News of the Week: A Mission to Mars, a Magnum Sequel, and a Mix-Up in Astrology 

This is Elon Musk to Major Tom …

Elon Musk doesn’t do things small, and that includes space exploration. This week, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX revealed at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico his plans to not only fly humans to Mars but also build a self-sustaining city there. It sounds fantastic, but a lot of people are skeptical of the plan, including Bill Nye the Science Guy. He doesn’t think anyone wants to live (and die) on the Red Planet.

Musk says that the first colony ship will be called Heart of Gold, which is the name of a ship in the Douglas Adams classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Lily Magnum, P.I.

I’ve been waiting for a Magnum, P.I. movie for a while. Years ago, Tom Selleck hinted there might be one, maybe even a big-screen adventure written by Tom Clancy; it never came to be.

But we might have a Lily Magnum coming to television. That’s the name of Thomas Magnum’s daughter, and ABC is readying a sequel that will feature her as the lead character trying to solve the mystery of what ended her military career. (The original Magnum, P.I. aired on CBS.)

At first I thought this was a terrible idea, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. It’s better than a full reboot of Magnum, P.I. because then we’d have someone else playing Magnum and the other characters from the original, and it would be updated. As approximately 400 TV show reboots have proven, it just wouldn’t be as good. But with his daughter being the focus of the new show, that means this sequel will actually take place in the same universe as Magnum, P.I., which means the events of that series did happen, and it opens the door for Selleck and his co-stars to make an appearance.

Hopefully, it will be filmed in Hawaii, or what’s the point?

Wait…I’m a Taurus Now?!?

In other space and sky news, everything you believe about astrology (you believe in astrology?) is probably wrong.

NASA freaked everyone out this week when it announced that our astrological signs aren’t the same as they were centuries ago because the constellations have changed, which means that we might not have the astrological sign we thought we had. Also, there are actually 13 zodiac signs. For some reason, we’ve been ignoring Ophiuchus all these years.

But if you believe in and follow astrology, NASA says not to worry. Nothing has really changed. If you’ve always been a Capricorn, well, you can continue to be a Capricorn. In fact, be the best Capricorn you can be!

This isn’t even a new story; it’s only coming around again. I remember this same exact story 5 or 10 years ago, and it caused a hubbub then, too, and everyone was talking about it. I don’t know why repetition of news stories like this irritates me, but as a Gemini, I’m not supposed to get along with Pisces, Cancers, Virgos, or Scorpios, so maybe that has something to do with it.

Cereal Killer

Here’s a side effect of global warming you might not have thought of: the disappearance of Lucky Charms.

That’s the finding of scientists who say that global warming is happening 5,000 times faster than grasses like wheat, rice, barley, and rye can adapt, and in the next 40 years or so, we could see them gone. This would affect the production of cereals. Of course, these grasses are used in a lot more foods than your breakfast cereal, so it could become a major problem worldwide.

Fortunately, it won’t happen until around 2070, so Jerry Seinfeld doesn’t have to freak out.

RIP Agnes Nixon: 1927–2016

I’ll tell you something if you promise to keep it a secret. I watched Guiding Light from 1980 until its final episode in 2009.

Agnes Nixon passed away this week at the age of 93. She wrote for Guiding Light from the late ’50s until the mid-’60s — long before I started watching it — and later went on to create both All My Children and One Life to Live (two other shows I watched because my mother watched them, but they weren’t as good as Guiding Light). She also created Loving and its spinoff The City and produced and wrote for Search for Tomorrow, Another World, and As the World Turns.

There aren’t many soaps on TV these days. They used to rule the daytime, but now only four remain: The Young and the Restless, The Bold and the Beautiful, General Hospital, and Days of Our Lives. The networks got rid of the soaps to fit in more programs like Dr. Phil, The Talk, and those shows where people throw chairs at each other.

RIP Phone Calls

According to Slate, the phone call died in 2007. Which must mean that it’s ghosts or time travelers who keep calling me.

In a piece about what’s lost when telephone calls go away in this age of texting, email, and social media, Slate says that phone calls still live on “in roughly the same way swing dancing lives on, or Latin declension, or manual transmission.” Now, maybe I’m living in a bubble (one where I don’t know what Latin declension is), but have people really stopped making and receiving phone calls that much? (Also, there are plenty of cars with manual transmission.)

Nielsen says that in 2007, the average monthly number of texts was more than the average monthly number of phone calls. And those text numbers are probably even greater in 2016. Everyone has a mobile phone now, and many people have gotten rid of their landlines. If you’re in your 20s, there’s a very good chance you’ve never even had a landline. And if you notice, a lot of people don’t actually make phone calls anymore on these devices; they’re just texting. Texting, texting, texting, texting, texting all day long.

The Slate article is worth reading, though, especially the section where the writer talks about how phone etiquette has changed, how our expectations regarding phone calls have changed, and how these new rules affect our relationships in ways we might not even think of.

Is it weird that I don’t think I’ve ever sent or received a text and that I still love and use an answering machine? I still have my landline too, and I plan to keep it until the phone company comes and rips it out of my wall and arrests me for communication nostalgia.

This Week in History: First American Newspaper Published (September 25, 1690)

Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick — which would make for a great album title — was the first multipage newspaper published in the United States (before that, newspapers were one page). It was edited by Benjamin Harris and was launched in Boston, Massachusetts.

This Week in History: George Gershwin Born (September 26, 1898)

The writer of songs like “Rhapsody in Blue” and “An American in Paris” and the opera Porgy & Bess was born in Brooklyn, New York. He was only 38 years old when he died, and it’s rather amazing what he did in such a short time.

The Arnold Palmer

In honor of golfer Arnold Palmer, who passed away this week at the age of 87, here’s the recipe for the drink he invented in 1960 while playing at the U.S. Open in Denver, Colorado. Palmer liked it this way: three parts unsweetened tea mixed with one part lemonade. A lot of people like it with half tea and half lemonade, and if you do it that way it’s called a Half & Half.

National Homemade Cookies Day

Saturday is National Homemade Cookies Day. Here’s a recipe for Cherry Oatmeal Cookies, and here’s one for Cream Cheese Cookies. Hallmark Channel has several recipes for the day, including Pumpkin Walnut Cookies.

If you just don’t have the time to make them yourself, you can always buy some Girl Scout cookies. You can even find out which one pairs best with your astrological sign — unless your sign is Ophiuchus.

Of course, it says my favorite cookie should be the Tagalong. Oh please. I’m a Samoa guy all the way.

Next Week’s Holidays and Events

Supreme Court term starts (October 3)

Cases the Court will be looking at this term involve Apple, service dogs, religious schools, and cheerleader outfits.

Customer Service Week (October 37)

Yup, this is the week we honor all those who help us, so call up a customer service rep on the phone and talk to them for 30 or 40 minutes.

Vice Presidential debate (October 4)

Governor Mike Pence and Senator Tim Kaine square off this Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia. The moderator is Elaine Quijano of CBS.

The Belles of the Brawl

The football game is the place to be in Huntsville on Friday night, but my sorry butt isn’t in those bleachers. Blair guilt-tripped me into babysitting Grandma instead. So here I am, stuck in a muggy warehouse on the outskirts of town, biding my time while “Gram” hangs out with her friends.

The crowd erupts in a chorus of cheers and boos. I close my eyes and rub my temples, reminding myself that I’m doing the right thing. “Your grandma isn’t as young as she thinks she is,” Blair said as she packed the minivan just a few hours earlier. “I’m counting on you to look out for her.” The kiss of death came when she gave me the look. You know, the one moms everywhere use to make you feel all crappy and selfish for wanting to do your own thing. “I’m working, Mary, or else I’d be there.” Her harp snug and secure, she closed the trunk and headed for the driver’s seat. “Besides, if you kept an open mind, I bet you’d even have a little fun.” With that, she’d blown me a kiss and pulled out of the drive.

I snort at the memory. Big. Fat. Chance. Watching a group of chicks skate around a beat-up old rink isn’t exactly my idea of a killer time. Still, I’d rather sacrifice an evening here than spend the entire weekend at a highlands festival with Blair. My bright red hair serves as a constant reminder of my heritage. I don’t need to traipse around a field in period garb, warding off a bagpipe-induced headache, to feel connected to my roots.

A huge guy with more piercings and tattoos than I can count accidentally elbows me in the face as he tries to squeeze past. “Sorry, hun!” he pats my arm apologetically as I tenderly probe my forehead. Great. I can already feel the beginnings of a goose egg.

Time to drown my sorrows in Diet Coke and sour Skittles. I clank down the bleachers and head for the concession stand. The skaters round a bend in the track, pushing and snarling at each another as they roll past. Cyndi Lauper blares from the loudspeakers, and I cut wide to avoid the team mascot, a panther attempting to pump his arms and jerk his hips in time with the music. It’s kinda funny, but I can’t afford to stick around and watch. The last time I got stuck on grandma duty, I swear the thing stalked me. Twice I turned around to find it standing right behind me, breathing all heavy and staring at me with those creepy yellow eyes.

The comforting smell of warm butter and nacho cheese sauce washes over me and I sigh in relief. I shove a crumpled $5 bill at the sleepy-eyed attendant and place my order. While he shuffles off, I drum my fingers on the countertop and look at the clock. My heart sinks. It’s not even halftime yet.

Four sharp whistle blasts pierce the air, followed by a roar from the crowd. Someone just got fowled big time. I cast a quick glance over my shoulder, but the bleachers block my view of the track.

Finally, cantina boy hands over the goods. Sugary remedy in hand, I turn around only to smack straight into a wall of fur. Soda drenches my shirt and my candy goes soaring. Thinking black thoughts, I cross my arms and wait for the jerk to apologize.

The mascot removes his feline head, and I think I might die. It’s Nick Abbot. Nick freaking Abbot! He’s a junior, the hands-down heartthrob of St. Bartholomew High. My mouth falls open, and my face burns with heat. He’s saying something, but I can’t make sense of the words. It’s like I’ve fallen into a weird, alternate reality. Beautiful Nick, with his devastatingly blue eyes and linebacker physique is the mascot? And he’s here? Talking to me?

“Mary.” He grabs my shoulders with his oversized paws and shakes. “Mary Calhoun.”

“Whaaaaa…” I croak, shocked that he actually knows my name.

He gives me a confused look.

I snap my mouth closed and curse my awkwardness.

“Sorry to scare you,” he tries again. “But you gotta come quick. Its your grandma.”

“What?” My head clears as the stars instantly fall from my eyes. “What happened?”

“One of the She Devils gave her one heck of a J-block.”

I give him a blank stare.

“Your grandma is hurt. She got body slammed by a girl from the other team.” He takes my hand in his giant paw and leads me to the rink.

I shove past the spectators and climb over the rail onto the slick banked track. My grandmother is on the ground, surrounded by her teammates. Please be okay please be okay, I chant over and over again in a silent prayer. My breath hitches in my chest, and I fall to my knees by her side, but she’s … smiling?

“Mary, darling,” she purrs and pets my arm. “I’m fine! Just took a wee tumble.” Her hair pokes out in wild bright red tufts from under her helmet, which sits askew on her dainty little head.

“Can you get up?” I ask apprehensively. Her thin legs are tie-dyed with bruises.

“No need.” She waves her hand dismissively. “That handsome young man will carry me,” she says, pointing at Nick.

“Sure thing, Gram Slam,” Nick replies cheerily. The rest of the team looks on with concern as he scoops her up in one swift movement.

My grandma bats her eyelashes.

I bite the inside of my cheek. Oh God. She’s hitting on him. I glare at her in silent reprimand.

She ignores me and leans against his chest, only to jerk back with a frown. “You’re all wet and sticky, dearie.”

Nick shoots me an amused look over her helmet. My face burns. I guess some of my soda hit him, too.

“Put me next to the action,” she commands, pointing a sparkly black fingernail at the base of the bleachers.

Nick hesitates. “Gram, I think —”

“I will cheer on my team.” She scowls at him, her bright red false lashes and sparkly eye shadow making her look like a crazed, elderly fairy. “The doctor can wait.” She sets her fuchsia lips in a firm line.

Nick shakes his head, his oh-so-kissable mouth splitting into a crooked smile. I watch with a mixture of horror and relief as the boy I’ve been crushing on for the past year carries my cougar of a grandmother to the sidelines.

A tap on my shoulder brings me back to my senses. I turn to face a massive woman with a wicked-looking eyebrow ring.

“Okay, Mary, you’re up,” barks Lady Harmalade, the team captain.

“What?” I ask, tilting my head to look up at her.

“You heard me. We need five gals on the track at all times. Ferocia has a bum knee, and Katie Karnage is out with a stomach bug. You’re our only back up.”

I look over her shoulder to see the two women in question leaning on each other as they hobble to the exit.

“Me?” My voice shoots up a few octaves, and my legs wobble. “Out there?” I vehemently shake my head. No. Fricking. Way.

“You’ll do fine. You’re here almost every other weekend, so I know you know the rules.”

She towers over me, hands on hips. I stare at the glittery pink team name — Belles of the Brawl — emblazoned on her skin-tight tank top. Her six-pack is visible through the thin fabric, and her biceps are big enough to crush my skull in a single curl.

“Well?” she demands, tapping the toe of her neon pink and green roller skate against the wooden floor with impatience.

“I … I’m not that coordinated,” I protest, casting my eyes about the room as I fumble for a plausible excuse. “And I haven’t skated in ages …”

Harmalade rolls her eyes at my excuses. “Go suit up.” She jerks her chin toward the locker room. “Just switch clothes with Gram … you guys are about the same size.”

I open my mouth to make a final plea, but she’s already turning away, clapping her hands to call a huddle with the other Belles.

Shell-shocked, I stand there staring at the track until a gentle voice murmurs in my ear and a big furry paw guides me toward the restroom. Nick. Sultry, unattainable Nick is actually helping me. I pinch the inside of my wrist; this has to be a dream.

“You’re gonna do great,” he gushes with excitement as he deposits me by the bathroom door. “It’s simple. Use your shoulders, butt, or hips to block. Do whatever you can to stop the girl with the star on her helmet from making it through.”

Easy for him to say. I don’t stand a chance against those raging glamazons. I blink and wipe my hands on my jeans.

“Sorry, you probably knew that already.” He shrugs, his gaze darting between my face and his feet. “I mean, you’re always here, and your grandma is just the coolest …” His voice trails off and he rubs his paws together nervously.

I nod, despite my confusion. My grandma? Cool?

“Well, better hurry,” he says in a rush. “I told Spanx I’d bring more Gatorade. Can’t keep my big sis waiting.” He runs off before my brain can signal my mouth to speak.

I take a deep breath and step into the locker room. As I don the ridiculous uniform my grandma chatters on and on, offering tips and reminding me of the rules, but I can’t focus on her advice. The words slide over me as I concentrate on keeping my fingers from shaking. Falling on my face while clad in sparkly fuchsia booty shorts would be plenty embarrassing, but with Nick there to witness my glittery demise, I could practically hear the nails being pounded into my coffin. Social. Suicide. I put on the knee-high pink socks, the black kneepads, and the neon green roller skates. Grandma tosses me her tank top, a little black thing emblazoned with rhinestones and the team name in pink cursive lettering. The back of the jersey sports her roller name, Gram Slam.

Soon I’m lining up on the track with the other girls. The Belles smile at me through their mouth guards, at once terrifying and beautiful. I accidentally make eye contact with the She Devil next to me, who grimaces and runs a finger over her throat in a cutting motion. That’s it. I’m gonna die. Or throw up.

The players around me still, their muscles tightly coiled in anticipation of the whistle.

I cast a wary glance to the sideline where Nick leans on the track’s railing, his chin atop his hairy cat arms. Gram sits beside him, legs propped up on a chair. He catches my eye and winks. My heart, already frantic with worry, skips a beat. Gram blows me a kiss and then whips her head around to flip off a passing She Devil.

The whistle sounds and my guts jump into my throat, but I somehow manage to remain upright. I make it a quarter of the way around the track before realizing I’m not half bad. I just need to take it one lap at a time. I narrow my eyes and focus on the Belle in front of me. It’s Nick’s sister, Spanx. She could level an opponent with one bump of her brutal booty, and I don’t want to be caught anywhere near that action.

Suddenly, a sharp blow to the side has me stumbling forward. Once I regain my balance, I snap my head around to find the same She Devil who threatened me. Her black lips twist into a nasty sneer, and I realize she’s snuck in an illegal hit.

But … I’m not doing too great at watching her and watching my feet at the same time. My skate catches and I trip into her, arms outstretched. I close my eyes and brace for impact, the She Devil’s crazed scream filling my ears. Another elbow pokes my side and a knee rams me in the back, but the fall isn’t as bad as I’d anticipated.

I crack one eye open to find I’ve somehow taken two She Devils down with me. Two! They lay there, pounding the floor and wailing as the pack speeds past, leaving us behind. I scramble to my feet, eager to avoid getting run over as the pack comes back around. In the next instant, however, the She Devil’s jammer makes it through to the front of the line, and the ref blows his whistle to stop the play.

We line back up again, and I lose track of time. Round and round we go, a blur of sweat and shouts and hunger. I fall again. I get up again. A She Devil makes a nasty comment about Gram, so I hip check her. This isn’t so bad. I catch myself smiling. The whistle sounds for halftime, and the Belles pull me into the hurdle. They pat my back, congratulate each other, and down thirsty mouthfuls of Gatorade between grins. My whole body tingles with the high of competition. It seems like only seconds pass before the buzzer sounds, telling us to line up for round two.

The rest of the night passes in a haze of unexpected happiness. We don’t win, but I’m too elated to care. I shake hands with the She Devils, and then turn to the sidelines to find Gram. The minute my skates touch the cracked cement of the warehouse floor, she springs up from her chair and comes flying, arms outstretched.

“That’s my girl!” she screeches, enveloping me in a hug so tight it’s hard to breathe.

I step back and give her a long look. She bounces in place, beaming from ear to ear. “How’s your leg?”

“Oh … that.” She stills and gives me a sheepish look. “Well, you never can be too careful at my age.”

“Looks to me like you could’ve skated just fine.”

“Looks like you had fun.” She glances past me, her voice dropping to a whisper. “And it looks like you have an admirer, too.” She turns on her heel and struts off to find her teammates.

I turn to find Nick, sans costume this time. My mouth goes dry.

“Hey.” He shoves his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. “You were great out there, Mary.” He smiles tentatively.

“Oh, uh … thanks.” I tug at the hem of my shorts and try to come up with something else to say.

“The uni looks good on you, too.” A slow red creeps up his neck to his ears. “You’ll need a roller name though,” he babbles on, trying to cover the awkwardness between us. “For your jersey, I mean …”

At that moment, Lady Harmalade and the rest of the team roll up. “Mary, Queen of Knocks!” She bellows in an awful imitation of a Scottish accent before giving an extravagant bow. The other girls follow her lead, bowing and curtseying with mock adoration.

“That’s perfect!” Nick nods, his smile more relaxed this time.

“So?” Gram arches her eyebrow. “You Scots enough to be a Brawler?”

I throw back my head and laugh. “Only if I can tie the tartan ’round my arm.”

Long before Trump: The Unsettling Popularity of Huey Long

The 2016 presidential campaign season doesn’t have a monopoly on charismatic, polarizing candidates with unconventional political ideas. Although this election cycle is legitimately unprecedented in a number of ways, the presentation of radical policies isn’t one of them.

One such presidential hopeful with radical ideas appeared in the 1930s. Louisiana senator and former governor Huey “The Kingfish” Long felt President Roosevelt hadn’t gone far enough to address income inequality. Claiming that 2 percent of Americans owned 60 percent of the wealth, he proposed a “Share Our Wealth” program to put more money into the hands of the poor.

Long argued that no family should earn more than 300 times the average income nor hold more than 300 times the wealth of the average American fortune. Under his program, the government would tax all incomes over $1 million on a rising scale, so that any income greater than $8 million would be taxed at 100 percent. The program also guaranteed every family a homestead valued no less than $5,000 and an annual income of $2,000 (one-third the average family income, according to Long).

Long, whom The Washington Post called “the most entertaining tyrant in American history,” came up with this plan in 1934 while weighing a run for the White House. To gauge voter support, he sent Rev. Gerald Smith across the south to start Share Our Wealth clubs. The response was so enthusiastic that by 1935, 27,000 clubs had been formed and 4.6 million members had signed up.

Though he was solidly supported by impoverished Southern voters, who felt they had a champion in the senator, Republican and Democratic politicians, alarmed by his dictatorial style as governor and his growing popularity, considered Long a threat.

The threat was removed on September 10, 1935, when Huey Long was killed by an assassin’s bullet.

In a biographical sketch written for the Post, and excerpted below, Hermann B. Deutsch detailed several of Long’s bolder political maneuvers, some of which skirted the law. The author conceded that Long brought improvements to the state and redistributed some of his state’s wealth, but Deutsch still considered him a “benevolent despot.”


Huey Long — The Last Phase

By Hermann B. Deutsch

Excerpted from an article originally published on October 12, 1935

The political history of Huey P. Long embraced three cycles which, though interlocking, preserve separate identities in time and space. For convenience they may be labeled: Louisiana, Washington, and Share the Wealth. Each had its share in making the others possible. Each contributed toward the absolute control his laws gave him over Louisiana, just as this control made it possible for all three to continue to function.

In all three cycles, Huey Long exacted unquestioned recognition of his authority.

“The only kind of a band in which Huey Long can play,” Marshall Ballard, editor of The Item, once observed, “is a one-man band.”

From top to bottom, the Long political machine was composed of those who acknowledged his absolute leadership and would dance to any tune of his piping. He asked no more of them and would accept no less. For those who refused, he passed this year the amazing series of laws in seven special sessions of his legislature which constitute what has been termed his Putsch-Over.

