On a blue afternoon toward the end of October in 1959, a number of notables gathered at 1071 Fifth Avenue in the city of New York. They were met to dedicate the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Aside from a motor salesroom on Park Avenue, this mass of concrete was the city’s only example of work by the world’s most famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. Therefore its opening was an occasion for oratory, and thousands of citizens waited behind barricades while the men of distinction sounded off. The mercifully short speeches ended by 2 p.m., and the patient public shuffled in to view the wonders of the Guggenheim.
The visitors saw an enormous circular room, 75 feet high, topped by a dome of geometrically patterned glass. Around and above them a gently graded ramp rose for seven stories, its walls affording exhibition space for 120 pictures from the museum’s collection of contemporary art. Places to sit and rest the feet tormented by the ramp’s hard marble flooring were scarcer than teetotalers at a brew master’s ball. Few of the visitors complained of this discomfort, or of anxiety that might be caused by the lowness of the parapets around the looming void between the ledges, for all knew that something fundamental and astounding was here. Instead of strolling from room to room, as in every museum hitherto known to man, they were “enjoying an experience in the continuity of space.”
As they flowed downward and outward, the visitors exclaimed: “Thrilling!” “Grand!” “An indescribable joy!” Among professional critics, the enthusiasm was equally great. … The New York Herald Tribune summed it up by reporting that the Guggenheim had “turned out to be the most beautiful building in America.”
Wright or wrong: With the Guggenheim — a symphony of triangles, ovals, arcs, circles, and squares — Wright dispensed with conventional museum design. One newspaper called it “the most beautiful building in America,” but many hated it. Shutterstock
There were those who disapproved. These objectors called Wright’s work a washing machine, a marshmallow, a cupcake, a corkscrew, an imitation beehive, and an inverted oatmeal dish.
A bystander paraphrased Kipling by murmuring, “It’s ugly — but is it art?” And the New York Mirror published an editorial titled “THE MONSTROSITY,” calling on the Guggenheims to “prove their love for New York by tearing the thing down.”
Amid the controversial publicity surrounding the dedication of the Guggenheim, one thing was clear — Frank Lloyd Wright had achieved fame beyond any American artist. In fact, he was one of the most renowned Americans in any line of work, recognized as promptly as a champion athlete or a television star. People got to their feet when he entered a room, as though before royalty. And, his stock answer to the question, “Which do you consider the greatest of your buildings?”
“The next one,” Wright would reply with a twinkle. “Always the next one.”
—“Frank Lloyd Wright: Defiant Genius” by Finis Farr, January 1961.
This article is featured in the May/June 2017 issue ofThe Saturday Evening Post.Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.
RIP Chuck Berry, Jimmy Breslin, Chuck Barris, David Rockefeller, James Cotton, Derek Walcott, Colin Dexter, Lawrence Montaigne, Robert Day
What else do you need to say about Chuck Berry except that he was one of the inventors of rock ’n’ roll? When you think of rock in the ’50s one of the songs you think about is probably “Johnny B. Goode,” later made famous for a younger audience in Back to the Future. His other classics include “Rock and Roll Music,” “Sweet Little 16,” “School Day,” “No Particular Place to Go,” and many others.
If Berry was the classic rock ’n’ roller then Jimmy Breslin was the classic newspaperman. The Pulitzer Prize winner wrote a column for The New York Daily News for 50 years, focusing on the everyday workers of New York City. It’s a cliché to say that we probably won’t see another guy quite like Breslin, but we probably won’t see another guy quite like Breslin. He wrote for The Saturday Evening Post too, including this 1965 humor piece about credit cards and this account of Jackie Kennedy’s final moments with JFK in Dallas.
David Rockefeller was a billionaire, philanthropist, banker, and member of one of the country’s most famous families. He ran the family bank, Chase, for many years, and along with his brother Nelson, governor of New York, was instrumental in getting the World Trade Center towers built. He was the grandson of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller. He died Monday at the age of 101.
James Cotton was a legendary blues harmonica player who performed and recorded with Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Santana, the Grateful Dead, Keith Richards, and many others over his seven-decade career. He passed away last week at the age of 81.
Lawrence Montaigne was an actor who appeared on several shows, including two episodes of the original Star Trek, where he played both a Vulcan and a Romulan. He was actually going to replace Leonard Nimoy in the second season if Nimoy had accepted an offer to join Mission: Impossible, but Nimoy decided to stay (he joined Mission: Impossible when Star Trek ended). He also appeared on shows like Batman, The Outer Limits, Lassie, I Spy, The Fugitive, and Dallas, as well as movies such as The Great Escape. Montaigne passed away last week at the age of 86.
Robert Day was a veteran movie and TV director. He directed the films First Man into Space, The Haunted Strangler, Two-Way Stretch, along with four Tarzan movies, and TV shows like The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Buccaneers, The Avengers, The Invaders, The F.B.I., Bracken’s World, The Streets of San Francisco, and Matlock. He died last Friday at the age of 94.
How Does a Thimble Become a Dinosaur?
I haven’t played Monopoly in years, but like most people I wanted to be the race car. I mean, who, if given a choice, would want to be the thimble? Maybe someone who sews.
If you didn’t care for the thimble, you’re in luck. After a poll, Parker Brothers has replaced that piece, along with the wheelbarrow and the boot. Instead of those pieces — hey, I kind of liked that boot! — we’re going to see a T-Rex, a rubber duck, and a penguin (and no, I have no idea why they call it a “rubber” duck and not just a duck). They’ll join the surviving pieces: the car, the dog, the top hat, the battleship, and the cat, so you might have a dinosaur and battleship square off, which I’m sure will be the basis for that Monopoly movie.
I’m reading a book of essays by Phyllis McGinley titled Sixpence in Her Shoe. It came out in 1963 and was a response to what people like Betty Friedan and other feminists were saying and publishing at the time. McGinley was a housewife and proud of it, and actually celebrated domesticity and suburban life. She also happened to be an acclaimed poet, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 for her collection Times Three and writing several children’s books and poetry for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and she wrote quite a bit for The Saturday Evening Post. It’s a shame that her books have gone out of print and she’s pretty much forgotten now (even though she was on the cover of Time at one point). But one of her books is remembered and celebrated every December: She wrote the original story for The Year Without a Santa Claus, the basis for the animated holiday TV classic of the same name.
Her birthday is March 21, which also happens to be World Poetry Day. On that day CNN anchor Jake Tapper posted this on Twitter. I don’t know much about poetry, but I like McGinley.
The iconic children’s show Sesame Street has debuted a new character. She has orange hair and her name is Julia. She also happens to be autistic.
I grew up watching Sesame Street and I learned a lot from it, not just basic knowledge like words and math and why some puppets like to live in trash cans, but also how to treat people. A character like this could really help kids understand.
Julia was already a character in Sesame Street books and stories, and producers decided to also add her to the TV show, which now runs first on HBO and then on PBS several months later.
This Week in History
Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty” Speech (March 23, 1775)
Here’s the full text and the story behind Henry’s famous “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!” speech. It was given at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia.
Harry Houdini Born (March 24, 1874)
When I was a kid I was obsessed with Harry Houdini. I read every book I could find on the magician, and at one point even thought of becoming a magician like Houdini (without all of the “escape from a milk container filled with water while handcuffed” stuff). Check out Saturday Evening Post Archives Director Jeff Nilsson’s article on Houdini and “The Art and Crime of Illusion.”
This Week inSaturday Evening PostHistory:First CrocusCover (March 22, 1947)
First Crocus Norman Rockwell March 22, 1947
I’m not entirely sure what a “crocus” is. It almost sounds like a car. Introducing the Ford Crocus, new for 2017! Anyway, 50 years ago this week the Norman Rockwell work appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. Read the story behind the cover here.
Pecan Day
Pecans? Not a fan. Almonds? Sure. Peanuts? Yup. Cashews? Great! But I never got a taste for pecans, really. I was going to make a joke that someone should do an ad campaign for pecans with the slogan “YES PECAN!” but something like that already happened.
Maybe I’ll try these sugar-coated pecans. Even though I’m not a pecan fan, I find that most things are improved when you cover them in sugar.
Next Week’s Holidays and Events
National Doctors’ Day (March 30)
This is the day when we honor the men and women who keep us alive. If you happen to have an appointment on this day, maybe you can bring your doctor some of those sugar-coated pecans.
World Backup Day (March 31)
If you’re like me, you often forget to back up the files you have on your computer (I once lost an entire novel I wrote because I didn’t have another copy). Today’s the day to remember to do that. Well, every day is the day to remember that, but maybe after an official day to remind us, we’ll actually start doing it. And I don’t mean just a cloud backup.
This article and other features about the early automobile can be found in the Post’s Special Collector’s Edition: Automobiles in America!
In this 1922 essay, the author points out that the vast changes underway to accommodate the automobile were about to vastly alter the character of towns across America, as was already happening in cities like New York and Chicago. But far from lamenting the coming changes, the writer describes them as essential to progress.
Tomorrow you may not know your own city. They have probably begun altering it already, or are planning to do so. Tomorrow your city will have wide boulevards cut through its narrow streets. These will accommodate four, six, and eight lines of traffic. They will start at the center and run miles out into the country. Thousands of buildings will be torn down. Sharp street corners will be rounded off and the circle and crescent take the place of the checkerboard.
Did your city fathers, years ago, lay out a downtown boulevard or two with a strip of parkway in the center? That beauty spot will be needed for traffic. Slums and tenements will disappear too. There will be a general grading up of living standards and an equalization of real-estate values.
When you drive a car the traffic cop will no longer be able to bawl you out, for he will disappear from street crossings, guiding traffic by electric signals from a point where he can see everything but say nothing — that is, if he doesn’t disappear altogether.
When you go for a walk it will be a far safer and more comfortable form of exercise than today, for the bulk of automobile traffic will either be transferred to elevated roads for automobiles alone, or disappear into tunnels. The trolley cars will disappear underground or be replaced by buses, which are not only more flexible than the trolley, dodging in and out of traffic, but are more flexible in routing.
Your city will be linked with others all over the state and country by great trunk motor highways, with lighted traffic signals, and perhaps traffic officers. Much of the motor travel between cities will be out of sight, on separate highways that do not enter the towns at all, but skirt them.
The automobile is at the bottom of all these changes. With the number of cars increasing to, in some cases, one for every two families, our cities have developed street traffic comparable with high blood pressure.
“Say, that thing’ll never be practical!” exclaimed a New Yorker when he first saw a horseless carriage. “Why, a man has to go ahead of it with a red flag!” Within five years he was driving an automobile himself. When horses and pedestrians became accustomed to the automobile, the man with the red flag was no longer necessary. But today he is again walking ahead, figuratively, as the traffic policeman. This is fundamentally wrong. “Speed limits on the automobile are a paradox,” says a New York trade-journal publisher. He writes: “The automobile is designed to run fast. That is its whole function, attraction, and service. Limit it, and you lose all its benefits. Speed limits and traffic control have become necessary because we have not yet learned to separate the automobile from slower traffic, and give it highways of its own.”
Few of our cities were really planned — for the most part they just happened — and even the best city plans of our fathers and grandfathers have been outgrown. The cowpath origin of city streets is familiar and amusing. People delight in its absurdities, getting lost in Boston’s old waterfront mazes, and verifying the fact that Pearl Street, in lower New York, crosses Broadway twice. A cowpath town was often most convenient for getting about, so long as everything was built within walking distance, allowing goods to be delivered by wheelbarrow. When it got larger, the cowpath section was extended on a checkerboard plan providing for growth, but usually with streets too narrow for present-day traffic, and with far too few parks and breathing places. If granddad was very farsighted he laid down a combination of checkerboard and turnpike, as in Washington and Indianapolis, the turnpikes radiating like the spokes of a wheel, providing lines of growth, and also highways by which farmers could bring in food from the surrounding country.
In general there are only these three kinds of towns, cowpath, checkerboard, and cartwheel. A cowpath town tends to congestion at the center rather than healthy growth at the radius, and makes dandy slums. The checkerboard town grows faster. The cartwheel town grows fastest of all, and most evenly and healthily.
Today we have better information than previous generations upon which to plan cities for the future. But we are dealing with city difficulties piecemeal. When traffic begins to tangle at a certain corner, we put a policeman at that corner to straighten traffic out. The tangle spreads up and down as traffic grows. We put more policemen on more corners, then lift them into towers and organize control in units of five or 10 blocks. But mere streets become impossible for handling all the traffic. Street cars, automobiles, motor trucks, horse vehicles, and pedestrians must be separated and given their own right-of-way where none can hamper or endanger the others.
—“Your Town Tomorrow,”
The Saturday Evening Post, April 1, 1922
1895: Vroom! Frank Duryea wins first U.S. auto race, besting field of six. Average speed is 7.5 mph in breakdown-plagued event. Automobile Racing Fousey October 23, 1909
Motoring milestones and other features about the early automobile can be found in the Post’s Special Collector’s Edition: Automobiles in America!
The Inventors
1885 Click it. Edward J. Claghorn of New York receives patent for seat belt.
1887 It still spills all over his shoes. First gas pump is patented by one Sylvanus Freelove Bowser.
1891 Range: 50 miles. Top speed: 20 mph. First successful electric car built in U.S. by William Morrison.
1895 Gasoline firsts. Duryea Motor Wagon Company is earliest company formed to build gas-powered cars. (But Winton claims first auto sale).
1896 Officer, I didn’t see her coming. In the first recorded auto accident, a Duryea Motor Wagon strikes a woman on a bike, breaking her leg. Driver spends night in jail.
1898 Going without the “Flo.” First auto insurance policy is purchased by Dr. Truman Martin of Buffalo, New York. $5,000 in liability coverage costs him $12.25.
Doing the best they can. New York City Police Department uses bicycles to chase speeding motorists.
1901 Rules of the road. Connecticut enacts first speed limit law for motorists — 12 mph in the city and 15 mph on country roads.
1903 A real adventure! Horatio Nelson Jackson and Sewell K. Crocker are first to drive cross country. 64-day trip is made in Winton Touring Car.
What’s in a number? Massachusetts is first state to issue license plate. It’s made of porcelain.
I can see clearly now. Inventor Mary Anderson develops first windshield wiper. Manual device is operated by a handle. Automatic wipers would arrive in 1917.
1901: Economies of scale. R.E. Olds (not Henry Ford) established first automobile assembly line to build the tiller-steered Curved Dash Oldsmobile. It sells for $650. Oldsmobile advertisement originally appeared in the Post on May 5, 1906
1904 Pull over! First paper speeding ticket is issued in Dayton, Ohio, to Harry Myers for going 12 mph in a 5 mph zone.
Pull over, part deux. U.S. surpasses France in car production.
1905 Temptation for speedsters. H.H. Buffum produces first American V8.
Dirty rags and all. First purpose-built U.S. gas station is recorded in St. Louis.
1909 POTUS gets a lift. The first official White House car is a 1909 White Steamer, ordered by President Taft, over congressional objections about cost and safety.
Ahead of her time. 22-year-old Alice Ramsey is first woman to drive cross country. Trip is made in Maxwell DA touring car and takes 59 days.
The Innovators
Birth of a classic. The first running of the Indy 500. Winner Ray Harroun averages 74.6 mph.
Watch out behind you! The first rearview mirror is used by Harroun in Indy 500. (Other drivers placed their mechanic in the backseat to keep an eye out for cars coming from behind.)
1913: The moving assembly line is born. Henry Ford’s Model T chassis assembly time is reduced from 12.5 to 1.5 hours allowing Ford to increase wages and drop price in later years. Model-T
1913 Chevrolet makes its marque. The iconic bow-tie emblem appears for the first time on 1914 models.
1914 Hard bodies. Dodge introduces first car body made entirely of steel.
Cadillac produces its signature V8. Known as the L-head, the engine is first mass-produced, water-cooled V8.
It’s a machine, but you have to obey it anyway. Cleveland installs first electric traffic light.
1915 Noise ordinance to follow. The first car to get the horn button in the center of the steering wheel is the Scripps-Booth Model C. In another first, the car sports electric door latches.
Now that’s power! Packard’s Twin-Six is first production car to offer a V12. The car, used in Italy during WWI, would later inspire Enzo Ferrari to design a V12 of his own.
Elderly Couple in Automobile Robert Robinson January 11, 1913
1916 Federal Aid Road Act. President Wilson signs law giving federal aid for state highway costs.
Ford leads the way. As prices drop and production surges on the Model T, Ford captures 55 percent of the auto market. The record has never been beaten.
1918 Stop, go, and huh? First tri-color stoplight is installed. In Detroit, of course.
Cars for All
1921 Design fails to include arches. The first drive-in restaurant in the U.S., J.G. Kirby and Reuben W. Jackson’s Pig Stand, opens in Dallas.
No umbrella? No problem. Hudson introduces the Essex Coach, the first affordable enclosed sedan, marking the beginning of a shift away from open vehicles. By the end of the decade, nearly 90 percent of all cars feature a closed carriage.
