter in 1952, the natal Sun in 1959.
      This brings us to the progressed New Moon of 1965, which had the significant character of an annular eclipse — a thin ring of light surrounding heavy darkness. Later I will deal with the implication of the crucial thirty-year progressed lunation cycle which began then, and with the meaning of the strong Plutonian emphasis which has characterized the Nixon administration and has focused the potentiality of deeply cathartic changes in the consciousness of at least a "creative minority" in this nation.