The rank and file of the Huey Long political army in Louisiana was content to let him run the whole show because he won battles, and thus led them to the Promised Land of Patronage. The followers of Long the Apostle were content to overlook the practical manifestations of the sublimated precinct politician.

Touching Off a Bombshell

When Huey Long became governor of Louisiana in 1928, the two principal proposals of his program were an increase in the severance tax on natural resources to provide free textbooks for all school children, and an increase of the gasoline tax from one to two cents a gallon — it is seven cents a gallon today — the additional cent to be funded into bonds for the purpose of paving the main highways of the state.

Both proposals were bitterly attacked by the anti-Long politicians; the former on the ground that the state’s money was being dedicated to private institutions in supplying free textbooks to private and parochial schools; the latter because there was no guarantee that the bond money would be expended in actual road construction and not merely in swelling the payrolls of the highway commission for political purposes.

The schoolbook law was validated by the Supreme Court of the United States. The gasoline-tax bond issue was validated by an overwhelming vote of the people, who were heartily sick of gravel highways, and who turned a deaf ear to the sound argument that the fulfillment of so ambitious a plan on the money available was a physical impossibility. Each community hoped that its roads would be paved, and devil take the hindmost.

However, it soon became evident that more money must be provided for the state treasury. Thus, 10 or 11 months after his inauguration, Governor Long called the legislature into special session to levy a tax of five cents a barrel on the business of refining petroleum products, to “enable us to take care of the sick, the halt, and the blind in our state institutions, and of the children in our schools.”

The target of this tax was Mr. Long’s ancient bête noire, the Standard Oil Company, which maintained a huge refinery just outside of Baton Rouge, an industry which at that time maintained a payroll numbering some 7,000 persons. The company promptly announced that the imposition of such a tax would force them to close their Louisiana plant, and immediately began to curtail operations. Along with this there was a roar of protest from all sections of the state. Manufacturers, accustomed to special inducements to bring payrolls and industries into a state, rose up in arms. It became evident almost at once that Mr. Long would not be able to muster a legislative majority for his tax, and, alarmed by a rising tide of personal opposition, he decided to adjourn the session. Anti-administration leaders, on the other hand, insisted there be no adjournment until the legislature had gone on record as opposing any tax on industry.

In order to shut off all such debate, Speaker John Fournet, of the House, had been instructed to recognize only the administration floor leader when the House met, and put the question of adjournment at once. When the chamber convened, the roll was called for a record of those present. This was done by an electrical voting machine which automatically locked until photostatic copies of the vote had been made. During this interval, the chaplain intoned a brief prayer. The moment the final “Amen!” was uttered, all bedlam broke loose. Amid the din, the Speaker put the adjournment motion, which no human being could hear in the hubbub, and the electrical voting machine was once more opened. The whole thing occurred so quickly, however, that the machine was still in the position of the “present” vote of a few moments before, and consequently, regardless of whether members voted yes or no, the machine flashed “yes.”

That fired the powder train. The house went into a riot. Half a dozen fist fights broke out. Members charged the Speaker’s dais. One of them was knocked down and his scalp laid open by a blow. At the height of the tumult, Representative Mason Spencer, of Tallulah, made his way to the front of the House and bellowed:

“In the name of sanity and common sense!”

Legislative Hairsplitting

The rioting was momentarily checked. In the lull, Spencer called on the Speaker to take another vote of adjournment, but the latter refused, declaring the House was already adjourned. Before this could bring on a fresh outburst, Spencer declared he would call the roll himself. He did so, and the vote stood 72 to 7 against adjournment. All but that handful of administration adherents hastened to disclaim any connection with what was then assumed to have been some sort of fraudulent vote-machine operation. Further action was deferred until the following day, when a resolution of impeachment, setting forth 19 specific counts, was filed with the House. A committee of inquiry was appointed, a series of hearings was conducted, and in the end, eight impeachment counts were adopted and sent to the Senate for trial.

The special legislative session had been called for but 15 days, and only one count was voted before the expiration of that period. Over the protest of the Long floor leaders, and on the theory that once it became a court of impeachment, the Assembly was no longer bound by legislative limitations, the lawmakers continued in session until the remaining counts were disposed of.

A New Word in Louisiana

The one passed on before the expiration of the original session limit was voted down by the Senate, where graver charges were still to be taken up. On the following day, however, a remarkable document was laid before that body: A round robin signed by 15 senators — two more than enough to block a two-thirds conviction — to the effect that since all charges voted after the expiration of the legislative time limit were, in the opinion of the signers, illegal, they would refuse to vote conviction on any of them, regardless of evidence. That ended the impeachment proceeding between clock ticks and added the word Robineer to Louisiana’s political vocabulary.

Far from being chastened by this experience, Mr. Long immediately announced he intended to “grow me a new crop of legislators.” To this end he initiated recall proceedings against those who had opposed him. Anti-Long leaders from all parts of the state delivered a counter to this thrust by meeting in New Orleans to organize the Constitutional League, dedicated to the restoration of constitutional government. Mr. Long promptly labeled it the Constipational League, and declared it was composed of those who sought to sacrifice the schoolchildren, the halt, the sick, and the blind on the altars of the Standard Oil Company.

Nonetheless, the courts ultimately upheld the League’s contention that the recall provisions of the constitution did not apply to legislators. The League further brought suit to compel those pro-Long legislators who held highly remunerative places on the state payroll, such as special attorney for the highway commission or warden of the state penitentiary, to vacate either the positions or their legislative seats. This, too, was upheld by the Supreme Court. The following day, 18 pro-Long legislators resigned state jobs.

Ultimately the business interests of the state stepped in to insist upon a political truce. One of its terms was a pledge by Governor Long to impose no manufacturers’ license tax during his term. In return, the business interests were to cooperate with him in a survey on how to raise money for the more effective conduct of state institutions.

Mr. Long’s idea of what the state needed was a great program of public expenditures. This was early in 1930. Pundits still declared oracularly that prosperity was just around the corner. Mr. Long’s position was that all effects of the depression could be fended off from Louisiana if $100,000,000 or so were devoted to permanent public improvements.

The requisite funds were to be raised by adding three cents a gallon to the gasoline tax, dedicating one cent for division between the port of New Orleans and the public-school system of the state, and funding the remaining two cents a gallon, and certain other taxes, into bonds.

The opposition immediately protested that this would do no more than place at the disposal of Huey Long a $100,000,000 fund with which so accomplished a spoilsman might well consolidate his political machine for the state elections of 1932, and thus perpetuate himself in power. Once again the demand was for “safeguards” to keep the money from being politicalized.

The legislature met in May 1930; and a nagging, dragging session it was. Governor Long had won over to his standard, after the impeachment of the preceding spring, a majority of the members, but not a two-thirds majority. Yet the bond issues he contemplated could not be put into effect without constitutional amendments, which required a two-thirds vote of both legislative houses. Since no constitutional amendment could be passed, His Excellency shrewdly hit upon the amazingly simple expedient of calling a constitutional convention, which could be done by a simple majority, to rewrite the entire organic law so as to include the desired amendments. Under the terms of the proposed call, he would control a majority of the delegates.

The opposition could not block a majority vote. So the anti-Long leaders began a sort of “strike on the job,” arguing endlessly among themselves over unimportant pending measures, to keep what was by that time dubbed the “con-con bill” from coming to a vote; but it was finally passed and sent to the Senate for action, with just about enough time left to get it through that body before the expiration of the session.

The Senatorial Toga

In the Senate, however, matters were on a different footing. Here the presiding officer was Lieutenant Governor Paul Cyr, a dentist, who, though elected on the Long ticket, was now one of Huey Long’s bitterest foes. Doctor Cyr made it possible for a filibuster to keep the con-con bill from coming up for consideration in the upper chamber, so that it died on the calendar. The day the legislature adjourned, Mr. Long announced his candidacy for the United States Senate.

“My platform,” he said in effect, “will be the public-improvement program that the people want, but that the legislature killed. If I am elected, that will mean the people approve my program. If I am defeated, that will mean they approve the action of my enemies. But … when I am elected I will not go to the Senate until after my term as governor is finished. I will not permit Paul Cyr to serve as governor of Louisiana for one holy minute. This will mean that one Senate seat from Louisiana will be vacant for two years, but that will make no difference. It has been vacant ever since the man who now holds it was elected.”

And so the issue was fought out. The Constitutional League supported Senator Joseph Ransdell for reelection, and rallied the anti-Long forces to the cause. Mr. Long jeered at the efforts of the Constipational League, spoke of its candidate as “Feather Duster” — a reference to the latter’s neat little brush of a white beard — and said that “the elements trying to defeat me and keep me from paving your roads and building up the prosperity of this state are the same old Standard Oil crowd that tried to keep me from giving your children free schoolbooks, and improving the hospitals, the insane asylums, and the other state institutions.”

“A St. Bernard Count”

The campaign was different from the gubernatorial race of two years before. At that time, Huey Long had had no political organization; only a personal following. The city machine had been aligned with one of his opponents and the state machine with the other. Now he had his own state machine, a vastly improved model of power and efficiency.

Long defeated Ransdell for the Senate by the overwhelming tally of 149,640 to 111,451. One rather unusual feature was the vote of St. Bernard Parish, which adjoins New Orleans on the downstream side. Mr. Long received 3,979 votes there, as against Senator Ransdell’s total of 9. This was the year 1930. A census had just been completed. Yet one ward in St. Bernard Parish, where the census listed a total population of 912 — men, women, and babies, nonvoting Negroes as well as whites — counted 913 votes, all of them for Mr. Long. This added still another expression to Louisiana’s political vocabulary. It is: “A St. Bernard count.” However, Huey Long would have been overwhelmingly elected even if every St. Bernard ballot had been thrown out. Thus, none of the reformers who later clamored for other election investigations raised their voices at this time. There was also a general feeling that “the people have spoken.” At any rate, all opposition to the Long proposals was withdrawn.

A special session of the legislature was called at once, and in a shrewdly worded opening message, the governor suggested that “if we must fight, let’s all fight for only 30 days on full stomachs 15 months hence, instead of starving ourselves while we fight for 16 months between now and the next election.” As an earnest of his readiness to let bygones be bygones, he stood by his original proposals to finance a Mississippi River bridge and aid the New Orleans port authority out of new gasoline taxes, and to give Baton Rouge a $5,000,000 new capitol. The only condition he made was that the impeachment charges, still technically pending against him, be withdrawn. Some 20 die-hards in the House refused to accede to this, but the overwhelming majority did, and thus one stormy chapter was closed.

The legislative program went over with scarcely a hitch, and the era of construction began. There was considerable eagerness to get some of the bond money into circulation, for 1931 was a dreadful cotton year, marked by a 10,000,000-bale carry-over, a record crop, and a price of five and six cents a pound for staple that had cost eight cents a pound by the time it left the gin. Proposals for acreage reduction, for plowing under every third row of the current crop, and similar curative measures were suggested. While the agitation was at its height, Governor Long proposed a law forbidding the growing or ginning of any cotton at all during 1932, the law to become effective when enacted by states representing three-fourths of the country’s cotton production.

At a conference of delegates from cotton states, Senator-Governor Long explained that acreage-reduction laws could be invalidated by the no-cotton law, if enacted as a measure to control the boll weevil or check the spread of root rot would be maintained. Texas, representing one-third of the country’s cotton production, was called upon to be the first to enact the holiday plan, since, if Texas rejected it, there would be no possibility of securing the requisite three-fourths concurrence.

However, Texas refused concurrence, which evoked from Louisiana’s executive the public statement that “Texas legislators were bought to kill the cotton-holiday plan like you’d buy a slot machine.” Mississippi likewise refused. Both passed acreage-reduction laws which came to nothing.

Two Men in One Chair

Meanwhile, Mr. Long found other fish to fry in Doctor Cyr’s sudden move to seize the governor’s chair, on the allegation that Huey Long had vacated it when he forwarded the credentials of his election to the United States Senate. To lend point to this contention, Doctor Cyr took oath as governor before the clerk of court of Caddo Parish, October 13, 1931.

The Statehouse immediately became an armed camp under constant highway police and militia guard, to keep Doctor Cyr from taking physical possession. For the rest, Huey Long chuckled joyously and said: “We’re going to send the Doc back to his tooth shop in Jeanerette now. By taking oath as governor, he vacated the office of lieutenant governor. That means I can go to Washington as soon as the courts settle him.”

The amused regard of the entire nation was focused on Louisiana during the legalistic marches and countermarches that followed. Unemployed men in parks and along water fronts whiled away the tedium of waiting for prosperity by administering to one another the oath of office as governor of Louisiana. Alvin O. King, president pro tempore of the state Senate, was sworn in by the Long administration as lieutenant governor; and the moment the Supreme Court upheld this step, Mr. Long hastened to Washington to take his seat in the Senate, just 17 months after his election to that body. On the same day, in a Statehouse surrounded by militiamen, Lieutenant Governor King became governor. Doctor Cyr continued his protests, and went so far as to open “executive offices” in a Baton Rouge hotel, from which point he issued a proclamation calling upon Mr. King forthwith to abandon the “armed insurrection he was maintaining” at the statehouse. But the move was little more than a gesture, for by that time the entire Long ticket had been elected by something very like a landslide, and was awaiting inauguration in May.

The First Step in Wealth-Sharing

The new governor was Oscar Kelley Allen, boyhood friend of Senator Long. John D. Fournet, the speaker who had sought to adjourn the House of Representatives during the riot of 1929, was lieutenant governor. They had headed what was known as the Complete-the-Work ticket; with both state and city machines solidly behind them, they polled a majority of something like 56,000 votes. St. Bernard Parish, chafing under the stigma of having counted 9 votes out of 3,988 against Senator Long in 1930, set a new high by tallying exactly 3,152 votes for every candidate on Mr. Long’s Complete-the-Work ticket, and not one single solitary ballot for any one of the 23 opposition candidates.

As always when confronting a new audience, “antics” were expected of Senator Long when he reached Washington, but none developed. Washington began to wonder whether, after all, this stuff about pot likker and green pajamas and “them birds” had been anything more than highly colored publicity. Then Mr. Long took the first step toward what he called “redistribution of our national wealth” by proposing a resolution to limit individual incomes to $1,000,000 a year, and bequests to not more than $5,000,000 to any one child, the balance of all incomes or fortunes in excess of those figures to go to the national treasury. The Democratic leader, Senator Joe Robinson, of Arkansas, rejected the resolution. Then and there Washington learned about Huey Long, for his response was an immediate resignation from all Senate committees, with the explanation that he would take no further assignments or honors from a party leadership he refused any longer to follow.

“I met myself very quickly on the proposition of Robinson for President,” he stated. “Right now I’m for Robinson to be Hoover’s running mate, since they both stand for the same thing.”

But it was a cartoon in the Chicago Tribune, showing Joe Robinson beneath an American flag and Huey Long under the red banner of Communism, which really set off his ire.

That was the prelude to the delivery of the speech which has since been reprinted by the millions, under the title of “The Doom of America’s Dream.” It was the first official utterance in behalf of what is now the Share-the-Wealth program.

The Steam Roller at Work

With the Choctaws and the Long organization still solidly welded, Overton was elected to the Senate, in the primary election, by a vote of 181,464 to 124,935. Broussard and a newly organized Honest Election League — “Every time I beat ’em in a campaign, they go get ’em up a new league!” — attacked the validity of the primary, not on the ground that Broussard could or would have won, but on the allegation that enough corruption had been practiced by the Overton supporters to taint the title of their candidate to a seat in the Senate. There were three public hearings by senatorial subcommittees, and the record of the proceedings covers 3,886 closely printed pages. While condemning such things as Louisiana’s lack of a Corrupt Practices Act and the use of dummy candidates to get control of polling-booth commissioners, the committee refused to unseat Senator Overton.

Flushed with this success, the state and city machine coalition pitched in to put over a series of constitutional amendments at the same election at which Franklin Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover for the presidency of the United States. The casual count of votes on these amendments brought on a probe by District Attorney Eugene Stanley, of New Orleans, and ended in the indictment of some 513 polling-booth commissioners, whom the state administration freed from their predicament by a new law which halted all further prosecutions.

Within a month, the city and state organizations broke the entente that had linked them for more than two years. Senator Long demanded that District Attorney Stanley be not endorsed for reelection in the approaching municipal primary. By a vote of 12 to 5, the Choctaw caucus rejected his demand. He immediately put out a city ticket of his own to oppose the regulars and the reform ticket as well, but his slate was soundly trounced and the regulars won.

Voters in Revolt

Prior to this time, however, an even more serious blow had been struck against his prestige in the Sixth Congressional District. Bolivar Kemp, congressman, had died in June, and because of the disaffection of the voters in that region, the Long organization had sought to evade the test of strength there by refusing to call an election to fill the vacancy. In November, a mass meeting of indignant citizens in Baton Rouge called an unofficial primary of their own and announced the winner would be given credentials to represent the district in Congress.

The state administration swung into action at once, through a district Democratic committee on which the Long forces held a majority. After refusing for six months to call an election, Governor Allen now called one for a date only a week hence. On the plea that this allowed no time to hold a primary, the district Democratic committee then arbitrarily named Mrs. Bolivar Kemp, the late congressman’s widow, as Democratic nominee. In Louisiana, Democratic nomination is tantamount to election. Usually, in such a contest as this, there is not even a Republican candidate in the race. Throughout the district citizens went into literal — not figurative — revolt.

“Never before has such a scoundrelly attempt been made to defeat the expression of the people’s will,” wrote Hodding Carter, editor and publisher of the Hammond Daily Courier. “If our stern protest is not answered, let us read our histories again. They will tell us with what weapons we earned the rights of free men. Then, by God’s help, let’s use them.”

In Amite, in St. Francisville, in Denham Springs and other parish seats throughout the district, ballots, tally sheets, and other election paraphernalia were seized by force and publicly burned. In the three parishes of Tangipahoa, St. Helena, and Livingston, District Judge Nat Tycer issued an injunction forbidding the election. Adding that “it’s a poor court that can’t enforce its orders,” he began to swear in and arm deputies, his own 82-year-old father being the first to take the oath. He instructed these deputies to go out and deputize others to help enforce the court’s ruling. A truck that sought to bring election supplies into the district was driven off by gunfire. In Hammond and in Plaquemine, Senator Long was hanged and burned in effigy.

Something less than 5,000 votes were cast for Mrs. Kemp in a district ordinarily polling more than 42,000, although she was the only candidate. Hers was the only name on the ballots. Three times as many votes were cast a fortnight or so later in the citizens’ election, at which J.Y. Sanders Jr. was the only candidate. However, the House of Representatives at Washington refused to recognize either election as valid. A new election was called, close upon the defeat of the Long ticket in New Orleans. Once more J.Y. Sanders Jr. was victorious.

That succession of victories over the redoubtable Huey sent the anti-Long contingent into full cry. Achilles really did have a vulnerable heel apparently. They began to rally their forces and confected a new sort of round robin, a pledge to oust Speaker Allen Ellender when the legislature convened in May, with the idea that this would be followed by removing Fournet, and later, perhaps, by the impeachment of Governor Allen. With the legislative machinery in their hands, the opposition would soon be in control of the state.

Of the 51 signatures needed to show a pledged majority in the House of Representatives, 48 were secured. The fact that the other three could not be gained was due primarily to the personal popularity of Ellender. Once it became definitely known, however, that the Long forces would remain in power, there was a regular stampede from the opposition to the administration. The Long political fortunes swung upward as swiftly as they had plummeted toward the depths. From a position where not more than three legislative votes stood between him and political extinction, Huey Long rose to a more complete absolutism than ever, and the Putsch-Over of 1934–1935 was begun.

From all parts of the state had come a demand for a reduction of automobile-license fees. Very well. The Long forces acceded to that demand, but coupled with it a proviso that would take away from New Orleans and its anti-Long city administration $700,000 a year in highway revenues. In order to reduce their auto taxes, the country members had to deprive New Orleans of this income, which gave them no pause whatever. Similarly, a bill authorizing New Orleans to regulate private boathouses along Bayou St. John was changed by amendment to take away, in addition, all control by the city authorities over the local police force.

A Law Mill in High Gear

At this point the Putsch-Over was abandoned for the time being, because the Long-Allen administration had its own legislative grist to grind in the way of a promised tax-relief program, under whose terms the first $2,000 of the assessed value of all owner-occupied homesteads was to be exempted from property taxes. To make this possible, it was further proposed that the revenue thus lost be made up by levying six new taxes — an income tax, an insurance-premium tax, a tax on stock-exchange and cotton-exchange transfers, a tax on newspaper advertising, and the like — thus shifting a portion of the burden of government from real estate. Much of this legislation required a two-thirds majority. Not until it had been securely consolidated was the real Putsch-Over begun.

Special session followed special session; half a dozen in the space of less than a twelvemonth. No need to mince matters now. Forty or more laws would be shoveled in a few minutes before midnight of the opening day of each session. Without regard to subject matter, all would be referred at once to the ways-and-means committee, where the Long forces had a majority of 15 to 2. Following a consideration which averaged two and a fraction minutes per new law, this committee then reported all administration bills favorably, after which the House would enact them and rush them over to the Senate, where the same procedure was followed. In this fashion, a law was passed giving the state supervision over the appointment of every nonelective employee of every parish, city, or village in Louisiana. In this way a law was passed providing that the governor would henceforth have the right to appoint all polling-booth commissioners in every primary election. Thus the law was passed providing for the appointment of an unlimited number of state police, permitting the governor to call out the militia at pleasure, ousting hostile local administrations, giving a state board control of the appointment of every schoolteacher in Louisiana.

