In recent months, there has been a sharp increase in filibustering. Republican senators have used the filibuster to block the appointment of federal judges and cabinet members, and oppose the use of surveillance drones in the U.S. What was once a last resort is becoming the rule, and Senate business has nearly ground to a halt.

Some Democratic senators say it’s time to reform Senate rules and curb the dependency on the filibuster. But as you can see in “Reform Of The Senate Rules,” people have been saying the same thing for at least 88 years.

The article was written back in 1926, when it was the Democrats who were filibustering. Vice President Charles Dawes warned Americans that the filibusters worked an “evil influence” over the county’s laws.

He believed the filibuster made it impossible to seriously consider lawmaking. He asked readers to imagine they were in a group that had to discuss and act on an important matter. However, “in this meeting any one of us may talk as long as he pleases, whether relevant to the subject we are considering or not. If anyone desires he may use up all the time we have at our disposal, even if he has the purpose of depriving us as a body of the right to act.”

Such an arrangement would be met with “scorn and derision,” except in the U.S. Senate. By permitting the right of unlimited debate, he wrote, “it has surrendered to the whim and personal purpose of individuals and minorities.”

Filibusters, he added, caused delays in business so that other bills couldn’t be properly debated. Generally they didn’t defeat legislation but pressured the senators to change laws shaped by public interest to favor personal and sectional interests. The result of all these amendments, Dawes says, is a spiraling increase in the number of laws.

Of course, the Senate has always had the means to end filibusters. If enough senators vote for cloture, the filibusterer has to yield. In Dawes’ time, cloture required the approval of two-thirds of the senate’s 96 members. Because of the difficulty in obtaining the consent needed, Dawes wrote, “the Senate has amended the Constitution as to make it possible for a 33 per cent minority to block legislation.” He proposed that cloture votes require a simple majority: 51 percent instead of 66 percent.

Today, the rules for ending filibusters are slightly easier. A cloture vote can be carried by three-fifths of the members. But it’s hard to get 60 senators to agree in a Senate polarized between 53 Democrats and 45 Republicans.

Will the current move to reform the filibuster rules be successful? There are two reasons why it’s unlikely. First, changing Senate rules would take the approval of 66 senators at a time when it seems impossible even to get agreement among 60. Second, there are the practical considerations of politics: filibusters can work for either party. The Democrats may find the filibuster very convenient when they are next in the Senate minority.

In the meantime, though, senators will continue talking about the need to reform the rules. And Americans will keep hoping to see a new Senator Smith stage a solitary fight on the Senate floor.

Why the Senate Can’t Fix the Filibuster The Saturday Evening Post

By the 1930s, the rising costs of servicing steam locomotives, as photographed here in Chicago North Western railyard, was causing the railroads to lose money.
Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The age of the great locomotives ended in the early 1960s, and yet they are still missed—even by people who have never seen one in operation. Something about these massive, steam-breathing engines captures the imagination and impresses us in ways that a Boeing 747 can’t.

Many Americans who have only known interstate highways and airports yearn to see a locomotive pulling out of a station in a cloud of smoke and steam. Or hear the mournful cry of a distant steam whistle in the night. And they wonder what prompted the railroads to replace these magnificent machines with the grimy, boring diesel engines.

Fortunately, we have a Post article from the 1930s—the time when railroads introduced diesel power. “The Articles of Progress” by Garett Garrett offers a good explanation of why railroads abandoned their steam engines.

It begins with a description of Burlington Railroad’s new, fully streamlined Zephyr train and its maiden journey on May 26, 1934, across the Great Plains from Denver to Chicago.

News of the train’s passing drew crowds to the rail line in Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois. People gathered on hills, embankments, and rooftops to see this sleek, futuristic train race past them at speeds up to 112 mph.

“Parents held out their infants in arms, exhorting them to look,” Garrett writes. “Women threw kisses wildly. Men leaped and waved their arms. Some who had come to make pictures saluted instead and forgot to turn their camera cranks.”

It wasn’t just the shining, streamlined engine and cars that excited the crowds. It was the sight of tangible change and progress in the depths of the Depression.

The 1930s were a bad time to pour money into experimental trains, but the railroad had little choice. Revenues had sunk to a dangerous level just because of struggling economy. But profits had also been declining steadily since 1920.

The only way to survive was to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Diesel power seemed to promise both.

According to the designers, diesel engines could run faster and work longer than steam locomotives. They were more fuel-efficient; they didn’t require frequent stops to replenish coal and water. Instead of generating steam in an enormous boiler, the diesel burned oil to power a generator that, in turn, powered electric motors on the wheels.

Locomotives, in comparison, had a low thermal efficiency.

They used a vast amount of energy to build up steam pressure, which had to be discarded whenever the locomotive stopped or shut down. In every week of operation, a locomotive consumed its own weight in coal and water.

“They ate too much for what they did,” Garrett wrote. “Only about one-twentieth, or 5 per cent, of the potential energy in what a steam locomotive devours is delivered to the wheels in the form of effective driving power.” In contrast, a gasoline engine could deliver more than 25 percent of its potential energy to the wheels.

The Zephyr in the stable door before starting on its run of 1,017 miles in 785 minutes. It was unlike any train that came before it—and it brought with it a sight of tangible change and progress in the depths of the Depression.

Steam locomotives also required costly maintenance. Once a month, by law, the boilers had to be cleaned out. Furthermore, each engine required a regular, extensive overhaul, which meant it was available for work just 35 percent of the time. Diesel engines, which needed less maintenance, had 95 percent availability.

Because the manufacturer was using a new design for the Zephyr, the manufacturer decided to take advantage of a new construction method that used extra-light, electronically welded stainless-steel frames. Traditionally, the railroad companies had believed that adding weight to cars and engines made a train ride more comfortable. Heavier trains were also safer, they believed, because they would absorb lethal impact when collisions occurred. But as the weight of cars increased, so did the strain on rails and bridges, and with each added ton of weight, the fuel efficiency of the train dropped even farther.

The Burlington Northern railway planned to run the lightweight Zephyr train between Kansas City, Kansas, and Omaha, Nebraska, replacing a train made up of two locomotives and six heavy passenger cars. The old train weighed 1,618,000 pounds. The Zephyr would weigh just 200,000 pounds.

Two years after this article appeared, another Post article on America’s railroads reported the Burlington line had achieved a remarkable drop in operating costs. Their standard, steam-driven train had been running with an operating cost of 70 cents a mile. The Zephyr’s per-mile cost was 31 cents. The decline in rail travel had turned around. The railroads were becoming profitable again. But the steam locomotive had begun disappearing from the rail yards, taking with them the coaling stations, water towers, and the thousands of jobs that had been necessary to operate these high-maintenance engines.

As much as railroaders loved the old locomotives, they were doomed. Even as early as that first run of the Zephyr, a railway superintendant riding with Garrett confided to him, “I love the locomotive. God knows, I hate to see anything like this happen to it. But I’m a mechanic too. A machine is for what it will do. This thing skins the locomotive alive.”

Why You Don’t See Steam Locomotives Anymore The Saturday Evening Post

A few days before the 2012 presidential election, Joe Scarborough, the conservative host of Morning Joe on liberal MSNBC, proclaimed, “Anybody that thinks this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue … they’re jokes.” He felt reports that put Obama ahead were biased, and he had one particular culprit in mind, Nate Silver, a presumably liberal polling expert who calculated that President Obama had a 79 percent chance of beating Romney.

There was just one problem. It turned out to be Scarborough himself whose judgment was clouded by bias—as Silver recognized when he offered to bet the anchorman $1,000 on the outcome of the election, a wager Scarborough wouldn’t take. Silver turned out to be amazingly accurate in how he called the race.