1922 Huge difference in stopping power. The Duesenberg is first to offer four-wheel hydraulic brakes.
Finally, a car for the whole family. The first production station wagon is offered by Star, a division of Durant Motors.
They didn’t reckon on Howard Stern. The radio is offered as an accessory for the first time.
1925 Sleepover date! First motel opens in San Luis Obispo, California.
Dogs and kids in the back. The first factory-assembled pickup truck is based on the Model T, but with rear cargo box. It sells for $281.
Flapper and Roadster Coles Phillips September 23, 1922
1926 Easy turning. Pierce-Arrow is first to be outfitted with power steering.
1927 15 million sold. The Model T, by the end of its run, hits a sales milestone.
New kid in town. Ford replaces the Model T with its (second) Model A, powered by a four-cylinder 40 hp motor. The car sports innovations such as safety-glass windshield, roll-up side windows, and three-speed transmission.
1928 Lincoln Highway completed. First road to span America, running from New York to San Francisco.
Move Over Ford. Chevrolet takes over as the No. 1 selling car company in the United States. Chevy would also hold that honor from 1931 to 1934 and would be No. 1 in sales every year from 1936 to 1976 (excepting 1957). Chevrolet advertisement originally appeared in the Post on August 3, 1929
The Classic Era
1930 Power surge! Cadillac 452 series is first production V16.
Hey! Slow down! There is still no speed limit in 12 states.
Whiz kid. Billy Arnold crosses 100 mph barrier at Indy 500: average speed 100.448 mph.
Anything for the record books. Charles Creighton and James Hargis drive roundtrip from New York to Los Angeles using only reverse gear. The trip, in a Ford Roadster, takes 42 days.
1932 Bigger is better! Ford introduces its famous flathead motor. The V8 becomes an option in the Model B and 18. Later that year it becomes an option in Ford trucks.
1933: Something else you can do in the car. The first drive-in movie theater opens in Camden, New Jersey. Moonlit Car Ride, Eugene Iverd, January 7, 1933
1934 No such thing as bad publicity. Bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrows endorse the 1934 Ford Model 730 Deluxe Sedan: “I have drove Fords exclusively when I could get away with one. It has got every other car skinned, and even if my business hasn’t been strictly legal it don’t hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V-8.” Ford responds with thank-you note.
1935 The original one-armed bandits. The first parking meters go into service in Oklahoma City.
Strength in numbers. United Auto Workers union is formed.
The hard part is remembering to switch them off. Flashing turn signals introduced. (They become standard on Buicks in 1938.)
1936 Rig Leader. Ford is tops in truck sales with 3 million units sold.
1937 Song to follow. Route 66 completed.
1939 Look ma, no hands! GM introduces first fully automatic transmission, the Hydra-Matic Drive, in its 1940 Oldsmobile models.
This article from the February 8, 1930, issue of the Saturday Evening Post was featured in the Post’s Special Collector’s Edition: Automobiles in America!
In 1930, Alexander Winton, by then one of the legends of the auto industry, wrote this article for the Post about the wild early days when even promoting the idea of a self-propelling machine would make you the object of ridicule. Winton was a bicycle maker, and as he writes below, he soon became infatuated with the idea of a bicycle that “a rider wouldn’t have to push and keep pushing.” In 1896, he founded the Winton Motor Carriage company, and soon began turning out cars at the dizzying rate of four per year. He would sell his first car in 1897 — arguably the first automobile sold in the U.S. — for the princely sum of $1,000.
There has been much argument as to who made the first automobile in this country. My own conviction is that the honor belongs to Charles E. Duryea. I began serious experiments in 1893, and I am sure Duryea was conducting them prior to that year. But whether Duryea built the first automobile or whether he didn’t, the fact remains I built, and sold, the first American- made gasoline car.
The exact date of the sale was March 24, 1898, and about a week later — on April 1, 1898 — I received payment and shipped the car to its new owner, Robert Allison, a mechanical engineer of Port Carbon, Pennsylvania. I bought it back after Allison had used it a few years, and it is now in the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington.
When I first contemplated the application of gasoline for vehicles, I had a bicycle plant in Cleveland. Because bikes interested me, my mind naturally turned to something a rider wouldn’t have to push and keep pushing if he was trying to get some place. But the great obstacle to the development of the automobile was the lack of public inter- est. To advocate replacing the horse, which had served man through centuries, marked one as an imbecile. Things are very different today. But in the ’90s, even though I had a successful bicycle business, and was building my first car in the privacy of the cellar in my home, I began to be pointed out as “the fool who is fiddling with a buggy that will run without being hitched to a horse.” My banker called on me to say: “Winton, I am disappointed in you.”
That riled me, but I held my temper as I asked, “What’s the matter with you?” He bellowed: “There’s nothing the matter with me. It’s you! You’re crazy if you think this fool contraption you’ve been wasting your time on will ever displace the horse.”
From my pocket I took a clipping from the New York World of November 17, 1895, and asked him to read it. He brushed it aside. I insisted. It was an interview with Thomas A. Edison: “Talking of horseless carriage suggests to my mind that the horse is doomed. The bicycle, which, 10 years ago, was a curiosity, is now a necessity. It is found everywhere. Ten years from now you will be able to buy a horseless vehicle for what you would pay today for a wagon and a pair of horses. The money spent in the keep of the horses will be saved and the danger to life will be much reduced.”
“It is only a question of a short time when the carriages and trucks of every large city will be run by motors. The expense of keeping and feeding horses in a great city like New York is very heavy, and all this will be done away with. You must remember that every invention of this kind which is made adds to the general wealth by introducing a new system of greater economy of force. A great invention which facilitates commerce, enriches a country just as much as the discovery of vast hoards of gold.”
The banker threw back the clipping and snorted, “Another inventor talking.”
Wild Ideas
In the uncertainty of what the public would want, a great many strange contraptions were put together. Joseph Barsaleaux, a blacksmith of Sandy Hill, New York, built a motor horse. In his device, the horse moved on a single wheel about two feet in diameter, with the wheel attached to the shafts just as was a live horse. Reins attached to the mouth of the horse served as a steering gear, because the machinery was inside the horse and had to be regulated some way. The contraption weighed about 550 pounds, had a cruising speed of six miles an hour, and attracted some serious attention.
In Washington there was a vehicle which gained its power by using compressed city gas. George Elrick of Joliet, Illinois, was busy with an engine having no wheels or gears and which manufactured its own gas as it went along. D.I. Lybe of Sidney, Iowa, was the owner of patents on a spring-motor device which stored energy running downhill and used it going uphill, while on level ground he claimed his vehicle would cover 2,000 feet at a maximum speed of 30 miles an hour. Compressed air and superheated water were to be employed by another company. At the time there was more money and in uence back of that idea than was behind all the gasoline-car manufacturers put together.
Cars with steam propulsion came in — not one or two but more than 100. Electric vehicles clogged the market, but in the end, public opinion turned to gasoline because it was clean, safe, and dependable.
In spite of my banker’s displeasure, I went ahead with my model and finally had it in such shape that I thought it would run. All I needed to finish the job was a set of tires. I went to the Goodrich Company, in Akron, and told them I wanted something bigger than their biggest bicycle tire, something that would fit the wheels of a horseless carriage.
“That’s a new one on us,” cried a man to whom I had been directed.
“A horseless carriage, eh? Hmph! Will it run?”
“You bet it will.”
“Well, I guess we can make them, although we never have.”
“That’s fine.”
The man hesitated, rubbed his chin, and observed: “We will make them, but you will have to pay for the molds.”
“Do what?”
“Yes, sir. There won’t be enough call for tires for horseless carriages, and we can’t afford to pay for the molds. Also, you will have to pay for them in advance — and the tires too. We’ll have them on our hands if you don’t get them.”
I paid.
They were single-tube affairs, and were pretty expensive. It wasn’t long before I got a puncture, and while I thought of patching the tire I figured out what I considered a better idea. Molasses was heavy and would stop leaks if they weren’t too large, so I began pumping it into the tube. I pumped too hard. The rubber gave way and the molasses came out too quickly to be dodged.
The First Road Trip
The tinkerer: Alexander Winton in the office of his bicycle plant in Cleveland, 1893.
That first car worked pretty well, but I saw so many things wrong with it that I started another, using part of my bicycle factory for the work. I foresaw a future in automobiles and tried to interest some people in starting a manufacturing plant. Failing in that, I decided to go on a long trip, hoping attention would be attracted to the machine.
In July 1897, I confided in a friend: “I am going to drive my horseless carriage from Cleveland to New York. I am inviting you to come with me.”
He laughed at me. I sought another friend.
On the morning of July 28, 1897, Bert Hatcher and I left Cleveland. The Horseless Age, one of the few motor publications of that time, wrote about us this way: “Combining business with recreation, Alexander Winton left Cleveland with a companion in a new motor carriage on the morning of July 28, and after a leisurely journey he reached New York City Saturday, August 7. From Mr. Winton’s account, no greater test could have been given the machine as, to use his own words, ‘the roads were simply outrageous.’ Fully two weeks of rainy weather had preceded him on the journey, and in many places the mud and water were hub deep, and in some places the sand was equally as bad. He traveled fully 800 miles, and the best day’s run was 150 miles. The machine consumed on an average of six gallons of gasoline a day, which would be little more than half a cent a mile for the trip. Much interest was shown by the people on the road and especially by those in the mountains.”
Hatcher and I did not return by motor. We had blisters enough. You may wonder why, on this first trip ever attempted by an automobile over a long distance, we were able to complete a day’s journey on an average of six gallons of gasoline. The fuel was more volatile in those days, and we had a low-speed motor. The present high-speed motor uses a great deal more fuel, but it is a more adaptable engine for the needs of modern travel.
In those days there were no gasoline stations, and the only place the fuel could be purchased was in a drug store. If, by chance, the druggist had a gallon of it, we were happy. Seldom were we able to buy in such a large quantity and usually we had to be content with a pint or a quart.
But aside from generous newspaper space, the trip attracted no attention. I waited for months, but no financiers came to put their tall silk hats on my desk.
Finally, however, the afternoon came when an assistant told me: “Mr. Metcalf is waiting to see you.”
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know.”
I hesitated, then said; “Send him in.”
The man came in and introduced himself. “My name is Irving D. Metcalf. I am from Oberlin College.”
“A professor?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You want to see my horseless carriage?”
“Yes, I do.”
“There it is” — and I jerked my thumb over my shoulder to indicate the machine standing in a corner of the room.
I turned to resume some sketching I was doing when I heard Mr. Metcalf say: “Would you mind explaining it to me? I’ve read so much about that machine that I’m convinced you have a good thing and, if you have no objections, I’d like to invest a little money with you.”
I wasted no time in accompanying him to the machine and explaining its workings.
“How many can you build and sell the first year?” he finally asked.
“Four.”
“Sell me some stock?“
“If you want it!”
“How much can you spare?”
I almost held my breath. “Five thousand dollars’ worth.”
“All right.”
Winton, January 24, 1903
Up to that time no company had been organized to build and sell a gasoline automobile.
Not in this country, at least. So Metcalf became the first outside holder of stock in such a company.
We did not know where our customers would come from, but we were sure they would come. We started building four machines, and when one was finished, Robert Allison, hearing that I was manufacturing automobiles, came to Cleveland.
He wanted a ride. I told him to hop in, and then proceeded to give the first of many millions of demonstrations that since have preceded the sale of automobiles. We started out about noon and did not return until after supper. During the afternoon he had me drive to a dozen places where friends of his were working, and from each he sought advice. After each stop he had a new set of questions, but apparently I answered them satisfactorily, for when we returned to the factory he asked: “How much do you want for this carriage?”
“One thousand dollars.”
“I’ll buy it.”
Within a short time we sold the other three machines, getting $1,000 apiece. Our profit on each was $400. By the end of 1898 we had built and sold 25 carriages, and this was such an amazing production that no one believed it. I had to publish a statement telling the names of the owners and when their machines had been delivered.
We were beginning to show a return on the original in- vestment, to build a business, and to start a gigantic industry. Those were vastly different days in manufacturing to what we now have. We had no long lines of broaching machines, multiple drills, cylinder grinders; no endless chains moving along parts to points needed. There was little of the time-saving of modern manufacturing methods. We had to develop to meet those demands, and in starting off, our tools consisted of the standard drills and lathes, plus good mechanics. Every workman we had in those days was a good mechanic. He could not hold a job unless he was. He didn’t spend his days or his years putting on a nut here or a screw there. If we needed spark plugs, he had to jump in and make them. He had to know how to ream out a cylinder. All argument to the contrary, I believe American life has lost something in the passing of the good mechanic and the widespread adoption of the automatic machine. For one thing, men have lost much of their usefulness to themselves. But that is beside the point.
No Secrets
We used foundry castings for cylinder blocks and, usually, the castings came to us with holes in them. Such a thing as rejecting the castings never occurred to us; we were too glad to get them, because foundry men weren’t entirely sold on the idea of making them. We plugged the holes with cast iron and said nothing. We made our own spark plugs — first out of mica, and then out of porcelain. Steering wheels were individualized ideas, not standardized equipment. One day Henry Ford came to Cleveland with a racing car. He had a steering wheel he had made himself and which spun around a number of times before he could get the car going in the desired direction. “Ford” I told him, “you are going to kill yourself with that thing.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because you can’t control your car with it.”
He allowed as though I might be right.
“You know I’m right,” I told him, and added I would send him blueprints of the wheel and gear I was using.
He thanked me, but instead of sending him the blue prints, I boxed up a complete outfit and shipped it to Detroit. He found plenty of use for it. The steering wheel was one of my early patents, and it was the same wheel that came into later and general use. It is but one of more than a hundred patents I hold on different parts for automobiles.
I believe I am entitled to say I have never collected a cent in royalties from them, nor will I. Lawyers have tried to argue me into bringing suits for infringements, but it so happened we pioneers always worked together. We loaned ideas. We loaned tools. We loaned patents. If we worked out a good idea, we loaned that. You see, some 20 years ago there was a man named George Baldwin Selden, a lawyer and inventor living in Rochester, New York, who caused a lot of trouble and expense to the automobile industry by bringing suit against all of us for the infringement of a patent that had been granted him on May 8, 1879. His patent covered a machine containing the essential principles of an automobile.
He tried to interest various persons in his idea, failed for years, and then entered into an agreement with William C. Whitney, an Eastern capitalist, on November 4, 1899, under which he turned over exclusive rights to his idea. Whitney purchased control of the Electric Vehicle Company and then began a vigorous enforcement of his claims. The Winton company was the first to be attacked because it was the largest, and though we put up a vigorous defense, we lost the first court fight. We appealed the case and, while waiting to be again heard, entered into an agreement with other manufacturers to pay certain royalties to Selden and Whitney.
For years Selden was in the courts, until, in January 1911, in the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, the validity of the Selden patent was upheld, but the defendant — the Ford Motor Company — was held to be not liable, because it was manufacturing a motor of a type known as the Otto engine, whereas Selden’s claims described one known as the Brayton type.
All of us were following the Otto principles, so that decision relieved us of further contributions to Selden and his backers. But the unpleasantness of all those suits brought together the manufacturers for an exchange of ideas and mutual protection. I am still old-fashioned and believe it was a good thing.
Self-Reliance
We made our own radiators. These cooling devices were nothing more than banks of tubes through which water could ow. During summer months, on Saturdays and after-school hours, we used to have boys come in and string square tin washers, with a jagged hole punched in the center of each, on the tubes. When the washers were all in place we would dip the tubes in solder so as to make them one part.
We made our own carburetors. The first device used was a tube which went down nearly to the bottom of the gasoline tank. Air went through it, was forced into the gasoline, and when the impregnated mixture reached the top, it was suctioned off and passed through a valve between the tank and the engine, so the mixture would be made lean enough to be combustible. That contrivance didn’t work any too well, so we made a mixer which was an ordinary valve and pipe through which the gasoline could pass on its way to the motor. Out of the mixer came the present carburetor. In the one we built I had a hole punched in the bottom so the air could reach the gasoline. One day I received a frantic letter from a Brooklyn doctor who had purchased one of my cars.
A few days later I was standing in his barn, looking at the machine, which, he said, wouldn’t run.
I examined the gas tank. It was all right. I looked over the spark plugs. Tested the batteries. Got down under the car and stared up underneath. Everything seemed all right, so I went around in front and spun the motor. It was dead. Finally I ran my fingers under the mixer.
Then I broke in on the physician’s sarcastic twitterings with this question: “Why did you plug the hole in the bottom of the mixer?
“To keep the gasoline from leaking.”
“Have you ever studied chemistry?”
“Certainly.”
“I see. But you never learned that an explosion is impossible without a mixture of some sort. In this case it happens that gasoline has to be mixed with air before results can be obtained.”
It was my turn to be sarcastic. I punched another hole in the mixer, drained off the gasoline which had flooded the cylinders, put the fluid back in the tank, turned the crank, and started the motor.
That was one thing we pioneers in automobiles had to do that presidents of companies miss today. We had to give personal service to our customers. Many times I have piled out of bed on a winter’s night to aid a stranded driver. A good many times, too, I left my telephone receiver off the hook so I could get some sleep.