Bills Passed in a Few Seconds

As a matter of cold record, even this procedure was speeded up during one session after the legislature was thoroughly broken to the idea of unquestioning enactment of any bill proposed by the Long administration. Laws were passed with only a few seconds of total consideration, under regular rules of procedure, by doing something no one else had ever thought of doing before. A bill may be amended at any time before the moment of its final passage. Thus an innocuous codification of existing laws would be introduced. After this had been passed by the House, and a moment or two before the Senate was to take final action, the Long floor leader would introduce an “amendment” which was the real new law. In one case such an amendment was 200 pages long and was adopted in less than a minute of elapsed time. It was then rushed to the House for concurrence, and was laid on Governor Allen’s desk for his signature within a matter of minutes after its first appearance in the legislative assembly. In precisely this way the manufacturers’ license tax, which had brought on the impeachment proceedings of 1929, was enacted in 1934; the only difference was that it had now been made more far-reaching, since it no longer applied merely to the refining of petroleum but to every other manufacturing industry except the processing of bread, milk, and ice.

This kindled the flame of revolt once more; not among the members of the legislature but among the employees of the Standard Oil Company, 1,000 of whom were laid off within the week; the great refinery cutting its operation to a minimum as a prelude to shutting down. Along with a number of sympathizers, they finally armed themselves and seized the courthouse at Baton Rouge, which had just been annexed to the Long organization by the simple process of enacting a law authorizing the governor to appoint enough additional police jurors — the Louisiana name for county commissioners — to give the Long side a majority over the elected commissioners. Short shrift was made of this rebellion. Baton Rouge was put under martial law, a number of leaders were charged with conspiring to assassinate Senator Long, and a number of others, who armed themselves and gathered at the Baton Rouge airport for action, were dispersed by militiamen without a single shot being fired save for the discharge of one shotgun, which was not in the hands of a uniformed soldier, but severely wounded one of the revolters. The situation was eased off when the five-cents-a-barrel tax was compromised for one cent a barrel.

Plot and Counterplot

Another “murder plot” was bared in the summer of 1935 by Senator Long, and laid to a group of five anti-Long congressmen, who met in New Orleans several months ago to confect an anti-Long ticket for the approaching state and congressional primaries. Two members of the Long organization moved into the hotel room adjoining that of the congressmen and recorded the conversation through a concealed listening device. Gossip has it that the records thus made were to have been reproduced over the loudspeakers of the Long fleet of sound trucks, during the campaign this winter. The senatorial primary had been moved up from early autumn, the usual date, to January, 1936. Senator Long planned to have his senatorial campaign nicely out of the way before the presidential conventions of next year, with every municipal employee, every state employee, every schoolteacher, and every polling-booth commissioner in Louisiana a part of his state machine; with the militia, the state police, and an unlimited number of special polling-place deputies at his beck and call.

It was just before the past year’s Putsch-Over, which made all this possible by law, that the Share-the-Wealth cycle of Mr. Long’s political history had its inception. The Reverend Gerald Smith had just quit his pastorate in a Shreveport church over differences with his board concerning social liberalisms advocated from the pulpit. Struck by the tenor of Huey Long’s speeches for the redistribution of wealth, he sought out the senator, and the two spent some time together. Doctor Smith was with Mr. Long on the fateful January night in 1934 when the returns of the city election spelled such decisive defeat for the Long municipal ticket. The throng that had milled about campaign headquarters early in the evening, cheering, jostling for a chance to shake hands with Huey Long, melted away as the returns were tabulated. By the time victory for the opposition was conceded, the rooms were almost deserted.

Doctor Smith remained with Huey Long that night, endeavoring to comfort him. He accompanied him to the national capital a day or so later, and, indeed, was mistakenly assumed by Washington reporters to be a new bodyguard. Early one morning, about three o’clock according to some versions of the incident, Huey Long summoned his secretary, Earl Christenberry, and the Reverend Smith to his rooms, and excitedly explained that he had just thought of a national organization, without dues of any sort, to be known as the Share-the-Wealth Society; something to be welded into a national Huey Long political unit on the basis of a platform whose principal plank was the decentralization of fortunes.

A Political Jack-of-All-Trades

He gave Louisiana good roads — miles and miles of them. He succeeded in providing funds for building bridges, equipping hospitals and other eleemosynary institutions, enlarging a university, founding new colleges in conjunction with it, and, in short, putting into physical effect a construction program of vast expenditures at a time of general financial depression. He succeeded in raising the state’s revenues to figures of previously undreamed-of scope by adding new taxes and increasing old ones, but apparently without incurring the hostility of a voting majority of his electorate thereby. His Putsch-Over deprived Louisiana communities of any semblance of local self-government, but in the main he was a benevolent despot to all who acknowledged his autocracy.

And finally, he managed to crystallize about his genius for political evangelism the general feeling of worldwide unrest, the vague discontent evoked by the thought: “Why does the fact that we produce more than ever at less effort than heretofore mean that we must have less to enjoy?” He did this through his Share-the-Wealth movement, whose principal organizer said that this movement consciously deified him to ensure the success of a new economic and social philosophy.

On August 30, 1935, the man who manifested himself on the national stage as a sublimated precinct politician, as a notable Washington personage, and as a nascent apostle was 42 years old.

Less than a month later, he was shot and killed by Dr. Carl A. Weiss, Jr., in one of the ornamental marbled hallways of the lavish state capitol he had built as governor of Louisiana.

Senator Long had just convened another of his amazing special legislative sessions. The New Orleans Choctaws had surrendered at discretion. Money withheld from the city treasury for months was now to be made available. Along with this, bills virtually depriving two anti-Long district judges of places on the bench were tossed into the legislative hopper. One of the judges, gerrymandered into a district where, as a practical matter, he could never have been reelected, was the father of Doctor Weiss’ young wife. Friends and foes alike flout the idea, however, that this could have aroused the studious 30-year-old physician to the pitch of homicidal vengeance.

A Legislative Tribute

By agreement among his supporters, the legislative program of the session he had initiated was carried out “just as if Huey was still here with us,” this being held a deeper tribute of respect and affection than any formal adjournment. The only impromptu feature added to the assembly’s program was the joint resolution authorizing the interment of Huey Long’s body in the spacious grounds of the Capitol his administration had built.


A week after this article was published, the Post published the editorial “The End of a Chapter.” While remarking on Long’s “remarkable qualities of wit and outspokenness, together with rare showmanship” and roundly denouncing political assassination, the editor’s relief that the Share-the-Wealth movement had come to an end is almost palpable. 

The End of a Chapter — The Death of Huey P. Long

Shortly after the assassination of Huey P. Long on September 10, 1935, the Post published the editorial “The End of a Chapter.” While it raises up Long’s “wit and outspokenness” and his “rare showmanship,” it openly denounces his radical “Share Our Wealth” campaign, which, sought to put a cap on personal fortunes and provide a base-level homestead for every family.

Learn more about Huey “The Kingfish” Long’s politics, life, and legacy in “Long before Trump: The Unsettling Popularity of Huey Long.”


The End of a Chapter

Editorial

Originally published on October 19, 1935

 

Men and events have a way of quickly becoming dim memories, but it will be many a day before the American people forget the strange career and colorful personality of Huey Long. He had remarkable qualities of wit and outspokenness, together with rare showmanship. Yet in wide and not unintelligent circles his violent death met with rather perfunctory expressions of regret.

Assassination under any circumstances or for any reason is not to be condoned, but it is the natural result or child of despotism. It has no place in our system of government, but neither has the type of government that was shaping up in Louisiana any place in our system.

Even before Long was killed, it was frequently pointed out that his whole career showed how mere laws do not insure or protect democratic institutions. Even while maintaining its legal and ostensible forms, he pointed the way to their destruction. Once again we are forcibly reminded that each new generation needs to be educated in the values of liberty and self-government, and that our whole political system requires constant revitalization from the bottom up.

Finally, any gifts which come to the people as the result of despotism are paid for with too great a price. Long was at times a searching and relentless critic of the present administration, but the cynical and ruthless way in which he ran his own state detracted from the sincerity of his strictures; no one could be sure of his motives or purposes.

He posed as a great friend of the people and made promises to “share the wealth” so absurd that any but the most gullible should have seen through them. It has never been suggested that the political machine under his personal management was a purely altruistic organization. Public men, like all others, must be judged by actions, not by words.

Huey Long was a friend of the poor and oppressed only to the extent that he led his own state along paths of enlightenment and progress, and within the framework of democratic institutions and self government.

If he did not do this, he was no friend of the people at all, no matter how inflated, exuberant, and grandiloquent his promises of what he would do if elected president. The only leaders in public life who should be listened to and followed are those whose promises square with their past performances and whose speeches are consistent with their actions.

Arnold Palmer Introduces the Grand Slam

In 1960, Arnold Palmer became the first professional golfer to win mote than $75,000 in a single season. More than halfway to this goal in June, the 30-year-old talked with the Post about how he planned to make his mark on the sport.


I Want That Grand Slam

By Arnold Palmer as told to Will Grimsley

Originally published June 18, 1960

Arnold Palmer
“I seem to play my best in the big tournaments. I like competition — the more rugged it is the better.” (Gus Pasquarella, © SEPS)

Ever since I was able to walk I have been swinging a golf club, and ever since I was big enough to dream I have wanted to be the best golfer who ever lived. At one time I was certain that someday I would duplicate Bob Jones’ “grand slam” of 1930 — that is, sweep the United States Amateur and Open Championships and the British Amateur and Opening a single year. Then I found out — to my disillusionment — that to devote the necessary time to golf, yet still remain an amateur, I would need either tremendous wealth or a high-paying job with no responsibility.

For me, such prospects were as far away as the moon. I concluded that if I were going to reach the top in golf, I would have to do it as a professional. It was then that I started thinking about a professional “grand slam.”

When I got off to such a fast start this year — winning five of my first thirteen tournaments, including my second Masters in three years — I determined to make my bid. Now my sights are fixed on winning the four biggest tournaments open to a pro — the Masters, the U. S. Open, the British Open, and PGA (Professional Golfers Association of America). Ben Hogan won the first three of these in his great year of 1953, but had to pass up the PGA. No golfer ever has taken all four in the same year. The odds against it must be at least 1,000 to 1. Yet I feel confident that, with a little luck, it can be done. I want to be the man to do it.

Many people felt that Hogan’s 1953 achievement was at least equal, and maybe even superior, to Jones’ 1930 sweep because of the keener competition Hogan met. I agree. I believe Bob Jones, a wonderful sportsman, also might agree. In his heyday Jones had to beat only a small handful of top-flight players. In a big tournament today, anywhere from 30 to 40 men are capable of winning. Jones always has acknowledged that in his time it was possible to win a tournament with three good rounds and one bad round, whereas now it generally takes four good rounds to come out ahead. I think one major victory today is worth two in the Jones era.

The next major test for me is the National Open at the Cherry Hills Country Club this week in Denver. From there I go directly to Dublin, Ireland, to team with Sam Snead in the Canada Cup matches at Portmarnock Golf Club next week. These matches should help me get adjusted to the new playing conditions I’ll face in the hundredth anniversary British Open at St. Andrews in Scotland beginning July 4. After that comes the PGA championship, which opens at Akron, Ohio, on July 21.

Frankly, I am very excited about the British Open, whether or not I still have any chance for my grand slam by the time I get there. The United States has had only two British Open winners in the last 26 years — Sam Snead in 1946 and Ben Hogan in 1953. Our top golfers seldom compete in this championship; they don’t like to leave the rich American tour for an event which offers a first prize of only about $3,500. I’ll miss tournaments worth about $100,000, but I don’t care. I got into this business primarily to win championships. Money is important to me, certainly, but mainly as a means to an end. The money helps make it possible for me to go after the big titles, and I won’t be happy until I win them all.

If I miss out on a slam this year, I intend to keep trying. I am 30 years old — five years younger than Hogan was when he won the first of his four National Opens — and fortunately I am healthy and strong. I believe I have at least 10 more good years of tournament golf ahead of me. Pap — my father, Milfred Palmer, who taught me almost everything I know about golf — insists I’ll be playing competitively until I’m 50.

“The main thing is to take care of yourself, boy,” he keeps telling me. “A man’s body is like a tractor. Keep it in shape, and it will be serviceable for years.”

I seem to play my best in the big tournaments. For one thing, my game is better adapted to the tougher courses. For another, I can get myself more keyed up when an important title is at stake. I like competition — the more rugged the better. When I get on a hard, exacting course, I feel as if I’m wrestling a bear.

Such a course is the Augusta National, where the Masters is played every year. It’s a course that will snap back at you — even swallow you — when you least expect it. I won there in 1958, then kicked away the 1959 tournament on the final round by taking a six on the par-three 12th hole and missing putts on the 7th and 18th. Art Wall Jr., who birdied five of the last six holes, beat me out by two strokes.

 

Because of that 1959 disappointment, I went to the Masters this year more determined than for any other tournament I can remember. I passed up the Azalea Open at Wilmington, North Carolina, in order to arrive at Augusta a week in advance. I think I startled Mrs. Helen Harris at the registration desk when I checked in.

“Well, this is my 13th tournament of the year,” I told her. “Why don’t you enroll me as number 13?”

Mrs. Harris did — a bit reluctantly. So, my caddie, Nathaniel Avery, better known as Iron Man, had to wear a big 13 on his back all week. He didn’t like it, but he stuck it out; he has been my caddie there for six years.

I found myself installed as the six-to-one betting favorite for the tournament. Masters tradition has it that the advance favorite seldom wins. Newspapermen kept asking me how it felt to be put on the spot as the man to beat.

“It doesn’t bother me,” I told them. “What the bookies and sports writers say doesn’t affect the way the ball bounces. I never think of such things.”

It looked for a while as if my defiance of superstition might backfire. On the Sunday before the tournament I caught a flu bug and was miserable. I didn’t practice at all on Monday. I got a shot in my hip and stayed in bed the entire day. On Tuesday I played 14 holes. On Wednesday, the day before the opening round, I played only four.

However, when I went to the first tee on Thursday, I felt fresh and eager. I shot a five-under-par 67, with an 18-foot putt on the final hole, and led by two strokes. I putted poorly the next day for a 73, but stayed ahead by a stroke. In the third round, I shot a 72. That sent me into the last round with a one-stroke edge over five tough professionals — Ben Hogan, Ken Venturi, Dow Finsterwald, Bill Casper, and Julius Boros. I now had a chance to equal the 1941 feat of Craig Wood — the only man in the previous 23 Masters tournaments to lead every round.

The final round quickly developed into a three-way battle among Venturi, Finsterwald, and myself. Venturi andFinsterwald, playing four holes ahead, both had two strokes on me at one stage. I was on the 14th hole when Venturi finished with a fine 70 for a score of 283. Finsterwald missed a tricky eight-foot putt and wound up at 284.

In our business they say it’s best to be in the clubhouse with a good score — as Venturi was — and make the guys on the course come and get you. I needed to play those last four holes in one under par to tie, and two under par to win.

The best I could do at the long 15th hole and the short 16th was to stay even with par. As I moved on to No. 17, Winnie, my wife, came out and put her arm around my shoulders. “You’re doing fine, honey,” she said consolingly. Pap, who had come down Saturday from our home in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, gave me a wink and a sign as if to say, “Go get ’em, son.” Iron Man, my caddie, was almost in a state of shock. He fumbled nervously with the clubs, and every time he tried to say something, the words clogged up in his throat.

As for me, I wasn’t nervous. I was keyed up, of course, but the juices in my system were flowing normally. I read later that Venturi said he played the final round without once looking at the scoreboard or checking on what I was doing. With me it was just the opposite. I got reports at every hole. I knew exactly what I had to do. I was confident I could get at least one birdie on the final two holes to tie him — somehow, I always feel I can get a birdie when I need it.

The 17th is a par-four hole of 400 yards. I hit a good drive, but my eight-iron approach sat down too quickly and left me well below the cup — about 30 feet away from it, I would say. I remembered that the year before, on this same hole in the final round, I had missed an easy three-foot putt because I failed to read a slight break to the left. This putt, although much longer, was on virtually the same line. So I struck it boldly, intending that if the ball stayed up, it should break a little left at the hole. It did. It plopped into the cup for a birdie, and half my job was done.

There was high tension and wild excitement all around me at the 18th tee. The only sensation I felt was that my mouth was awfully dry. I would have given 10 bucks for a sip of water. But my main interest was in getting my drive on the fairway so I could be reasonably sure of my par. Par on the 18th is four. The hole is 420 yards and uphill, and we were playing into the wind.

My drive was a good one, a bit to the right. Then I punched a six-iron to the green about six feet to the left of the pin. Again I remembered the last day in 1959. I had had a ball in almost this exact spot. I had become disconcerted by the whirring of newsreel cameras and missed. This time I intended to take no chances. I studied the putt very carefully. I asked the newsreel men to stop their cameras. I gave the ball a solid whack. It dropped. That was the tournament.

“How did you do it?” one friend asked me later. “I would have swallowed my Adam’s apple.” Another said, “With that putt on the 18th, I don’t think I could have brought my putter’s blade back.”

Well, I don’t think I have any stronger nerves than the next man. I suspect it’s just the patience I got from my mother and the ornery bullheadedness I inherited from Pap. My mother and father are of stolid German-Irish stock. Both their families settled in the hilly section east of Pittsburgh in the early 1800s and have been there ever since. Originally they were farmers and landowners. Later some of them, such as my dad, drifted into the steel mills and other lines of work.

Pap never had it easy. When he was just a tyke, shortly after he had learned to walk, he came down with polio and was in bed for months. Then he had to be taught to walk again. Today his left leg is about one-fourth as big around as his right, and he walks with a distinct limp. But he developed into a par golfer. He can chin himself with either arm, and 30 times with both. He swims like a fish.

Pap has served at the Latrobe Country Club in various capacities for 39 years. He first worked there as an ordinary laborer when this nine-hole course was carved out of a mountainside. He helped put the roof on the clubhouse. Later he became greenskeeper and took some courses at Penn State to learn more about grass. Then in 1933, in the midst of the depression, he was made combination greenskeeper and pro at the club at a very modest salary. To keep his growing family in groceries, he had to work in the steel mills during the winter.

Latrobe is an industrial community of about 15,000. It is about 30 miles east of Pittsburgh, off U.S. Highway 30. Three independent steel mills provide most of the employment. There also are some thriving construction businesses. The golf course is now in the process of expanding from nine holes to eighteen.

My family has always lived within a brassie shot of the course. I am the oldest child, born September 10, 1929. I have a married sister, Mrs. Ronald Tilley, 28, living in Washington, D.C.; a brother, Milfred Jr., better known as “Jerry,” 15, and a kid sister, Sandy, 12. None of them is very interested in golf.

 

I couldn’t have been more than three when I got my first golf club. It was an old iron with a sawed-off shaft. The first thing Pap showed me was the proper grip — the Vardon overlapping grip. I vividly remember swinging the club hours at a time as Pap and his men worked nearby. I’d be swinging at some remote spot on the course, and my dad would walk by and tell me what I was doing wrong. I would correct myself and start swinging some more.

Pap says that’s the reason I have such big hands. “They’re the hands of a blacksmith or a timber cutter,” he says. “You can only get hands like that by swinging an ax or a golf club.”

My father always impressed on me the importance of keeping a firm hold on the club and not letting my swing get too loose. Even as a kid I kept my swing compact. I tried to hit the ball so hard I often would lose my balance.

“Deke is ruining that boy,” some of the club members would say. “He should make the kid swing easy.” Pap, who doesn’t know where he got his nickname of “Deacon,” or “Deke,” never let this criticism bother him. “It’ll work out all right as you get older,” he told me. He was correct.

Although my dad was the club pro, I didn’t have free run of the course. On the contrary, the club maintained the old British aloofness toward professionals and other employees. I wasn’t permitted on the course except on Mondays, when it was closed to members.

I recall I used to draw mother’s wash water on Monday mornings and then rush off to the course to play golf with the caddies. I also played some with my mother, who was quite good for a woman and a real stickler for keeping a correct scorecard. Other times I had to sneak in my practice when nobody was looking. At eight years, I could shoot 55 for nine holes. Then I got down to 50. One day when I was nine, I shot even fives for a 45. I couldn’t wait to run home and tell mother.

“Did you count them all?” she asked skeptically. She and Pap never let me get the big head.

As I grew older I took on more responsibility around the course. I worked the tractors and mowers. I helped in the golf shop. But always I was anxious to get out and hit practice balls. Sometimes I would go out to cut a fairway and, with the job half done, I would park the tractor and start hitting balls. Pap would find me and chew me out.

I guess I was even worse around the shop. “Arnie is the worst caddie master I ever had,” Pap always said.

One day when I was left in charge of the caddie shop, things got a little dull, and I sneaked down to the 8th hole to try out a new club. One of the club officers, an executive at one of the steel mills, picked this time to go by the shop for his clubs. He was hopping mad when he found the door locked.

Although he saw me hitting balls, he didn’t come down and say anything to me about it. Instead he hunted up Pap. He told Pap he would like to get his clubs.

“The caddie master will get them for you,” Pap said.

“Your caddie master is out there hitting balls,” the steel executive told my father coldly.

Pap tried to apologize, but it was little use. The other man said, “Let me have that boy in the steel mill for a while, and I will take some of that starch out of him.”

“I’d rather send him up on the ridges to chop trees,” Pap replied. Although my dad gave me a good dressing down when we were alone, he didn’t like the idea of anyone else pushing me around. I was a headstrong kid, but Pap kept a good bridle on me. He would hammer away at the things I was doing wrong in golf. I would get furious. We would wind up wrangling like a pair of alley cats.