That’s the problem with media bias. We all know it’s there, and we all know we need to see it, detect it, and overcome it if we’re ever going to know the truth, but we also all see it in different places. All too often, we think whoever we agree with is unbiased. It’s the other guy, the one we disagree with, who holds the biased opinion. How, then, are we ever to get at the truth, the truth we need, not only just to know what’s going on, but to be responsible citizens in a democracy?

It’s a very old problem, and it’s not about to go away, though there are definitely things we can do to try to smoke out biased reporting and see the facts more clearly. We’ll get to that later, but first, a little history. Bias in the media wasn’t always considered a negative. In fact, until about 100 years ago, it hardly ever occurred to anyone that media should be unbiased. Everyone agreed that an informed electorate was the basis of a free society, but they didn’t take that to mean that the news should be delivered without a point of view. They did agree, however, that in the U.S. the freedom of the press was sacred. That was a founding principle of our nation, and one of the great things that set us apart from every government that had come before.

The idea of a truly free press was born in 1735, when a New York newspaperman named John Peter Zenger was put on trial for libel for defaming the royal governor. Zenger’s lawyer insisted that he was innocent because what he had printed was the truth. No law at the time protected a journalist who told truth that hurt a public official, but the jury set Zenger free anyway—and established the notion of a press unafraid to speak truth to power as a cornerstone of liberty.

What makes the jury’s decision all the more intriguing is that it was quite well known that Zenger’s paper had been founded expressly to attack the royal governor. Freedom of the press was considered to be quite a separate matter from bias, as indeed it should be. By the time of the American Revolution, the colonies were awash in partisan newspapers and pamphlets. One of the British outrages that led to the Revolution was the Stamp Act—which put a tax on newspapers. In Europe the press had always been controlled by the ruling aristocracy and bent to serve its purposes; in the colonies, it became the weapon of the people, and publications like Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense fired the people to revolt against their overseas overlords. The only kind of media bias anyone really worried about was bias imposed from above, by the king and his men.

And so, when the Constitution was written its very first amendment stated “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press …”

With those words, a free press was enshrined along with freedom of speech and religion as one of our most crucial liberties. The government went well beyond mere words in supporting it, too. Where other nations heavily taxed their newspapers, the young United States did the opposite. It subsidized them. The Postal Act of 1792, which established the nation’s mail service, gave newspapers discounted postage rates, and legislators often provided funding for papers in their districts.

With that help the American press flourished so much that by 1835 the U.S. had five times as many daily papers as the British Isles. However, high officials often hated and distrusted what the papers printed. In 1798 President John Adams went so far as to push through the notorious Sedition Act, which made it a crime to publish “false, scandalous, and malicious” writings about the president or Congress. The law would backfire badly, turning its victims into free-speech martyrs. Thomas Jefferson got rid of the Sedition Act soon after he was elected president.

Not all bias is political bias. In the 1830s James Gordon Bennett used sensationalism and colorful embroidering of the truth to build his New York Herald into the biggest newspaper in the world. As but one lurid example, his paper described the corpse of a murdered prostitute in 1836 as follows: “The perfect figure, the exquisite limbs, the fine face, the full arms, the beautiful bust, all, all surpassed in every respect the Venus de Medici.”

Newspapers were, after all, businesses first, and the primary concern was selling papers. By 1871 a British observer would describe the typical American newspaper as “a print published by a literary Barnum, whose type, paper, talents, morality, and taste are all equally wretched and inferior; who is certain to give us flippancy for wit, personality for principle, bombast for eloquence, malignity without satire, and news without truth or reliability.”

How biased was the press in the 19th century? In 1860 Bennett’s Herald reported that Abraham Lincoln was “a fourth-rate lecturer who cannot speak good grammar.”

By the end of that century, the United States was a nation of mass-readership newspapers. Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World led the way, with signs in its city room that read, “Accuracy, Accuracy, Accuracy! Who? What? Where? When? How? The Facts—The Color—The Facts!”

Despite the noble motto, in the World and in its archrival, William Randolph Hearst’s Journal, “there was a lot of willful omission and lying,” as Brooke Gladstone, media historian and host of the NPR show On the Media, points out in her book, The Influencing Machine. Hearst himself is best remembered for his (possibly apocryphal) 1897 telegram to the artist Frederic Remington, who told him there was no fighting in Cuba to report on: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”

The tide began to turn with the century. Adolph Ochs bought The New York Times in 1896 and announced that it would henceforth “give the news … impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interest involved.” Lack of bias became a new ideal in the Progressive Era of the early 1900s. In 1904 Joseph Pulitzer endowed one of the first journalism schools, at Columbia University, to “raise journalism to the rank of a learned profession,” and others soon followed. In 1922 editors founded their first professional association, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and drafted a code of ethics that declared, “News reports should be free from opinion or bias of any kind.”

Balancing Act The Saturday Evening Post

The trip south wasn’t a complete waste, however, because he found the love of his life: a charming and strong-willed Southern belle. The two fell in love, but the girl refused to marry him because he didn’t have enough money. So he set out to earn the fortune that would win his fiancée back to him.

“Babylon Revisited” was one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s finest short stories. It was published in The Saturday Evening Post on February 21, 1931, and in 1954, it was adapted into a movie called The Last Time I Saw Paris.

Up to this point, the story describes the early career of both the fictional Jay Gatsby and his creator, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Gatsby eventually went to work for bootleggers. Fitzgerald returned home to Minnesota and threw himself into writing. Within a year, his career took off when he was discovered by both a book publisher and the editors of The Saturday Evening Post.

In April 1920, Scribner published his first novel, This Side of Paradise. The book was an immediate success; the entire first edition of 60,000 copies sold out within three days.

But even before the novel hit bookstores, the Post was publishing his short stories. Years later, he recalled his excitement at the news of the Post accepting his work: “I’d like to get a thrill like that again but I suppose it’s only once in a lifetime.” The Post’s editors liked his work and published six of his stories in 1920 alone.

Any writer published in the Post during the 1920s would have felt that he or she had ‘arrived.’ No other magazine offered such a large audience—2.5 million readers—or such large payments. Even though he was still an unproven author, Fitzgerald received $400 for his first story. Within a year, the editors had increased his fee to $500. By 1929, they were paying him $4,000 for every story, which would be, roughly, $54,000 today. He began to live extravagantly, spending money as if it would always come as quickly and as easily.

He never again enjoyed the success with a novel as he did with his first. For the rest of his 20-year career, the majority of his income came from short stories—168 of them. And most of this money came from the Post, which published 65 of his stories between 1920 and 1937.

Fitzgerald knew that writing would win him the recognition and success he needed. It would enable him to live like the wealthy students he’d met at Princeton: young men with carefree, careless manners and a natural assumption of privilege and preference. His new wealth also helped convince that charming Southern belle, Zelda Sayre, to marry him. And so, with the Post’s money burning a hole in the pocket of his raccoon coat, Fitzgerald and his free-spending wife began a spree of lavish living that continued through the decade.

His earnings introduced him to the world of Gatsby. He entered a nonstop party, surrounded by the sounds of hot jazz and an ocean of bootleg liquor that extended from nightclubs to exclusive New York hotels. He moved into an exclusive area on Long Island, New York, and eventually relocated to France, where he spent his time among wealthy American émigrés in Paris and the French Riviera.

This new life brought him into close contact with the wealthy, including aimless young people with inherited fortunes. He began to see the emptiness that often lay at the heart of success and the dark edges of the Great American Dream.

In “How to Live on $36,000 a Year,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that three months after marrying Zelda, “I found one day to my horror that I didn’t have a dollar in the world. … This particular crisis passed the next morning when the discovery that publishers sometimes advance royalties sent me hurriedly to mine.”

Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald entertained lavishly and continually, spending money on a scale that’s hard to imagine. In 1924, he wrote an article for the Post entitled “How To Live on $36,000 a Year.” It is a humorous piece describing the ineffectual attempts he and his wife made to live within a budget. He wrote it after he realized that, in a single year, he’d burned through the 2013 equivalent of half a million dollars. A few months later, the Post published “How To Live On Practically Nothing A Year,” which told how he moved to Europe where he could live comfortably for far less money. But even with a favorable exchange rate, he had trouble keeping ahead of his spending.

He completed The Great Gatsby while living in France. It is perhaps his greatest work: concise, intriguing, and peopled with memorable characters. Like all his works, it is beautifully written, created by a great writer at the height of his powers. Fitzgerald built his stories with the precision and care of a master jeweler. There is not one wasted or poorly chosen word, or one flabby sentence in its 200 pages.

He wanted to write more novels, but he never escaped money problems. As long as the Post continued to pay him so well, he continued writing stories for its pages. Though they weren’t novels, Fitzgerald was proud of his talent for producing these “commercial” pieces. He knew writing magazine fiction was far more difficult than it looked, and he was good at it. His Post stories contain some of his finest, most readable works: “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” “The Last Belle,” “Babylon Revisited,” “The Ice Palace,” and all the Basil and Josephine stories.

His work for the Post didn’t give him the satisfaction he got from writing The Great Gatsby, which he told a friend was “about the best American novel ever written.” But without the support of the Post, Gatsby would never have been born.

Read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories in Gatsby Girls, a collection of his first eight short stories originally published in The Saturday Evening Post and accompanied by original illustrations and beautiful cover images. Available to purchase in both print and digital editions.

For more information, visit shopthepost.com.

How The Saturday Evening Post Helped Create Gatsby The Saturday Evening Post

Will we see the end of book publishing in America?

The question would have been unthinkable not very long ago. Today, it’s worth asking because there’s the possibility that electronic books will outgrow and replace printed books. The first electronic book reader was introduced in 2006. Five years later e-books began to outsell printed books.

While digital publishing seems to be growing, the printed book industry is continuing its long decline. Countless independent bookstores have vanished from the American landscape, followed by the demise of the Border’s bookstore chain in 2011. Now, most Americans live within driving distance of only one bookstore—Barnes & Noble—and that company’s health is not exactly robust. (The company plans to close 20 of its stores every year for the next decade.)

However, the fear that book publishing will disappear has been around for more than a century. Back in 1958, for example, this fear prompted American Publisher Bennett Cerf to write “Books Are Here To Stay.” He was writing in response to the concern of parents, educators, and publishers that young Americans were becoming addicted to television. Kids, they said, showed no interest in reading but remained glued to the tube all day. Soon the great publishing houses would shut down, they assumed, and books would start to disappear from the American home.

But Cerf saw things differently, and he knew what he was talking about. He had run Random House publishing for 30 years, and could assure Post readers that “publishers cry more easily than anybody else on earth. … To hear them tell it, there’s always something threatening to bankrupt half the publishers extant. Television is merely their latest bugaboo.”

And then, interestingly, Cerf told us several things that were going to destroy publishing before television.

In the 1900s, he said, a New York publisher prophesied that interurban trolley cars would bring about the end of reading in America. The new trolley lines being built in those days allowed Americans to easily commute between the country and the city. They also permitted the youth to go joyriding for a day, taking a trolley from Chicago to Milwaukee, for example, or Philadelphia to Atlantic City, New Jersey. What youngsters, the publisher asked, would be content with books if they could ride for hours in a trolley car?

Even before the interurban lines were bearing youths away from their books, Cerf said, the bicycle was going to kill the book. Young men and women of the 1890s spent all their free time on bicycles, even taking 100-mile, weekend-long rides, leaving them no time or energy to read.

In the first few decades of the 20th century, books faced growing competition from the phonograph, the radio, and the affordable Model T that seemed to consume more and more of the average American’s time.

Yet with all these alternatives to reading, the popularity of books continued to grow. The Book Of The Month Club, founded 83 years ago this month, proved immensely popular. Between 1926 and 1929, membership grew from 2,000 to 100,000.

Today we are far from seeing the end of publishing. More than a million new titles are produced every year, including over 200,000 self-published books. This latter number is misleading, though, since many of these ‘books’ are purely digital and will never see a single sheet of paper.

As we’ve stated before in the Post Perspective, the love of reading and the love of books are not the same thing. The lovers of reading don’t care if they read text out of a book, off a smartphone, or from the back of a cereal box. As long as it’s legible, they’ll enjoy it.

Book lovers, on the other hand, are enchanted by the feel of a cloth binding, the scent of the pages, and crisp, dark type on white paper. They’ll spend fortunes on books, and care for them tenderly, and might even read some of them.

For lovers of reading, the future has never been better. More people are reading and writing than ever before, and the Web offers an endless supply of new, unexpected material. But for book lovers, the future does not look promising. The number of bookstores, and the size of their inventory, are not likely to grow. However, book lovers should take comfort in the fact that no form of entertainment has ever disappeared. The Internet hasn’t replaced television, which didn’t replace radio, which didn’t replace movies, which didn’t replace the theater, etc. Americans are continually rediscovering and reviving old entertainments and crafts.

We will see fewer large-inventory bookstores in the future, but a growth of print-on-demand (POD) publishers. These small, independent operations will print and bind any book of your choice. You can get the title you want in minutes, and the POD operation doesn’t have to pay the costs of maintaining an inventory of unsold titles.

The good news is that book publishing won’t disappear. The better news is that Americans today are reading more than ever.

Are Books Really Here to Stay? The Saturday Evening Post

On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear opening arguments in a case that may decide whether a company can own a patent on human genes.

Such a case would have been unthinkable 60 years ago, when medical researchers were just starting to make progress in molecular biology: the study of how genes control the actions of living cells.

Scientists already knew that chromosomes—the long strands of a complex molecule called DNA—control the function of cells. But they still didn’t understand how DNA holds the information required to assemble and operate every human cell. If they could gain this information—“the molecular facts of life” as a Post author expressed—they might be able to increase, alter, or stop certain activities within cells. Doctors could halt cancers, grow new nerve tissues, or repair cells damaged by disease.

A major breakthrough came on April 25, 1953, when British scientists James Watson and Francis Crick published the results of their DNA research. In the article, they presented their theory on how DNA was constructed and how it worked. [For the Post’s explanation of their work, see “The Messages of Life,” by James Bonner, April 15, 1961.]

Building on the X-ray imaging data of other researchers, Watson and Crick hypothesized that DNA has a double-helix structure. Crudely put, it is shaped like a spiral ladder. Each rung is composed of a link between two nucleotide molecules. All genetic information is encoded within the long sequence of these molecule pairs.

The double-helix model earned international recognition for Watson, Crick, and colleague Maurice Wilkins. Nine years later, it earned them a shared Nobel Prize.

With this new understanding of how DNA works, researchers began searching for ways in which they could manipulate the DNA transfer of genetic material to assist in human reproduction, halt inherited diseases, and regenerate healthy tissue.

However the great potential of genetic medicine brought moral complexities, leading medicine into areas where there are no clear ethical boundaries. For example, prenatal screening might tell parents that their fetus is likely to develop a severe, inherited disease. Should they gamble on a procedure to alter the child’s genetic makeup, or wait to see what develops, knowing that it might then be too late to alter the situation?

Or, a young woman with a history of breast cancer takes a genetic test that reveals she has the breast cancer genes BRCA1 or BRCA2. Should she and her physician consider a radical mastectomy on the potential risk? Should her insurance carrier be involved in the decision?