Batteries, so dependable now, were practically useless as they then made them. The battery was nothing but a receptacle holding containers, or cups, filled with the active acid fluid. These cups were made of carbon, and after a car had traveled a couple of blocks the cups were almost sure to break, spilling their contents and rendering them useless.
A man named Nungesser was building ours, and they were causing me so much trouble that I refused to put them in the cars. I went to Nungesser and said to him: “I want you to tell me the truth. For weeks you have been promising a dependable battery and you haven’t delivered. What’s wrong? Can’t you make one?”
His face flushed as he admitted: “I can’t, Mr. Winton. I’ve tried everything and can find nothing.”
That was bad news for me. I went into his plant, looked over various experiments and finally suggested: “Why don’t you use a wire gauze for your cup instead of carbon?”
“A wire gauze?”
“Yes. Use copper. It is flexible and will not deteriorate in the acid solution.”
He tried it and it worked. Worked so well that he o ered me a half interest in his business. I declined, although it would not have cost me a cent. I told him I was having troubles enough in the automobile business. That suggestion solved battery difficulties for a good many years and was really the beginning of the present storage battery. Nungesser later sold out to one of the big battery companies for an appreciable sum of money.
The Demise of the Half-Cranked Starter
Six pack: Alexander Winton, wearing a soft hat, is in the front seat with a group of his friends in front of the Winton Motor-Carriage Company in 1900.
We made our own fans, our own differentials, transmissions, frames, brakes. I built the first two-braking system, and a Winton car was first to be equipped with internal and external brakes on the one drum.
This was another of my patents, and it is only in the last few years that four-wheel brakes have taken the place of those I worked out. We built our own starters. We had an air starter that took the pressure from the cylinders, stored it in a tank, and kept it ready for use. This air starter was the forerunner, in a sense, of the present electric starter.
It came about in a simple way. I was looking at a car one day when one of my men came along and began cranking it. The motor was cold and it was hard work.
“Next year we are going to equip our cars with starters,” I told an associate, standing with me.
“You mean so cars won’t have to be cranked?”
“Yes.”
“How can you do that?” There was doubt in his voice.
“That’s what I’m thinking about.”
I went inside, made a drawing of the idea that had come, built a mechanism that could be operated by pressing down a foot, and we had the starter.
Dishonest Practices
If there was orderliness in our shops, there was vast confusion in the fledgling industry. Not only did we have to fight all the time to get things done but after we had them finished we had to pitch in and fight the wildcat automobile companies on the outside. It was difficult for the public to distinguish between the genuine and the ephemeral, and there are towns that can still point to windowless factories that were built from the stock sold by glib promoters, but which never manufactured more than two or three cars. Orphan cars were numerous and always were a 100 percent liability, because it was impossible to get replacements for broken parts. The big accessory companies that now help the industry did not exist.
Dishonest practices did much harm during years when support was most needed.
The orphan-car situation became so serious that the White Company — another of the pioneers — gave publication to this advertisement: “In a reserved and guarded way we have several times spoken of the desirability of purchasing a car made by a substantial firm possessing ample capital. In the last few months many concerns which have embarked in the manufacture of automobiles have discontinued, while others have withdrawn from actual business and their organizations have been scattered.
“The man who has bought a car from such a concern learns too late that he has a car on his hands which is the next best thing to useless and worthless simply because duplicate parts cannot be obtained. It is of utmost importance that the purchaser should inquire very thoroughly into the stability of the concern from which he buys, and that the order of a car at a special price is apt to be an incident of a closing-out sale.”
When you know that more than 500 automobile companies came in and went out in those first few years, you will better understand some of the forces working against those of us who were honestly trying to succeed. We pioneers had to be conservative.
‘Visionary to the Point of Lunacy’
I remember that back in 1899 a bus line was announced to operate between Chicago and St. Louis. All of us believed bus lines would come some day, but we knew the public was not ready to accept such a dream. And, indeed, E.P. Ingersoll, a reporter on automobile topics, wrote the following widely circulated opinion piece: “The notion that electric vehicles, or vehicles of any other kind, will be able to compete with railroad trains for long-distance traffic is visionary to the point of lunacy. The fool who hatched out this latest motor canard was conscience-stricken enough to add that the whole matter was still in an exceedingly hazy state. But,if it ever emerges from the nebulous state,it will be in a world where natural laws are all turned topsy-turvy, and time and space are no more. Were it not for the surprising persistence of this delusion, the yarn would not be worthy of notice.”
We were trying to keep public interest, suddenly aroused, within reasonable boundaries. Aside from making cautious predictions, we had other diversions. Stirring word battles were fought in the greatest wilderness of all — the wilderness of terminology. Some wanted “horseless carriage” as a standard description; others recommended “polycycle,” “syke,” “motor wagon,” “motorcycle,” “horseless-carriage bicycle,” “road locomotive” — I guess there were a hundred names, but “automobile,” because of its easy rhythm, won out.
The Ford-Winton Race
Another thing we had to do which no president or executive of an automobile company of today would think of doing was to compete against each other on race tracks. Duryea, Walter C. White, Ford — we all used to race. That is how we attracted attention to our products. The public looked upon racing as a test of an automobile’s worth, and to a great extent it guided its buying habits by the results of the contests.
Ford got his first big reputation when he raced me at the Grosse Pointe track in Detroit. The day was October 10, 1901. Prior to that time Ford was little known. The first mention of him in connection with the motor industry, so far as I have been able to find, was in a small item in an issue of The Horseless Age, printed in 1898. It read: “Henry Ford, of Detroit, Michigan, chief engineer of the Edison Electric Company of that city, has built a number of gasoline vehicles which are said to have been successfully operated. He is reported to be financially supported by several prominent men of the city who intend to manufacture the Ford vehicle. From Mr. Ford himself no information can be gleaned regarding his vehicle or his plans for manufacture.”
For some time prior to 1901, I had been the dirt-track champion driver, and when I received a challenge to race Ford in Detroit I accepted. A number of cars started, but the event soon narrowed into a test between my car and Ford’s. The Detroit News, on the day following the race, described the event: “Winton took the lead at the start and held it easily for five miles. Then the Detroit car began to creep up, and right in front of the grandstand, on the seventh lap, Ford forged ahead. Winton seemed to lose his power. His great car began to smoke and he was out of the race.”
Ford won, of course, and in winning, attracted national attention. Afterward he said, “Put Winton in my car and he’ll beat anything in this country.”
I told him I’d put myself back in my own car and beat him any time he came on the track.
The following day he announced: “I will never again be seen in a race.” Nor was he.
Those were great days. Lots of hardships. Lots of quarreling. Lots of satisfaction too. No paved highways for automobiles to shoot along at 60 and 70 miles an hour; just country roads, filled with ruts, sand, and mud, over which no one wanted to drive at the maximum speed of passenger cars, which was about 30 miles an hour. But every trip was a different adventure.
—“Get a Horse,” The Saturday Evening Post, February 8, 1930
It feels like a hundred and three!
And we’re both just as parched as can be.
We’re panting and moaning,
Perspiring and groaning…
So why are we drinking hot tea?
Congratulations to Guy Pietrobono of Washingtonville, New York! For his outstanding limerick, he wins $25 and our gratitude for this funny and entertaining poem describing Billboard Painters (above) by Stevan Dohanos. You can enter the Limerick Laughs Contest for our next issue of The Saturday Evening Post through our online entry form.
Guy’s limerick wasn’t the only one we liked. In nor particular order, here are some of our other favorite contest entries:
When the heat is uncompromising
And the work is ever-perspiring.
With the drink that you pour,
It is hard to ignore
That there’s truth in some advertising.
—S. Pavelich, Grand Blanc, Michigan
Two painters named Willy and Fred,
Rode up in a truck that was red.
Old Fred should have learnt
That his head would get burnt
If his hat was not up on his head.
—Tom Glatting, Chillicothe, Ohio
“Imagine us both in the shade
Sipping GALLONS of pink lemonade …”
“Imagine instead
That we’re working here, Fred,
‘Cause on Friday I’d like to get paid!”
—Guy Pietrobono, Washingtonville, New York
I’m thinkin’ that drinkin’ this potion
Might make me go weak with emotion.
Up here on this deck,
It’s hotter than heck.
A refill? You’ll have my devotion.
—Rebekah Hoeft, Redford, Michigan
The sign was for selling AC.
One painter explained it to me:
AC really cools
By transferring joules.
And a jewel of a painter was he.
—Phillip T. Ross, Indianapolis, Indiana
Think back, now, to winter’s big chill,
And the snowball you rolled down the hill.
This heat wave won’t last,
It soon will be past,
And then you’ll miss summer, you will!
—Grace Bates, Ft. Wayne, Indiana
It’s hotter than what it reads there,
And that big fan ain’t blowin’ cool air.
It sure would be nice
To sit on the ice
And pretend to be Big Papa Bear!
—Dolores M. Sahelian, Mission Viejo, California
Of all the unfortunate luck,
Hot weather had actually struck.
Poor Robert and Casey!
If only the AC
Was working inside their own truck.
—Neal Levin, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
Outdoor work that is done in the sun
Isn’t close to a job you’d call fun.
When the heat is so cruel,
Try to keep yourself cool
So not you, but the sign, is well done.
For some reason, I thought that Yes was already in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but while they’ve been nominated before, they’ve never made it. Maybe this year will be different, as they’re on the list of the 2017 nominees. Other nominees are Bad Brains, Joan Baez, The Cars, Chic, Depeche Mode, ELO, The J. Geils Band, Janet Jackson, Jane’s Addiction, Journey, Chaka Khan, Kraftwerk, MC5, Pearl Jam, Tupac Shakur, Steppenwolf, Joe Tex, and The Zombies. This is Chic’s 11th nomination!
You can help decide who gets into the Hall by going to the official site and making your choices. Voting ends on December 5.
In related news, The Nobel Prize academy can’t find Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and new Nobel Prize for Literature winner Bob Dylan. If it helps, tomorrow he’s going to be performing at the WinStar World Casino and Resort in Thackerville, Oklahoma.
Au H2O in ’64
CBS Sunday Morning had an interesting segment this week: campaign bumper stickers. The first ones were actually made out of metal. The stickers arrived in the 1940s.
Applegate played Patty Lane’s boyfriend Richard Harrison on the sitcom that ran from 1963 to 1966. He also appeared in TV shows like Gunsmoke, The Lucy Show, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Daktari, and Nancy, as well as the 2010 movie Easy A. He died Monday at the age of 81.
October Books
Some new fall books you might be interested in:
The New York Times Book of the Dead, edited by William McDonald. This happy little volume contains 320 obituaries from the newspaper, along with access to 10,000 more on a special website.
A Torch Kept Lit, edited by James Rosen. Speaking of famous dead people, here’s a collection of eulogies written by William F. Buckley Jr. Included are remembrances of Ronald Reagan, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr., and Truman Capote.
The Age of Daredevils, by Michael Clarkson. A history of the many people who tried to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel early in the 20th century.
Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, by Colin Dickey. A travelogue of places in the U.S. that are supposedly haunted, with lots of historical information about each place. Just in time for Halloween.
Happy Hallo … I mean Merry Christmas!
Here we are, ten days before Halloween, and they’re already running Christmas commercials. I saw this one on Tuesday night:
In a few years we’ll come home after watching the Fourth of July fireworks and Frosty the Snowman will be on TV.
Starburst? Seriously?
I refuse to believe that Starburst is the most popular Halloween candy in my state of Massachusetts.
But that’s what this map from Influenster says. They did a state-by-state survey of Halloween candy and Starburst rules The Bay State. I have not eaten a Starburst in 25 years and I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone eating/buying/talking about them (though to be honest, I don’t really keep track of other people’s candy purchases). I’ll take Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
This Week in History: New York World’s Fair Closes (October 17, 1965)
The fair was open for two six-month runs in 1964 and 1965. Some of the buildings are still standing, if in poor condition, and you can see the Unisphere every year when the U.S. Open is played at Flushing Meadows, New York.
This Week in History: Cuba Embargo Begins (October 19, 1960)
A couple of years ago, I made a batch of spiced nuts that was well-received by my family during the holidays. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the recipe and can’t find it online, so how about this spiced nuts recipe from Emeril Lagasse? Here’s a chocolate zucchini bread recipe that includes chopped nuts, and here’s one for dark chocolate bark with roasted almonds and seeds.
I would have included a recipe for fruitcake, but that’s a Christmas thing and it’s still Halloween time. Even though they’re already playing Christmas commercials. Before Halloween.
Abbreviations in electronic communication have a long tradition in the U.S. The forerunners of LOL, BTW, and FWIW date from the 19th century, as Americans tried to save money on costly telegrams. In 1860, a message from New York to New Orleans cost $2.70 — the equivalent of over $70 today— and only permitted the sender a 10-word message. Transcontinental telegrams, which were introduced on October 24, 1861, were even more expensive: A 10-word telegram from California to the East Coast cost more than $210 in modern currency.
Americans soon found ways to say more with less, dropping nonessential prepositions, articles, punctuation, and any words that could be omitted while retaining the sense of the message. This message from the Wright brothers to their father on December 17, 1903, is a good example of “telegraphese”:
Success four flights thursday morning all against twenty one mile wind started from level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty one miles longest 57 seconds inform Press home Christmas
But as businesses grew more dependent on communication with remote salespeople, they began developing their own abbreviations. Eventually, businesses constructed their own system of code words for commonly used phrases, as “Lost Your Money? Wire KUBIT” explains. Now they could keep in touch with the home office and not exceed 10 words.
It’s surprising that codes haven’t made a comeback. Coded messages might not be understood as quickly as common acronyms and initialisms, but a simple decoder app could quickly render the gibberish back into English. Coded texts also add another level of security, and protecting emails and texts from interception is getting harder all the time.
Lost Your Money? Wire KUBIT
By Paul D. Green
Originally published on November 6, 1948
Commercial codes, like double talk and nuclear fission, require a lot of understanding. To the average person, the oddly combined letters, GAHGU, appearing in a business telegram, might suggest approaching nausea. But to men like William J. Mitchel, who know commercial codes, these letters stand for “cod-liver oil.” Similarly, the letters AAAAA, in code language, mean “goose feathers, No. 1 grade,” and the letters ZZZZZ mean “bamboo steel.” Between these combinations are 456,000 other possible combinations, which may mean anything from a single word to a whole page of text.
In 26 years of code building, Mitchel has sold some 40,000 general business codes at from $40 to $75 each. In addition, he has made private codes for more than 300 large firms, including Standard Oil and General Motors. His largest private code contained 400,000 five-letter combinations, took two years and nine assistants to assemble, and cost the silk-importing firm that ordered it $100,000. Military and diplomatic codes are in an entirely different field; they are so much more complicated that only during wartime does the government bother to censor commercial codes.
Commercial codes have two main purposes: to cut cable and telegram costs and to make messages confidential. The cheaper business codes may be read by anyone willing to buy a code book; the more expensive private codes are carefully guarded, and code books are given only to trusted officials. The saving in telegraphic charges through the use of codes is easily understood. For example, the five-letter combination LIMUD stands for the phrase, “Cannot return unless you prepay passage.” PYTUO means, “Have collided with an iceberg,” and KUBIT means, “Have lost all my money.” There are more pleasant messages in any commercial code book, but the general idea is to make a few letters do the work of many words. Happily, the telegraph companies smile on this effort, and encourage code users by giving them a 40 percent discount. The discount, plus the saving of words, explains the great saving.
As codes are handled by humans, occasional mistakes crop up. Years ago a Brazilian castor-bean grower wired a New York merchant the code word NFHIU, which means, “Cannot sell.” The message, jumbled en route, arrived as NHFIU, which means, “Sell, if you cannot do better.” The merchant sold, and the castor-bean grower lost a lot of money. The Supreme Court has ruled that the telegraph company isn’t responsible for such mistakes.
Most of these errors happened because there was only a one-letter difference in every five-letter combination. Then William Mitchel revolutionized the commercial-code business by trotting out a code that had two letters different in every combination. From this solid springboard, he jumped to become head of the Acme Code Company, with offices in London, New York and San Francisco, and to be considered by many the top commercial-code man in the world.
Here’s how the codes operate: The sender uses the subject index of his code book to find the phrase and code equivalent he needs for his message. The receiver simply takes his code book and runs down the alphabetically listed combinations until he finds the right one.
Mitchel often is asked to decode personal messages. He thinks the saddest words of code or pen came to him when he decoded one that a young lady received from a man she obviously knew not wisely, but too well. It read: “I am giving you up for my wife.”
In 1941, the Post published Jack Alexander’s report “Alcoholics Anonymous,” the first bit of media attention the six-year-old program had received. In the weeks that followed, AA received an overwhelming number of inquiries, and AA tripled its membership within the next year. That Post article helped thousands of people find the help they needed to break their addiction.
In 1954, the Post hoped to repeat those results with Jerome Ellison’s “These Drug Addicts Cure One Another,” a report on Narcotics Anonymous, a 12-step program similar to AA. NA was a harder sell, both to the public and to those addicted to narcotics. Alcoholics might be reluctant to join a group and talk about their problems, but drug addicts were even more hesitant because the substances they abused were illegal. Speaking publicly about their addiction could incriminate themselves and others.