Sometimes I would tell him he was old-fashioned and didn’t know what he was talking about. Pap would get peeved and give me the “freeze treatment.” I would ask him to help me correct some flaw, and he would pout, “I’m an old fogy — I don’t know anything. Besides I’m busy.” Then I would apologize. Pap would give in and work with me. I’ve found out one thing — he’s almost always right.

I played No. 1 on the golf team at Latrobe High School for four years. I lost only one match, to a Greensburg senior when I was a freshman. I won the Western Pennsylvania Junior three times and the Western Pennsylvania Amateur five times.

At the Hearst national junior tournament in Los Angeles around the time I finished high school, Bud Worsham, brother of former National Open champion Lew Worsham, suggested that he could help me get a golf scholarship at Wake Forest College in North Carolina. I leaped at the idea. Pap, with a houseful of hungry mouths to feed, had a tough enough time trying to keep me in golfballs, much less financing a college education for me.

With golf mainly on my mind, but majoring in business administration, I entered Wake Forest in September 1947 and became Bud Worsham’s roommate. Soon I found myself playing against fellows I later was to face on the pro tour. Art Wall and Mike Souchak were at Duke. Harvie Ward was at North Carolina. I won the conference title two times and the Southern Intercollegiate once. I was twice medalist in the National Intercollegiate, although I didn’t win it.

After I had been in college about three and a half years, I lost my roommate when Bud Worsham was killed in an automobile accident. I became restless and quit school to join the Coast Guard. I served three years — a few months in New Jersey and Connecticut, the rest in Cleveland. I had an opportunity to play a lot of golf.

In January 1954, I re-entered Wake Forest, but stayed only a semester. I was still short some credits, and I never got my degree. All this time I was the captive of my strong obsession with golf and my conviction that I could become a better amateur player than Bob Jones was.

 

I returned to Cleveland and got a job with W. C. Wehnes and Company, manufacturers’ agents. On this job I could work in the morning and play golf in the afternoon. But there was no way I could get off for extensive periods to play in tournaments.

Then came what looked like my big break. A friend of Bill Wehnes offered me a job marketing a revolutionary trailer with a hydraulic lift. He guaranteed me $50,000 a year for two years and promised that I would make enough money thereafter in renewals to enable me to devote myself almost completely to golf. I was in the man’s office to sign a contract when word came that he had been killed in an automobile accident in Florida.

At this time I still wanted to play as an amateur, although I felt a growing urge to get into big-time golf. My restlessness continued when I won the 1954 U.S. Amateur title at the Country Club of Detroit in August, beating Robert Sweeny one-up in the final match.

Three weeks later I was playing in Fred Waring’s tournament at Shawnee on Delaware, Pennsylvania. On the first day of the tournament — a Tuesday — I noticed a pretty, dark-haired girl in my gallery. After I finished I learned she was Winnie Walzer of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a friend of Fred Waring’s daughter Dixie. We were introduced. By Friday night I had proposed. We became engaged and talked about taking a honeymoon the next spring when I went to England with the United States Walker Cup team.

However, now that I wanted to get married, it began to seem impractical to me to remain an amateur all that while. I turned professional on November 19, 1954, signing a contract with Wilson Sporting Goods Company. I talked it over with Pap first, and he didn’t mind. He had wanted to play on the tour himself, but never felt he was good enough or had enough money.

Shortly before Christmas I picked up Winnie at her home, and we drove to Washington to visit my sister. Winnie and I decided to get married right away. I called my folks at Latrobe. They gave their approval and decided to come to the wedding. Winnie’s parents weren’t keen on the idea, but that didn’t stop us.

We went to the courthouse to get our license, and the clerk asked Winnie how old she was.

“Twenty,” she said.

I kicked her on the shin.

“I mean, twenty-one,” she said.

“Are you sure?” the clerk asked.

“Yes, sir,” Winnie said bravely. Actually she was just short of 21. We were married in Falls Church, Virginia, on December 20 and then began the tournament circuit as a honeymoon. We started our new life on a shoestring in 1955. Under PGA rules I was ineligible to accept prize money from PGA-sponsored tournaments until I had served six months’ probation. But I picked up $750 in a special pro-amateur competition at Miami, then went to Panama and tied Roberto de Vicenzo for second in another non-P.G.A event, collecting $1,300.

This was our stake. Winnie and I picked up the winter tour on the Pacific Coast and bought a trailer to be hauled around by my secondhand 1952 car.

We pulled that trailer all the way across the United States on the tour. In St.Petersburg, Florida, we bought a bigger trailer and headed for home. Near the end of the journey I decided to take a shortcut over a mountain. On the steepest slope, we got near the top and couldn’t make it. I had to back the big trailer down and start again. Winnie got scared and walked to the top. When we finally got over, the very steep downgrade was almost too much for us. With brakes of both the car and trailer screeching and smoking, we somehow reached the bottom of the mountain safely. After we had made it the rest of the way to our backyard in Latrobe, I told mother, “Sell that thing. I never want to see it again.”

I won enough money in non-sanctioned tournaments to keep our heads above water until my six-month probation was up. Since then the tour has been good to me. My money winnings have ranged from about $10,000 that first part year to $42,607 in 1958, when I was the national leader. Last year I didn’t putt well and fell back to fifth with $32,462. This year, with almost $50,000 already won by late May, I have a good chance of reaching $100,000, which would be more than any man ever won in PGA tournaments. Ted Kroll holds the record — $72,835 in 1956.

Three years ago Winnie and I built a white ranch house overlooking the Latrobe Country Club. There is more than an acre of romping room for our two little girls — Peggy, 4, and Amy, almost 2. I’m strictly a home man, and I generally play my best golf when the family is with me. When they can’t be, I take breaks from the tour and go back to Latrobe. Usually I play six or seven tournaments and then skip two. I find these little breathing spells good for my game.

I have two main hobbies — bridge and flying. The Latrobe Airport is only about a mile from my home, and I have close to 100 hours of solo flying to my credit. I’m looking forward to the day I buy my own plane and can sky-hop between tournaments.

 

On the golf course, I’ll admit, I am a bold player, but the tour has taken away much of my early brashness. As a freshman pro, I felt I could beat anybody. I played like a pirate, going for the pin every time regardless of the consequences. I still do that most of the time — particularly when I feel I have at least a 50-50 chance of making the shot — but I don’t gamble when a miss can be very costly.

All in all, I think the biggest improvements in my game during the first months of this year were steadier putting and better concentration.

Now that I’ve won my second Masters, I notice that some people are comparing me with Ben Hogan and Sam Snead. I’m not like either of them. I figure I am a power hitter like Snead, with a swing that has needed little or no overhauling. But Sam has the greatest natural talent I ever saw. His ability is such that he can win tournaments without concentration or extra effort. All he has to do is swing away.

Hogan, on the other hand, is self-made — the product of his own relentless determination. He is the coldest, sharpest calculator I have ever seen on a golf course. I get intent at times myself, but often I shrug it off and say, “What the heck — it’s just a game.”

Although Hogan and Snead are nearing 50, both are still threats in a tournament such as the National Open this week. However, I believe the main competition at Cherry Hills will come from younger men who have been active on the 1960 tour.

Bill Casper, the defending champion, is more than just a great putter — the label some people have hung on him. He is a fine all-around player. Dow Finsterwald, one of my closest friends, is always a threat. This is a cold business with him, and he approaches it like a machine. Ken Venturi is a classic player, capable of reaching brilliant heights. Mike Souchak is the strongest man in golf and is hard to beat when he is rolling, but he is inclined to be streaky. Gene Littler is solid as an oak, with wonderful natural talent, but has seemed to lack inspiration. Art Wall and Bob Rosburg have proved they can be top players despite their unorthodox baseball grips.

In my opinion, this is the select little group I’ll have to overcome if I’m to keep my grand-slam attempt alive by winning the U.S. Open. I have one wish for this tournament. I just hope things will work out so that I can come down to the final two holes needing one birdie to tie and two to win.

 


Eight days after this story was published in the 1960 Post, Arnold Palmer won the U.S. Open. At the British Open in July, he came in second — by a single stroke — to Kel Nagle, ending his chance at the modern-day Grand Slam. (To date, the challenge of winning the four major PGA tournaments in a single season remains a unicorn for professional golfers, who credit Palmer with the concept.) In October, Palmer was voted 1960’s PGA Player of the Year, receiving 1,088 of the 1,217 votes cast by professional golfers and the media.  

 

The international golf star gained 95 professional and 26 amateur wins before he retired at age 76 — nearly three more decades of golf than “Pap,” his father and golf teacher, had predicted for him in 1960. Palmer died Sunday at the age of 87. 

 

Free Narcotics for Drug Addicts?

American attitudes about how we deal with drug addicts seem to be shifting. According to polls from the Pew Research Center, 67 percent of Americans believe the government should focus more on treating drug addicts than on prosecuting them. The same study says that more than half of Americans support — or at least don’t oppose — the legalization of marijuana.

But legalization arguments extend beyond marijuana. Some countries that are faced with drug addiction problems are trying an alternative approach: providing addicts with the drugs they need, for free, under professional supervision.

At first glance, such an approach seems reckless, heartless, and wasteful of social resources and addicts’ health. Yet these countries report that many addicts live with their addiction while leading productive lives. The state benefits from that productivity while saving the money it would otherwise spend arresting, trying, and imprisoning those drug abusers. Not only do addicts stay out of trouble with the law, many have used this service to reduce and even quit their dependency.

Providing free drugs to addicts is not a new idea. The argument was exemplified half a century ago in the following two opinion pieces.

In “Give Drugs to Addicts,” from our August 8, 1964, issue, Nathan Straus III emphasized that drug abuse was a medical, not a legal, problem. He wanted to focus on what would work for addicts and for society and believed that giving drug addicts regulated access to narcotics could be beneficial.

Straus was the head of the National Association for the Prevention of Addiction to Narcotics, an organization that was starting the first national study of addiction. In later years, the NAPAN sponsored conferences to introduce the methadone treatment for opioid addiction.

Two years later, Jonah J. Goldstein made some of the same points from a different angle in “Give Drugs to Addicts so We Can Be Safe.” A judge in New York’s court for 25 years, Goldstein knew addicts and what a drain on the legal system they could be. Out of this experience, he made a surprisingly practical and original argument for decriminalizing drugs: to protect everyone else.

 


Give Drugs to Addicts

By Nathan Strauss III

Originally published on August 8, 1964

Nathan Strauss
Nathan Straus, head of the National Association for the Prevention of Addiction to Narcotics, has testified on drug abuse before a House subcommittee and a presidential commission.

Free drugs for addicts — no plan for coping with the national tragedy of narcotics addiction prompts greater outrage. All manner of “experts,” from government officials to heads of citizens’ groups, denounce the plan as immoral and dangerous.

“We can’t let dope fiends get drugs from clinics and then stalk the streets,” the typical argument runs. “They’ll prey on women and children — no one will be safe. Addicts will have a ‘free-drug ride’ through life, and addiction simply will be perpetuated, made acceptable …”

All such objections are shortsighted. Allowing addicts to obtain drugs legally from doctors, instead of from underworld “pushers,” is the one step that may end the chaos of drug abuse.

Today, after years of hysteria, neglect, and downright cruelty to the addict, we are still woefully ignorant about his disease. We still don’t know exactly what addiction is, or what causes it or cures it. We do know that the police method of “treating” addicts — throwing them in jail — does not work. Addicts must not be punished or put away but treated in their own communities, if science is ever to make meaningful discoveries about their shattering sickness.

Even if there are risks, we must try treating addicts in clinics, for all else has failed. In our big cities there are tens of thousands of addicts, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Every year they consume at least $350 million worth of heroin and related opiates. Increasingly, young people are turning to cheaper, addictive “dangerous drugs,” amphetamines and barbiturates. (Of the 10 billion barbiturate and amphetamine pills produced annually in the United States, it is estimated that half end up on the illegal market.) The underworld thrives on illicit drug sales to addicts, and addicts themselves are forced to become criminals. Desperate for money to support their habit, they commit millions of thefts annually, and occasionally they murder.

The situation has become uncontrollable. A presidential commission reported recently that 95 percent of the heroin that smugglers bring to the U.S. every year gets past law-enforcement officials. Police freely admit that one addict may commit 500 or 1,000 or even 1,500 crimes before he is apprehended. In New York City alone, addicts commit about half the city’s crimes, resulting in losses of more than $1 million per day. And the total is constantly increasing.

Of the addicts jailed or locked in hospital wards to “detoxify,” an estimated 90 percent or more soon return to “shooting dope.” Many of them resume taking drugs the day they are freed. Their “connections” wait for them outside the jail or hospital walls.

To combat this horror, we must bring addiction out into the open, as we have epilepsy, mental retardation, and, to a certain extent, emotional illness. We must regard it as a disease that can be studied, treated, and, hopefully, cured. “Actually, the addict is a sick person, not a criminal,” says a report of the New York Academy of Medicine. “He needs medical care, not a jail sentence.”

Where should we start? The organization of which I am president, the National Association for the Prevention of Addiction to Narcotics, will initiate this year a program with two goals: to help addicts conquer their addiction, and to provide medical and social scientists with sorely needed facts about the fundamental nature of the disease. With the cooperation of law-enforcement officials, NAPAN plans to establish two outpatient clinics for addicts, one in New York, the other in California. These are the states with the most serious addiction problems. The program, the first of its kind, will be operated on a strictly scientific, experimental basis.

In these clinics small groups of addicts, carefully selected and closely supervised, will receive drugs in gradually decreasing quantities. And, because addiction is related to emotional distress, the addicts will receive psychiatric treatment, counseling about education and jobs, and other forms of assistance. Only through such a comprehensive assault will we learn how to take the addict off drugs and keep him off.

Why attempt such studies of addiction? Because experience has shown that by studying illness in the “walking patient,” science learns things it never learns from patients confined to hospitals. Researchers in heart disease, for example, learned a great deal about anticoagulant drugs by studying their effect on heart patients leading their usual lives in the outside world. We may never find the secrets of addiction unless we study the addict who is out in the world and being tempted to take drugs by forces in his usual environment. The locked hospital ward simply does not permit this kind of searching and practical inquiry.

Through research with these selected addicts, we may learn whether addiction is fundamentally psychological or environmental, or whether it has a physical basis. Why does one person succumb to addiction while his brothers and sisters often do not? Why are teenagers so susceptible to the disease? And why do some 30- and 40-year-old addicts simply “walk away” from their addiction? At present we do not have the answers.

Is it unreasonable to hope for a specific, valuable treatment for addiction? I think not. It is just possible, for example, that addiction stems from an abnormality in body chemistry. If this is true — and we’ll never know unless we study patients — perhaps we can isolate and neutralize the guilty chemical factor. Then we might be able to prevent addiction altogether, either through medication or by some “immunizing” injection.

Even if research fails to yield quick answers, the very fact that addicts can get drugs from doctors will have one tremendous effect. The addict will be lifted from the cellar of the criminal world to the level of the medical center where, as a sick person, he can be helped. This one measure will do a great deal to rid the addict of the stigma of his disease and to end his degradation. This has happened in England, where the punitive approach to addiction has been abandoned, and with excellent results. There doctors are allowed to treat addicts as exactly what they are — sick people. Most addicts in England are treated in doctors’ offices. Only a handful are involved with the underworld. (The English, however, have yet to mount the intensive research effort outlined above.)

It has taken years, but the American Medical Association has finally come round to the conclusion that addiction is basically a medical problem. Recently, the AMA conceded for the first time that it would be ethical for physicians to treat addicts on an experimental, out-patient basis. Similar endorsements have come from the New York County Medical Society and from the New York Academy of Medicine. The latter organization has declared that as long as the police approach to addiction prevails, the disease will continue to spread.

What until now has prevented organized medicine and individual doctors from supporting clinical research with addicts? For one thing, police agencies, especially the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, have threatened and intimidated doctors. Federal regulations restrain doctors from treating addicts — even though Supreme Court decisions clearly indicate that doctors are entitled to do so. As the New York Academy of Medicine report states, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics opposes the practice “because it really does not trust doctors.” The bureau, says the report, maintains that the only way to treat addicts is by abruptly depriving them of drugs. Its insistence on this harsh and futile method has crippled narcotics control in this country.

Organized medicine, too, has been shamefully timid about addiction. Doctors, like most of the rest of us, have passed the buck to the police, saying in effect, “We aren’t interested in this kind of sickness. Lock up the addicts. Keep them away from nice people.” Today the climate is changing. More and more doctors and law-enforcement officials are convinced that something new must be attempted — simply because all previous efforts have failed.

What of the bitter objections to outpatient treatment of addicts? For example, will addicts on maintenance doses endanger innocent people? Hardly. An addict becomes desperate only when he has no access to drugs or has no money to buy them. Under the influence of drugs, most addicts are quite harmless.

Will addicts use free drug doses simply as a “convenience”? Critics believe that the addict will not be content with controlled doses but will use them as a starting point for his “kicks.” After leaving the clinic, the argument goes, the addict will return to his criminal sources for additional drugs.

This objection is ill-founded. Soon precise new laboratory techniques will let doctors determine exactly how much narcotic is in the blood. If an addict-patient obtains drugs from a criminal pusher, the doctor will know immediately and the addict will have to answer to the police about his criminal sources of supply.

Many opponents of maintenance doses feel the most compelling argument of all is that if addicts are provided drugs, the door will be opened wide to lifetime addiction. As one misguided doctor said to me recently, “Let’s not permit doctors to lead the addict down the primrose path.”

I must say that this objection, too, is shallow. In the treatment of cancer, heart disease, arthritis, and all other illness, we do everything we can to cure the patient. However, if we fail to cure, we then try to control the patient’s symptoms, so that he will remain productive and relatively comfortable, physically and emotionally. Perhaps after years of research we will find that some addicts cannot be cured. We may find, however, that by giving these incurables maintenance doses, we can control the symptoms of their disease and enable them to lead productive and relatively normal lives.

In short, it is just possible that some addicts will need continued, reduced doses from the clinic in order to function in society. It is just possible, too, that their addiction itself serves to control a more serious and socially dangerous psychological sickness. Wouldn’t it be ironic if we discovered that drugs keep some addicts from becoming murderers, rapists, or arsonists?

As hopeless as the narcotics picture may appear, much can be accomplished if we view the addict with compassion, not fear. Fear has led us to punish the addict instead of helping him. But we can no longer afford to indulge ourselves in this barbarity. For, as crime statistics grimly show, when we punish the addict, we punish ourselves.

 


Give Drugs to Addicts So We Can Be Safe

By Jonah J. Goldstein

Excerpted from an article originally published on July 30, 1966

Jonah J. Goldstein
Jonah J. Goldstein was a New York City judge for over thirty years.

Not long ago an office building in New York’s Rockefeller Center area hired private detectives to catch the thieves who were stealing everything movable and salable from the offices in the buildings, night after night. The detectives caught 49 men; 43 of them were narcotics addicts.

Half the crimes in New York City today — the robberies, the muggings, the burglaries — are committed by drug addicts, and other cities are beginning to share New York’s dangers. A while back, one of our newspapers carried a banner headline: NEW CRIME WAVE EXPECTED. Because federal narcotics agents had seized a big heroin shipment in the port, the story explained, heroin prices would go up, and addicts would have to rob more people to buy their shots.

What kind of police protection is it — what kind of law, is it — that turns a great triumph of law enforcement into the cause of a crime wave?

Discussions of drug addiction always seem to turn on the question of what happens to the addict. Instead of worrying so much about the one-tenth of one percent of the population who are hooked on drugs, let’s worry about the 99.9 percent who aren’t, and whose homes and lives are less secure because we drive sick people to crime with our narcotics laws.

Mind you, the drug addict is almost never dangerous when he’s under the influence of drugs — narcotics are sedatives. What makes him dangerous is the desperate need for the money to buy the next dose. And the costs are stupendous. The $50-a-day addict must steal $250 to $300 in merchandise daily to support his habit; and when you catch him, it costs $15 a day of tax revenues to keep him alive in jail.

I don’t want the kind of system where people have to register to get their narcotics. Some addicts are wanted by the police: They wouldn’t register. All we need is a simple arrangement by which the addict who can pay for the shot can go to his doctor and get it — and the poor addict can go to the clinic, just as the poor diabetic goes to the clinic for a shot of insulin.

Nobody would have to sign up for “treatment” unless he wanted it; nobody would even have to give a name or sign a receipt — just walk in the front door, get the shot, and walk out the back door. Any nurse could do the job. The single dose, of course, would have to be moderately light. If a man’s condition is such that he needs another dose, he can come around to the front door again.

A simple test could guarantee that nobody gets narcotics at the clinic unless he is already addicted. Another test, perhaps an invisible-ink time stamp that comes out under an ultraviolet lamp, could give enough control on the number of doses to make sure nobody used the clinic’s narcotics to the point of killing himself.

One night at dinner at the Grand Street Boys Association, I was talking about narcotics with a monsignor of the Catholic Church. He asked me if I’d give a man five dollars if he asked me for five dollars to buy a shot of heroin. I said, “Of course I would.”

“Wouldn’t you be concerned that you might be shortening his life?” the monsignor said.

“That’s his business,” I said.

I think there’d be a good case for giving the addict his drugs even if it did help him harm himself. There are a thousand times as many people who are not addicts as there are addicts, and the important thing is to help them. And I can’t see how an addict can harm himself more by going to a clinic than he does now by roaming the streets and robbing people to get the money to buy adulterated stuff from a vicious pusher. Is the female addict any better off as a prostitute? Anyway, why do you think the addict is so sure to be harmed?

When I was on the bench and the cops brought in a workingman who was an addict, I’d call him and his wife into my chambers and I’d show them a map of Texas. I’d say, “Pick a town near the Mexican border, and go down there and get yourself a job. When you need the drugs, just walk across the border — you can buy the stuff there for the price of a pack of cigarettes. So you don’t work eight hours a day, you only work six — you’re still a lot better off than you will be up here, going in and out of jails and hospitals.”