As early as 1965, the Post was reporting the concerns that genetic manipulation might put too much power into the hands of doctors. In an article ambitiously titled “The Secret of Life,” Journalist Max Gunther asked, “if it becomes possible to control human heredity, who will decide which traits should be inherited by whom? On strictly moral grounds, the thought of man having this power has caused a certain amount of uneasiness among both scientists and laymen.”

Gunther quoted a researcher at the Rockefeller Institute, who told him, “You can see why people might be worried. If we ever reach a stage where we can exert a highly detailed kind of control over life and heredity, we’ll be in somewhat the same position we were in when we harnessed atomic energy.”

Today, in addition to ethical questions, legal and financial concerns are further complicating genetic medicine. Researchers in the past decade have taken information, which was developed by the nonprofit Human Genome Project, and identified which genes are closely linked to diseases. Their sponsoring companies have patented this information—the DNA sequencing that makes up the breast cancer genes, for example. Consequently, other researchers working in this area are prohibited from studying or developing this information.

As the Supreme Court hears from a gene-patent company that wants to protect the investment it made to find the breast cancer gene, it will also hear from doctors, researchers, and patients who want this information made public.

It took the combined genius of Watson, Crick, and others to understand how DNA was structured and how it operated. It will take an even greater work of genius to understand how to balance the medical, financial, legal, political, and ethical applications of what was discovered 60 years ago.

Playing God with Human DNA The Saturday Evening Post

At the peak of success, self-doubt kept Quinn teetering between calm and fury.

Fifty years ago, the Academy Awards ceremony was handing out its Oscars to a remarkable crop of films—including big winners such as Lawrence of Arabia, The Miracle Worker, and To Kill A Mockingbird. Although Hollywood’s big-name actors were noted for memorable performances, several 1962 Post articles also pointed out that they were showing a trend toward rebellious, temperamental, and selfish behavior.

Rising stars like Anthony Quinn, Marlon Brando, and Peter O’Toole were becoming increasingly hard to work with, and were threatening the survival of the studios.

For example, an article about Anthony Quinn often described the actor as “volatile, unpredictable,” alternately gracious or bitter. A director, who had recently worked with Quinn in the movie Requiem for a Heavyweight, said, “I found Tony has great selfishness as a performer. He thinks how each scene can best serve him. Of course, when he’s good, he’s brilliant. He just makes it hard as hell for everyone around him,” [“Anthony Quinn, Unsettled,” October 13, 1962].

An article about Peter O’Toole, star of Lawrence of Arabia, mentioned the rumors among actors that O’Toole was brash, irresponsible, a braggart, and a drinker. The producer of Lawrence of Arabia believed the rumors, O’Toole said. “It hardly helped matters when a fifth of whiskey tumbled from my pocket during our first meeting,” [“Oscar Winner,” March 9, 1963].

Fellow Brit Richard Burton was becoming well known for his wild rages. While filming The Robe, he deliberately ran his head into a wall after failing to perform a stunt called for by the script. The year before, while performing in the Shakespeare festival at Stratford, “he got so carried away during a fight scene that he lifted [Michael] Redgrave and hurled him against the scenery, nearly bringing the set crashing down,” [“Actor With Two Lives,” January 27, 1962].

Robert Mitchum, who had just finished Cape Fear with Gregory Peck, instinctively fought any type of authority. His impatience often led him to lose his temper. When a studio phone failed to work, he destroyed his dressing room and walked onto the set to announce, “If they treat me like an animal, I’ll behave like an animal,” [“The Many Moods of Robert Mitchum,” August 25, 1962].

Newcomer Warren Beatty had starred in only three movies by 1962, but he was already making demands on the studio. He insisted on complete silence on the set while he was acting. He also demanded, and was given, the best dressing room on the lot, normally reserved for Gregory Peck, [“Brash and Rumpled Star,” July 14, 1962].

But of all the troublesome actors, none was more difficult or demanding than Marlon Brando. Lewis Milestone, who had recently completed Mutiny On The Bounty, told Post contributor Bill Davidson that Brando’s attitude—argumentative, uncooperative, and easily offended—“cost the production at least $6 million and months of extra work.”

The petulant superstar turned paradise into a moviemaker’s nightmare.

Co-star Trevor Howard said Brando’s behavior had been “unprofessional and absolutely ridiculous,” and Richard Harris said working with Brando had made “the whole picture a large dreadful nightmare.”

According to Milestone and other members of the cast, Brando rarely knew his lines and would fumble his way through as many as 30 takes of a single scene. He constantly used “idiot cards”—pieces of paper with his lines written on them—which he concealed on his person or somewhere on the set.

Says Director Milestone, “It wasn’t a movie production; it was a debating society. Brando would discuss for four hours, then we’d shoot for an hour to get in a two-minute scene because he’d be mumbling or blowing his lines. By now I wasn’t even directing Brando— just the other members of the cast. He was directing himself and ignoring everyone else.

“Did you ever hear of an actor who put plugs in his ears so he couldn’t listen to the director or the other actors? That’s what Brando did. … I’ve been in this business for 40 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it. … Whenever I’d try to direct him in a scene, he’d say, ‘Are you telling me, or are you asking my advice?’ [“The Mutiny of Marlon Brando,” June 16, 1962].

While Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer hoped to recoup the cost overruns of Mutiny on the Bounty, Twentieth Century Fox was starting to see similar budget problems on its production of Cleopatra.

Robert Wise, an Academy Award-winning director, predicted Hollywood would have to change to survive. Hollywood, he said, had built up its stars in order to compete with television. In the process, it had created monsters. “Brando’s behavior has made us realize how far out of hand the situation has gotten. More and more of us are saying. ‘The hell with the star. I’ll make little black-and-white pictures with good scripts and unknown actors.’ We must do that to survive. A few more mutinies by stars and we’ll all be out of business.”

Yet the Post editors seemed to expect actors to be demanding, difficult, and hard to work with. Movie stars had to be bigger than life in everything they did. The stars of Hollywood’s golden era, like Gable and Bogart, were “exciting personalities … every gesture and mannerism set them apart from ordinary men, creating about them the aura of a star.

“Each of these old-time stars was a vibrant personality with his own distinctive style. He snarled, fumed, raged, stormed, fought, loved, bled and died with a gusto that today’s pallid actors cannot match.” The editors compared the “glittering greats” of the past with the young stars of that year and concluded, “much of the excitement has gone out of the movies.”

Bad Boys of Hollywood, 1962 The Saturday Evening Post

In 1992, Annette Funicello told the Post she wanted no pity as she fought against multiple sclerosis. Click the image above to read the full article.

For many baby boomers, she had become an icon of more innocent times.

First on television’s The Mickey Mouse Club and later in numerous Beach Party movies, Annette Funicello came to embody the idea of the wholesome American girl, forever associated with youth.

So many Americans were dismayed to hear in the late 1980s that she was struggling with multiple sclerosis.

In 1992, she agreed to an interview with the Post and talked about her determination to not let her MS dominate her life. Her death today, 21 years later, shows how strong her determination was.

Read the original Post interview “Annette Fights Back” by Holly G. Miller here.

Remembering Annette Funicello The Saturday Evening Post

Click image to read the full 1975 article “Margaret Thatcher—Britain’s First Lady Prime Minister?”

Back in 1975, four years before she became prime minister, Margaret Thatcher was profiled in a Post article, which was farsightedly titled “Britain’s First Lady Prime Minister?” At the time, Thatcher was a high-ranking member of Britain’s Tory party.

Those in her party who questioned whether a woman could lead the British government were startled to find her decisive and determined and, as the Russians soon dubbed her, the “Iron Lady.”

She held onto the prime ministership for 11 years and, like her friend Ronald Reagan, significantly reshaped British politics and society.

Click here to read “Margaret Thatcher—Britain’s First Lady Prime Minister?” in full.

Pre-Prime Minister Thatcher The Saturday Evening Post

This classic 1938 illustration features Harpo Marx’s backfired prank.