NA started slowly — when it was founded in 1953, only three participants showed up for the first meeting. But the results were undeniable, and word spread around. Reluctant or not, addicts in NA and other 12-step narcotics addiction groups were finding the help they needed and getting their lives back.
Although Ellison’s report, reprinted below, didn’t have the same immediate and astonishing effects as the earlier piece on Alcoholics Anonymous, it did help get the word out. Since then, NA has offered continued hope and improvement to addicts and has spread around the world. Now, 67,000 NA meetings in 139 countries are held every week.
For more information about Narcotics Anonymous or to find a meeting near you, visit na.org.
These Drug Addicts Cure One Another
By Jerome Ellison
Originally published August 7, 1954
Tom, a young musician just out of a job on a big-name dance band, was pouring out the story of his heroin addiction to a small gathering in a New York City YMCA. He told how he started three years ago, “fooling around for thrills, never dreaming to get a habit.” His band went on the road. One night in Philadelphia, he ran out of his drug and became so shaky he couldn’t play. It was the first the band management knew of his habit. He was promptly sent home.
“Music business is getting tough with junkies,” Tom said.
His audience was sympathetic. It was composed of former drug addicts who had found freedom from addiction. They met twice weekly to make this freedom secure, and worked to help other addicts achieve it. The New York group, founded in 1950 and called Narcotics Anonymous, is one of several which have been piling up evidence that the methods of Alcoholics Anonymous can help release people from other drugs than alcohol — drugs such as opium, heroin, morphine, and the barbiturates.
The groups enter a field where patients are many and cures few. The population addicted to opiates has been placed by competent but incompatible authorities at 60,000 and at 180,000. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics estimates that the traffic in illegal opium derivatives grosses $275,000,000 a year. About 1,000 people a month are arrested for violations of federal, state, or local laws regulating the opiates. Addiction to the barbiturates, it is believed, involves more people. There are some 1,500 known compounds of barbituric acid, some of them having pharmaceutical names and others street names such as yellow jacket, red devil, and goof ball.
Addicts work up to doses sufficient to kill a nonaddicted person or an addict with a lesser tolerance. In New York recently, three young addicts met and took equal portions of heroin. Two felt no unusual reaction; the third went into convulsions and in a few hours was dead. Many barbiturate users daily consume quantities which would be lethal to a normal person. Others have demonstrated an ability to use barbiturates for years, under medical supervision, without raising their consumption to dangerous levels.
The drug addict, like the alcoholic, has long been an enigma to those who want to help him. Real contact is most likely to be made, on a principle demonstrated with phenomenal success by Alcoholics Anonymous, by another addict. Does the prospect, writhing with shame, confess to pilfering from his wife’s purse to buy drugs? His sponsor once took his children’s lunch money. Did he steal the black bag of a loyal family doctor? As a ruse to flimflam druggists, his new friend once impersonated a doctor for several months. The NA member first shares his shame with the newcomer. Then he shares his hope and finally, sometimes, his recovery.
To date, the AA type of group therapy has been an effective ingredient of “cures” — the word as used here means no drugs for a year or more and an intent of permanent abstinence — in at least 200 cases. Some of these, including Dan, the founder of the New York group, had been pronounced medically hopeless. The “Narco” Group in the United States Public Health Service Hospital at Lexington, Kentucky, has a transient membership of about 80 men and women patients. The group mails a monthly newsletter, The Key, free to those who want it, currently a list of 500 names. Many of these are interested but nonaddicted friends. Most are “mail-order members” of the group — addicts who have left the hospital and been without drugs for periods ranging from a few weeks to several years. The HFD (Habit-Forming Drug) Group is a loosely affiliated fellowship of California ex-addicts who keep “clean” — the addict’s term for a state of abstinence — by attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with volunteer AA sponsors. The federal prison at Lorton, Virginia, has a prisoner group which attracts 30 men to its weekly meetings. Narcotics Anonymous in New York is the sole “free world” — outside-of-institution — group which conducts its own weekly open-to-the-public meetings in the AA tradition.
Today’s groups of former addicts mark the convergence of two historic narratives, one having to do with alcohol, the other with opium. References to the drug of the poppies go back to 4000 B.C. According to Homer, Helen of Troy used it in a beverage guaranteed to abolish care. Opium was employed to quiet noisy children as early as 1552 B.C. De Quincey and Coleridge are among the famous men to whom it brought disaster. In its dual role it appears today, through its derivatives, as the friend of man in surgery and his enemy in addiction.
The alcoholic strand of the story may be taken up in the Zurich office of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, one day late in 1933. At that time, the eminent doctor was obliged to impart an unpleasant bit of news to one of his patients, an American businessman who had come for help with a desperate drinking problem. After months of effort and repeated relapses, the doctor admitted that his treatment had been a failure.
“Is there, then,” the patient asked, “no hope?” Only if a profound religious experience were undergone, he was told. How, he wanted to know, could such an experience be had? It could not be obtained on order, the doctor said, but if one associated with religious-minded people for a while —
Narcotics Anonymous—AA’s Young Brother
The American interested himself in Frank Buchman’s Oxford Group, found sobriety, and told an inebriate friend of his experience. The friend sobered up and took the message to a former drinking partner, a New York stockbroker named Bill. Though he was an agnostic who had never had much use for religion, Bill sobered up. Late in 1935, while on a business trip to Akron, Ohio, he was struck by the thought that he wouldn’t be able to keep his sobriety unless he passed on the message. He sought out a heavy-drinking local surgeon named Bob and told him the story to date. They sat down and formulated a program for staying sober — a program featuring 12 Suggested Steps and called Alcoholics Anonymous. Bill devoted full time to carrying the AA message, and the news spread. The now-famous article by Jack Alexander in The Saturday Evening Post of March 1, 1941, made it nationally known, and by 1944 there were AA groups in the major cities.
In June of that year, an inebriate mining engineer whom we’ll call Houston “hit bottom” with his drinking in Montgomery, Alabama, and the local AAs dried him up. Houston gobbled the AA program and began helping other alcoholics. One of the drunks he worked with — a sales executive who can be called Harry — was involved not only with alcohol but also morphine. AA took care of the alcoholic factor, but left Harry’s drug habit unchanged. Interested and baffled, Houston watched his new friend struggle in his strange self-constructed trap. The opiate theme of the narrative now reappears. Harry’s pattern had been to get roaring drunk, take morphine to avoid a hangover, get drunk again, and take morphine again. Thus he became “hooked” — addicted. He drove through a red light one day and was stopped by a policeman. The officer found morphine and turned him over to the federal jurisdiction, with the result that Harry spent 27 months at Lexington, where both voluntary and involuntary patients are accommodated, as a prisoner. After his discharge, he met Houston and, through AA, found relief from the booze issue. The drug problem continued to plague him.
During this period, Houston, through one of those coincidences which AAs like to attribute to a Higher Power, was transferred by his employers to Frankfort, Kentucky, just a few miles from Lexington. “Harry’s troubles kept jumping through my brain,” Houston says. “I was convinced that the 12 Suggested Steps would work as well for drugs as for alcohol if conscientiously applied. One day I called on Dr. V.H. Vogel, the medical officer then in charge at Lexington. I told him of our work with Harry and offered to assist in starting a group in the hospital. Doctor Vogel accepted the offer, and on Feb. 16, 1947, the first meeting was held. Weekly meetings have been going on ever since.”
The Phenomenon of “Physical Dependence”
Some months later, in a strangely woven web of coincidence, Harry reappeared at “Narco” as a voluntary patient and began attending meetings. He was discharged, relapsed, and in a short time was back again. “This time,” he says, “it clicked.” He has now been free from both alcohol and drugs for more than five years. Twice he has returned to tell his story at meetings, in the AA tradition of passing on the good word.
In the fall of 1948 there arrived at Lexington an addict named Dan who had been there before. It was, in fact, his seventh trip; the doctors assumed that he’d continue his periodic visits until he died. This same Dan later founded the small but significant Narcotics Anonymous group in New York. Dan’s personal history is the story of an apparently incurable addict apparently cured.
An emotionally unsettled childhood is the rule among addicts, and Dan’s childhood follows the pattern. His mother died when he was three years old, his father when he was four. He was adopted by a spinster physician and spent his boyhood with his foster mother, a resident doctor in a Kansas City hospital, and with her relatives in Missouri and Illinois. When he was 16, he developed an ear ailment and was given opiates to relieve the pain. During and after an operation to correct the condition, he received frequent morphine injections. Enjoying the mood of easy, floating forgetfulness they induced, he malingered.
Living in a large hospital gave Dan opportunities to pilfer drugs, and for six months he managed to keep himself regularly supplied. An addict at the hospital had taught him to inject himself, so for a time he was able to recapture the mood at will. He was embarrassing his foster mother professionally, however, and though not yet acknowledging the fact to himself, was becoming known locally as an addict. Sources of drugs began to close up, and one day there was no morphine to be had. He went into an uncontrollable panic, which grew worse each hour.
There followed muscular cramps, diarrhea, a freely running nose, tears gushing from his eyes, and two sleepless, terror-filled days and nights. It was Dan’s first experience with the mysterious withdrawal sickness which is experienced sooner or later by every addict.
In one of the strangest phenomena known to medicine, the body adjusts to the invasion of certain drugs, altering its chemistry in a few weeks to a basis — called “physical dependence” — on which it can no longer function properly without the drug. How physical dependence differs from habit may be illustrated by imagining a habitual gum chewer deprived of gum. His unease would be due to the denial of habit. If he were denied gum and also water, on which he is physically dependent, he’d feel an increasingly painful craving called thirst. The drug addict’s craving is called the “abstinence syndrome,” or withdrawal sickness. In extreme cases it includes everything Dan experienced, plus hallucinations and convulsions. Withdrawal of opiates rarely causes the death of a healthy person; sudden cessation of barbiturates has been known to. The violent phase, which is usually over in two or three days, may under expert care be largely avoided. Physical dependence gradually diminishes, and ordinary habit, of the gum-chewing type, asserts itself.
This is the interval of greatest vulnerability, NA members say, to the addict’s inevitable good resolutions. He has formed the habit of using his drug when he feels low. If he breaks off medical supervision before he’s physically and mentally back to par, the temptation to relapse may be overwhelming. It is in this period, Dan says, that the addict most needs the kind of understanding he finds in N.A. If he yields to the call of habit, physical dependence is quickly re-established and his body calls for ever greater doses as the price of peace.
Dan went through the cycle dozens of times. Besides the half dozen withdrawals at Lexington, there were several at city and state institutions, and numerous attempts at self-withdrawal. He tried sudden and complete abstinence, the “ cold turkey “ method. He tried relieving the withdrawal pangs with alcohol, and found it only canceled out his ability to think, so he automatically returned to drugs. When he attempted withdrawal with barbiturates, he “just about went goofy.”
All this, however, was to come later; in his early 20s he had no intention of giving up the use of drugs. Haying been spotted as an addict in the Kansas City area, he sought fresh fields. He found a job as a salesman and traveled several Midwest states. The demands of his habit and his scrapes with the law made it hard to hold a job long. Drifting from one employment to another, he found himself, in the early 1930s, in Brooklyn.
His attempts at withdrawal resulted in several extended periods of abstinence, the longest of which was three years. When off drugs Dan was an able sales executive and a good provider. He married a Staten Island girl. They had a son. Dan continued to have short relapses, however. Each new one put a further strain on the family tie. For a time, to save money for drugs, he used slugs in the subway turnstiles going to and from work. He was spotted by a subway detective and spent two days in jail. A few months later he was caught passing a forged morphine prescription. As a result, he was among the first prisoner patients at the new United States Public Health Service Hospital for addicts at Lexington, when it was opened on May 28, 1935.
After a year there, he made a supreme effort to be rid of drugs for good. To keep away from the temptations offered by New York drug pushers, he found a job with a large Midwest dairy. He worked hard, saved his money, and sent for his family. By this time, however, it was too late; his wife refused to come, and a divorce action was begun. “Her rebuff gave me what I thought was a good excuse to go back on drugs,” Dan reports. After that, his deterioration accelerated. On his seventh trip to Lexington, in 1948, he was in a profound depression.
After a month of sullen silence, he began attending the group meetings, which were a new feature at the hospital since his last trip. “I still wouldn’t talk,” he reports, “but I did some listening. I was impressed by what Houston had to say. Harry came back one time and told us his story. For the first time, I began to pray. I was only praying that I would die, but at least it was prayer.” He did not die, nor did he recover. Within six months of his discharge he was found in possession of drugs and sent back to Lexington for a year—his eighth and, as it turned out, final trip.
“This time things were different,” he says. “Everything Houston and Harry had been saying suddenly made sense. There was a lawyer from a Southern city there at the time, and a Midwestern surgeon. They were in the same mood I was — disgusted with themselves and really ready to change. The three of us used to have long talks with Houston every Saturday morning, besides the regular meetings.” All three recently celebrated the fifth anniversary of their emancipation from the drug habit.
Dan, conscious of what seemed to him a miraculous change of attitude, returned to New York full of enthusiasm and hope. The 12th of the Suggested Steps was to pass on the message to others who needed help. He proposed to form the first outside-of-institution group and call it Narcotics Anonymous — NA. He contacted other Lexington alumni and suggested they start weekly meetings.
There were certain difficulties. Addicts are not outstandingly gregarious, and when all the excuses were in, only three — a house painter named Charlie, a barber named Henry, and a waiter we’ll call George — were on hand for the first meeting. There was uncertainty about where this would be; nobody, it seemed, wanted the addicts around. Besides, missionary or “12th step” work of the new group would be hampered by the law. When the AA member is on an errand of mercy, he can, if occasion warrants, administer appropriate “medicine” to stave off shakes or delirium long enough to talk a little sense into his prospect. If the NA member did so, he’d risk a long term in jail. Drug peddlers were not enthusiastic about the new venture. Rumors were circulated discrediting the group.
Out of the gloom, however, came unexpected rays of friendliness and help. The Salvation Army made room for meetings at its 46th Street cafeteria. Later the McBurney YMCA, on 23rd Street, offered a meeting room. Two doctors backed their oral support by sending patients to meetings. Two other doctors agreed to serve on an advisory board.
There were slips and backslidings. Meetings were sometimes marred by obstinacy and temper. But three of the original four remained faithful and the group slowly grew. Difficult matters of policy were worked out by trial and error. Some members once thought that a satisfactory withdrawal could be made at home. Some hard nights were endured and it was concluded that the doctors were right —for a proper drug withdrawal institutional care is necessary. Addicts are not admitted to meetings while using drugs. Newcomers are advised to make their withdrawal first, then come to NA and learn to live successfully without drugs.
Group statisticians estimate that 5,000 inquiries have been answered, constituting a heavy drain on the group’s treasury. Some 600 addicts have attended one or more meetings, 90 have attained effective living without drugs. One of these is a motion picture celebrity, now doing well on his own. One relapse after the first exposure to NA principles seems to have been about par, though a number have not found this necessary. “A key fact of which few addicts are aware,” Dan says, “is that once he’s been addicted, a person can never again take even one dose of any habit-forming drug, including alcohol and the barbiturates, without running into trouble.”
The weekly “open” — to the public — meetings are attended by 10 to 30 persons — addicts, their friends and families, and concerned outsiders. The room is small and, on Friday evenings when more than 25 turn up, crowded.
There is an interval of chitchat and visiting, and then, about 9:00, the secretary, a Brooklyn housewife, mother, and department-store cashier, opens the meeting. In this ceremony, all repeat the well-known prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” The secretary then introduces a leader — a member who presents the speakers and renders interlocutor’s comments from his own experience with a drugless life. The speakers — traditionally two in an evening — describe their adventures with drugs and with NA. In two months of meetings, I heard a score of these case histories. I also charted the progress of a newcomer, the young musician named Tom, whose first NA meeting coincided with my own first reportorial visit.
Within the undeviating certainties of addiction, individual histories reveal a wide assortment of personal variations. Harold, an optometrist, is a “medical” addict; he got his habit from the prescription pad of a doctor who was treating him for osteomyelitis. An outspoken advocate of psychotherapy for all, Harold absorbs a certain amount of ribbing as the group’s “psychiatry salesman.” Florence, the housewife-cashier-secretary, recently celebrated her first anniversary of freedom from morphine, which she first received 25 years ago in a prescription for the relief of menstrual cramps. Carl, an electrician, became interested in the effects of opium smoke 30 years ago, and reached a point where he could not function without his daily pipe. He eventually switched to heroin, and his troubles multiplied.
Manny, an executive in a high-pressure advertising agency, and Marian, a registered nurse with heavy administrative responsibilities, began using morphine to relieve fatigue. Don, Marian’s husband, regards alcohol as his main addictive drug, but had a bad brush with self-prescribed barbiturates before he came to AA and then, with Marian, to NA. Pat, another young advertising man, nearly died of poisoning from the barbiturates to which he had become heavily addicted. Harold and Carl have now been four years without drugs; Manny, three; Marian, Don, and Pat, one.