In my 25 years as a judge, I never had a rich user brought before me. I said that while I was still on the bench, and the newspapers picked it up. The next day I got a call from the government’s chief New York narcotics agent, who said he wanted to see me. He came up to my chambers and said, “It’s not true we don’t go after the rich addicts. We’ve been following one for five years, and one of these days we’re going to get him.”

I asked for the name, and he mentioned one of the most famous and best-loved men in America, a man who’s given away fortunes to charity, especially charity to help kids. I asked the federal chief what good he thought it would do to take a man like that and throw him in jail and ruin him, just because he used drugs. And then — as a citizen, not as a judge — I called the man and warned him. He said sadly, “I know about it.”

Some say that giving shots to addicts will increase addiction. I doubt it. I don’t think the end of prohibition increased the consumption of alcohol, or the number of alcoholics.

During prohibition important people never had any trouble getting whiskey. And there are some important people who have no trouble getting drugs today. Harry Anslinger, who was federal Commissioner of Narcotics, once testified to supplying a congressman with drugs out of the government’s own stock, because it would be dangerous to let somebody outside get that kind of hold on a congressman. Everybody knows about doctors and anesthetists who have the habit. Narcotics agents don’t want to let the doctors handle the problem because the police know that many doctors are addicts themselves. Men work as orderlies in hospitals for less money than they could make washing dishes in a cafeteria, because the job brings them near the source of their drugs. But why touch them — if they can live with their habit and do their work?

For years I have been receiving letters from people who are addicts, but nobody knows it except themselves and their doctors. They were in an accident or a fire once, or badly wounded in the war (I once had a man before me who got the habit as a prisoner of war in North Korea). The doses that then kept them from agony later became the curse of their lives. Some of them became substantial businessmen and professional men, but they had to live with the knowledge that they and their doctors were breaking the law every day.

Though many of the addicts we now make criminals could live useful lives with their habit, many others are hopeless derelicts. Nobody who has served as a judge in a criminal court could ever deny that addiction is a terrible thing. If we had a cure for addiction, there might even be an argument for the sort of program Governor Rockefeller has been advocating — ordering users to hospitals for treatment as soon as their addiction is discovered. But the hospitals don’t help. We’ve had federal narcotics hospitals for more than 30 years in Lexington and Fort Worth, and the biggest claim I’ve ever seen for cures is 10 percent. Most doctors I know think 2 percent is optimistic.

In planning what to do right now, we have to start with the fact that addicts as a rule can’t shake the habit, and that nothing we know how to do is much help to most of them. The psychiatrists have quit on the problem. One of them, Dr. Joost A.M. Meerloo, recently put their belief in his own kind of language: “Drug addiction is much more related to the pusher and the existence of criminal seduction and hypocritical laws than to circumscribed pathology within the individual.” Do you eliminate the pushers and criminal seduction and hypocritical laws by ordering people into hospitals?

All the police and the courts can do with today’s laws is increase the risk to the pusher. The greater the risk to the pusher, the higher the profits from pushing, and the stronger the temptation to push. The mob opposes reform of the narcotics laws now, just as the bootleggers always backed the drys in the fight on prohibition.

Make the drugs easily available to the addicts, and you take the profits out of pushing. Then if you find anybody pushing drugs, especially to kids, you can slap him in jail and throw away the key — let him rot. The law can do its job. Without the profits, there won’t be new pushers to come up and replace the jailbirds.

Giving away the drugs doesn’t solve the problem — we’ll still need a cure for addiction as much as we ever did. Today’s stupid laws make it nearly impossible to launch a research project big enough to get near the problem. Dr. Berger estimates that in New York, the worst-afflicted city, there are now only five or six doctors interested in the addiction problem. Take the stigma off the subject and provide money, and maybe we can have doctors instead of pushers and police determining what happens to sick people in our country.

But let’s keep our eyes on what our criminal laws are supposed to do. We don’t write them to protect or to rehabilitate the addict or the criminal, to mete out exact Solomon-like justice to the pusher. We write them to protect the society, all the ordinary people who obey the law without even knowing that’s what they’re doing. Our laws on narcotics should benefit the 190-odd million who don’t take drugs, not the 200,000 who do. I think it would turn out that we’d help them, too, but that’s not what’s important. The significant victim of the present law is not the derelict half-crazed addict with the need for drugs who mugs the old lady on the street, but the old lady herself.

Let’s forget some of the fancy theories and make our cities safer by giving the addict the narcotics he needs.

The Short-Is-Swell Movement in Digital Communication

Most of us lead busy lives. Errands to run, people to see, messages to send. i mean tiny msgs without commas & forget periods cuz no time 4 that

This inexorable trend toward ever briefer-faster everything (snip, cut, snip snip) is both a national embarrassment and a disgrace. Period.

Unfortunately, we are in the thrall of digital media, which almost always favors speed over depth. Morning till night we bow low before the prodigious (quasi-religious?) powers of our smarty-pants devices, so glowy and touch-sensitive.

The result is plain to see. We’re losing our ability to reflect. The operative command today is “Give it to me short, condensed, or fast.”

Hardly any segment of our popular culture has been spared. Books, magazine articles, TV shows, even advertising copy and instructional manuals — all are shorter these days. Six-second videos playing in a continuous loop are hugely popular on smartphones. TV news reports are supplemented by scrolling tickers. Amazon.com has an entire section devoted to “Best Sellers in 15-Minute Short Reads.” In live theater, a new genre has emerged: 10-minute plays and musicals. I’m only mildly surprised that no one is insisting Twitter reduce its 140-character limit.

It would be hilarious were it not true, but some youngsters evidently find even texting too arduous. They choose instead to share thoughts in the language of sequential emoji. Ah, the young! So … visual. So … utterly defeated by the tyranny of Silicon Valley.

But so what? Why not cut to the chase? Well, no matter the prevailing sentiment, sometimes less is not more; sometimes it’s just less. If we were to adopt a national tool, I submit it would likely be the scissors.

If we were to adopt a national tool, I submit it would likely be the scissors.

When shrinkage becomes strategy, as it has in these matters, the underlying message to consumers is unequivocal: Deeper, nuanced content is essentially a waste of your time, so don’t even bother.

Am I being unnecessarily grouchy about the drift toward less? On the contrary. I contend a high degree of grouch is required.

The other day, while ruminating about all this, I reached out to Richard Watson, author of Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years. “Any chance that our aversion to, say, immersive reading is just a temporary cultural blip?” I asked.

I could almost hear him sigh. “I fear the further erosion of sustained, focused thought,” Watson answered.

Improbably, the short-is-swell movement recently gained an unofficial mascot — none other than novelist James Patterson. Yep, that Jim Patterson, best known for producing blockbusters that are ground out, nonstop, as if manufactured in a frankfurter factory. He has launched BookShots, a publishing imprint devoted to novels that can be read in two hours or less.

Patterson says the conceit behind BookShots is that they will skip “the boring parts.” He has got an ally in fellow writer Jesse Kornbluth, whose novel, Married Sex: A Love Story, came out last year. “Publishing has been trying to commit suicide for all the decades I’ve been writing, and it’s finally making progress,” Kornbluth told me (appropriately, in a text message). “One good reason is the belief that the public wants novels thick as doorstops, but they don’t. My ideal reader for Married Sex would open the novel as the plane lifts off from New York and finish as it lands in Los Angeles.”

If all this wanton pruning troubles you, I’m sorry to report that the situation may grow gloomier still. A Facebook executive recently predicted that, in five years, the site’s newsfeeds will be almost entirely filled with videos — because users vastly prefer video to actual, you know, words.

It’s not easy, but I’m resisting the temptation to conclude this column with a sad-face emoji.

Crude Language on the Campaign Trail

John Adams and Thomas JeffersonThink this year’s presidential campaign has been crass, coarse, and contentious? Campaigns in America have often been rough, with name-calling taking precedence over, and frequently obscuring, the issues of the day.

“Fatso!”

1796: John Adams (Federalist) vs. Thomas Jefferson (Republican)

Real Issue of the Day: America’s foreign policy toward England and France.

Low Blow: The Philadelphia Aurora, which backed Jefferson, referred to the stout Adams as “His Rotundity.” Another pro-Jefferson rag in Boston warned that Adams would support hereditary succession and appoint his son, John Quincy Adams, to be the next president.

Retort: Federalist papers warned that Jefferson’s followers were “cut-throats who walk in rags and sleep amidst filth and vermin.” Jefferson was also accused of cheating his creditors and robbing a widow of her estate.

Victor: Adams

“Girly man!”

1800 (Rematch): John Adams (Federalist) vs. Thomas Jefferson (Republican)

Real Issue of the Day: Whether power should be centralized under the federal government (Adams) or held by the states (Jefferson).

Low Blow: Jefferson hired scandalmonger-journalist James Callender to produce a pamphlet that referred to Adams as “a hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

Retort: Citing Jefferson’s early admiration for the French Revolution, a Federalist editorial asked, “Are you prepared to see your dwellings in flames, hoary hairs bathed in blood, female chastity violated, or children writhing on the pike and halberd?”

Victor: Jefferson

Footnote: Unlike today’s anything-goes political atmosphere, criticism of the administration was prohibited under the 1798 Sedition Act, and Callender was jailed.

“Adulterer!”

1828: Andrew Jackson (Democrat-Republican) vs. John Quincy Adams (National-Republican)

Real Issue of the Day:  Free trade. Adams favored a high tariff to discourage imports; Jackson favored free trade and lower import duties.

Low Blow: Adams’ supporters called Jackson a brawler, gambler, drunk, thief, and adulterer. This last claim proved particularly harmful. Jackson had married his wife before her divorce was official, so there was some truth to the rumor in a technical sense. The shame caused by the attacks on Mrs. Jackson’s character undermined her health and led to her premature death from a heart attack shortly after Jackson’s victory.

Retort: Jackson supporters called President Adams anti-religious, using as proof the fact that he traveled on Sunday. They also accused him of living in the White House in “kingly pomp and splendor,” and using public funds to buy “gaming tables” and “gambling furniture”; actually, he had simply bought a chessboard and a pool table.

Victor: Jackson

“Drunkard!”

1844: James K. Polk (Democrat) vs. Henry Clay (Whig)

Real Issue of the Day: Annexation of Texas and Oregon — Polk favored it, Clay waffled.

Low Blow: Democrats said Clay was a drunkard, addicted to gambling and prostitutes, and a slave trader to boot.

Retort: Polk had a reputation for being so dull as to be incapable of immoral behavior. So the Whigs circulated a story that Polk, like Clay a slave owner, inhumanely branded his initials J.K.P. into slaves’ shoulders. (Not true, by the way.)

Victor: Polk

“Coward!”

1852: Franklin Pierce (Democrat) vs. Winfield Scott (Whig)

Real Issue of The Day: The controversial Compromise of 1850, which strengthened slave owners’ rights. Both parties supported it, but the Whigs less enthusiastically.

Low Blow: The Whigs called Pierce the “Fainting General” because he once passed out on the battlefield during the Mexican War. In fact, the fainting spell came about not from cowardice but because Pierce was suffering from an injury to his knee sustained the previous day.

Retort: Democrats made fun of Scott’s pompous nature, invoking his nickname, “Old Fuss and Feathers.”

Victor: Pierce

“Bastard!”

1856: James Buchanan (Democrat) vs. John C. Frémont (Republican)

Real Issue of the Day: Slavery. Democrats sought to maintain the status quo; the new Republican party was strongly against slavery.

Low Blow: Democrats played up the fact that Frémont was born out of wedlock and that he opposed slavery. Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise declared he’d march an army into Washington and overthrow the government if Frémont was elected.

Retort: Republicans claimed Buchanan’s age and bachelorhood  made him unfit for the presidency, and they called him “Ten-Cent Jimmy” because he once said that 10 cents a day was a fair wage for manual workers. They also claimed Buchanan’s custom of tilting his head — the effect of palsy, it is now believed — was the result of an attempt to hang himself.

Victor: Buchanan

“Ape!”

1864: Abraham Lincoln (Republican) vs. George McClellan (Democrat)

Real Issue of the Day: How to end the Civil War. Republicans sought nothing less than a full military victory over the Confederacy. Democrats wanted to negotiate peace and end the war.

Low Blow: Democrats threw everything they could think of at Lincoln, calling him a buffoon, ape, idiot, tyrant, a teller of dirty jokes, and, for good measure, an incompetent commander-in-chief. Democratic supporters published a pamphlet falsely claiming Lincoln was encouraging Irish immigrants, then viewed as the lowest-of-the-low white citizens, to marry former slaves.

Retort: Republicans publicized McClellan’s repeated, costly failures as commander of the Union army. They also argued that voting against Lincoln was an act of disloyalty.

Victor: Lincoln

“Traitor!”

1872: Ulysses S. Grant (Republican) vs. Horace Greeley (Democrat)

Real Issue of the Day: Reconstruction. Greeley’s party wanted to end Reconstruction — essentially withdrawing Federal troops from the South. A secondary issue was civil service
reform, with Greeley, a newspaper editor, calling for an end to the “spoils system” of handing out government jobs as political favors.

Low Blow: Republican artist Thomas Nast portrayed Greeley as a traitor in a series of bitter cartoons. In one, he shows Greeley shaking hands with the ghost of John Wilkes Booth over Lincoln’s grave. In another, Greeley is handing over a black man to the Ku Klux Klan, which has just murdered a black mother and her child.

Retort: Democrats called Grant a dictator and drunkard and produced a booklet calling the Grant administration a “crowning point of governmental wickedness … bribery and corruption have seized all the avenues of public life; robbery, murder and assassination are of daily occurrence, and guilty perpetrators escape through the solemn mockery of law.”

Victor: Grant

Footnote: Worn down by the stress of the campaign, Greeley’s health gave out. He was dead before all the electoral votes were counted.

“Lecher!”

1884: Grover Cleveland (Democrat) vs. James G. Blaine (Republican)

Real Issue of the Day: Charges of corruption in the Republican party, which had held the White House for 24 years and had sponsored a tariff that favored business interests.

Low Blow: Republicans publicized the fact that Cleveland had been paying child support to a widow, branding him “lecherous” and a “debaucher.” At rallies, Republicans would chant, “Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa?”

Retort: Democrats obtained a letter from Blaine to an attorney for one of the railroads that alluded to improper business dealings. The letter closed with the admonition, “Burn this letter!” which became a rallying cry for the Democrats.

Victor: Cleveland

“Empty Suit!”

1948: Harry S. Truman (Democrat) vs. Thomas Dewey (Republican)

Real Issue of the Day: The spread of communism and, at home, civil rights.

Low Blow: Behind in the polls, Truman felt he had nothing to lose by going on the attack. He ridiculed Dewey for being no more than a puppet of the Republican party and a stooge for corporate interests. He charged that Wall Street Republicans were “not satisfied with being rich … [these] gluttons of privilege … want an administration that will assure privilege for big business, regardless of what may happen to the rest of the nation.”

Retort: Dewey, in trying to maintain his lead, never attacked Truman directly. But J. Edgar Hoover ordered his agents to dig up dirt on Truman. He found ties to a corrupt Missouri politician and suspicions of communists in the administration, but it wasn’t enough to damage Truman’s appeal.

Victor: Truman

“Warmonger!”

1964: Lyndon B. Johnson (Democrat) vs. Barry Goldwater (Republican)

Real Issue of the Day: The Cold War.

Low Blow: Democrats portrayed Goldwater as dangerous, impulsive, and reactionary — a president who might very well start World War III. All they had to do was cite his public statements, including this one: “I’d drop a low-yield atomic bomb on the Chinese supply lines in North Vietnam.” The famous “daisy” ad that forever tarred Goldwater as a potential instigator of WWIII never mentioned the senator by name, but simply portrayed a small girl in a field, plucking the petals off a daisy, and then zoomed in to an image of a mushroom cloud. “Vote for President Johnson on November 3,” the ad urged viewers. “The stakes are too high for you to stay home.”

Retort: Goldwater’s followers promoted a book titled A Texan Looks at Lyndon, which accused the president of involvement in the murder of men who could testify against his business associates. Goldwater himself inferred in his speeches that Johnson was a crook: “To Lyndon Johnson, running a country means buying and bludgeoning votes. … It means building a private fortune. … It means craving and grasping for power — more and more and more, without end.”

Victor: Johnson

News of the Week: Fall TV, the Fallacy of the Five-Second Rule, and 50 Years of Cool Whip

The New Shows (So Far)

The fall TV season officially launched this week, with new seasons of old shows and new shows debuting. CBS’s The Good Place has Kristen Bell dying and going to the afterlife (don’t worry, it’s a comedy), which happens to be a good place run by Ted Danson. Reviews are pretty good, and the first episode got good ratings. CBS also has Bull, which is about Dr. Phil’s early years as a jury consultant, and it was just as exciting as it sounds.

Fox has Lethal Weapon (a very average TV version of the movie), and ABC has the comedy Speechless and the drama Notorious. Designated Survivor, with Kiefer Sutherland as the secretary of Housing and Urban Development who suddenly becomes president when there’s a bombing (don’t worry, that’s the premise of the show, not a spoiler) started on ABC on Wednesday. It’s the best new show I’ve seen this season (so far, there’s plenty more to come) — a mix of The West Wing and a spy drama. Hopefully they can maintain the quality of the pilot.

Last night, Pitch premiered on Fox. It’s about the first female Major League Baseball pitcher. Tonight, Fox has The Exorcist, a TV version of the 1973 movie, which no one was asking for, and CBS has MacGyver, a new version of the late ’80s/early ’90s TV show, which no one … actually, this one could work out if they handle it correctly and capture the tone/fun of the original. So far, reviews are mixed. And if they don’t get Richard Dean Anderson to guest star, well, that’s just silly.

Kevin Can Wait also started this week, but since CBS insists on calling Kevin James “The King of Comedy” in ads, I refuse to watch it. Everyone knows Adam Sandler is the King of Comedy.

Don’t Trust the Five-Second Rule

There are several rules we should always try to live by. We should be kind to others, save our money, brush our teeth at least twice a day, and avoid watching reality shows where a woman tries to find a husband after dating a dozen men. Oh, and we should try to not eat food that has fallen on the floor.

You’ve heard of the Five-Second Rule, right? That’s the theory that it’s okay to eat food that has fallen to the floor as long as you pick it up within five seconds. Turns out it’s not true! I know, I’m shocked too!

I don’t understand why this was ever a thing anyway, as if there’s a real difference between 10 seconds or 5 seconds or 4 seconds. And wouldn’t this theory be confined to a clean kitchen floor? I mean, I’m sure even the hardiest of Five-Second-Rule defenders wouldn’t stick to the rule if the food fell in a playground sandbox or on the floor of a public restroom. But really, your default position should always be, “Food that falls on the floor is now garbage.” Or maybe, “Here Spot, I have a treat for you!”

RIP Edward Albee and Curtis Hanson

Edward Albee
Edward Albee
Vytas Vatalis, © SEPS

For some reason, my junior high school English teacher showed us the movie version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I don’t know if I appreciated it then, but I saw it years later and liked it a lot more (though it’s still a weird movie and makes me uncomfortable). Playwright Edward Albee was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the play version … but then the board decided to take back the award, actually deciding to not give an award that year (prompting jury members to resign). He did win three Pulitzers though, for A Delicate Balance, Seascape, and Three Tall Women. He also won several Tony Awards. Other plays Albee wrote include The Zoo Story; The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?; The Lady from Dubuque; The Man Who Had Three Arms; Me Myself and I; The Play about the Baby; and Peter and Jerry.

In 1964, not long after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? did and did not win the Pulitzer Prize, the Post’s John Skow wrote about the up-and-coming Albee, calling him “Broadway’s Hottest Playwright.”

Albee died last Friday at the age of 88.

Curtis Hanson was the director of such films as L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, 8 Mile, Bad Influence, and many others. He passed away on Monday at his home in Hollywood. He was 71.

By the way, if you’ve never seen L.A. Confidential, stream/rent/buy it ASAP. It’s that rare thing: a perfect film. It should have won the Best Picture Oscar for 1997, but it lost to Titanic.

What Really Happened to Amelia Earhart?

Every couple of years, we hear about a new theory about what really happened to aviator Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan in 1937. This is one of those years.

The theory by the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) actually isn’t new, but it’s getting new attention. As the theory goes, her plane crashed near Gardner Island in the Western Pacific, but she and Noonan actually survived (though Noonan may have been severely injured). They even got out several distress calls that people around the country swear they heard. Earhart and Noonan may have spent some time on the island, but they eventually died, and the island might still hold their remains and maybe parts of the aircraft. It’s a fascinating theory, and TIGHAR wants to go back to the island to see what else they can find.

Do We Really Need Robot Shopping Carts?

No, but we might get them anyway.

Walmart is experimenting with robot shopping carts that drive themselves around the store while you shop. Because we all know how difficult it has been all these years to shop while also having to push a cart around.

This is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Soon, we won’t have to do anything. We’ll be driven to the supermarket in our driverless cars, robots will grab things off the shelf for us, and when we get home, robot butlers will feed us like babies. Not everything we saw on The Jetsons is worth doing.

Maybe instead of robotizing our shopping carts, scientists can use that money and technology to give us carts with wheels that don’t wobble.

Guy Enters 1957 Contest … and Wins!

Just a few weeks ago, I came across a contest in an old magazine. I thought about checking to see if the address for the contest was still valid and wondered what would happen if I actually entered a contest from decades ago. I didn’t actually do it, but maybe I should have.