Practical jokes have a bad reputation. We tend to think of them as unimaginative annoyances, like putting salt in the sugar bowl, making prank phone calls, or taping a “kick me” sign on someone’s back. But, as the Post reported, a good prank is of a different class altogether.

We’ll start with the case of Humorist Oliver Herford whose exceedingly clever gags arguably approached the level of high art, as Post Contributor Julian Street describes them in “More or Less Practical Jokes.”

In the 1890s, Herford announced to his friends that he had just been invited into a highly exclusive club. From his rapturous descriptions of the Farragut Club, many of his friends hoped they would also be chosen for membership. What they didn’t know was that Herford was the only member of the Farragut Club, which he’d dreamed up just to torment his good friend Richard Harding Davis, who was a bit of a social climber. For years, Davis repeatedly begged Herford to nominate him for membership. Again and again, though, Herford had to tell his friend, with sighs of deep regret, that one member had anonymously voted down his nomination. It’s possible Davis never learned who that one person was.

An Audience Of One

Professor Clyde Miller of Columbia University was another prankster who appreciated subtlety, as Author Fred C. Kelly described him in the Post article “He Sets Them Wondering.”

Whenever a publisher sent Miller a book to review that he found impossibly dull, he’d mail it to a friend along with a note, signed with the author’s name, saying, “I hope you will like the references in this little volume to yourself and that you will not mind the free use that I have made of your name.” Miller enjoyed imagining his friend wearily reading the entire book just to find where his name was mentioned.

Once, as part of a printer’s advertisement, he was sent a stack of sample Christmas cards left over from various jobs. On the inside were the names of complete strangers—a Dr. Montgomery, and a George and Helen McFarland. He mailed these cards to his friends with a brief personal note from Montgomery or the McFarlands, telling the recipient “Cousin Frank finally got the job. He would love to hear from you,” or “Ben and Sarah have a new baby. They are naming it after you.”

The Educational Joke

The Post stories of practical jokes also include a few that served an educational purpose, teaching a lesson to people who might not learn any other way.

Actor Rowland Buckstone, for example, taught fellow Actor E.H. Sothern, how it felt to have a practical joke sprung on him. For years, Sothern had played pranks on Buckstone, who had always accepted the joke with a good-natured laugh. Then, one night, Buckstone saw an educational opportunity for his friend.

It happened the night that Sothern announced to his fellow actors that he’d just become engaged to Virginia Harned, the leading lady in his current play.

Buckstone met Harned backstage while the play was in progress and congratulated her on the engagement. He added that Sothern was a brave man for telling her about the … um, sensitive issue. He knew it must have deeply pained Sothern to share with her the secret he kept from so many people.

“What are you talking about?” Harned asked.

Buckstone pretended to be shocked that Sothern hadn’t told her his great secret. The woman pleaded to know what her fiancé was hiding. At last, with a great show of reluctance, Buckstone said, “His glass eye.”

Harned couldn’t believe him. Buckstone offered to prove it. He told her that Sothern had plenty of spare eyeballs and kept them in several hiding places. He quickly led her to the dressing room of Sothern, who was then onstage. He opened the door and pointed to the dressing table, where a glass eye lay in a saucer, just where Buckstone had placed it minutes before.

Harned was aghast. Buckstone began digging through the pockets of Sothern’s clothes where he ‘chanced’ to find another glass eye. Just then, they heard Harned’s cue. She rushed through the wings and onto the stage with Buckstone strolling after her in a contented mood. Standing behind the curtain, he watched her play the love scene with her husband-to-be. He noticed that Harned seemed distracted that night, and spoke her lines haltingly. And, from where he stood, Buckstone could see that her gaze kept shifting back and forth between Sothern’s eyes, trying to figure out which was the glass one.

As soon as they got offstage, Sothern learned of the hoax and cleared up any doubt Harned had. They then began hunting through the theater for Buckstone, but never found him that night.

A Joke For Marital Equality

Julian Street also offered an example that shows a woman as capable as a man in the field of educational pranks.

When his friend, Art Editor Ray Brown, married, he and his wife agreed they would remain independent, and never demand to know where the other had been, or what he or she had been doing.

So on the first night they visited Paris, Mrs. Brown attended a concert and Mr. Brown went strolling alone through the artist’s district. Hours after she arrived back at the hotel, he came staggering in and collapsed on the bed. True to their code, she didn’t ask where he’d been.

The same thing happened for the next two nights. Mrs. Brown sat alone in their room under he would come stumbling to the door in the small hours.

On the fourth night, Mrs. Brown came to a decision. She put on her best evening gown and waited by the window overlooking the street. In the middle of the night, she saw a cab pull up to the hotel door and her husband step out. She immediately left the room and hurried upstairs to the floor above. There, she silently paced the corridor for a half hour before returning downstairs and knocking at the door of their room.

As Street describes it, Mr. Brown opened the door and Mrs. Brown sauntered in, cheerfully saying, “Oh, you got home first.” She yawned, slipped off her wrap and began to make ready for bed, aware, as she did so, of his anxious, questioning gaze.

“During the remainder of his stay in Paris, Ray Brown was given to fits of abstraction in which he would stare at his wife with brooding, speculative eyes. And she was always there to stare at, for he did not leave her any more.”

Years later, as Street was writing this article for the Post, he sent Mrs. Brown a letter asking permission to use the story. She wrote back with the permission and the news that, until her husband had read Street’s letter, he’d never known where she was that night.

Blowing Up in the Joker’s Face

Finally, we consider a category of practical jokes that are rarely reported: the ones that backfire.

According to Alva Johnston’s 1938 article, “What Larks!” Harpo Marx once entered the Tiffany & Co. jewelry store to shop for some expensive jewelry. He was dressed in street clothes. Without his trademark wig and top hat, few would have recognized him. A salesman showed him several trays, but Marx said he saw nothing he wanted. He turned and was heading to the door when he ‘accidentally’ pulled an open bag from his pocket that spilled diamonds, rubies, and pearls across the showroom floor. Several salesmen started toward Marx, then stopped. Even from 60 feet away, they recognized the look and sound of costume jewelry hitting the tiles. They remained where they stood, fixing Marx with an icy stare. No one even helped him pick up the fake jewels.

Humiliated, Marx quickly rounded up the fake gems, handed them to the doorman, and darted outside.

He didn’t dare to show his face inside Tiffany’s again until he returned, ten years later, as a legitimate customer looking for a silverware pattern. Even though a decade had passed since his joke backfire, he had taken only a few steps into the store when a salesman stepped up and said, “No jokes, Mr. Marx.”

Pranks for the Memories The Saturday Evening Post

Butts and Bryant meet as friends, exchange warm greetings before the Georgia-Alabama game at Legion Field, Birmingham, Alabama, in 1960.

It’s a story that refuses to lie down and be quiet, even half a century later. In 1963, James Wallace “Wally” Butts, former coach of the University of Georgia’s football team, sued Curtis Publishing, the Post’s parent company, for libel. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided unanimously against Curtis Publishing. Fifty years later, there is growing doubt that it was the right decision.

To understand the doubt, you need to know the background of what the Post claimed was the most shocking sports story since the Chicago Black Sox scandal—a story that began with an overheard phone call and ended by damaging the credibility of America’s most popular magazine.

On September 13, 1962, George Burnett, an insurance salesman in Atlanta, called a friend at a local public relations firm. As sometimes happened in those days, the phone lines became ‘cross-connected.’ Instead of hearing his friend’s voice, he heard a telephone operator identify two famous college football coaches. One was Butts, the athletic director and former coach at the University of Georgia; the other was Paul “Bear” Bryant, coach at the University of Alabama.