Perhaps a third of the membership are graduates of the teenage heroin fad which swept our larger cities a few years ago, and which still enjoys as much of a vogue as dope peddlers can promote among the present teenage population. Rita, an attractive daughter of Spanish-American Harlem, was one of the group’s first members. Along with a number of her classmates, she began by smoking marijuana cigarettes — a typical introduction to drugs — then took heroin “for thrills.” She used the drug four years, became desperately ill, went to Lexington, and has now been free of the habit four years. Fred, a war hero, became a heroin addict because he wanted friends. In the teenage gang to which he aspired, being hooked was a badge of distinction. He sought out the pusher who frequented the vicinity of his high school and got hooked. There followed seven miserable and dangerous years, two of them in combat and one in a veteran’s hospital. In December of 1953, he came to NA and, he says, “really found friends.”
Lawrence’s story is the happiest of all. He came to NA early in his first addiction, just out of high school, just married, thoroughly alarmed at discovering he was addicted, and desperately seeking a way out. NA friends recommended that he get “blue-grassed,” an arrangement by which a patient may commit himself under a local statute to remain at Lexington 135 days for what the doctors consider a really adequate treatment. He attended meetings in the hospital and more meetings when he got home. Now happy and grateful, he thanks NA. His boss recently presented him with a promotion; his wife recently presented him with a son.
Besides the Friday open meeting, there is a Tuesday closed meeting at the Y for addicts only. As a special dispensation, I was permitted to attend a closed meeting, the purpose of which is to discuss the daily application of the 12 steps.
The step under discussion the night I was there was No. 4: “Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” The point was raised as to whether this step might degenerate into self-recrimination and do more harm than good. Old-timers asserted that this was not its proper application. A life of drug addiction, they said, often built up an abnormal load of guilt and fear, which could become so oppressive as to threaten a relapse unless dealt with. When the addict used Step 4 honestly to face up to his past, guilt and fear diminished and he could make constructive plans for his future.
The Narco meetings at Lexington have borne other fruit. There was Charlie, the young GI from Washington, D.C., who once looted first-aid kits in the gun tubs of a Navy transport en route to the Philippines and took his first morphine out of sheer curiosity. After his Army discharge, his curiosity led him to heroin and several bad years; then to Lexington, where the Narco Group struck a spark. He heard about Dan’s work, went to New York to see him, and on his return to Washington looked around to see what he could do. He discovered that there was a concentration of addicts in the Federal penitentiary at Lorton, Virginia. Working with Alcoholics Anonymous, which already had meetings in the prison, he obtained permission to start a group like the one at Lexington. Now a year old, these meetings, called the Notrol Group — Lorton backward — attract the regular attendance of about 30 addicts. Washington has no free-world group, but Charlie helps a lot of addicts on an individual basis, steering them to AA meetings for doctrine.
Friendliness of ex-drug addicts with former devotees of alcohol sometimes occurs, though Bill, the same who figured so prominently in AA’s founding, says a fraternal attitude cannot be depended upon. The average AA, he says, would merely look blank if asked about drug addiction, and rightly reply that this specialty is outside his understanding. There are, however, a few AAs who have been addicted both to alcohol and to drugs, and these sometimes function as “bridge members.”
“If the addict substitutes the word ‘drugs’ whenever he hears ‘alcohol’ in the AA program, he’ll be helped,” Houston says. Many ex-addicts, in the larger population centers where meetings run to attendances of hundreds, attend AA meetings. The HFD (Habit-Forming Drug) Group, which is activated by an energetic ex-addict and ex-alcoholic of the Los Angeles area named Betty, has dozens of members, but no meetings of its own. Individual ex-addicts who are “making it” the AA way include a minister in a Southeastern state, a politician in the deep South, a motion-picture mogul in California, and an eminent surgeon of an eastern city. The roll call of ex-addict groups is small. There is the parent Narco Group, Addicts Anonymous; Narcotics Anonymous; the Notrol Group; and the HFD Group.
A frequent and relevant question asked by the casually interested is, “But I thought habit-forming drugs were illegal — where do they get the stuff?” The answer involves an interesting bit of history explaining how opiates came to be illegal. In the early 1800s, doctors used them freely to treat the innumerable ills then lumped under the heading “nervousness.” Hypodermic injection of morphine was introduced in 1856. By 1880, opium and morphine preparations were common drugstore items. An 1882 survey estimated that 1 percent of the population was addicted, and the public became alarmed. A wave of legislation swept the country, beginning in 1885 with an Ohio statute and culminating in the federal Harrison Narcotic Law of 1914. Immediately after the passage of this prohibitory law, prices of opium, morphine, and heroin soared. A fantastically profitable black market developed. Today, $3,000 worth of heroin purchased abroad brings $300,000 when finally cut, packaged, and sold in America.
Among the judges, social workers, and doctors with whom I talked there is a growing feeling that the Harrison Act needs to be re-examined. Dr. Hubert S. Howe, a former Columbia professor of neurology and authority on narcotics, says the statute, like the Volstead Act, “removed the traffic in narcotic drugs from lawful hands and gave it to criminals.” In an address before the New York State Medical Society, he asserted that the financial props could be knocked from the illegal industry by minor revisions of present laws and rulings, with no risk of addiction becoming more widespread. Doctor Howe proposes a system of regulation similar to that of the United Kingdom, which reports only 364 addicts.
Meanwhile the lot of those who become involved with what our British cousins rightly call “dangerous drugs” is grim. It is just slightly less grim than it might have been five years ago. Since then a few addicts have found a way back from the nightmare alleys of addiction to a normal life which may seem humdrum enough at times, but which when lost, then regained, is found to be a glory.
For as long as the U.S. has been a nation, it’s had a substance-abuse problem. In its early years, Americans consumed staggering amounts of alcohol: from 5.8 gallons of pure alcohol per person in 1790 up to 7.1 gallons per year by 1830. The misery and waste caused by drunkenness prompted many Americans to beg for laws that would outlaw liquor.
But alcohol was just one addictive substance. Opium was widely used before the 20th century, and its drawbacks were not recognized early. Throughout the 19th century, opium was a common ingredient in patent medicines that relieved any pain or discomfort, from teething to kidney stones. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were both known to imbibe laudanum — a preparation of alcohol and opium — to ease pain in their later years. Morphine, an injectable form of opium, was developed in time to ease the suffering of wounded Civil War soldiers, in many cases leading to lifelong addiction.
As the century wore on, people began to notice the addictive and detrimental effects of this drug and, well before the Prohibition Era, started limiting its use. In 1875, San Francisco passed the first anti-drug law, banning opium parlors — though this was as much an anti-Chinese law as it was anti-drug.
By the 1900s, the abuse of opiates had become so widespread that the federal government intervened. Under the Food and Drug Act of 1906, patent medicine manufacturers were required to state if their wares contained opiates, cocaine, alcohol, or other intoxicants. In 1914, six years before prohibition of alcohol, the Harrison Narcotic Act regulated the production, import, and distribution of opium, even among doctors.
But as Judge William McAdoo reports, it was still a serious problem that occupied much of his efforts in the New York City courts in the early 1920s. With a wealth of experience dealing with addicts, he describes the realities of their lives, their habit, their character, and their chances for recovery.
We tend to think that booze was what made the ’20s roar, but drug abuse added to the frenzy of those times.
Narcotic Drug Addiction as It Really Is
William McAdoo
Excerpted from an article originally published on March 31, 1923
There is an almost unbroken line of statements from drug addicts among men that they began taking drugs at public dance halls and all-night or late-at-night resorts. Here is a young fellow who has worked at an honest employment all day. He has swallowed a hasty meal, dressed himself up, gone to meet his steady-company girl, and the couple have brought up at a ball or a dance that will continue during the night. As the hours go on he becomes intensely fatigued, but he notices how wide awake appear the rivals for the favors of the other sex. They are apparently quite fresh, and are dancing and drinking without any signs of physical exhaustion. One of these young fellows whom he knows takes him out into the hall and drawing out of his pocket a small vial of heroin tells him: “Take a snuff of this. It will brighten you up.” So far as he is concerned, that is the beginning of the road to ruin, physical, mental, and moral. The addicts positively assert that a week’s use of a drug is sufficient to form the habit. This young fellow now has brightened up from the effects of the stimulant. The sleepy feeling has rolled away like a fog before the breeze, all his faculties are alert. He takes another dose in the morning before going to work — and this lamp that lights the dismal way to the caverns of despair has to be kept constantly fed during the years to come.
Sometimes you shudder as you look up at a stalwart young fellow riding on a steel beam on the 20th or 30th story of a building under construction, or tossing and catching red-hot rivets thrown as far away as 30 or 40 feet from the fire. It would seem unbelievable that this man, suspended in midair, with so cool a head and steady a nerve, was a drug addict, but in my experiences here I have found a few such cases. And the same is true of jockeys who have ridden horses for big stakes at the great race courses of the country. They will tell you that so long as they can get a full supply of the drug they have a steady nerve for these dangerous occupations, but they will readily admit that should they not get doped up, as they call it, before they undertake some especially hazardous task, they would undoubtedly fail. The lamp must be fed, the wick trimmed, and the fire alive, or it is darkness and ashes.
There is one thing that makes drug addiction much more serious than drunkenness from alcoholic liquors. The drunkard cannot conceal his vice. He may drink in secret, but he is sure to be found suffering from the effects of his drinking. If he is married, his wife and children will discover his condition; if he is unmarried, his parents and the other members of the family will know about it; and all their combined efforts, as may be found in painful cases, will not prevent detection by friends and neighbors. But the addict may be taking the drug for years without its being known by his family or immediate friends. This fact is so well known that it often gives rise to very unjust suspicions against persons who are entirely free from the habit. Mental deterioration, eccentricities in behavior, loss of memory, a vacant stare in the eyes— all these will frequently be regarded by unfriendly persons as indications that a man is taking drugs, whereas all these appearances may be from quite other causes.
Pitiful Cases
This inability to detect the addict makes the vice eminently a secret one. The drunkard has difficulty in hiding his bottle, but the addict carries a vial not larger than the small finger of the hand. If he takes hypodermic injections, the needle is easily concealed. If he cannot get the needle, which is prohibited by law, he will puncture a hole in his flesh and insert the fluid from an innocent-looking eye dropper, savagely punching the hole big enough to insert the end of the blunt dropper.
Addiction, therefore, can be carried on so secretly that the addict becomes covert and illusive in his manner, suspicious, untruthful, deceptive. When needing the drug and without money to purchase it or lacking opportunity to get it, he is likely to resort to courses involving crime, and to cruel deception of those interested in him. This is one of the very unfortunate circumstances connected with drug addiction which makes the addict in many cases the potential criminal, and when a real one, much more desperate and dangerous than those persons who are normal and under no artificial stimulus to the commission of crime.
Are Drug Addictions Curable?
Away back in the old days when drug addiction was unknown and alcohol and drunkenness were prominently featured in press and on platform, what pathetic things used to be said about the callous and unsympathetic nature of the drunkard; how indifferent he was to appeals to any remnants he had left of self-respect, to his obligations to those dependent on him as father and husband. However correct this view of the drunkard may have been, its truth has certainly been demonstrated with regard to the addict, so secretive and cunning in obtaining the drug and administering it to himself. His moral deterioration is much more rapid than his physical decay. He will lie and steal to get the drug, and he has ceased in an alarming degree to regard all social obligations. I shall refer hereafter to how hard, callous, cruel, and indifferent the addict shows himself in the presence of the appeal of mother and father, wife and children.
In outward appearance and demeanor, he appears to be as stoical as [James Fenimore] Cooper pictured his red warriors facing death. Self-respect and hope are dead, and a cruel and dominant selfishness has taken their place. He must have the drug or he suffers tortures beyond description. Life means the drug. Existence without it is impossible. Under the influence of the drug, he is blind to all surroundings except those channels by which he can obtain it. He is deaf to all pleadings. No sympathies can hold him back when the narcotic demands are pulling him forward. …
Is there any standard treatment by which the addict can be cured? Is there any hope in medication or even in surgery? Speaking as a layman and only in the light of experience, I am compelled to say that, depending on medical treatment alone, I think there is none. I mean by that that I have never heard nor do I know of any prescription or any treatment by medication that can cure a drug addict. It is quite true that the acute symptoms and seemingly the desire for the drug will, under custodial care, disappear for the time, but in a great majority of cases, once freedom is gained, the drug addict goes back to its use. In weaning the drug addict from his addiction there are two different treatments known to those in charge of hospitals in which these patients are segregated, and very often a drug addict will come here and ask to be sent to a particular hospital because he prefers the sort of treatment at that institution to the other. The end of both treatments, is, of course, the same — to purge the system of the poison, alleviate the disease, take away the craving, and bring the patient back to normal conditions. …
Practically all addicts admit that the usual course is to return to the drug after treatment and that they know that it is lack of self-control and the condition of mind that drive them to it. I make it a rule to impress on the addict when he leaves the hospital that he must never on any occasion go with another addict. “Do not keep company with any other person who is an addict or whom you suspect of being one, even if he is your own brother or a member of your family.” When two addicts get together, their relapse is inevitable. Mental depression, physical suffering, financial distress, comparison of symptoms—and they both go back to the old remedy, which they look upon as opening the door to an artificial and easeful world. Their cares and sorrows are temporarily dropped, only to be added to like compound interest on an unpaid debt.
Federal and Local Laws
The first wave of popular excitement about drug addiction in New York occurred in 1913, and as is usual in such matters the public was aroused from indifference to apprehension and alarm. Legislation was hastily drawn and readily enacted.
First there was the Harrison Law — federal — and then in New York State, there were various enactments and the creation of a narcotic drug commission; special committees of the legislature were appointed to investigate the subject, a great deal of testimony was taken and modifications of the amendments to the existing laws were made. Finally all were expunged from the statute book in 1920, leaving at this writing only the ordinance of the city of New York covering the subject, and now there is an organized effort to restore state legislation.
All the state enactments were restrictive as to use, and punitive. They allowed the doctor to prescribe for the ambulatory case — a person who goes to a doctor and gets a prescription for a drug and uses it without personal supervision by a physician or anyone else is called an ambulatory case — but they compelled the doctor and the druggist to keep strict records of prescriptions and sales. They made possession without a doctor’s prescription a crime. They compelled the reporting of cases to the Board of Health. They made provision for the institutions where addicts could be committed for treatment. They provided for the punishment of dealers and peddlers. I think they did not go to the root of the evil, but I am not condemning them. As for the present New York City ordinance, we could not very well get on without it.
Last year Congress appropriated $6 million to enforce prohibition against alcohol. The Treasury Department is now earnestly requesting that it be given sufficient money to enforce the Miller Act — that is, the drug-control law. It seems to me, considering this evil, that the enforcement of the Miller Act is certainly, without making comparisons, of vast importance to this country. As I understand it, up to this time no appropriation has been made to enforce the Miller Act.
Having taken part in many public discussions by doctors and laymen, representatives of organizations and individuals on this question of drug addiction and the treatment of addicts, I became convinced that if we are to go to the root of the evil, so far as the law is concerned, it must be by way of federal legislation.
The federal law, known as the Harrison Act, passed in 1914, aimed chiefly at controlling the sale and distribution of narcotic drugs within the United States and required of druggists and physicians that they should make returns of their actions with reference to these drugs on blanks furnished to them. Practically it was intended that the doctor should act in good faith as to the diagnosis and prescribe professionally in decreasing doses, and not merely cater to the craving of the addict; and that the sales by the druggist should be strictly inspected and accounted for.
Following this, New York enacted a law somewhat on the same lines and providing for a narcotic-drug commission. After this law was repealed, the health commissioner of New York City, having large legislative powers under the charter, called together a committee, of which I was a member, to formulate enactments covering the situation, to be added to the Sanitary Code, and these were the pertinent questions in connection therewith:
Can a drug addict be cured by getting prescriptions from a physician to be filled by a druggist while the addict is at large and without any custodial supervision?
Is it absolutely necessary, in order to undertake the cure and reformation of the drug addict, that he should be put in some institution under supervisory direction and custodial authority?
Conscienceless Physicians
Considering that at present most of the addicts — of the poor and working type, at least — buy their drugs from peddlers selling smuggled stuff, is this condition more dangerous than if the addicts resorted to certain types of conscienceless physicians with unrestricted liberty in prescribing? If the physicians were unrestricted in prescribing, would the addicts not get at the drug stores an article more potent than the smuggled stuff and for less money, and would this not really increase the number of addicts?
Before that committee, a sharp line of professional opinion was exhibited by those physicians who were backed by official action of the American Medical Association, that a physician should only administer narcotic drugs and not prescribe them, against those who favored prescription and hospital treatment, private and otherwise.
The federal district attorney for New York presented the case of one physician who issued thousands of prescriptions during one year to drug addicts, evading the law with deliberate cunning, and who had reaped a fortune from this cruel and conscienceless practice. Of course men like him are not representative of the medical profession, but they were sufficient in number in New York to make it easy for any addict to get as much of the drug as he wanted. In one case prescriptions were kept in bundles ready for use, just as it is alleged they are now kept for the sale of alcoholic drinks.