Darwin Day, a 70-year-old who lives in Texas, was recently going through some old baseball cards in his house and came across one from 1957 that had a Bazooka bubble gum contest on the back. There was no deadline for the contest, so he decided to enter to see what would happen. Well, here’s what happened.

Note to self: enter more contests from the ’50s.

This Week in History: U.S. Air Force Founded (September 18, 1947)

Before becoming independent in 1947, the Air Force was actually part of the U.S. Army.

This Week in History: Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” Speech (September 23, 1952)

Richard Nixon was running for vice president when controversy arose regarding a fund that was established to help him with campaign costs. During the televised speech, Nixon said that he was going to keep one important gift that his campaign had received. Here’s the speech:

Happy 50th Birthday, Cool Whip

Speaking of Nixon, 2016 is the 50th anniversary of the launch of Cool Whip (stay with me here). To celebrate, why not make a Watergate Salad? No one really knows how it got that name, though Delish cites one theory that it got the name because the Watergate plan was put together the way you put together a dessert salad. It’s a mixture of pistachio pudding, crushed pineapple, pecans, and mini-marshmallows, topped with Cool Whip. You can put on All The President’s Men and have that for dessert.

Just make sure you don’t drop it on the floor.

Next Week’s Holidays and Events

Library of Congress National Book Festival (September 24)

Stephen King will open the 16th annual festival at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C.

Charles Osgood’s Last CBS Sunday Morning (September 25)

Osgood announced his retirement after 22 years as host of the show and 45 years at CBS. He will still make an appearance on the show now and then, and he’ll continue his radio show, The Osgood File. No replacement for CBS Sunday Morning has been announced yet, though Jane Pauley seems to be a good bet.

First Presidential Debate (September 26)

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton square off at Hofstra University at 9 p.m. in the first of three debates. NBC’s Lester Holt will moderate, and it’s on a hundred channels (not to mention Facebook and Twitter) so don’t even think about not watching it.

Edward Albee’s Vortex of Violence

Edward Albee did not write feel-good plays with happy endings. He wrote difficult, uncomfortable, and often violent plays that were hard to understand. They were controversial because people didn’t know how to feel about Albee’s work; they only knew they felt something.

One such controversy was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1963, but when it was chosen by the jury as the 1963 Pulitzer Prize winner for drama, the advisory committee at Columbia University, which administers the prize, intervened. No such prize was awarded that year, and two jury members resigned in protest.

His next play was Ballad of the Sad Café, a stage adaptation of a Carson McCullers novella. It, too, would be nominated for the Tony for Best Play. Post writer John Skow caught up with Albee at the show’s premiere, and what followed was a sketch of the early career of a man who would go on to become one of the greatest American playwrights of all time.

 


Broadway’s Hottest Playwright, Edward Albee

By John Skow

Originally published on January 18, 1964

The big woman greases her arms with hog fat. The man sullenly does the same. A lame dwarf lurches from one to the other like an evil Cupid, insane with glee. Townspeople whisper excitedly. When the woman and the man have finished readying themselves, they face each other, crouch, and spring. Their fight is brutal, and for a time it is even. Then the woman’s greater strength begins to tell. She has nearly strangled the man, when the dwarf shrieks and jumps on her back. The man recovers, clubs the woman to the ground, then gouges out her eyes. The Ballad of the Sad Café is over.

The cast takes its bows, and the cash customers walk up the aisle wearing a look that Broadway has come to know well. It is shock, but not simply that. The audience has had its emotions wrung out by something it does not understand and does not like, but cannot dismiss. After Ballads opening performance, the first man interviewed by TV reporters was crying.

An hour or so after that opening, a thin young man at the cast party turned to Colleen Dewhurst, the show’s star. “Why do we have to put up with this?” he asked, in a voice edged with boredom and irritation. “This” was the roomful of 32-toothed smilers waiting to widen their smiles or narrow them to smirks, depending on the reviews. The young man, who was Edward Albee, author of the stage version of Ballad, did not look as if he could possibly have attended enough opening-night parties to have become bored. He is 35 but looks 26, and his face is the kind you see waiting in an ad agency, 15 minutes early for an appointment with the assistant head of personnel.

But Albee, bad type-casting or not, can look, on a good night, very much like the New Thundering Savior of the American stage. There is no denying that the credentials he has presented both on and off Broadway are impressive. So impressive, in fact, that although he is supposed to be a ferocious critic of the American society, State Department Chautauqua officials recently booked him into Russia under the cultural exchange program.

Less than six years ago, however, the only thing impressive about Edward Albee was that a grandmother had left him $100,000 in trust. The income allowed him to slop through a comfortably shabby existence in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, as one of the late-rising legion of tennis-shoed young men who were, someday, going to write something. Then, a few weeks before he turned 30, A!bee did write something. “I was desperate,” he recalls with no pleasure. “It had begun to look as if I wouldn’t make it.”

He made it with The Zoo Story, a brief, two-character play that, like the rest of his work, cannot be summarized precisely. It is about a homosexual who, despising the square world and unable to live in his own, tricks an inoffensive stranger into killing him. It is flawed by easy symbolism, but does contain two qualities that have marked almost everything Albee has written since. The first is a punishing force of dialogue: Every line has the inevitability of falling rock. The second is the author’s ability to draw the emotions of actors and audience into a vortex of unbelievable violence.

Since Zoo Story, audiences have dazedly applauded five more gloomy, puzzling plays. Their themes are grounded in the destruction of children by parents, and of men and women by each other. The best of these is not Ballad, but a rackingly funny, astonishingly unpleasant three-and-a-half-hour drunk scene called Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which has been on Broadway for 15 months.

Virginia Woolf — the title refers to a drunken joke and may be ignored — deals with two married couples who gnaw away at each other for three acts like dying hyenas. There is no letup except to pour more whiskey. At the end, the actors do not bow, they slump.

Virginia Woolf is clearly the most powerful play by an American author since A Streetcar Named Desire, and most critics praised it. Others, upon being fanned back to consciousness, pronounced that society’s moral fabric, that tattered dropcloth, was being unraveled again. When the Pulitzer Prize nominating committee voted in favor of Albee’s play, the trustees of Columbia University, who control the award, rose up righteously and refused to give the play their approval.

What is this alarming young man like, and what is he up to? Before rehearsals began this season, Albee took time from polishing Ballad to answer some questions. The place was a beach house on Fire Island, a rookery for Manhattan’s artists and almost-artists. Albee wore a three-day beard, short hair, and his customary solemn expression. Speaking in a barely audible, buttoned-down voice, he said that he was not indulging in “attack for the sake of attack. But I don’t write reassuring plays, not opiates. …” He smiled a faint, cold smile at his understatement. “I’m not interested in the kind of problems that can be tied in a bundle at the third-act curtain. You walk out of that sort of play, and all you think about is where you parked your car.”

Symbols? Albee’s plays are hung with tempting but somewhat unripe symbolic fruit, and more than one critic has come away with a stomachache. The older married combatants in Virginia Woolf, for instance, are called George and Martha. They have pretended to each other for years that they have a son, who is, or would be if he existed, 21 years old. If the playgoer is intended to think of George and Martha Washington, does Albee mean the whole of the gloomy play to be a dissection of the American culture? And does the son “represent” something? Capitalism, Christianity, the perfectibility of man?

Albee shrugged off the son, a startlingly inventive parody of whatever cherished falsities suggest themselves to the viewer. George and Martha? “This country hasn’t lived up to its beginnings,” Albee said. “But the naming of George and Martha was supposed to be a small irony, not a large truth.” He was quiet for a moment. “It all starts out terribly private. Then somewhere along the line you realize you’re talking about general matters. If it stays private, it’s no good.”

Some critics have suggested that the “terribly private” origins of Albee’s plays, like those of many writers, lie somewhere in his personal background. At the age of two weeks, he was adopted — he knows nothing of his natural parents — by Reed Albee, heir to the Albee theater fortune, and his wife Frances. Reed was a small, vague man whom not even money could make vivid. Frances was, and is, tall, imperious, and social.

There are some observers who see certain similarities between these two and the protagonists of Albee’s cruelly satiric fantasy, The American Dream, but the nervous laughter from theater audiences indicates that many people can recognize a more universal drama in the conflict between Albee’s anonymous caricatures. Their dialogue deadens the ear.

In Dream, Albee portrays Mommy and Daddy as a couple who once adopted a son, whom they crippled with psychological torture of a classic Freudian kind. The only character treated with sympathy in Dream is “Grandma.” She also appears in Sandbox, a one-acter in which she commits suicide by sitting in a child’s sandpile and slowly burying herself with a toy shovel.

No outsider can know at this point what Albee’s real relations with his foster parents were like. The record suggests that Edward was pampered clumsily with expensive toys and exotic pets, but that he was still a lonely child. Does Albee have any resentment toward his foster parents as a result of his confused childhood? “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “But I find it hard to forgive my real parents.” He has not seen Frances Albee in years, he said. What does she think of his plays? “I don’t know whether she has seen them.” The subject closed with an audible click.

During his youth, Edward was kicked out of a succession of prep schools for refusing to prep, but graduated from Choate, where masters praised his wildly self-pitying verse. He tried Trinity College for three semesters, cut too many classes and was bounced.

When he was 21, he began receiving about $50 a week from his inheritance. He moved to Manhattan and for a while dated a debutante. Then, drifting into New York’s bohemia, he shared an apartment with William Flanagan, a composer who later wrote the incidental music for Ballad and is currently collaborating with Albee on an operetta.

To pad out his inheritance, Albee worked at a string of dreary jobs, among them, messenger boy for Western Union. (“I liked delivering telegrams; it got me out into the air,” he says.) And, recalls Flanagan, “every six months he had a fit at the typewriter.” In 1953, Albee met Thornton Wilder, who read his verse and suggested that Albee write plays.

But it was five years before Albee wrote anything. “Things just ran down,” he said. Then came Zoo Story. The play opened in Berlin in 1959 and was a huge success. Albee, however, showed no particular elation; he didn’t kick up his heels, he didn’t buy a new suit. And that has been the pattern for the unbroken string of successful openings since. After the opening of Ballad, he thanked the cast for a fine performance, then withdrew to nod and smile his cool, unearthly smile. And yet, says Colleen Dewhurst, “you put your arms around him and you feel a terrible warmth.”

Theater people who have worked with Albee agree that he has enormous talent and a complete professionalism. Actors love to play Albee parts. “You’ve always got a chunk to get into,” said Miss Dewhurst. “His theatrical instincts are phenomenally sure,” said Alan Schneider, perhaps the best of the younger generation of directors, who has directed everything Albee has written since American Dream. Albee maintains a firm control over his scripts, and although he will make changes with good grace, the final decisions are his. And since Albee believes he can write plays better than the Boston critics, he refuses to open his shows out of town. For Ballad, he refused to grant an intermission, thus forcing his audience to give up smoking for more than two hours. “Why not?” Albee says. “They do it in movies.”

Critics who are disappointed in Ballad say it is not really a play at all, but a talking novel. An omniscient narrator stands between the audience and Colleen Dewhurst’s hulking Miss Amelia, the country girl who marries the strongest man in her Georgia village, throws him out of her house when he wants to make love, and years later fights him in the terrible battle — waged over the friendship of the dwarf — that ends the play.

It was not an accident, however, that Albee chose the Carson McCullers story to adapt. The novella follows a theme that runs through Albee’s work — that love between men and women is impossible except as a kind of total warfare.

This theme obviously arises from somewhere near the center of Edward Albee. But it is not quite the core of Albee’s plays. It may not be possible to say what this core is until Albee has written more — currently he is working on two plays and a novel. His writing invites speculation but resists analysis; he is an emotional rather than an intellectual writer.

But any understanding of Albee probably should begin with his preoccupation with hate. Hate is the clay in which he works. The Sandbox and The American Dream, despite their humor, are pure hatred. In The Zoo Story and Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, hate is masked by a contorted face called love. The Ballad of the Sad Café inverts the theme — love wears the face of hate.

Is Albee mellowing in Ballad, and can he stay angry enough to write good plays? No say some observers — his life is too pleasant now.

Still, the inclination is to bet on Albee. No play will be watched more critically than his next one; he is the heir apparent. And it may be that soon the crown will be placed on his neatly furrowed brow, if only Tennessee Williams can remember what he did with it.

Listening Under Water

I hate my husband the most at dinnertime, but I can’t stop myself from cooking his favorites. Tonight the greasy smell of fried chicken hangs in the air and the bowl of mashed potatoes sport the perfect shade of buttery yellow. Freshly baked chocolate chip cookies rest on the counter. I breathe it all in, gleaning strength from the heaviness in the air, reminding myself that this is still a kind of love, but the battling emotions jostle through my belly in a new, angry grumble I’ve never felt before.

I reach for the light switch, flick it up and down three times. It’s been two years to the day since Jim installed the switch, a way for me to gain his attention when he’s sequestered himself away in his basement workshop building bassinets for the new mothers at church. I can’t call down because he won’t hear me, and I stopped descending the stairs one year, 360 days ago. After two nights of cold dinners plus another three days of snaking Home Depot wires through the walls, Jim revealed the beauty of his new light switch signaling system. Silent genius.

By the time I transfer everything to the table, Jim’s boots have clomped their way up the wood stairs and he stands in the doorway, smiling broadly, appreciative of the fragrances, appreciative of my efforts, but not of me, I don’t think. He’s wearing the headphones, the noise-cancelling ones he pumps with white noise day in and day out, filling his head and his thoughts and his life with burbling static. My brain registers his wide smile, genuine as the day he married me, but all I really see are the giant black headphones wrapped over his head.

Jim takes a seat, scoops food directly from the serving dishes to his plate. He can reach clear across the table, almost to my fingertips, so he’s done in seconds, already shoveling food into his mouth and nodding his approval before I even reach for a utensil. My stomach gives an unexpected lurch that roars at me inside my head: You cant possibly still think he will ever show up for dinner without wearing those stupid things! You cant possibly think things will ever be normal again!

I don’t understand how that wiggling discomfort in my stomach can be speaking to me, but it is. It’s shouting at me, shutting out everything else the same way the noise in Jim’s headphones must, twisting at my guts and forcing me to acknowledge thoughts I’ve tamped down and ignored for years.

I haven’t eaten my first bite. Jim is halfway through his first helping, but suddenly he stops, fork suspended in the air. He looks at my plate, my glass of iced tea, my silverware, which rattle against the tabletop as if an earthquake has descended on the 20 or 30 square feet occupied by our kitchen table. There is no earthquake, though. It’s me. My fingers are gripping the edge of the table so tightly my fingers have turned red and white in stressed splotches. The tremors in my body are running down the lengths of my arms, transferring into the table, shaking up my place setting so the lined-up knife and fork and spoon are now askew.

My mouth drops open when I see what I’m doing. Jim’s jaw unhinges too. His eyes go round, and there’s a wild fear etched across his brow, a mirror reflection of what I’m feeling, an open distress I haven’t seen from him in a long time. I can tell he doesn’t have a clue what to do. We’ve been in denial for too long to even begin to know how to handle this.

My insides are screaming now. Break away! Break away! So I do. I yank my hands off the table, and since I’m the only one who could hear the clatter I’d created, there’s a satisfaction in this abrupt stillness that’s completely opposite of the chaos I’ve endured since Jim went silent. Now I’m fumbling in the kitchen drawer, digging for a notepad, a pen. In the back, I find a tiny pad of Post-its that are curled at the corners. Jim is very adept at lip-reading but this I’m going to write, because I want him to hear me. I want what I have to say to linger on his retinas.

It feels good to drag the pen across the paper, scratching out the words:

No more, Jim!  I rip the top sheet away and slap it onto the table in front of him. He reads the paper, has the decency to look at me even if his expression is that of an uncomprehending child.

I have to leave. I palm this note on top of the first.

Jim touches it with the tip of his finger. No. He shakes his head. No.

Cant do this anymore. Slap — on top of the other two. I don’t wait for his reaction.

Why are we still here in this house, by the lake? This one I stick to my index finger because I’ve run out of room.

doing THIS Its killing me. You 

This one goes on my middle finger. I force myself to write smaller, even though I’m trying to scream.

wont let me move on. I cant heal, J. Im dying. I lay all three notes down, one next to the other in a line of neon squares. My chest is heaving. I can’t feel any air in my lungs.

He doesn’t look up. He’s arranging all the notes into a neat three-by-two grid, each one perfectly squared to its neighbor, and he’s pressing at the curled corners, trying to control the situation.

My anger drains into sorrow I don’t need, seeing him like that, but I can’t stay, not now that I’ve broken.

Decide!

I push the note toward him. It dangles, quivering, by the adhesive attached to my fingertip. He plucks it away and stares at it while I fish my car keys from my purse and run out the door.

I stamp my foot on the gas, let gravel fly against the undercarriage, and squeal out onto the asphalt. I can only think of one place to go. I would rather go anywhere than the Tuesday night support group at church, but that’s where my inner GPS seems to be taking me, steering by rote to the exact place where all my well-meaning friends begged me to go back when my wounds were new and open and oozing with fresh pain. They’ll take me in, but I won’t be able to blame them if my arrival is met with a lack of enthusiasm.

I am wrong, of course. They all speak at once, saying my name over and over until my nerves tingle while they tug me into the fold. I’m dissolving into a frayed wire, but the pressure of their tight hugs keep me from buzzing completely apart.

From our circle of chairs, Deedee Smith begins by telling us how her husband Clint’s grown children have ostracized her since his death. “They ate Easter lunch at my house not three months ago, and now they can’t be bothered to call me. It’s as if I don’t exist anymore. I’ve lost a whole family.” Next to Deedee, Alan Maguire reaches across the blank space and covers her hand in her lap, a comforting gesture echoed by a hum of support in the room. I stare at his hand, the lean fingers all-encompassing, marveling at the way her tinier one curls into a ball, disappearing underneath his. When he pulls it away seconds later, it actually feels like a burden has been lifted from the room.

He’s next in the lineup. “I think I’m doing better,” he declares. I already knew that Alan’s wife, Carol, had passed away four months ago from cancer. Jim and I sent a sympathy card. “I hope it doesn’t sound terrible to say I don’t think about her every second of every day.”

“Of course not,” I hear myself say, my words harmonizing into a chorus of similar sentiments.

Alan basks in the approval. “It feels like a shift has occurred. There are these moments now when I realize time’s gone by when my mind has wandered into a completely different place and I’m not sure how it got there. The pain comes back, in waves, but they aren’t crashing against me relentlessly anymore.”

How incredibly poetic, I think, with not an ounce of sarcasm. Jealousy, yes. I want that relief he’s describing, but I haven’t been allowed to have it. I want my loss transformed into a simple, beautiful description like that, but I don’t believe I can make it happen. And I’m right.

The baton continues passing from one bereaved soul to another. When it’s my turn to grasp it, all I can muster is, “It still hurts …” An almost inaudible, even to myself, “… so much” is swept away by heartfelt mutterings of late, late condolences. These people all know that I lost my child. They even think they know how. I can’t elaborate. Even after the way I left Jim tonight, hovering over my sticky-note ultimatums, the truth will always only belong to the two of us. What I’ve said isn’t much, but it’s all I can let go of right now.

Fifteen minutes later, the group disburses. Not enough time has passed for me to go home. I cross the parking lot as slowly as I can and linger by my car, keys in hand, watching other cars exit, one by one, punctuation on a smile and a wave from each driver. I would prefer a shroud of darkness, but I’m thankful for the promise in the fading light.

“Anna.”

Alan Maguire has pulled his truck alongside my car. “Are you all right?”

He’s asking me. This man with his own grief to handle is asking me how I feel, and I can’t answer. My silence must speak volumes. Ironic.

“Anna,” he says again, gently, like he’s trying not to spook a horse. “Come with me. We’ll get a coffee.”

I have to swallow. “No coffee,” I say.

“We can go to the park. Walk. It could help.”

Walking. Yes. That sounds good. The park down the street doesn’t have a lake or pond. I can walk there, with this man who is willing to talk to me. “Okay.”

His truck is foreign territory, layered in dust from a different world wherever his fingers haven’t buffed out a shine. He gathers several fast food bags from the passenger seat, crumples them, and stashes them behind the seat so I can take their place. A startling pang of sympathy zips across my midriff for this man. The skin over my ribs used to contract like that for Jim.

“Sorry about that,” Alan says.

“Oh no, don’t worry about it. You’re busy.” I’m thinking of the homemade zucchini muffins Carol used to bring for Sunday school breakfasts on Fifth Sundays. My trite response hangs between us on the short drive, and I’m grateful when we turn into the park’s entrance, more grateful to be out of his truck and on the path.

“I don’t eat very well now that …” Alan tapers off.

“I cook like crazy. It’s all I do.” What I’ve said feels instantly inappropriate, like I’m lording my meals over him. “I’ve never mastered cooking for two.”

“No?” It’s incredibly bright, this one word spoken while he looks at his feet.

“It’s the recipes,” I back-pedal, trying to correct my faux pas before it gets worse. “I could never divide the measurements and have things turn out right, so I gave up. It’s always too much. I could pack you some meals.”

No doubt he’s run through all the home-catered casseroles that appeared in droves in the beginning. He might be entirely content with his trips to Chick-fil-A, now that I think about it.

“I miss her cooking.”

“Zucchini muffins,” I blurt.

This gets a smile. His head pops up, and I realize in this moment that for all his nice intentions back in the church parking lot, we aren’t here for me. We’re here for him.

“Oh my God, yes! Were they not delicious?” he says.

“So delicious.”

“Did you ever taste her apple fritters? They were so flaky.”

“No, but remember that time she made jambalaya for the basketball banquet? I asked her for the recipe, like ladies do. She didn’t say no, but I’m pretty sure she had one of those telepathic excuse-me-I-have-to-answer-this-phone-that-didn’t-actually-ring calls.”