Instead of hanging up or announcing his presence, Burnett remained on the line and listened. Over the next 15 minutes, according to what Burnett told the Post, he heard Butts give Bryant details about Georgia’s plays and strategies. In particular, he described the formations that his school’s football team would use against Georgia in the opening game, just eight days away.

Burnett feverishly took notes. When the conversation was done, he had six pages in all.

After the coaches hung up, Burnett redialed the number he originally called. This time the call didn’t get crossed over, and he reached his friend at the public relations firm. Burnett told him what he’d just heard. The friend replied that Butts was, in fact, at the firm and using a phone in a back office. Both men knew Butts and liked him, and after discussing the matter, they agreed to forget the whole business.

The next week, Alabama defeated Georgia, to no one’s surprise. Bryant’s team had been widely expected to win. What was unusual was the score: 35-0. Few gamblers would have bet on which team would win the game. Most of the betting action would concern the difference between the teams’ scores. A gambler who knew the point spread would have been particularly large could have made a lot of money. And Butts was close friends with gamblers.

The lopsided win bothered Burnett. He broke his silence and mentioned the matter with another friend, who passed it on to the new Georgia coach, who informed the University of Georgia’s administrators. They asked Butts about the incident. Butts didn’t deny the charge; in fact he admitted he’d discussed Georgia’s plays with Bryant. But he said the whole incident had been misinterpreted. The next day, Butts resigned from the university.

The university’s regents then called Burnett to a meeting, where they grilled him on what he’d heard. They brought up the fact that Burnett might not be a credible witness since, they’d learned, Burnett had written some bad checks in the past. Perhaps he was hoping to gain by making these charges.

Burnett left the meeting convinced the university was going to dispose of the problem by discrediting him. Expecting to face an accusation of slander from Butts, Burnett spoke with his attorney, who suggested he take his story to The Saturday Evening Post.

Solemnly Wally Butts leads a Georgia football team in locker-room prayer.

“The Story of a College Football Fix” appeared in the March 23, 1963, issue. On March 28, Butts sued Curtis Publishing for $10 million.

The case was heard in the Atlanta federal court, where a jury awarded Butts $60,000 in damages, and $3 million in punitive damages. Stunned, Curtis Publishing appealed the verdict. The 5th Circuit Court upheld the decision in 1965.

Curtis appealed again, believing it could get a favorable hearing in the U.S. Supreme Court, which had recently handed down an important decision concerning the rules of libel. In that case, L.B. Sullivan, the public safety commissioner in Birmingham, Alabama, had sued The New York Times for libel after the paper ran an appeal for Martin Luther King Jr.’s legal defense fund. He believed the wording of the appeal, which criticized the city’s police, had defamed him personally. At the time, several southern states had libel cases pending against newspapers they felt were unfairly reporting on their racial problems.

When the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of The New York Times, Justice Hugo Black explained that malice “even as defined by the court, is an elusive, abstract concept, hard to prove and hard to disprove.” In this instance, the Supreme Court declared that a public official could not be libeled unless a publication showed intentional malice; that is, acting with reckless disregard for the truth.

Which is what the court decided the Post had done. They upheld the lower court’s decision for Butts. But the award of $3 million was appealed, and eventually Butts accepted $460,000.

Over the past 50 years, journalists have revisited the case, wondering how the Post managed to lose the case. There was proof the phone call had taken place. Burnett was a credible witness. Butts was not. Other investigators, both at the University of Georgia and the state attorney general’s office, corroborated what Burnett reported. So why did the Post lose all three trials? The reason might be one, or several, of the following:

• The Post’s attorney was not nearly as good as Butts’ lawyer, who was very skillful in diverting suspicion away from his client.
• The Post‘s attorney knew little about football, while Butts’ attorney had an incredible knowledge and could use this knowledge to discredit the value and usefulness of Burnett’s notes.
• The jury was unfavorably impressed that the Post editors didn’t bother to attend the trial but sent depositions of their testimony instead.
• The Post didn’t pass the story for review among its other editors, who could have caught several minor errors in the story, and would not have approved the sensationalistic tone in the introduction, which stated, “The corrupt here were not professional gamblers but two men—employed to educate and to guide young men. … How often do teachers sell out their pupils? We don’t know—yet. For now we can only be appalled.”
• The magazine was operating out of its depth. It had been trying to rebuild its popularity by engaging in what its publisher called “sophisticated muckraking.” It had successfully dug into several political scandals, and had often run stories about college athletics. But when challenged in this case, they mounted an indifferent defense with the wrong lawyer, and never even showed up in court to speak on their own behalf.

Yet none of these factors changed the fact the phone call took place, other inquiries backed up what Burnett said, and the fact that during the opening game, Georgia players had taunted the Alabama team by calling out the code names of their plays before they were run.

The Supreme Court’s decision in this case still baffles students of journalism law. So the question remains: why did the Post lose the case?

To further understand why doubt lingers, we recommend Fumble: Bear Bryant, Wally Butts and the Great College Football Scandal (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986). The author, James Kirby, taught law at the University of Tennessee and had been dean of Ohio State University’s law school. In 1963, he investigated the Post’s allegations on behalf of the Southeastern Athletic Conference.

Why Did the Post Lose its $10 Million Libel Case? The Saturday Evening Post

The reward offer, as it appeared in the March 26, 1831, Post.

Late on the night of March 20, 1831, two men with a set of homemade keys approached the City Bank of New York. The keys, which had been made from wax impressions of the door locks, enabled the men to let themselves into the bank and lock the doors behind themselves.

What happened that night is generally considered to be the first bank robbery in the U.S. The two men—James Honeyman and William J. Murray—emptied the vault and several safe deposit boxes. By the morning, they had filled several bags with $245,000 in bank notes and coins. It was an incredibly large sum for a robbery, roughly equivalent to $52 million today. The robbery was sensational enough to be rushed into print in the next edition of the Post, under a bold headline offering “$5,000 Reward.”

Honeyman and Murray got away the next morning as the sun rose and the city’s night watchmen went off duty. Carrying the loot under the large capes they were wearing, they hurried to Murray’s house where they divided the money.

Honeyman put his share of the loot into three trunks, then drove to a boarding house, where he rented a private room under the name of Jones.

Less than a month later, the Post was able to report that “something peculiar in his conduct, particularly regarding the trunks, seems to have excited the suspicions of his landlord.”

Once in the rooms, Honeyman divided the stolen money again, taking $37,000 to the house of a Mr. Parkinson, his brother-in-law.

The site of the old City Bank, directly across the street from 55 Wall Street, where the bank now does business under the name of Citibank.

Meanwhile, news of the bank robbery had sped across town and reached the ears of New York’s Chief Constable Jacob Hays. He immediately knew whom to suspect. Honeyman had recently been charged with robbing a store in Brooklyn, but had escaped conviction due to lack of evidence. He had also been caught trying to steal money from a steamboat. And there were rumors that he was still the chief suspect in an English mail-coach robbery. Hays immediately went to Honeyman’s home, but found neither his suspect nor any money.

The following Saturday night, March 24, Honeyman left the boarding house with one of the trunks and told the landlord he would soon return for the others. The landlord, now convinced the trunks contained the stolen bank money, summoned Hays. Together, they opened the remaining trunks where they found $185,758.

The men seated themselves and waited. Three hours later, when Honeyman walked into the room, Hays seized him, put him in handcuffs, and took him before a judge.

The landlord also told Hays that another man had often visited Honeyman. From the description, Hays recognized the man as Murray. The two men were frequently seen together. In fact, they had been close friends ever since meeting in the penal colony at Botany Bay. Both men had beat long odds and escaped Australia to return to England, commit a few more robberies, then flee to the states.

High Constable Jacob Hays, the pride of New York.

After depositing Honeyman in jail, Hays went to Murray’s house but found the man had fled to Philadelphia. Hays followed after, apprehending Murray and bringing him back to New York for trial.