The average addict who came to this office was obliged to get about four prescriptions a week, the doctor limiting the supply to about the amount the addict would use in two days. The prices for the prescriptions ranged from 50 cents to $2 or more. An addict came in here one cold winter day, without an overcoat and devoid of underclothing, who was getting prescriptions from one of these rascally doctors and spending all his wages as a mechanic, amounting to about $28 a week, and even more, for the drug. When I asked him why he did not buy himself some clothing, he told me that he had begged the prescribing doctor to give him prescriptions for at least two weeks in advance and reduce the rates so that he might get clothing suited to the season, and that the doctor had brutally refused to do so, taking the last cent this man had.
The ambulatory case can go to the doctor and get a prescription for the drug and use it, and then under another name he can go to another doctor, and so on; and I see no reason why under such a system he cannot accumulate even more of the drug than he needs for his own personal use. From the very nature of the case the patient requires constant professional supervision, and, above all, moral aid and encouragement.
Questions of Policy
With all this contention and debate and clashing of professional interests and the opposition of the big manufacturing, commercial, and distributing agencies who produce and sell the drugs, the subject became involved, and a Babel-like confusion of tongues ensued. The lay public, alarmed at the dangerously menacing situation, was naturally anxious to arrive at some conclusion as to what was the proper course to take.
Then, too, the question of prohibition with reference to alcoholic liquors became a stumbling block. Zealous prohibitionists believed that calling attention to drug addiction and asking for federal restrictive measures were attempts to divert public attention from that which they believe to be the only evil or at least the most important one. Some of them seemed to believe that the Wets were drawing a red herring over the trail in the talk about drug addiction’s being an evil equal to alcoholism. As a matter of fact, there is more hope for the reformation and regeneration of a drunkard than of a drug addict. Addicts who were barkeepers told me that they never took, nor had any inclination to take, a drink of alcoholic liquor, even when constantly handling it.
The health commissioner of New York finally adopted as part of the Sanitary Code the law that now obtains in this city with reference to drug addiction. It is in many features in line with the former state law, was very carefully drawn, and seems to answer the purpose for which it was intended. Violations of this code are punishable by fine and imprisonment. It prohibits the possession, sale, and distribution of cocaine or opium or any of their derivatives of Cannabis indica or Cannabis sativa or any of their derivatives, except under conditions set forth in the ordinance; and provides also that any addict may, on his or her own complaint, be committed to a hospital or other institution maintained by the city of New York; or to any correction or charitable institution maintaining a hospital in which drug addiction is treated; or to any private hospital, sanatorium, or institution authorized for the treatment of disease or inebriety; and that the addicts shall not make any false statements in obtaining prescriptions.
Out of all this welter of discussion, disagreement and clashing of counter interests I long ago became convinced, as I have said, that the remedy lies through federal legislation and a more sane and practical treatment of the addict.
The weakness of the original Harrison Act lay in the fact that it did not control importations and exportations. The law, in order to be effective, should check the incoming and the outgoing of opium and its derivatives. To that end the law known as the Miller Act went into effect in 1922. This, in my judgment, is the most important and effective legislation as yet on the statute books of either nation or state, but will no doubt require amendment as weaknesses may develop. Anyone who is interested in this subject will find a report on this law when pending, Sixty-seventh Congress, Second Session, H. R. Report 852.
Ham on wry: Parodying holiday schmaltz in last year’s A Very Murray Christmas. The Kennedy Center will honor Murray with its Mark Twain Prize for American Humor on October 23. Courtesy Netflix
You are standing on a corner in New York City, waiting to cross the street. Lost in thought, you aren’t paying much attention to the world around you. Suddenly, a man puts his hands over your eyes and says, “Guess who?”
Nobody’s played this game with you since elementary school. It would be alarming, except that the voice is familiar. You can’t quite place the speaker, but you’re pretty sure he’s a friend.
You whip around and see, much to your surprise … international film star Bill Murray. He is taller than you expected, and his shirt is wrinkled. You sputter, groping for words, unable to process the unlikelihood of this situation. Bill grins, leans in close, and quietly says, “No one will ever believe you.”
Variations on this story began to circulate widely around 2010. Sometimes it happened in New York, sometimes in Austin, Texas, or Charleston, South Carolina. Sometimes Bill wasn’t blindfolding people with his fingers — instead, he was stealing a french fry off somebody’s plate or grabbing a handful of popcorn from a stranger at a movie theater. But the punch line was always the same, underscoring that this encounter was an eruption of surrealism on an otherwise ordinary day, meant to be enjoyed for a few flickering moments: “No one will ever believe you.”
For years, it was unclear whether this was something that Bill Murray actually did, as part of a personal campaign to make the world a better, odder place, or whether it was an urban legend that had grown large enough to have its own zip code. Asked point blank about it in a magazine interview, Bill artfully managed not to unravel the mystery. “I’ve heard about that from a lot of people,” he said. “A lot of people. I don’t know what to say. There’s probably a really appropriate thing to say. Something exactly and just perfectly right.” Bill considered the rhetorical tightrope he was walking, and then he smiled: “But, by God, it sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Just so crazy and unlikely and unusual?”
Hillary’s upcoming shindig is likely to seem sedate in comparison to the zaniness of last week’s spectacle in Cleveland. But, if anything, this is a turnaround from tradition. Historically, the Democrats have been the raucous ones.
Just look at the 1968 Chicago convention. For context, recall that President Lyndon Johnson, amidst abysmally low ratings due to the unpopularity of the Vietnam War, had announced in spring that he would not run for a second term. That decision opened up the Democratic field to JFK’s brother Robert Kennedy and antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy, as well as the more centrist Hubert Humphrey, the incumbent vice president.
In the months before the convention, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. There was the palpable sense that America was coming apart at the seams. On the convention floor, the bitterness boiled over into shouting and shoving matches, but ultimately Humphrey and the status quo prevailed.
If this angered the antiwar delegates to the convention, it drove the 10,000 protesters outside into a pure and dangerous frenzy. Throughout the week, protesters were in open conflict with Chicago Mayor Daley’s security detail of 11,900 Chicago police — reinforced by more than 10,000 Army troops, National Guardsmen, and Secret Service agents.
Murray Kempton, a columnist for the New York Post and editor of The New Republic, was in Chicago to serve as a delegate for the liberal Senator Eugene McCarthy and also to write about the proceedings for the Post. After watching his candidate lose, he stepped outside to bear witness to the rioting in the streets, where he quickly found himself arrested along with hundreds of others.
The Decline and Fall of the Democratic Party
By Murray Kempton
Excerpted from an article originally published on November 2, 1968
We had arrived at 18th and Michigan, where the [national] guard and the police waited to say we could not go farther. The delegates had all found us and efficiently lined up behind Rev. Richard Neuhaus and me, since, for reasons obscure but connected with the failure of its beginning, ours was known as the Neuhaus-Kempton group. Such then was my last caucus; and, when Dick Gregory [the former comedian turned antiwar activist] went forward to get himself arrested and the Rev. Mr. Neuhaus to treat with the police, not knowing the procedure for getting arrested in Chicago as well as Gregory, I found myself stranded as its leader. Gregory’s blacks were juking in front of us; and [pacifist David] Dellinger’s strayed grays were no doubt preparing some manifestation behind us; and there fell upon me the sickening dread that at least two of our repertory companies were about to start their productions while ours, the amateur one, could not even think of its script.
Then Neuhaus returned at last, welcomed as no servant of the Lord often is, and said we should advance to confront the guard. There was nothing to do but get arrested, which took an unconscionably long time, during which we sat down symbolically, and then got up, because Gregory’s pards felt that it was about time to go into their performance and that we ought to stand and afford them free passage. A National Guard lieutenant colonel finally read his office over me, and I was moved, correctly but not cordially, into the wagon. Its bag was a mixed one of delegates and stray young people; riding over, the young called out “Free Vietnam” to the invisible streets outside. “Free assembly,” I ridiculously croaked.
In my usual job, you come to think of policemen as very much the same; when you are under arrest, they turn out to have quite extraordinary range. I should say that I met three nice cops for every nasty one; what surprised me was how far our permissive society has gone even with cops: A pleasant one feels free to be unusually pleasant and a mean one feels free to be unusually mean, neither of which tones is exactly what the book must command for treatment of that offender against society who is also its ward.
“Give me everything you’ve got with a sharp point,” the one who searched said. “One of you peace lovers put out an officer’s eye with a pin once. Do you know that?” He found a token that somebody had slipped me a long day ago and that I had put in my pocket without even looking at. It turned out to have the likeness of Martin Luther King on it; and he threw it to the floor. “Martin Luther Coon,” he said, grinding it with his shoe; “you all come from the same bag.” To my shame I did not make reply and only shuffled along, which is why it is so necessary never to be surprised. Yet, after this caricature, the trip to the Dark Tower, while tedious, had illogical moments of good manners. “What is a distinguished-looking man like you doing being arrested?” one of the booking detectives asked. I had no answer; the question, kindly meant, could only make me understand that I was getting old.
But, after a while, these desultory excursions into the study of policemen were driven away by the revelation of the other persons who had been arrested that night. The journey crept along in the company of The Professor of Physics at Stevens Institute and The Personnel Director of the Perth Amboy Hospital, The Telephone Company Lawyer, and then it would end in the waiting outside Riot Court, the Dark Tower itself, with the finding there of Harris Wofford, the President of A New York State University, of The Man from The New York Times, and The Rockefeller Man from Kentucky.
What could have brought them here in police custody? I knew why I was here; I had taken a contract. But what brought them, these safe men who had never before been arrested and probably never would be arrested again? It must be the indefinite suspension of their assurance of the virtue and redemption of America. The means of grace and the hope of glory had been taken away, because, after all, America had been their real God. And this night, otherwise inconsequential in our dreadful recent history, was The Night They Knew It.
But I could almost feel each of them, in his private heart, tending all afternoon toward this least dignified of places as the only one where they could be sure of being alone with their dignity. For them to have been in public that night would have been to rail or make bad jokes there; they had gone to the patrol wagon for privacy.
We stood about and talked among ourselves as men unused to arrest probably do; Dellinger’s stray young grays, who had been there before and would be again, slept on the floor. I felt quite tender about them, because I had noticed that although they sometimes carry signs bearing the device of some four-letter word or other when they are on-camera, they do not write dirty words on the walls of detention rooms. Do they, among other reasons, go to jail for privacy too?
There is very little to the rest. We went on talking; The Man from the Times came out from the Dark Tower and said this was a rough judge; he had been told to stop slouching. (I cherish The Man from the Times, but, in fairness to the judiciary, he does slouch.) My name was called; I entered the Dark Tower. And there, as usual with me, the first sight, instead of the Beast, was the warm bright greeting of William Fitts Ryan, my congressman; the convention was over and he had generously come down to be my lawyer. Bill Ryan unsheathed his congressional identification card and gave rein to his imagination for hyperbolic explanations of the distinction of his client; the judge struggled to the summit of whatever foothills of grace are afforded by night courts, and I was set loose.
Library of Congress/Illinois WPA Art Project Chicago
Editor’s note: We remember President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a leader who took the reins of office in the depths of the Great Depression and, in a record-setting span of nearly four terms in office, steered a course back to prosperity. But few of us are aware just how much we owe FDR for his crusading efforts to save and improve America’s forests. “Think 3 billion trees planted, crucial landscapes saved, from the Okefenokee Swamp to the Olympic Mountains — and more acreage conserved than the size of California,” writes historian Nigel Hamilton.
Growing up in Hyde Park, New York, on a 600-acre family farm, FDR had learned at an early age how to manage land. When his father died while the future president was at Harvard, he took over the farm. “It was the beginning of FDR’s lifelong obsession with trees and the importance of trees to the environment,” Hamilton writes.
Just days after his inauguration, Roosevelt ordered that thousands of trees be planted in Hyde Park, New York.
That FDR, with the crushing weight of the Great Depression on his shoulders, found time for planting trees was tangible proof of his long-held conservationist convictions. “Forests, like people, must be constantly productive,” Roosevelt told the Forestry News Digest. “The problems of the future of both are interlocked. American forestry efforts must be consolidated, and advanced.” To that end he wanted to use forests to ease the economic crisis at hand.
On March 14, 1933, Roosevelt issued a memorandum for the secretaries of war, the interior, labor, and agriculture. “I am asking you to constitute yourselves an informal committee of the Cabinet to coordinate the plans for the proposed Civilian Conservation Corps [CCC]. These plans include the necessity of checking up on all kinds of suggestions that are coming in relating to public works of various kinds. I suggest that the Secretary of the Interior act as a kind of clearing house to digest the suggestions and to discuss them with the other three members of this informal committee.”
From inauguration day forward, Roosevelt ably projected the image of an open-hearted liberal who cared mightily about the downtrodden, struggling families, and the homeless.
FDR convened the first meeting of the quartet of Cabinet members that March. The team was composed of George Dern, from War; Henry A. Wallace, from Agriculture; Harold Ickes, from Interior; and Frances Perkins, from Labor. During the meeting, Roosevelt nonchalantly sketched, on a scrap of paper, a flowchart of the CCC chain of command. As Perkins later explained, Roosevelt “put the dynamite” under his Cabinet members and let them “fumble for their own methods.” Roosevelt envisioned three types of camps: forestry (concentrated in national forest sites); soil (dedicated to combating erosion and implementing other soil conservation measures); and recreational (focused on developing parks and other scenic areas). From the get-go, Ickes was the New Deal’s taskmaster, with the impatience of a drill sergeant. In a symbolic gesture, Ickes ordered the doors to the Interior headquarters locked every morning at 9:01. Showing up late for work, by even a few minutes, meant instant dismissal. Throughout Roosevelt’s first term, Ickes promoted state and national parks with pluck and vigor, rebuffing right-wing senators who claimed the CCC was a Bolshevist threat to democracy.
Frances Perkins — the first female Cabinet officer in U.S. history and one of only two Cabinet secretaries to work for the entirety of Roosevelt’s tenure in the White House (the other being Ickes) — was tasked with coordinating the recruitment and selection of able-bodied CCC enrollees. Initially a quarter of a million unemployed, unmarried “boys” or juniors between ages 18 and 23 (later expanded to 28) were sought. The pool was later widened to include 25,000 veterans of World War I who had fallen on hard times; 25,000 “Local Experienced Men” (LEM) who worked as project leaders in the junior camps; 10,000 Native Americans, who would be assigned to improve reservations; and 5,000 residents of the territories of Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Perkins worried that Roosevelt was biting off more than he could chew. However, as the trees got planted, she soon became a believer.
What made the CCC more than just a dazzling work-relief program was the professional expertise the LEM brought to land reclamation. Skilled young physicians, architects, biologists, teachers, climatologists, and naturalists learned about conservation in a tangible, hands-on way. If not for the Great Depression, these workers would have found themselves engaged in upwardly mobile jobs. But by a twist of fate, as many of their diaries and letters home make clear, these LEM were indoctrinated in New Deal land stewardship principles. Later in life, after World War II, many became environmental warriors, challenging developers who polluted aquifers and unregulated factories that befouled the air.
Into the Woods: President Franklin D. Roosevelt and key Civilian Conservation Corps staff visit the Big Meadows CCC camp in Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, in 1933. Front row, left to right: Harold Ickes, Robert Fechner, FDR, and Henry Wallace. Courtesy FDR Library
Having developed a working model for the CCC, Roosevelt delivered his plea to launch it with the passage of the Emergency Conservation Work Act, which would provide the authority to create, by statute, a “tree army” to provide employment (plus vocational training) and conserve and develop “the natural resources of the United States.” He sent his bill to Congress on March 21. Roosevelt made it very clear that reforestation projects wouldn’t interfere with “normal employment.” In a message to Congress, Roosevelt stated in part:
I propose to create a Civilian Conservation Corps to be used in simple work, not interfering with normal employment, and confining itself to forestry, the prevention of soil erosion, flood control, and similar projects. …
More important, however, than the material gains will be the moral and spiritual value of such work. The overwhelming majority of unemployed Americans, who are now walking the streets and receiving private or public relief, would infinitely prefer to work. We can take a vast army of these unemployed out into healthful surroundings. We can eliminate to some extent at least the threat that enforced idleness brings to spiritual and moral stability.
Roosevelt did a marvelous job of selling the CCC, answering congressmen’s questions forcefully but politely. At six press conferences, he invoked public works and the CCC. After a round of debate, the 73rd Congress passed S. 598, Public Law No. 5 on March 31, creating the CCC as a temporary emergency work-relief program. Roosevelt’s unstated hope was that what the New Republic called his “tree army” would eventually become a permanent agency.
Roosevelt hired American Federation of Labor leader Robert Fechner as the first director of the CCC. Originally from Chattanooga, Tennessee, Fechner, born in poverty, left school at age 16 and moved to Georgia to become a “candy butcher” on trains. Mild-mannered and collaborative by nature, Fechner was an intrepid labor reformer. Because of his sterling reputation for fairness — as well as his union background — he proved an inspired choice.