“Right!” A hearty laugh boils up inside him. “Don’t take it personally. That recipe was her grandmother’s. The Villemont women guard that thing like well-trained Dobermans.”

I throw my head back to laugh with him and a smattering of raindrops hit my face.

Yards away, a sudden wall of rain chases our warning drops. Alan holds out his hands, palms up. “Up for a sprint?”

I grab one of his hands, knowing full well that’s not why he’s put them out there, but he folds his fingers over mine anyway, and we take off.

The rain catches us, drenching our hair and the top half of our clothes. We let go of each other and jump in the truck, slamming our doors at the same time while the rain pounds onto the roof and windshield.

He runs a hand over his head, dragging water through the strands, and wipes water from his face. “So was your walk cleansing enough for you?” A surprisingly soprano giggle bursts out of him.

“Yes. It was,” I say. I touch a wet strand of his hair that he missed and comb it back with the rest, allowing my fingers to lightly trace the naked top of his ear. I want to dig my fingers into a man’s untethered hair, to cup my hand around the back of his head, to draw him to me and kiss him and whisper into his ear, and I want that man to be Jim. I give Alan’s hair a little tousle, like he’s a 5-year-old child, and put my hands in my lap. “Thank you.”

The rain shower has conjured a mist that reaches up off the lake, illuminated in my headlights as my wheels crunch across the gravel leading to my house. At first I don’t see him, but then the outline of a man emerges intermittently through the wavering fog.

Jim. Not Jim. Jim again. Staring out over the lake.

I cut the lights, get out, pick my way through the weeds toward him. The closer I get, the better I can make him out. Disappointment surges through me, but something else too. Hope? The headphones are there, black sentries wrapped over the top of his head. He won’t have heard me walk down the bank, but he knows I’m behind him.

Without turning, he holds up a square of neon orange paper.

Through the moonlight, I read my own handwriting: Why are we still here

Then he holds up a second note. Because shes here. It’s his lumpy writing, his boxy letters penned neatly onto the tiny square, not like the frantic scrawling of my note. This feels like a decision.

I walk around so I’m standing in front of him, my back to the lake, planting myself between him and the demon that took our child. I can’t undo the fact that he took her swimming too far out, that when he saw the boat speeding straight toward them, the boy on board drunk and laughing and plucking at his girlfriend’s bikini strap, he uttered his last words to our daughter. “Big breath, Linds. The biggest.” Together, they gulped in air that stretched their lungs, then Jim flipped and dove with Lindsey in his arms, into the cold depths with the churning blades of the boat’s motor chomping after their heels. Jim thought the boat was circling back; he could hear the muffled motor buzzing away, but then it sounded like it was coming back at them, so he stayed under too long, holding onto Lindsey, listening, listening for the quiet of a lake with no boats that never came while she clawed her tiny fingernails into his back and finally let the air go from her lungs.

I can’t blame him for never wanting to hear another boat scuttle across these waters — his keen hearing betrayed him that day on the lake — but it’s time for my husband to stop punishing himself.

Because shes here, the note says. It’s an answer, but it’s not a decision. I need Jim to decide, so I back toward the water, my body trembling with the aftershock of the quake that shook our kitchen table hours before.

The muscles in Jim’s face tense, folding in on themselves.

When my feet touch the water, he shakes his head, begging me to stop, but I can’t. I walk backward until the lazy water laps against my shins. There’s movement in his shoulders, like he’s leaning into me.

I’m up to my waist before he moves. He reaches me, wincing as the water folds over his feet, and I can see the streaks drawn by tears along either side of his nose.

I take his hands and slide my feet backward through the muddy bottom so the water is at my chin. A moment passes when I think he will leave me, that he won’t be able to bear what I’ve put in motion, but then he drifts into me, presses against me. We breathe and go under. I can’t see him in the dark of the water, but my hands follow the line of his shoulders and neck till I find the headphones. Barely moving, I slip my fingers underneath them, then over his ears, and push them away from us forever into the cool black water.

The lake is completely silent. I hope he can hear it.

Narcotics Hysteria and the Criminalization of Drug Addiction

What is a proper reaction to reports, in the 1940s and ’50s, that imply the existence of 4 million drug addicts in the U.S.? One reaction — the one ultimately chosen the federal and state governments — was to pass stricter new laws and regulations that sought out those involved with both using and selling drugs and locked them up, away from civilized society. Another way, the one championed by Dr. Laurence Kolb of the U.S. Public Health Service, was to check those numbers and find out if the problem was really so widespread.

To be sure, there was a narcotics problem. At the end of the 19th century, opium and its derivatives — like heroin, morphine, and laudanum — had found their unregulated way into hundreds of over-the-counter pain relievers for everything from teething to arthritis. People were becoming addicted, and doctors were starting to notice.

In 1914, the Harrison Act limited access to opiates and cocaine. Clinics were set up to help the addicted under the care of professional supervision. But over the next 10 years, most of those clinics closed as political positioning and journalistic sensationalism shifted public opinion away from helping addicts and toward criminalizing them. New laws and their interpretations meant that addicts seeking medical help were more likely to face conviction than convalescence.

Amid the hysteria, in 1924, Dr. Kolb published his report for what would become the National Institute for Public Health, estimating that addicts in the United States “never exceeded 246,000.” Drug addiction was a problem, yes, but not as great a problem as headlines led people to believe. What’s more, Kolb argued, our reaction to the drug problem was wrong-headed.

In 1956, Dr. Kolb wrote “Let’s Stop This Narcotics Hysteria!” for the Post. In the 32 years since his original report, our approach to drug addiction hadn’t changed much. In this article, he argues for a more enlightened view, showing how treating all drug addicts as criminals makes little sense medically, economically, or socially. He also offers an alternative.

Today, the so-called war on drugs continues, and the outlook doesn’t seem much different. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, nearly half of federal prison inmates are there for drug violations. A Justice Policy Institute study has shown that treating a drug addict costs, on average, $20,000 less per year than imprisonment. Given the cost of incarceration, punishment instead treatment is not simply shortsighted and vengeful, but it’s also impractical.


Let’s Stop This Narcotics Hysteria!

By Laurence Kolb, M.D.

Excerpted from an article originally published on July 28, 1956

Many years ago, when I was a stripling, I sat listening to a group of elderly men gossiping in a country store. They were denouncing the evils of cigarette smoking, a vice that was just coming in.

This store had on its shelves a jar of eating opium, and a carton of laudanum vials — 10 percent opium. A respected woman in the neighborhood often came in to buy laudanum. She was a good housekeeper and the mother of two fine sons. Everybody was sorry about her laudanum habit, but no one viewed her as a sinner or a menace to the community. We had not yet heard the word addict, with its sinister, modern connotations.

Since those days, public opinion has done a complete about-face. The “sin” of smoking cigarettes, in 50 years’ time, has become a socially acceptable habit, while drug addiction has been promoted by hysterical propaganda to the status of a great national menace.

As an example, one prominent official has said that illegal heroin traffic is more vicious than arson, burglary, kidnapping, or rape, and should entail harsher penalties. Last May 31st, the United States Senate went even further, in passing the Narcotic Control Act of 1956. In this measure, third-offense trafficking in heroin becomes the moral equivalent of murder and treason; death is the extreme penalty, “If the jury in its discretion shall so direct,” for buyer and seller alike, whether addicted or not.

In my opinion, the lawmakers completely missed the point. For drug addiction is neither menace nor mortal sin, but a health problem — indeed, a minor health problem when compared with such killers as alcoholism, heart disease, and cancer.

I make that statement with deep conviction. My work has included the psychiatric examination and general treatment of several thousand addicts. I know their habit is a viciously enslaving one, and we should not relax for a moment our efforts to stop its spread and ultimately to stamp it out completely. But our enforcement agencies seem to have forgotten that the addict is a sick person who needs medical help rather than longer jail sentences or the electric chair. He needs help which the present Narcotics Bureau regulations make it very difficult for doctors to give him. Moreover, no distinction has been made, in the punishment of violators, between the nonaddicted peddler who perpetuates the illicit traffic solely for his own profit and the addict who sells small amounts to keep himself supplied with a drug on which he has become physically and psychologically dependent.

Hunter college students under arrest
“Two Hunter College students covering their faces with books, at police headquarters after they were picked up on narcotics”
World Telegram & Sun photo by Herman Hiller.

Library of Congress

The Council of the American Psychiatric Association, in a public statement issued after the Senate passed its bill, declared that this and a companion measure introduced in the House, “represent backward steps in attacking this national problem.” The association, after listing some of the points I have just made, concludes by remarking that “additional legislation concerning drug addiction should be directed to making further medical progress possible, rather than discouraging it. The legislative proposals now under consideration would undermine the progress that has been made and impede further progress. Thus, they are not in the public interest.”

I was launched in this field of medicine in 1923, when the United States Public Health Service assigned me to study drug addiction at what is now the National Institute of Public Health. In 1935, I opened the service’s hospital for treatment of addicts at Lexington, Kentucky. Three years later I became Chief of the Division of Mental Hygiene, overseeing administration of the Lexington hospital and a similar institution at Fort Worth, Texas. And after retiring from the service in 1944, I continued to be active in psychiatry. So I know a great deal about addiction, and how perverse our attitude toward it has become.

Most addiction arises from misuse of marijuana, cocaine, alcohol, opium, or opium’s important preparations and derivatives — eating opium, smoking opium, laudanum, morphine, and heroin. Alcohol is a yardstick with which to measure the harm done by other drugs. There are 4,500,000 alcoholics in this country, and about 700,000 of them are compulsive drinkers who are on “skid road” or headed for it — gripped like opium addicts by psychological forces they cannot control.

Until recent times, millions of people in Asia and Africa were habitual users of opium. Dr. C.S. Mei, a physician and Chinese government official, told me in 1937 that there were about 15,000,000 opium smokers in China. He was interested in the anti-opium campaign because the slavish habit was lowering users’ diligence and industry. But he remarked that opium smoking had little or no effect on health and no effect whatsoever on crime.

Addiction is far less common among Western peoples, chiefly because of our preference for alcohol. At the highest point of drug addiction in the United States, 1890–99, when all kinds of opiates could be bought as freely as candy or potatoes, there was only one opium addict for every 300 of the population. Today we have about 60,000 addicts in the United States — that is, about one in 2,800 of the population. About 50,000 of them are addicted to opiates, mostly heroin, about 5,000 to opium-like synthetic drugs, and about 5,000 to marijuana. Cocaine, once widely used, has practically disappeared from the scene.

Lawmakers may feel that addicts as well as sellers deserve death, but few doctors would agree. I have in mind particularly a report issued in June 1955 by a group of prominent New York physicians, appointed by The New York Academy of Medicine to study the addiction problem. The gist of their report is that drug addiction is not a crime, but an illness, and that the emphasis should be placed on rehabilitation of addicts, instead of on punishment.

This committee deplores the fact that addicts are forced into crime by unwise suppressive methods. It recommends that, under controlled conditions, certain morphine and heroin addicts be given the drug they need while being prepared for treatment. For certain incurable cases, the committee advocates giving the needed opiate indefinitely at specially regulated clinics, although many physicians oppose using clinics in this way. My own proposal, which I shall go into later, would be to have such cases evaluated by doctors appointed for their competence in this field. The New York committee also recommends counseling services for patients after withdrawal treatment, to help them resist the temptation to return to the drug when stress situations arise.

A key fact to bear in mind is that the man addicted to an opiate becomes dependent on frequent regular doses to maintain normal body functions and comfort. If the drug is abruptly withheld he becomes intensely ill. In rare cases he may even collapse and die.

I once saw a woman who had come here from abroad, where she had been taking eight grains of morphine daily. Cut off from her supply, she got into an American hospital where suppression of the “drug menace” was more important than the relief of pain. She died in two days, due to sudden stoppage of the drug. There was nothing in the law to forbid giving this woman morphine to relieve her suffering, but propaganda about drugs had clouded the judgment of someone in authority.

The effect of opiates on the general health of addicts is not definitely known. There is a lack of positive evidence that a regularly maintained opium habit shortens life, but it probably does so, especially when large doses of morphine or heroin are used. The few reports that indicate harm are based on death statistics of groups of addicts, mostly opium smokers, many of whom started using the drug to ease already existing illness. Addicts in American jails undoubtedly have a high death rate. Some are repeatedly ill due to many periods of forced abstinence. Others, unable to buy enough food after paying for needed drugs, arrive at the prison gates half starved and a prey to infections.

In the 1920s, the average American addict was taking six grains of morphine or heroin daily. It was impossible to find harmful effects among those who got their dose regularly. I have known a healthy, alert 81-year-old woman who had taken three grains of morphine daily for 65 years. The well-fed opiate addict who regularly gets sustaining doses is not emaciated or pale, nor does he have pinpoint pupils, as is popularly supposed. He cannot be recognized as an addict on sight.

Cocaine is another story. It is fortunate that cocaine addiction is seldom seen nowadays, for excessive use of this drug causes emaciation, anxiety, convulsions, and insanity. Neither cocaine nor marijuana has the merit of making some neurotic people more efficient, as is the case with opiates. And the use of marijuana or cocaine can be discontinued abruptly without bringing on uncomfortable or dangerous withdrawal symptoms. When cocaine is suddenly denied a large user, he simply goes into a deep and very prolonged sleep. Therefore, there is no reason why any cocaine or marijuana user should be allowed to have his drug, even for a short time.

In an earlier period, opiates could be bought anywhere in America without restriction, and many people became addicted. Still, they worked about as well as other people and gave no one trouble. Only the physicians were concerned. They saw that the cocaine user and 60-grains-a-day morphine addict were injuring their health. More important, they saw thousands of unhappy opium eaters, opium smokers, and laudanum, morphine, and heroin users seeking relief from slavery, and often failing to get it.

Distressed by the evil, physicians advocated laws to prohibit the sale of opiates without prescription. By 1912, every state except one had laws regulating in some way the prescribing or sale of opiates and cocaine. As a result, the number of addicts fell from 1 in 300 of the population during the decade 1890–99, to 1 in 325 during the next decade. And after 1909, a ban on smoking opium caused a further decline in addiction.

Until 1915, however, addicts who needed opiates to continue their work in comfort could get their supplies legally without much trouble or expense. Then the Harrison Act became effective. This important federal law had both good and bad effects. Unable to get opiates, hundreds of addicts were cured by deprivation. These were mostly normal or near-normal people who were not seriously gripped by the psychological forces which hinder treatment of neurotic addicts and drunkards.

The bad effect came through unwise enforcement of the law. Physicians thought they could still prescribe opiates to addicts who really needed them for the preservation of health or to support the artificial emotional stability which enabled so many addicts to earn their livings. However, physicians prescribing for such people wound up in the penitentiary. Inability to get opiates brought illness to many hard-working citizens, and illness cost them their jobs. Some of them committed petty crimes to procure narcotics.

To remedy the situation, narcotic clinics were established throughout the country, where addicts could get needed drugs. Practically all of these clinics were forced to close by 1923. They had not been well run, but the chief reason for closing them was that addiction had become a crime, by legal definition.

The arrests of physicians, some of which were justifiable, and the sending of hundreds of addicts to prison, brought about a perversion of common sense unequaled in American history. Uncritical observers concluded that opium caused crime. The sight of so many law-abiding citizens applying to the clinics for help, instead of arousing public sympathy, was interpreted as evidence of moral deterioration, calling for increased penalties. The stereotype of the “heroin maniac” was born.

The number of addicts continued to decline. In 1924, the United States Public Health Service reported there were only 110,000 of them. By 1925, however, propaganda had led people to believe that there were 4,000,000 addicts in the country, and our fancied heroin menace was in full swing.

An ex-congressman appeared before the Senate Committee on Printing in 1924 to urge publication of 50,000,000 copies of an article entitled “The Peril of Narcotics — A Warning to The People of America.” He wanted a copy in every home.

Among other strange things, the article warned parents not to allow their children to eat away from home. If they did, it was said, some other child — a heroin maniac — might inject the drug into an innocent-looking titbit; whereupon the child eating it might instantly become an addict and join in a campaign to promote heroin addiction among other children. A Public Health Service physician persuaded the committee that this was nonsense, but propaganda about the heroin menace continued.

The Cocaine Fiends title card
There was money to be made in movies about the drug problem, particularly if the film used generous helpings of lurid imaginings.
By Willis Kent Productions (The Cocaine Fiends (1935) at the Internet Archive) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
It was said that thousands of school children in New York were heroin addicts. An investigation was made, and in 1927 Dr. Carlton Simon, Deputy Police Commissioner in charge of the Narcotics Bureau, stated that a thorough survey had failed to reveal one case of heroin addiction among 1,000,000 New York City school children.

When American physicians advocated laws regulating narcotics, they had in mind the kind of laws in force in most Western European countries. What our physicians did not foresee was that they would be bound by police interpretations of the regulations; and that doctors who did not accept police views might be tricked into giving an opiate to an informer, who pretended to need it for pain or disease. Conviction meant that the physician went to prison.

Europeans regulate narcotics, as we do, but they are not alarmed by addiction, as we so obviously are. They have never lost sight of the fact that, as a great English physician wrote in the 17th century, “Opium soothes, alcohol maddens.”

In 1954, England controlled the illegal-narcotic traffic with the conviction of only 214 persons, 74 for opiate violations, 140 for violations involving marijuana. In the same year 12,346 persons were convicted in the United States for similar offenses. Allowing for differences in population, we had about 14 times more convictions than the English. Prison sentences meted out here ran into thousands of years — a fact that zealots boast about. In England, light sentences sufficed to discourage illegal traffic — 28 days to 12 months for opiate offenses, 1 day to 3 years for marijuana violations.

England’s sensible, effective policy is in sharp contrast with what goes on in the United States. I became well acquainted at the hospital in Lexington with a paralyzed, bedridden man who had been sentenced to four years for a narcotic violation. Just how he could be a menace to society was never clear to me. In Europe he would have been allowed to live out his last days in comfort. Only in the United States must addicts suffer and die or deteriorate in prison.

Unreflecting and sometimes unscrupulous people — and newspapers too — have contributed to the hysteria about drug addiction. News items reporting the seizure of “dope” frequently exaggerate the contraband’s value. One “$3,000,000 seizure” of heroin which made headlines was actually only enough to last seven six-grains-a-day addicts for a year. To justify the $3,000,000 figure, heroin would have to bring $196 a grain. Some addicts do spend from $5 to $10 a day on the habit, but few can afford it; hence the sickness and stealing.

Distorted news has prepared the public to support extreme measures to suppress imagined evils. When legislators undertook last spring to do something about the so-called drug menace, federal law provided two years in prison for a first-time narcotic-law offender. The minimum for a second offense was five years, and for a third, 10 years, with no probation or suspension of sentence for repeaters. The Narcotic Control Act of 1956 proposed increasing penalties for heroin trafficking to a minimum of 5 years for the first offense, 10 years for the second offense, life imprisonment or death for the third offense.

What happens under such laws? In one case, under the old law, a man was given 10 years for possessing three narcotic tablets. Another man was given 10 years for forging three narcotic prescriptions — no sale was involved. And another 10-year sentence was imposed on a man for selling two marijuana cigarettes, which are just about equal in intoxicating effect to two drinks of whisky. Extremists have gone on to demand the death penalty. They would do away with suspended sentences, time off for good behavior, the necessity for a warrant before search. They want wire tapping legalized in suspected narcotic cases, and they would make the securing of bond more difficult.

Existing measures and those which are advocated defy common sense and violate sound principles of justice and penology. There is nothing about the nature of drug addicts to justify such penalties. They only make it difficult to rehabilitate offenders who could be helped by a sound approach which would take into account both the offense and the psychological disorders of the offender.

Drug addiction is an important problem which demands the attention of health and enforcement officials. However, the most essential need now is to cure the United States of its hysteria, so that the problem can be dealt with rationally. A major move in the right direction would be to stop the false propaganda about the nature of drug addiction and present it for what it is — a health problem which needs some police measures for adequate control. Our approach so far has produced tragedy, disease, and crime.

The opinion of informed physicians should take precedence over that of law-enforcement officers, who, in this country, are too often carried away by enthusiasm for putting people in prison, and who deceive themselves as well as the public about the nature and seriousness of drug addiction. We need an increase in treatment facilities and recognition that some opium addicts, having reached the stage they have, should be given opiates for their own welfare and for the public welfare too.

Mandatory minimum sentences should be abolished, so that judges and probation and parole officers can do what in their judgment is best for the rehabilitation of offenders.

Medical opinion should have controlling force in a revamped policy. This is not to say that every physician should be authorized to prescribe opiates to addicts without restrictions. Some would be dishonest, others would be indifferent to consequences. Neither should the old type of clinic be re-established. A workable solution would be to have the medical societies or health departments appoint competent physicians to decide which patients should be carried on an opiate while being prepared for treatment and which ones should be given opiates indefinitely. Physicians would report individual cases to local medical groups for decision. And that decision should never be subject to revision by a nonmedical prosecuting agency.

The details of a scheme of operation should be worked out by a committee of physicians and law-enforcement officers, with the physicians predominant in authority. The various states could make a start by revising their laws to conform to actual health and penological needs. The medical profession could help by giving legislators facts on which to take action.

It should be stressed that it is easy to cure psychologically normal addicts who have no painful disease. Even the mildly neurotic addict is fairly easy to cure. Severe withdrawal symptoms pass within five days, although for several months there are minor physical changes that the patient may not feel or even know about, but which increase the likelihood of his relapse. The reason for the apparently large relapse rate among addicts is that a difficult group remains to be dealt with after the cured cases have been dismissed. The most difficult cases, perhaps, are neurotic addicts who suffer from migraine or asthma. Neurotics who have a painful disease are liable to have a psychic return of pain when their drug is withdrawn. When several treatments fail, such persons should be allowed to have the drug they need.