Both Honeyman and Murray were convicted and sentenced to five years at New York’s Sing Sing prison.

Hays recovered about $176,000 of the stolen money, but had no idea where to find the remaining $69,000. Months passed by, and his searches turned up nothing. City officials accused Hays and one of his associates of keeping the money to themselves.

Then, on September 20, Parkinson entered a bank to exchange some of the bank notes Honeyman had left with him. The bank clerk thought the notes resembled those he had deposited at the City Bank before it was robbed. He notified Hays, who quickly arrested Parkinson. He told the police all he knew and, in exchange for immunity, returned $37,000.

This still left $42,000 unaccounted for, but Hays was exonerated in public opinion. The Post’s editors felt that now, even the most skeptic would see “Mr. Hays is worthy of the important situation which he has so long filled.”

Hays even had the support of the men he’d put behind bars, the Post reported. “While Smith [one of Honeyman’s aliases] and Murray were in prison, awaiting their trial, they were informed that Mr. Hays was openly charged with abstracting that part of the money which was missing. They expressed great indignation at so malignant an accusation and stated that the amount not found had been placed beyond the reach of Hays before Murray was arrested. It can hardly be supposed that any unworthy suspicions can now be attached to this meritorious public servant, who had passed the prime of his years in the discharge of an arduous and unpleasant duty.”

America’s First Bank Robbery The Saturday Evening Post

Batman and Robin devise an ingenious plan to escape a steamy death.

The year was 1966, and television was starting to take itself less seriously. Programs like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and The Wild Wild West were lightly satirizing action shows by introducing outlandish plots, ridiculous villains, and impossible gadgets.

No show took the concept of self-parody farther than Batman, which premiered in 1966. It purposely exaggerated every cliché of the detective story. Yet, as John Skow pointed out in his May 1966 Post article, it was among the most popular programs of its day. So popular that, when ABC interrupted an episode to report on the emergency return of the Gemini 8 space mission, the network was flooded with protests from outraged fans.

Batman quickly became more than just entertainment. It became the country’s biggest fad. References to the show popped up in conversation and worked their way into late-night talk shows. Everyone seemed to be enjoying this jokey version of a comic book hero. Sales of Batman merchandise in 1966 exceeded $75 million—about 60 percent more than James Bond merchandise had earned in any year.

Unlike the action hero Bond, Batman was purely a comic hero: a parody of every good guy on TV. He was improbably strong, brave, and virtuous to the point of being preachy, as in this typical exchange with a villain:

RIDDLER: “With you two out of the way, nothing stands between me and the Lost Treasure of the Incas … and it’s worth millions!! Hear me, Batman, millions!”

BATMAN: “Just remember, Riddler, you can’t buy friends with money.”

No laugh track accompanied such lines, but viewers quickly lost any doubt they were watching a comedy.

The look of the show—low-budget sets painted with comic-book colors—was heavily influenced by the Pop art craze. Starting in 1962, Pop artists used images from popular entertainment and advertising to ironically reflect American culture. (Remember Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can?) The show’s chief writer, Lorenzo Semple Jr., chose a Pop art style as his protest against conventional TV programming. Serious dramatic shows, he said, relied on semi-truths and evasion. “We started out to do a Pop-art thing and we’re doing it.”

The mocking of the superhero figure also reflected the rise of “camp” humor. Camp emphasized the cheap, gaudy, and sentimental elements of popular culture. It was never meant to ridicule. The purpose was to ‘make fun with’ not ‘make fun of’ popular icons. (However, Skow believed camp humor was “mean spirited … a jeering private laugh at anyone square enough to take the pretension seriously.”)

Another influence on Batman the TV show was the public reaction in the 1950s against violence in comic books. Responding to pressure from parents and educators, publishers established the Comics Code Authority, which prohibited any references to brutality and gore.

Batman administers a lie detector test to a suspect within his high-tech Batcave.

The show took the new comic code even farther by eliminating any hint of violence. Batman was no more dangerous than a pillow fight with very small pillows. The crimes, committed by a gallery of returning characters, would involve stealing something, or taking over Gotham City’s government (in order to steal something). No one was ever murdered on the show. There was nothing more brutal than “comic violence”—burlesqued fistfights in which the words “Pow,” “Bam,” and “Zap” appeared in large, comic-font letters. And Batman always triumphed in the end.

For a while, this satire on a popular comic book hero was a successful formula. By 1968, however, the novelty had worn off and the last show aired 45 years ago this week.

It wasn’t a bad run. The show had been an audacious gamble with viewers’ indulgence. It had assumed, as Skow expressed it, “there was nothing that could make the adult American television watcher feel silly.”

The year that Batman disappeared for the last time into his papier-mâché Batcave, a new crime-fighter rose to the top of the TV rating: the tough, dedicated, but always cool hip Steve McGarrett of Hawaii Five-O.

Batman, of course, didn’t disappear. The comic books are still in print, though they are less restrained in their use of death and violence. The movie versions have become increasingly morose. The most current version, starring Christian Bale, who may be returning in a Justice League movie, is a grim, solitary loner. The caped crusader of the 1960s would barely recognize himself today.

The Curious, Campy Success of Batman The Saturday Evening Post

Bad news may travel fast, but at the time of the Alamo siege, it rarely moved faster than the walking pace of a horse or the cruising speed of an early steamship.

So on April 9, 1836, readers must have thought the Post’s news from Texas appeared with unusual speed. A mere four weeks after the event, it reported the Mexican army was besieging the Alamo of San Antonio de Bexar and would likely obtain possession of the place.

The shocking news had barely sunk in when the next issue brought a report on the fall of the Alamo and the merciless slaughter of prisoners. Under the headline “Horrible Butchery, Highly Important from Texas,” the Post reported: “… On the 6th March, about midnight, the Alamo was assaulted by the whole force of the Mexican army, commanded by [Gen. Antonio López de] Santa Anna in person. The battle was desperate until daylight, when only 7 men belonging to the Texian Garrison were found alive, who cried for quarters, but were told that there was no mercy for them—they then continued fighting until the whole were butchered.

“… Gen. [Jim] Bowie was murdered in his bed sick and helpless. [The Mexican] General Cos, on entering the fort, ordered the servant of Col. Travis to point out the body of his master. [When] he did so, Cos drew his sword and mangled the face and limbs with the malignant feeling of a Comanche savage.”

General Antonio López de Santa Anna

The victory was as decisive as it was brutal, but Santa Anna’s success only inspired Texans to take arms against him. Hundreds of settlers who had previously refused to support the Texan army before now rushed to offer their services.

These settlers had moved from the U.S. into the Mexican territory of Texas at the invitation of the Mexican government. The leaders in Mexico City hoped they would develop its dry northern plains and build a buffer of loyal inhabitants between themselves and the United States. Under the Mexican Constitution of 1824, the government granted the American immigrants both land and a fair degree of autonomy.

By 1830, however, Santa Anna had become Mexico’s dictator. When he dissolved the country’s legislature, several states in Mexico rose up in rebellion. Santa Anna ruthlessly put down all opposition, and then turned his attention to the northeast and the Texans who showed little inclination to recognize any government.

He decided he could waste no time or mercy suppressing the rebellion, and so marched on San Antonio with 1,800 soldiers to confront a small army of Texans encamped at the Alamo. The commander of the garrison, Col. William Travis, sent out urgent pleas for reinforcements. One of the Texan commanders he was hoping would march over the horizon to his rescue was Col. J.W. Fanning. But Fanning had troubles of his own. As the Post reported: “Distressing news has reached us of the horrible massacre and butchery of the entire command of Col. Fanning, by the tyrant monster Santa Anna and his forces. … Col. F. being overpowered by the Mexicans … capitulated upon the promise of Santa Anna, that himself and soldiers should be treated as prisoners of war. But no sooner had the fiend of hell fastened them in his clutches than he secured their arms, and early next morning ordered them all to be shot.