By mid-April, the program was coming to life. According to Roosevelt’s estimation, an 11-man CCC crew could, weather permitting, plant 5,000 to 6,000 trees per day. Surrounded by maps of America, the president studied rivers and streams, deserts and forestlands. “I want,” Roosevelt declared, “to personally check the location and scope of the camps.”
Roosevelt’s “tree army” became a legend from the start, and he became a forester-in-chief hero to many conservation groups. As historian David M. Kennedy noted, the public quickly understood that Roosevelt had a “lover’s passion” for trees.
All over America, CCC tent cities popped up like Boy Scout camps; they were soon replaced with rustic barracks. Each company unit of 200 CCC “boys” was a temporary village in itself. All sorts of bylaws, pledges, and rules of engagement were announced. The “CCCers” received three full meals each day and were issued olive-drab uniforms, which included pants, a shirt, gloves, two pairs of underwear, a canteen, and a pair of heavy, steel-toed boots. In time, Roosevelt and Fechner changed the uniform to a spruce-green color for the coat, pants, overseas cap, and mackinaw (the shirt remained olive). “The issuance of a new uniform distinctive from other governmental services will improve the appearance of the corps,” Fechner noted. “It will also aid in building up and maintaining high morale in the camps.”
Unlike the army, there were no guard houses, drills, saluting, or court-martials. But morale was important from 6 a.m. reveille to taps at 10 p.m. At just $30 per month, these young men weren’t going to get rich: $22 to $25 of their pay was mandated to be sent home to their families; what remained was spent at the canteen, on haircuts and snacks, or at the local nickelodeon. Topnotchers were able to boost their salary by becoming technicians. A gag circulated among new enrollees — “Another day, another dollar; a million days, I’ll be a millionaire.”
Uniformed enrollees started working at a breakneck pace to plant millions of trees, restore grass, build check dams, practice rodent control and kill invasive or destructive animals, prevent wildfires, and teach bankrupt farmers how to form soil conservation districts. Particularly concerned about California’s forests — which drought and arid conditions had made hyper-vulnerable to fire — Roosevelt instructed CCC crews to cut a 600-mile Ponderosa Way firebreak along the base of the Sierra Nevada in California, the longest such protective barrier in the nation. The CCC “boys” were also dispatched to do immediate battle in the drought-ravaged Great Plains and the soil-stricken American South. Even Puerto Rico had CCC camps, employing 2,400 men.
Roosevelt never meant the CCC to be a panacea for the systemic woes of the Great Depression, but it did save a vast number of young men from homelessness or, even worse, hopelessness. Roosevelt viewed his “boys” not merely as temporary relief workers, but as makers of a permanent, greener new America. Bursting with optimism, he believed the work-relief experience would transform the young recruits intellectually as well as physically. Teamwork and citizenship and conservation would all be learned in the CCC. Only 37 days after Roosevelt took office, the first CCC enrollee — Henry Rich of Virginia — was dispatched to Camp Roosevelt near Luray, Virginia, located in the 649,500-acre George Washington National Forest, the first camp to open. Six additional CCC camps soon followed in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, employing nearly a thousand men to thin overcrowded stands, remove dead chestnut trees, plant saplings, install water systems, build overlooks, and lay stone walls. Between 1933 and 1938, owing to New Deal care, state park acreage in America increased by 70 percent. When FDR became president, Virginia had only two state parks. Determined to rectify the recreation crisis, Roosevelt sent 107,000 CCC enrollees into the state, and within three years, six more parks would open.
Forest grunts: Civilian Conservation Corps workers clear brush and plant seedlings in an area of Idaho’s Saint Joe National Forest damaged by fire. Courtesy of The National Archives and Records Administration
Although the CCC actually started in Virginia, it was the trans-Mississippi West that the “boys” quickly occupied like an invading army. In the early and mid-1930s, perhaps the most notable CCC infrastructure work in the West was in Colorado, a state ideally suited for a youth corps. Only five states exceeded Colorado’s native forest acreage. Meanwhile, unemployment was at 25 percent. So in the summer of 1933, 29 CCC camps were established.
Many CCC recruits lived in the gateway town of Estes Park and rode red tourist buses (called “woodpeckers” by locals) up to the construction sites. It took six CCC companies, working on a dozen mountain peaks, to help turn FDR’s “Top of the World” road into a 48-mile reality. “A few months ago I was broke,” Charles Bartell Loomis wrote in Liberty magazine in 1934. “At this writing I am sitting on top of the world. Almost literally so, because National Park No. 1 CCC Camp near Estes Park … is 9,000 feet up. Instead of holding down a park bench or pounding the pavements looking for work, today I have work, plenty of good food, and a view of the sort that people pay money to see.”
In the state of New York, enlistment in the CCC began on April 7 and 8 with 1,800 young unemployed men, all carrying welfare agency certificates, showing up at the Army Building at 39 Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan. Cheers and renditions of “Happy Days Are Here Again” were heard. From the Wall Street area, these initial New York City recruits were bused to Fort Slocum in Westchester County, Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, and a segregated African-American CCC camp at Fort Dix in New Jersey.
Roosevelt ordered that half of New York’s 66 CCC camps were to be based in state parks. Four innovative New York CCC camps were erected on private land with the cooperation of the owners. Throughout the Adirondacks were numerous old dams, once installed for logging purposes but now collapsed, leaving flats overrun with sumps and bog vegetation. The CCC, by improving these old dams or building new ones, created nine new lakes.
Pennsylvania boasted the second-highest number of CCC camps of any state, trailing only California. Federally funded historical restoration projects took place at Fort Necessity and Valley Forge. Thirty-seven new fire observation towers were erected in state parks. Ickes, an ardent supporter of the NAACP, dispatched an African-American CCC company (led by black military officers) to landscape and renovate Gettysburg National Military Park with the hope that the experience would foster pride in the unit.
What Roosevelt hoped to do by employing youths, whether rural or urban, was to reduce juvenile delinquency. The New Republic went so far as to editorialize that the CCC was Roosevelt’s way to “prevent the nation’s male youth from becoming semi-criminal hitchhikers.” Education was a key component of the camps. Once the young men were officially enrolled, they would take classes in Forestry, Soil Conservation, and Conservation of Natural Resources. CCCers were further required only to do calisthenics, polish their shoes, brush their teeth clean, and maintain a sense of humor.
From inauguration day forward, Roosevelt ably projected the image of an open-hearted liberal who cared mightily about the downtrodden, struggling families, and the homeless. Increasing the size and scope of the federal government to alleviate suffering blindsided the GOP opposition. The CCC was part of this expansion. The public response was so favorable to the CCC that on October 1, 1933, Roosevelt instituted a second period of enrollment. Three months later, 300,000 CCCers were serving America. In 1935, Congress renewed the program, allowing participation to be over 350,000.
CCCers could initially sign up for only six-month stints. Later they could re-up for a total of 18 months, but after that time expired they had to leave the CCC for six months before they could reenlist.
“Instead of holding down a park bench or pounding the pavements looking for work, today I have work, plenty of good food, and a view of the sort that people pay money to see.” —CCC worker Charles Bartell Loomis
When CCC acceptance letters arrived by mail or telegram or even word of mouth in Missouri, whoops and celebrations usually occurred. While there is no proper documentation of how precisely the CCC office in St. Louis selected the first 25,000 men from Missouri, a distinctive pattern emerged. Most Missouri CCCers were skinny as a rail, Caucasian, averaging an eighth-grade education, and lacking meaningful work experience. After passing a strict physical evaluation and receiving vaccinations, they were clay ready to be molded.
Within a year, over 4,000 CCCers, directed by the National Park Service, fanned out in 22 CCC camps and worked in 15 Missouri state parks, the majority in the Ozarks. A total of 342 examples of “rustic architecture” erected in these state parks by the CCC have been listed in the National Register of Historic Places as of 2015 — an astounding testimonial to the craftsmanship of the CCCers.
Tainting this fine record of achievement in Missouri, however, was the institutionalization of racial prejudice. Although Roosevelt had originally considered integrating the CCC, the program wasn’t sold to Congress as a civil rights crusade. Nor did he want to offend his Democratic political base in the South — which had been instrumental in his election — by attacking Jim Crow. Early on, the CCC created separate companies for African-American enrollees; 250,000 blacks enrolled in 150 “all-Negro” CCC companies throughout the nation from 1933 to 1942. The president’s uninspired “separate but equal” principle regarding the CCC infuriated civil rights groups.
Each Missouri camp had a company commander, a project superintendent, and an educational adviser. There were also chaplains, doctors, silviculturists (tree experts), agronomists, and engineers. At bugle call, the enrollees made their beds and scrubbed the barracks under the watchful eye of an Army foreman. Because the CCC had certain practices in common with the U.S. Army, it isn’t surprising that many military leaders, after initial skepticism, appreciated the CCC. Reserve officers were often in charge of a camp’s transportation needs, day-to-day management, and operational regulations. Part of the attraction of the CCC for many men was the seductive promise of three meals a day. Once the orange juice was downed and plates of eggs and sausage were consumed, the shovel-ax brigade climbed into the pickup trucks that drove them to work sites. At some sites, CCCers drove giant bulldozers and concrete mixers and wielded hydraulic rock-busters and electric saws. It’s been said that the CCC recruits in Missouri were more likely to stink of gasoline than smell of pine.
Not long after the CCC was established, the mushrooming camps each launched their own newspapers or mimeographed newsletters to chronicle daily life. Roosevelt asked Melvin Ryder — who had served on the staff of Stars and Stripes during World War I — to publish from Washington a nationally distributed weekly newspaper, Happy Days, which would feature propagandistic pieces on life in the CCC camps, sporting events, entertainment, and developments in conservation education. Happy Days sometimes printed entries for the best CCC motto. Many were funny, such as “They Came, They Saw(ed), They Conquered,” or bittersweet: “Farewell to Alms.” The New York Daily News approvingly quoted from Happy Days that the CCC motto was “They’ve Made the Good Earth Better.”
Even though the CCC was dissolved in 1942, the work of the “boys” remains visible from coast to coast. Over the course of its nine-year existence, the CCC conserved more than 118 million acres of national resources throughout America — more acreage than all of California. As the plaque at the School of Conservation in Branchville, New Jersey, reads: “These men participated in the world’s most famous conservation program. America will never be able to repay them. All that is great and good about conservation we owe to the CCC.”
The Post’s editorial board generally hewed to a conservative line. But when it came to the CCC, a program many on the right vilified as a socialist initiative, our support was wholehearted.
Better Than Welfare
All manner of schemes have been tried and very large sums have been spent for unemployment relief during the past three years. But no attack upon unemployment yet attempted has in it a greater element of hope and inspiration than the emergency conservation work of the Federal Government. This gives 250,000 men the opportunity of working for six months this summer in the nation’s parks and forests in return for food, clothing, medical attention, shelter and $30 a month, most of which the workers are expected to allot to their families at home.
Great numbers of young men have felt themselves a burden upon their families. Relief efforts in general have been directed to the unemployed married worker with dependents; the unmarried young men have been, until now, largely neglected. The forest camp work is aimed at these youths; its purpose is to redeem them from incipient social rebellion, to raise their depressed morale, to build up their health, to help their families with the allotments sent home, and incidentally to accomplish needed work in the forests and parks.
These young men will put in their six months under wholesome and uplifting conditions. They cannot fail to be better citizens for having spent that length of time in constructive manual labor in forests and parks. Nor can they fail to receive new hope and strength. After all, it is dreary business just to feed people and leave them in idleness. Details may prove thorny, but the idea is definitely promising and the attack upon the problem of idle youth is strategic and direct.
—“Hope for Young Men,” Editorial, June 17, 1933
Self-Respect, Confidence, and Fortitude
How might morality be strengthened in the individual? Above all, by strengthening courage; therefore, proximately, by developing hardiness and health; a fit and ready body is a sturdy prop to self-respect, confidence and fortitude. How admirable it would be if the Civilian Conservation Corps would raise its remuneration, widen its purposes, and draw every American youth for a year into its character-forming discipline, its wholesome friendship with forest, stream and sky!
—“Our Morals,” by Will Durant, January 26, 1935
Some Mistakes Were Made
Recent admissions that political influence has been a factor in selecting part of the CCC personnel are exceedingly distasteful to large numbers of fair-minded and unprejudiced people. … Surely, in the hasty finding of work projects for nearly half a million young men, it is more than likely that some mistakes were made. But the idea of putting hundreds of thousands of otherwise idle youths into wholesome outdoor work amid healthful and often beautiful and inspiring surroundings has appealed to everybody.
—“The Trail of the Politician,” Editorial, September 5, 1936
A jury in Los Angeles has decided that Led Zeppelin didn’t rip off another song when they wrote “Stairway to Heaven.”
It took them five hours to decide that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page didn’t copy parts of the song “Taurus” by the band Spirit when creating the opening melody to “Stairway to Heaven.” The plaintiffs tried to show that Plant and Page had seen Spirit in concert in the ’60s and even owned the band’s album, while the defendants tried to show that the chord progression used in the song’s intro was common. Interestingly, Plant admitted that Led Zeppelin did use parts of another Spirit song in a medley early in their career.
Here’s that passage from “Stairway to Heaven” followed by “Taurus.” You make the call:
Barnes & Noble, Beer & Wine
These days, a bookstore can’t survive by just selling books.
Barnes & Noble is trying something new later this year: They’re opening up four “concept” locations that will feature beer and wine in redesigned cafes, along with table service and a new menu. The first store will open in Eastchester, New York, in October.
This is actually a great idea. I’ve been to combo restaurants/bookstores before (like Trident on Newbury Street in Boston), but I hope they’re massively redesigned cafes. The Barnes & Noble location I frequent has the tiniest tables inside a really crowded cafe. It’s almost as if they don’t want you to stay there and drink their drinks and eat their food (Borders was a lot better). But I’m sure they won’t mind if you want to meet people for dinner and buy several glasses of wine.
A B&N exec described their forthcoming comestible fare as “shareable, American food.” I’m not exactly sure what that is. Pizza? Apple pie? Cookies shaped like Abraham Lincoln?
RIP Scotty Moore
Scotty Moore was Elvis Presley’s guitarist. In 1954, he was in a band called Doug Poindexter and the Starlite Wranglers — they had the best band names in the ’50s — when he was asked by producer Sam Phillips to audition a young singer. Moore told Phillips that Presley wasn’t great but he might be okay with some work.
Here they are performing “Hound Dog” in 1956:
It’s hard to overstate how influential and important Moore was. He was one of the people who invented rock ’n’ roll and rockabilly, and many guitarists will tell you how much they were influenced by him.
Moore passed away on Tuesday at the age of 84 in Nashville. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000.
In happier RIP news, writer Cormac McCarthy — who won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Road — didn’t die this week, no matter what USA Today said.
An explorer recently found the tunnels, which were created by the American Expeditionary Force sent to the area to help out Britain and France. Inside the tunnels, the explorer found 250 ornate insignias and faces carved into the walls and pillars of the tunnels by the soldiers.
You think that everything that could be discovered about World War I and World War II has already been discovered, and then something like this happens.
Bob Barker Wants CBS to Be Spayed or Neutered
I haven’t seen any of CBS’s sci-fi drama Zoo, though I feel like I have. I’m pretty sure they run the promos for it on a continuous loop in a little box in the corner of the TV screen, 24/7. I’ve seen so many commercials for it that I feel like I already know what’s going on and don’t really have to watch it every week.
Bob Barker isn’t a fan of the show. The former Price Is Right host wants CBS to use special effects on the show instead of actual animals. Barker wrote a letter to the network outlining why he and PETA think that CGI should be used on the show instead of subjecting animals to “abusive training methods” and keeping them “locked inside tiny cages.” It should be noted that there haven’t been any reports of animals being abused for Zoo and that Barker is talking more about the general mistreatment of animals in Hollywood over the years.
I don’t listen to enough podcasts. There are just so many, and so many that are good, that I get overwhelmed and don’t want to investigate to find out which ones are worth listening to regularly. But I’ve found a few — beyond This American Life, which everyone already knows about — that really stand out:
Karina Longworth hosts this really entertaining look at “the secret and/or forgotten history of Hollywood.” This season focused on the Hollywood blacklist of the ’40s and ’50s, and it was outstanding. This isn’t just one of the best podcasts online, it’s one of the best things online, period.
The Vanity Fair writer and humor book author hosts this really unpredictable show that includes interviews with people like David Sedaris and Bill Hader, along with segments with titles like “Colonel Sanders Babbling” and “NPR Fan Fiction.” Really fun stuff.
This is billed as “a stage show and podcast in the style of old-time radio,” and that’s exactly what it is, with pulpy stories about a marshal sent to protect Mars, ghosts, detectives, and time travel. Regulars include Paul F. Tompkins, Paget Brewster, and Josh Malina, along with lots of famous guest stars.
This is hosted by comedian/writer Michael Ian Black and actor Tom Cavanagh (his old castmate from Ed, currently on The Flash). The title says it all, really: The two guys sit around and eat snacks and talk about them!