Thomas Jefferson, distressed over the ravages of alcohol, once said that a great many people spent most of their time talking politics, avoiding work, and drinking whisky. One wonders what he would say today if some muddled citizen warned him that opiates were rotting the moral fiber of our people. I suspect that he would advise his informant to take care, in walking down the street, lest he stumble over one of our 4,500,000 alcoholics and break a leg.

For a modern look at the problems of opium addiction, read “The Drug Epidemic That Is Killing Our Children,” from our September/October 2016 issue. 

5-Minute Fitness: Pilates for Posture

Strengthen the back of the body to reposition rounded shoulders and ease lower back pain. This move powers up the posterior chain — the often-neglected muscles that run from the soles of your feet, along either side of your spine, and finish at the base of your skull, says fitness instructor Liz LeFrois of AcaciaTV.

Back Extension

1 Lie face down, arms at sides, palms facing up, legs hip-width apart.
2 Tighten abdominal muscles and pull shoulder blades together.
3 Lengthen neck and stretch legs.
4 Lift upper body and legs, as shown at left. (Those with any lower back issues: Keep legs on ground.)
5 Hold for count of three. Lower body to ground. Reps: Gradually work up to 3 sets of 10 daily.

Teacher’s Pets

image
Happy Birthday, Miss Jones, March 17, 1956, was inspired by a beloved teacher from Rockwell’s youth.
© SEPS

In the aught years of the previous century, a certain teacher (named Smith, not Jones) had a certain young pupil by the name of Norman Rockwell in her classroom. Rockwell was not a strong student, but Smith recognized his artistic flair. Happy Birthday, Miss Jones is his tribute to the woman who encouraged him to draw.

Film directors Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have described Rockwell’s work as cinematic, and this one is a prime example. Though it consists of a single “frame,” one can imagine an entire scene prior to the teacher’s arrival: children neatly placing gifts on her table, scrawling greetings on the blackboard, the sudden rush back to their desks as they hear Miss Jones approaching (suggested by the chalk and eraser on the floor). Then there’s the class clown, playing for laughs by placing an eraser on his head.

This cover inspired numerous letters to the editors, including one from Laura R. Jones, of Atlanta, who wrote that she had known a moment just like this. She had walked into her classroom to find a cake decorated with the words We love Miss Jones. Whenever she faced a dark day of exhaustion and discouragement, she wrote, the memory of those bright, eager faces kept her going and in love with her work.

News of the Week: Grease Theories, Greta Friedman, and the Great Guacamole Controversy

Here’s a Theory About Grease I Bet You Never Thought Of

Of course, you probably don’t sit around your house thinking about Grease theories at all — “Hey, Edna! Get in here! I have a new theory about Grease I want to share with you! — but if you did, here’s a new one that might interest you.

Sandy was dead the whole time! [insert scary music here]

This theory was spread by actress Sarah Michelle Gellar on Facebook. She didn’t come up with it, but she heard about it and passed it along to her fans.

That’s right, Sandy actually drowned at the beach that day (“I saved her life, she nearly drowned …”) and she’s in a coma imagining this entire musical before she dies. Grease co-creator Jim Jacobs disputes this theory, though to be accurate, he co-created the stage musical. This theory has to do with the 1978 movie version with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.

If anything, this new theory might give you an idea for a Halloween costume this year. Sure, many people will be dressing up as Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or Captain America or someone from Game of Thrones, but you can surprise everyone by going as Dead Sandy from Grease. Just be prepared for a lot of questions.

RIP Greta Zimmer Friedman

Friedman is one of the most famous women in the world, but you never knew her name.

She was the dental assistant grabbed and kissed by a sailor in Times Square on V-J Day, the day World War II ended in 1945. Friedman was just standing there with friends celebrating when George Mendonsa, a sailor also celebrating the end of the war, surprised her by taking her in his arms and kissing her. The classic photo was taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt.

Friedman passed away last week at the age of 92. She’s going to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery next to her husband.

There has actually been confusion about who the couple was, with several other people coming forward over the years, claiming to be the man and woman in the photo. But researchers say that Mendonsa and Friedman are the ones locking lips in the iconic picture, and four years ago CBS reunited the couple in Times Square.

Squee, Moobs, and YOLO

No, that isn’t the title of a new kids cartoon about animals who open a law firm. They’re three words that have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Squee is the high-pitched sound someone makes when they’re excited. YOLO is an acronym for “You Only Live Once,” and moobs is a pudgy man’s … well, you can Google that if you want.

Other new words added include Murica (a different way of saying “America,” and it has more than one spelling), clickbait (those web headlines that try to get you to click on them and they turn out to be misleading or worse), and fuhgeddaboutit (“forget about it” mashed into one word and often said by people in New Jersey). To celebrate Roald Dahl’s 100th birthday, the OED editors have also added Oompa Loompa and scrumdiddlyumptious, and they’re also adding yogalates, which is a combo of yoga and pilates. Like you, this is the first time I’ve ever heard that word.

By the way, if you can use all of those words in a single sentence, let us know in the comments.

New F. Scott Fitzgerald Stories Coming in 2017

Who said there are no second acts in American lives? Oh wait, that was F. Scott Fitzgerald. But he might change his tune if he were alive today.

Next April, Scribner will release I’d Die For You, a collection of stories Fitzgerald wrote in the 1930s and was unable to sell because the subject matter was different from what magazine editors at the time expected of the writer. The title comes from the time Fitzgerald was suffering from alcoholism in North Carolina and his wife was in a sanatorium.

Fitzgerald, of course, wrote several classic stories for The Saturday Evening Post, and here’s a feature on how we helped create The Great Gatsby.

This Week in History: Jesse Owens Born (September 12, 1913)

Owens wrote several pieces about the Olympics for The Saturday Evening Post in 1976, including this piece on how he trained for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and what happened there.

This Week in History: Princess Grace of Monaco Dies (September 14, 1982)

Here’s how Princess Stephanie, youngest daughter of Princess Grace, described the car accident that took the life of the former actress known as Grace Kelly.

National Guacamole Day

How many ways are there to make guacamole? You’re probably thinking that guacamole can’t possibly be controversial. But it is, and we’ll get to that in a minute. Meanwhile, for National Guacamole Day (which is today), here’s a classic recipe from The Saturday Evening Post Antioxidant Cookbook.

You’ll notice that this recipe — like most guacamole recipes — doesn’t have peas in it. And therein lies the controversy. Last year, people were up in arms because The New York Times printed a guacamole recipe that included those little green veggies. It was The Great Green Pea Scandal of 2015! The Guacamole Recipe That Shook the World! The Guacamole Conundrum (which also happens to be the best Robert Ludlum novel)!

Here’s the recipe that caused all the trouble. Even if you don’t think it sounds too appetizing, try it anyway. Maybe you’ll be surprised. YOLO!

Next Week’s Holidays and Events

The Emmy Awards (September 18)

The 68th ceremony airs this Sunday at 7 p.m. Eastern on ABC. Here’s a list of nominees so you can make your guesses at home.

Wife Appreciation Day (September 18)

Not to be confused with Mother’s Day, which celebrates women with children. Wife Appreciation Day is for married women who don’t have kids.

Fall begins (September 22)

BREAKING NEWS: I bought tea this week; I’m ready for fall. That doesn’t mean the temperatures are going to cooperate right away, but fall begins on the 22nd, and I’m ready for it.

Boxing’s Great What-If: Jack Dempsey on the ‘Long Count’

Alternative sports histories are nearly as popular as the sports themselves. Fans love to consider (and argue over) the effects of the ultimately unknowable “what-ifs” of sports. For example:

The most intriguing what-ifs concern the alternative histories of a sport. For example:

One of the great never-to-be-settled what-ifs involves the 1927 Dempsey-Tunney heavyweight championship fight and the infamous “long count.” On September 22 of that year, more than 100,000 boxing fans crowded into Soldier Field to see Jack Dempsey try to win back his heavyweight title from Gene Tunney.

In round seven, eight rapid hits from Dempsey sent Tunney to the mat. Usually, Dempsey would stand over his fallen opponent, ready to beat him back down. But a new rule required boxers to go to a neutral corner before the referee would start counting their opponent out.

Forgetting this, Dempsey remained beside Tunney. The referee finally shoved Dempsey to a corner and only then began his count — nearly five seconds after Tunney fell. At count  “nine,” Tunney rose to his feet. Those extra seconds became known as the “long count.” Tunney later claimed he could have regained his feet early in the count, but took the extra time to recover. And Dempsey said he had no reason to doubt him.

When fans read about the match in 1927, they believed Dempsey was robbed. Only when films of the contest were released in newsreels did Americans see that the count was not as long as they’d imagined. But some fans held onto the idea that, with a proper count, Dempsey would have won with a technical knock out.

Boxing aficionados continue to speculate about what might have been. In the Post four years later, one man with a unique perspective on the fight weighed in: Jack Dempsey himself. In “In This Corner,” although he recounts the fight and the events surrounding it, he hardly lays the controversy to rest. He does, however, take a broader, more pragmatic view of his life as a boxer and of that fight in particular.


In This Corner 

by Jack Dempsey

Excerpted from an article originally published on August 29, 1931

 

Following my knockout victory over Jack Sharkey, Tex Rickard immediately propositioned me for another match with Gene Tunney.

“The old iron is hot again, Jack,” Tex said to me. “Now is the time to strike. This win over Jack Sharkey puts you right out front with Tunney himself. You laughed at me a few years ago when I told you that we would draw $1,000,000 with the Carpentier fight. Laugh at me now, if you dare, when I tell you we’ll draw at least $2,500,000 with you and Gene in the ring again.”

Who can know but that man who has lived through the experience what it means to wonder whether you are good or bad? I had every reason to feel I had been a great fighter. I hadn’t as yet had incontrovertible evidence that my day was gone. The old fighting heart and the old fighting instinct throbbed within me for expression. I hated the thought of anybody else in possession of my heavyweight championship. I reasoned the thing out very carefully in my own way; thought it out when I was alone at night with none to bother me.

There was one thing which seemed certain to me. That was that I would knock out any man I hit right. What if my legs had slowed up a trifle? What if the old zip and speed were gone from my bobbing and weaving? These things must essentially be offset by experience and by knowledge. I felt strong as an ox, and because most of my contests had been short, I had never really taken any serious beatings. Why, then, should I not gamble that at least once in 10 long rounds I could tap Gene Tunney on the chin, or under the heart, with a punch that would win me back the heavyweight championship of the world? There was no good reason to suppose such a thing unreasonable. I felt that I could hit Gene; felt that I could plan out a campaign of battle that sooner or later would bring him to me for that one lovely punch.

With this in mind, I considered the possibility of a $3,000,000 box office. Aside from the money that would establish Tunney and myself as the greatest financial figures boxing had ever produced, I was a comparatively rich young man when these problems presented themselves. I could have retired then as easily as I retired later, and lived on my income.

So it was not entirely money by which I was actuated. There was — and I do not say it sentimentally — an appreciation and a love for the sport of boxing which superseded in my calculations every financial angle. I think, perhaps, I was a big kid who had lost a toy and wanted to fight to get it back again. In any event, I told Tex Rickard to match us and I promised myself that I would give Gene Tunney a whole lot better fight than I had given him that rainy night in Philadelphia.

My contest with Jack Sharkey netted me almost $500,000 and, to put it in the jargon, I was sitting pretty, financially. There was nothing between me and retirement other than a determination on my part to satisfy that hankering wonderment as to my own condition. I knew perfectly well that I wasn’t 30 percent of the old Jack Dempsey the night I lost my heavyweight championship. On the other hand, I knew perfectly well that Gene Tunney was a fine fighter and a whole lot better than the public has ever given him credit for being. There lay the problem.

I knew that my win over Sharkey indicated that I was in fair physical condition. I felt that a good training siege would put me back in excellent condition. Furthermore, I was perfectly certain that when I was in condition, the man did not live who could box me 10 rounds without at some time or other being hit on a vital spot. I knew perfectly well, as I have said, that anyone I hit on a vital spot was very apt to be counted out. That was my bet on the Tunney fight at Chicago. I believed that the worst I had was a 50-50 chance to regain the championship, and that is exactly the right percentage for a great fight.

I went to Chicago to train. Leo Flynn once again took charge of my training and acted in the capacity of chief adviser. I think that most of the fellows who realized my condition before the first Tunney contest favored me to win over Tunney in the second. There were all sorts of rumors floating about my camp to the effect that the gamblers had everything set against me once again. This time I did not easily fall for those rumors.

No Fixers Wanted  

I had been knocking around the $1,000,000 gates long enough to know that a good many shady things were attempted. But I also had seen enough of Gene Tunney to know that it was not in his mind or his heart to fake a championship prizefight. This absolute confidence in Gene gave me the greatest weapon I had to use against the fixers who later approached me.

It is not easy to sit here and write these details. I feel that I must do it, however, in justice to myself and in justice to Gene Tunney. I have often hoped, to be truthful about it, that Gene would write his life experiences. I certainly would like to read them and get the other side of our two contests. In my own relation of events, I have stated the absolute and simple truth just as closely as I know how. I know that Gene would do the same thing. Out of a contrast of the two stories a pretty situation ought to develop.

I positively was approached by people in Chicago. I was, in fact, told that for $100,000 I could win the heavyweight championship. I laughed in their faces for a good many reasons, the principal ones of which I am going to relate. They are so obvious and so indisputable that none can deny them.

First, I refused because I had planned a careful campaign against Gene Tunney and believed that I could beat him on the level. Second, I never would trust anybody who would take or give a bribe. Third, I have never faked a fight in my life and I never will. Fourth, even if I did lose my head and pay such a craven bribe, I knew nobody could fix Gene Tunney, and Gene Tunney was the man I had to fight. Next, despite the advice of some people who harassed Leo Flynn and myself, I felt that my coming contest with Gene was the last I ever would fight, win, lose or draw.

If I won, I planned to retire undefeated. If I lost, nothing more need be said. So I laughed in their faces when they made me this proposition.

The fight itself has hardly wilted sufficiently in the public memory to warrant a detailed description here. I went into the ring planning to work on Gene much after the fashion I had worked on Jack Sharkey in my last contest. In Tunney, however, I was fighting a better fighter than Sharkey. I do not wish to be unkind in that statement; I merely state the fact.

Down for the Long Count  

No matter what happened, Gene remained as calm as a mill pond. At times, his machine-like perfection was maddening to me. That darting, straight left jab of his, coupled with an inside, straight right cross that had great jarring possibilities, sufficed to fill anybody’s evening with bouquets that were loaded with reverse English. Gene could fade away from an attack and at the same time hook a jarring left to the liver as well as any fighter who ever lived. So I did not fight him exactly as I had Sharkey. I took more precautions. I felt from my first experience with Tunney that he would draw the lead from me and counter. I planned my campaign entirely on that supposition. It worked out perfectly.

Just as I had planned, I finally got my shot at him. The rest is history. The fact that it is disputed history is of no vital importance at this moment. I have stated previously in my story what Tex Rickard said to me on the afternoon I boxed Georges Carpentier. He told me that I was the sort of a kid to whom things happened.

There are people like that, and I am confident that I am one of them. Even in my present activities, events can run along at a fight club in the even tenor of their way, show after show after show. But let me appear in the capacity of referee and the unusual happens. This has recently been true twice in Madison Square Garden at New York City. It was true the other night in Los Angeles. It seems to me to be true wherever I go. It certainly was true that night in the Chicago Stadium when I caught Gene Tunney in a corner of the ring and knocked him down for the historic “long count.”

If anyone thinks that I am here to express any opinion as to the merit of that “long count,” they have another think coming. All I have to say about that hectic contest is that I fought the best that I knew how to fight. I put into that battle everything that I could summon in the lexicon of physical equipment and experience. When I cornered Gene and knocked him down, I felt the exultance that came to me that July Fourth in Toledo when I won the championship from Jess Willard. Gene was down, and, boys, he had been hit! A look at the motion pictures of the battle will indicate just how many punches Gene absorbed as he toppled over there against the ropes.

I want to say something else in terminating my story. Gene Tunney, on the floor of that Chicago ring, showed the world more of the stuff of which a champion is made than he did in the entire fight at Philadelphia. I don’t think Gene even knows how to spell quit, and I don’t think he’ll ever learn how to spell it. He has the equipment and the heart of a champion. Had he not, he never would have got up off that ring floor in Chicago inside a hundred count.

All the way through that contest, I figured it a hard-fought and close one. After Gene had got up, following that knock-down, he gave a great exhibition of thinking under fire. I could not catch him for the rest of the round to land a finishing punch. But I kept right on trying in the next round, and as a result of my over-anxiety, Gene dropped me to my knees for a count of one.

It was a red-hot fight, and I don’t think anybody could criticize the performance of either of the contestants. Gene won the decision and remained heavyweight champion of the world. To say that I was not disappointed would be to tell a lie. I was disappointed. But once again I had collected a modest fortune for my efforts, and there was a good deal in my life to console me for the missing heavyweight championship.

After the Fight  

There was a home and a wife in Hollywood. There was plenty of money in the bank to take care of me and the family I had caused so much worry in my younger days. There was the Firpo fight, the Carpentier fight, the Fulton fight, and several others which had marked the very peak of thrills for the boxing public. Of none of these need I ever be ashamed. After all, that man who wins a championship should be content. He should not expect to hold it over the hurdles of the onrushing years.

In my dressing room after the second Tunney contest, I was momentarily dejected. As is always the case with dressing rooms, a great many people I did not know managed to crowd in. I presume this is curiosity on their part, and it may be morbid curiosity. A fighter, in defeat or victory, is much like a monkey in a zoo to those who can get close to him. They want to look at your eyes and your ears to see how badly you may have been injured. They want to pick up a word here or a gesture there which, later on, they can relay, magnified, to their own little public.

I have always regarded these curious fans in a tolerant, even friendly way. They are, I presume, out of the great masses which support professional boxing. But I never had come to regard them seriously, nor did I ever expect to receive from one of them a perfect gem of philosophy. But I did.

It came from an emaciated chap weighing not more than 130 pounds, in high boots and an overcoat. I never will forget him. He had a hooked nose and sharp little eyes that winked incessantly under thin, scraggly eyebrows. He was smoking a cigarette when first I saw him, puffing a cigarette and looking intently at me.

I sat down on the edge of a rubbing table and my handlers began removing the bandages from my fists. The little chap wore a brown suit and shifted uneasily from foot to foot. He smoked jerkily at his cigarette, inhaling nervously and blowing the smoke upward so that it curled under the brim of a shabby, brown felt hat.

Whats a Championship?  

I noticed, for no particular reason, that his fingernails were in deepest mourning about their tips. I grinned at him and winked. He took the gesture as a personal salutation which seemed, from his expression, to illuminate his life.

“Okay, Jack,” he called to me.

I grinned and winked again. Newspapermen crowded about, but they did not get between us. The little stranger saw to that. One of the newspapermen said:

“Jack, do you realize that Tunney was down for 17 seconds?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know how long he was down.”

“Why didn’t you go to a neutral corner?” the newspaperman demanded.

“I meant to,” I admitted, “but there didn’t seem to be any hurry about it. The count had started and I thought it would continue.”

One of my seconds growled: “He’s still champion of the world, ain’t he? How many times do you have to count a guy out to win? Seventeen seconds!” Some other newspaperman spoke up, “It was only 14 seconds,” he said.

“Well,” my handler growled, “up till tonight, 10 seconds has always made a champion! I’m tellin’ you guys right now that, with the great majority of American boxin’ fans an’ with everybody who knows anythin’ about the prize ring, Gene Tunney got a decision tonight, but Jack Dempsey is the heavyweight champion of the world!”

“No, he ain’t either,” the newspaperman returned laconically. “They don’t reverse those decisions. If you had a kick to make, you should have pulled Jack out of the ring when it all happened. It’s too late now.”

“Not with the real fans who know the racket, it ain’t,” my overenthusiastic second insisted. “With them, Jack Dempsey is the heavyweight champion of the world. It’ll never be any other way.”

The newspapermen looked at me.

“What do you say about it, Jack?” they demanded.

I shrugged. “I’ve got nothing to say, boys. You saw what went on in there and you’re damned sight better judges than I am. I was too busy trying to fight. But don’t get this handler wrong. It’s his loyalty as much as his judgment that speaks.”

Suddenly a piping, unimportant voice rose from near at hand. I glanced up, and it was the fellow in the little brown suit with the shabby felt hat and the fuming cigarette.

“What the hell!” he exclaimed stridently. “What if he is champ, or what if he ain’t? He’s young, ain’t he? He’s got dough, ain’t he? He’s famous, ain’t he? I ask you, what the hell’s the champeenship of the world to a guy like that?”

So, from the great mass whose gift to me was fame and fortune, came finally a philosophical gem in the shape of unintentional advice. This little chap was right. I had my share of the fame and the fortune. I had lived down the things that once were held against me. I had been champion of the world, and I had been a fairly good one.

Suddenly the sun-washed shores of California looked awfully good to Jack Dempsey. I urged my handlers to hurry with their tasks that I might the sooner get to a telephone and talk with my wife. I thought again of what good old Bill Brennan had said when defeat overtook him in the person of myself. “That’s the fight racket.” Two cannot win a fight, and I’d had more than my just share of victories.

I looked again at the anemic little man in the brown suit. His sharp little eyes peered right straight back at me. While the others worked on me, I grinned again and winked at him. Whether he knew it or not, there was a world of appreciation in that final gesture.

For Dempsey’s full account, including his views of his first loss to Tunney in 1926, read “In This Corner” in full here.