“The men under the immediate command of Colonel Fanning were all killed but FIVE!” (“Late and Important from Texas,” May 7, 1836).

Post readers had only two weeks to digest this news when the conflict suddenly ended with a surprising victory. On May 28, under the headline “Particulars of the Capture of Santa Anna,” the Post gave a report of the battle at San Jacinto by a Col. Hockley of the Texan army: “We commenced the attack upon them at half-past 5 o’clock, P.M. by a hot fire from our artillery.

“We marched up within 175 yards, unlimbered our pieces and gave them the grape and canister, while our brave riflemen poured in their deadly fire. In fifteen minutes the enemy were flying in every direction, and were hotly pursued by us. They left 500 of their slain behind them.

“Never was there a victory more complete. Gen. Cos was taken and killed by a pistol ball from one of our men, who instantly recognized him.”

Santa Anna was pursued by the Texans for 15 miles until his horse became bogged down near the Brazos River. Abandoning his horse, he ran for the nearby woods with his pursuers close behind. Once among the trees, his trail disappeared. As the Post described these events in an article dated May 28, “The pursuers then spread themselves, and searched the woods for a long time in vain, when it occurred to an old hunter that the [escaping officer] might have ‘taken a tree.’ The tops were then examined, when lo! the game was snugly ensconced in the forks of a large live oak.

“The captors did not know who their prisoner was until they reach the camp, when the Mexican soldiers exclaimed, ‘El General, El Jefe! Santa Anna.’”

Gen. Houston did not execute Santa Anna in reprisal for his slaughter of prisoners, but held him hostage to prevent further actions by the Mexican army.

Santa Anna’s brutality, by general opinion, was both immoral and stupid. Yet he declared he had the right to execute prisoners. Hadn’t he issued a proclamation that branded all supporters of Texan independence to be pirates? Hadn’t he flown a red flag at the Alamo? Didn’t the Texans know this meant he would take no prisoners?

He felt no mercy to foreigners who crossed his border to build their own communities, speak their own language, become prosperous, and aspire to political power.

Santa Anna was eventually returned to Mexico, where he became president again. Breaking the conditions of his release from the U.S., he marched into Texas in 1842, was again defeated, then overthrown, captured, and sent into exile in Cuba. He returned in 1846, declared himself president, was overthrown, and went into exile again. In 1853, he once more returned to Mexico and named himself dictator-for-life. Within a year, he was removed from power, and went into exile. In 1869, he died in New York while trying to raise money for an army that would return him to power.

How the Post Reported the Alamo Story The Saturday Evening Post

On New Year’s Day, Congress finally, at the very last moment, passed the fiscal cliff legislation that saved the economy from free fall. Everyone on every side of the negotiations made sacrifices to make it happen. Or so it seemed. But one pharmaceutical company got wording stuck in the bill that will bring it hundreds of millions of dollars over the next couple of years.

The law ensures that Amgen, the world’s largest biotechnology business, will have two years to sell its dialysis pill Sensipar without any limits on what Medicare has to pay for it, even though the fiscal cliff bill is supposed to save $4.9 billion over 10 years by reducing overpayments for dialysis drugs and treatments. Exempting Sensipar from those controls will cost Medicare as much as $500 million.

How did the company arrange such a windfall? The provision requested by Amgen was added to the final draft of the legislation by Senate staff members, according to published reports. Why? Amgen has no fewer than 74 lobbyists in Washington, including the former chiefs of staff of both Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and Sen. Max Baucus. It has contributed more than $5 million to candidates and their political action committees since 2007. Those lobbyists had repeated meetings with senators’ staffers in the fall. Critics contend that bowing to special interests is part of the reason for our current dilemma.

“Sadly, the lawmaker-lobbyist cabal has once again acted to serve their own financial interests; continuing to place patients at risk and passing the costs on to the taxpayer,” Dennis J. Cotter, a health policy researcher in metropolitan Washington, D.C., told the Post.

Amgen is a very big lobbying presence in Washington, but there’s nothing that special about it. Just about every business there is, from AAI Corporation to Zurich Financial, has its lobbyists prowling the halls of Congress, doing everything they can to serve their industries’ purposes, sometimes at the expense of the greater good. So does just about every special interest group.

Lobbying is a huge business. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, there were 12,051 registered lobbyists in Washington in 2012, and they spent a total of $2.47 billion trying to get government officials to do their bidding. The biggest spender of all? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which forked out almost $96 million on lobbying, followed by the National Association of Realtors, $26 million. One of the top industry sectors? Health, which spent $365 million—more than 10 times as much as organized labor.

How can so much money flowing around the nation’s capital not corrupt? It certainly does, and the revolving door between Congress and K Street, the main street of lobbying, is not just a myth. Almost two-thirds of all lobbying, in dollars spent, involves former congressional staffers. Is such a situation excusable? Should it even be legal?

Absolutely. In fact, it’s necessary. And even the founding fathers knew it. Our most revered, sacred law of all enshrines it. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution doesn’t just guarantee freedom of speech and religion. It says, in full,

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Those final words are what allows lobbying. As crucial as is our right to talk freely and worship freely, so is our right to present our concerns to Congress, and to “assemble” to do so—that is, to join forces as part of a special interest group. That’s how government works. Lobbying is as much a part of what makes representative government tick as voting or town hall meetings.

Furthermore, lobbying has evolved over time from a shady and secretive business, where outright bribes were commonplace, to a heavily regulated one, where transparency rules and where the great majority of lobbyists are open and forthright about what they do and how much they spend and why. As enormous a presence as lobbying has become in Washington (and there’s lobbying in every state capital and county and town, too), it is far more civilized and controlled and honorable today than it ever used to be. At various times, laws have been passed to make it more so, when its evils have become too undeniable.

During the very first Congress, in the 1790s, a senator wrote that a lobbyist had said “he would give [Rep. John] Vining a 1,000 Guineas for his Vote, but … he might get it for a 10th part of the Sum.” Men were already descending on Congress to try to influence votes on taxes, federal workers’ pay, veterans’ benefits, and other matters. One of the biggest earliest lobbying interests was the Bank of the United States, a quasi-government institution with enemies that included Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Its lobbyists’ activities grew so pernicious and yet accepted that in December 1833 Sen. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts wrote to the bank’s president, “I believe my retainer has not been renewed, or refreshed, as usual. If it be wished that my relation to the bank should be continued, it may be well to send me the usual retainer.” Could Tony Soprano demand a payoff more bluntly?

That’s not all Tony Soprano could relate to. According to the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd, who made a study of lobbying in the early United States, “clubs, brothels, and ‘gambling dens’ became natural habitats of the lobbyists, since these institutions were occasionally visited by members of Congress, who, far from home, came seeking good food, drink, and agreeable company.”

By 1869 a newspaper columnist could write this lurid description: “Winding in and out through the long, devious basement passage, crawling through the corridors, trailing its slimy length from gallery to committee room, at last it lies stretched at full length on the floor of Congress—this dazzling reptile, this huge, scaly serpent of the lobby.”

What exactly was the serpent up to? America’s first big industry, the railroad, was growing fast at the time, and it begat America’s first big organized lobbying effort. Laying rails across the country involved getting major government land grants and subsidies, and railroad barons hired hundreds of lobbyists at a time. Their work included giving lawmakers passes for free train travel and even cash payouts. The early railroad lobby reached an ugly peak in the Crédit Mobilier scandal of 1872, when senators and congressmen were given free railroad stock in return for passing railroad-favorable laws.

Learning to Love Our Lobbyist Friends The Saturday Evening Post