I’ll have a lot more in the future, but that’s a good start.
Safety Begins with You!
I think too many people spend too much time looking down at their phones and tablets and not watching where they’re going. They deserve to walk into poles and fall into water fountains. So I like this L.A. Metro subway safety ad, even if it’s a little … extreme:
Not sure why Joan comes apart after being hit. Maybe she didn’t drink enough milk?
National Picnic Month
I have not been on a picnic in … wait, have I ever been on a picnic? I can’t even remember. If I have, it wasn’t one of those lay-a-blanket-down-in-the-park type of scenarios. I do have a memory of eating on a picnic table a few times, but it was when Carter or Reagan was president.
But hey, July is National Picnic Month! Here are three recipes to try if you want to make the picnic just a little healthier, including a mayo-free potato salad.
What, you don’t care about being healthier? Here’s an old-fashioned potato salad recipe that uses lots of mayo and eggs, and here’s one from Rachael Ray that has yellow mustard and pickle relish along with the mayo. Throw in some corn on the cob with Parmesan cheese, some cold brews, and some fireworks, and your Fourth of July is all set.
Eight players from the Chicago White Sox (later nicknamed “The Black Sox”) were banned from baseball for cheating in the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds, even though they were acquitted of criminal charges.
This girl has a radiant smile,
And it seems she has savvy and style.
This was Valentine’s Day.
No one sent gifts her way,
So she bought them and selfied the pile.
Congratulations to contest winner Deborah Dickinson-Deacon of Amherst, New York! For her limerick describing F. Sands Brunner’s illustration, Valentine’s Gifts (above), Deborah wins $25 and our gratitude for an entertaining poem. If you’d like to enter the Limerick Laughs Contest for our next issue of The Saturday Evening Post, submit your limerick through our online entry form.
Deborah’s limerick wasn’t the only one we liked. Here are some of our other favorite contest entries, in no particular order:
For me? Well, I’m just pleased as punch.
The problem: I don’t have a hunch
Who the gift could be from.
Let’s hope not that bum —
Fred Bruner — who stuck me with lunch.
—L.J. Williams, Topeka, Kansas
Valentine gifts are such fun,
No matter how often they come.
I will save them and then
I’ll thank the young men
Just as soon as I know who they’re from.
—Alfred W. Cross, Sacramento, California
Although she’s aglow with her heart,
It really would give her a start
To know that her flower
And mini card shower
Were a last-minute thought at Walmart.
—Kevin Rorabaugh, Ellis, Kansas
Such Valentine gifts make me weep —
A card with a message that’s deep,
Some candy — what’s more,
There’re posies galore.
So where is the jewelry, you creep?
—Betty Lyons, Newton Falls, Ohio
This Valentine babe — such a cutie —
Blushed at chocolates and violets as booty.
If she’d known modern taste
To maintain a tight waist
She might have requested tofutti.
—Mia Berman, New York City, New York
His girl was utter perfection,
So he sent her a lovely confection.
She blushed chin to locks
When she opened the box
‘Cause he sent her the “lover’s selection.”
—J. Janes, Marinette, Wisconsin
Perusing the many entreaties
That came from her various sweeties,
The candy she tried
Came with one downside:
The risk of type two diabetes.
—Patrick McKeon, Pennington, New Jersey
I’ve waited all year for this day,
And I’ve only got one thing to say:
While candy is nice,
It just won’t suffice;
I’d rather go roll in the hay!
—Michelle Gordon, Airway Heights, Washington
This sweet lass had suitors of three.
There was Harry and Masters and me,
Yet I thought she was mine,
This dear sweet valentine,
Till she ran off with someone named Lee?
One word to describe Artie Shaw, clarinetist and popular big band leader from the 1930s and ’40s, might be turbulent. This word describes the personal life of a man whose marriages to eight women, including Lana Turner and Ava Gardner, all ended in either divorce or annulment. It describes the professional life of a man who became rich from the music fans he often despised. And it describes the health of a man who pushed himself so hard that it led to hospitalization and even to a medical discharge from the navy in 1944.
But through it all, Shaw was a champion of jazz as a musical art form. His became one of the first big bands to integrate when he hired Billie Holiday as vocalist. And when his primary competition, Benny Goodman, was bestowed the label “King of Swing,” fans dubbed Shaw “King of the Clarinet.”
In 1939, Shaw took a moment to comment in the Post about what life as a jazz musician had been like for him. Shaw was known for being brutally candid, and this article follows suit as Shaw writes about his success and the aggravation, disillusionment, and sacrifice that came with it.
This post was published to mark National Jazz Appreciation Month. You can read more of the Post’s historical stories from and about jazz legends in “Jazz History by Men Who Made It.”
Music Is a Business
‘Music is a Business’ by Artie Shaw
By Artie Shaw, with Bob Maxwell
Originally published December 2, 1939
A year ago, I paid the last $5 installment on my clarinet. When I walked out of the band-instrument store I had a signed receipt and forty-seven cents in cash.
My lawyer and business manager tells me my net income for 1939 will be in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million dollars. These aren’t press-agent figures. The last theater date I played brought in $25,000 for a two-week engagement. A recording company pays me $6,000 to cut three phonograph records — an afternoon’s work. A college-prom date is good for as much as $3,500.
I’m not trying to bowl anyone over with telephone-number finance. I simply want to show there’s money in music — plenty of it. When America dances, it pays its pipers well. And yet, despite that I earn close to $5,000 a week, I’d think twice before advising anyone to follow in my footsteps. Probably it’s because I learned, during my illness on the Coast, that while a quarter of a million will buy a lot of things, it won’t buy the energy you blew out making it. I learned it the hard way, at the expense of almost losing my life.
I was plenty frightened when they stretched me out on an operating table and began pumping other people’s blood into my veins. A number of magazine and radio-station polls had elected me King of Swing, but the bugs inside me had no respect for royalty. I overheard a nurse whisper something about one chance in a hundred, and that capped the climax.
The Letdown After the Build-up
They wouldn’t let me talk or move a muscle, but they couldn’t stop me from thinking — even with a temperature of 106°. I looked back into the months that had been a build-up for this letdown. The one-night stands, the long brutal jumps from town to town in rainstorms and blizzards, the bottles of aspirin I had consumed to keep me going and blowing. What for? To die at 28?
Bix Beiderbecke, my roommate, had blown his heart out in much the same way. Irregular hours, no recreation, food on the run, nervous tension. Sooner or later, it’s bound to get you. The doctors who pulled me through my siege tell me it may happen again if I’m not careful. It won’t. I’ll be out of the band business before it gets another chance to lay me low, because the musician in America hasn’t only a financial and artistic problem with which to contend, but he must fight politics, corruption, and a system of patronage.
I’m not biting the hand that feeds me. My job is to play music, not politics, and my only obligation is to the people who pay to listen to me. I don’t attempt to ram hackneyed, insipid tunes down the public’s throat just because they’ve been artificially hypoed to the so-called “hit” class. This policy of trying to maintain some vestige of musical integrity has, naturally, earned me enemies, people who think I’m a long hair, impressed with my own ability. Nothing could be farther from the truth. My faith in dance music — I refuse to call it swing — borders on the fanatic. I have the utmost respect for the many real musicians who are creating a new music as important as the classics, but I have no respect for musical clowns who lead an orchestra with a baton and a quip. However, more power to them if they can make it pay.
A Case of Too Many Charlatans
All this has really been a preamble to what I want to get off my chest. Actually, this is the first time I’ve been able to talk without that necessary evil — a press agent — at my elbow. Publicity men possess vivid imaginations. Legend is their business. I have to be a personality, an eccentric genius who combs his hair with the jawbone of a hummingbird and reads Aristotle in the original Greek.
For once I’d like to let down that jawbone-combed hair and talk, not so much about myself, but about the future of dance music in the land of its birth. At the same time, I want to answer the question that has been put to me in fan letters: How can I learn to lead a band?
Strangely enough, the future of what, in lieu of a better term, we can call jazz is tied up with the desires of close to half a million amateur musicians to emulate the success achieved by the big band leaders.
Anyone can lead a dance band. At least, anyone could lead many of today’s name bands. None of them need leaders — and very few have them. The average bandleader is only a front, a window dressing. If he has capable musicians behind him and imaginative arrangers behind the musicians, it doesn’t matter whether he’s on or off the platform — the music will sound the same. One of the best-known dance bands in the country is “led” by a man who, literally, can’t read a note of music.
There are, of course, exceptions. Duke Ellington, for one. Duke is a musician. Jazz means more to him than a cacophony of blasting brasses or the saccharin strains of a corny ballad. I wish every amateur musician could sit in on an Ellington rehearsal. Music is made on the spur of the moment, ad lib. Phrasing is born of inspiration. The man lives it.
The point I want to make is simply this: If Young America, practicing on its saxophones, trombones, clarinets, basses, and drums, is interested in preserving the future of dance music, it had better not look to many of the reigning favorites of the day. Unfortunately, popular music in America is 10 percent art and 90 percent business. As a result, it boasts more than its share of charlatans and lacks its share of honest, intelligent critics.
Certainly an art appealing to millions deserves better treatment. As it is now, musical worth is measured not by how well a man handles his instrument or directs his orchestra, but by his personality, his love life, and his glibness of tongue. Mountebanks have cheapened popular music to such an extent that a wisecrack or a catch phrase becomes more important to their success than the music they play. The only saving grace seems to be that the public soon learns to weed the musical bad from the musical good.
There are two ways to build a band — the hard way and the easy way. The easy way requires high-powered exploitation, and high-powered exploitation requires money. Give me $50,000, 14 good musicians, and a press agent, and I’ll make Joe Doakes, who doesn’t know a C scale from a snare drum, one of the most popular band leaders in America.
A variation of the easy way involves selling yourself and your band down the river and letting Big Business hold the reins. This happens time and time again, and each time it does, another shackle is placed on the art of popular music. Whenever you hear of a band or leader achieving overnight popularity, don’t attribute it to a lucky break or accident. Accidents happen rarely in the music business, but they can be made to happen. It’s amazing what a powerful booking office or music publisher can do to assist a new band up the ladder.
The Easy Way to the Top
Take the case of a leader who recently burst into prominence like a meteor. He is, incidentally, a good musician, but that alone did not account for his sudden rise. What happened was this: A smart manager sensed possibilities in the band and made arrangements to promote it. He saw to it that the band recorded tunes that were destined to be in the hit class and put cold cash into the exploitation of the band. He arranged with a booking office to put the band in a night spot with a network wire, thus guaranteeing it two or three coast-to-coast air shots a week. In short, this favored leader hurdled obstacles that, to a new band, normally would be almost insurmountable. Whether or not he can stay on top is something else.
There are important monetary drawbacks to success achieved in this manner. Perhaps the manager has a piece of the band — say 25 percent. Possibly the booking office owns another 25 percent. A big song publisher may have 15 percent. In some cases, bands are incorporated businesses with dozens of outsiders holding shares. Even if the band reaches the top, the leader finds his share of the profits slim. Then, too, the leader who accepts help of this kind is always in debt to those who helped him. He’ll have to give his publisher-benefactor’s songs a plug whether they’re good or bad. He’ll have to record tunes he knows aren’t worth putting on wax. He’s owned, musically, and he does his owner’s bidding unless he reaches the point where he can buy back what amounts to his musical birthright.
Now, the hard way — the way almost every budding leader will have to take — the way that is likely to make an old man of you at 30. Since my own career serves as a fair example of the hard way, perhaps I will be forgiven a little autobiographical data.
Being dead broke when I paid up for my clarinet was purely of my own doing. I had been earning $500 a week playing in NBC and Columbia house bands — Kostelanetz, Barlow, Shilkret, Romberg, Rich, and others. I gave it up because I had an idea I could be happier writing. Bix Beiderbecke had been my friend and now Bix was dead. The story of his short but brilliant life deserved to be told, and I thought I could tell it. I bought a small Bucks County, Pennsylvania, farm and went to work. It took a year for me to discover that a typewriter isn’t a clarinet. I gave it up.
When I returned to New York early in 1936, nobody wanted a clarinet. At least, they didn’t want me. I remember my first day in town. From ten until two I toured the studios and offices. All I got was the story I shouldn’t have quit the business cold when it was paying me good money. From two until four I sat on a park bench getting more and more panicky. All I knew was music. If I couldn’t sell that, what could I sell? At four I called my mother to tell her the situation. She had a message for me. A swing concert for charity was being given at the Imperial Theater and I was invited to play a clarinet solo.
I accepted — but not as a soloist. I had always felt that a string background for a hot clarinet would wed the best of sweet and swing as it was being interpreted at the moment. At least, it would be novel and might attract some attention. I convinced a string quartet the idea had merit. We went to work.
Three hours before the concert, one of my fiddle players landed a job for the night and I had to get a substitute. We sat backstage while every big-name orchestra in the business played to thunderous applause. Brass … brass … and more brass. Raucous, ear-splitting. The louder the music, the more the rafters rang. And here I was with two fiddles, a viola, a cello, and a clarinet — a chamber-music group in a house packed with jitterbugs!
Mention the incident to my press agent now and he’ll tell you we were colossal. We were a little short of that, but the following day, three major recording companies offered to put us on wax, and I signed with a booking office to develop a larger band using the same basic idea — string interludes and backgrounds against a jazz combination.
The band went into the Hotel Lexington. Don’t imagine you can get a choice hotel or night-spot booking by applying to the manager. Every worthwhile location — with a radio wire — is tied up by one of the large booking offices, and if your band isn’t handled by the office controlling a certain hotel, you’ll never get into it — well, hardly ever — unless you’re Gabriel blowing a diamond-studded trumpet.
The string-reed band was no bombshell at the Lexington. Musically it had everything, but the shaggers wanted hot brass and wild drum solos. We played the French Casino and the Paramount Theater, reputedly the home of the jitterbug, with mediocre success. At this point, my booking office advised me to take the band on the road for seasoning. Although it was — and still is — the accepted practice to season a new band with one-night stands, I should have known that if New York refused to go into raptures over us and thought us lukewarm, we would die in the hinterlands.
Die we did. The band chalked up new box-office lows wherever it appeared. Back to New York we came. The office was sorry, but the idea seemed to be a floperoo. They paid off and called it quits.
The dismal failure of the string band convinced me it was financial suicide to try to sell the public on anything novel without tremendous backing. My only chance was to get together the standard combination and beat the topnotchers at their own game. Another booking office was talked into taking a flier on me. Somehow, I found three trumpets, two trombones, four saxes, and a rhythm section. The booking office wanted me to open at a small New York spot, but I balked. This was my last chance. That audience at the Imperial Theater had misled me once. No single audience was going to mislead me again. We’d open out of town and play for as many people as possible before risking a New York showing.
We hit the road in an old truck we had bought from Tommy Dorsey. It had Tommy’s name painted on both sides, weather-beaten but legible. Until we had enough money to pay for repainting the body, we were stopped three times for having stolen it. A cop in Boston arrested our Negro driver and tossed him in the can. He had heard Tommy Dorsey broadcasting from New York an hour before. We left our driver in jail, the truck in the police yard, and went on to our next stand by bus!
I had decided, long before we left New York, that come what may, the band wasn’t falling into the melodic groove dug by any other swing outfit. The only way to avoid it would be to keep the so-called pop tunes out of our books. Playing the things everyone else was playing would only serve to type us. I had written some originals, and these, together with old musical-comedy songs I felt had merit, made up our repertoire. The boys in the band thought I was making a mistake. I argued that dancers would go for good arrangements of songs old or new.
We spent two weary years on the road, playing every hamlet in New England and the Middle West, making 600-mile jumps overnight to earn a top fee of $250 — for five or six hours of playing in a stuffy hall or an ex-barn from which the cows had only recently been evicted. Two years of seasoning and heartbreak — when a hotel room was a luxury shared by three brass players, a drummer, and their instruments. We’d finish at Scranton, Pennsylvania, at two in the morning, grab a bite to eat, crowd into the truck and two used cars we had picked up, and make Youngstown, Ohio, 350 miles away, by noon the next day. We had devised a system for getting the equivalent of two nights’ sleep for a one-night hotel fee. When we hit a town in the morning we’d register and turn in immediately, sleeping until it was time to show up for the engagement. Finished playing, we’d return to the hotel and sleep the night through, driving to our next date the following day. That happened every other day and saved us plenty of much-needed money.
Time and again I was on the verge of throwing it all up. Everything seemed to happen to make things tough. We had what we considered a choice engagement to play a Cornell college prom at Ithaca. The two cars went on ahead, with the truck following. The truck landed at Utica, ninety miles away. We played for the prom with four men, the drummer beating it out on a large dishpan !
Gas for the cars was always a problem. They were old and they drank it fast. Once we had to resort to using a police teletype system to send an urgent message to New York for gas money. Two things kept me from quitting: The knowledge that if I did I was through for good, and because I could see the band shaping up. We began to get calls to return to towns we had already played. I felt safe in trying out innovations. They clicked. We dug up tunes like “Donkey Serenade” and “Zigeuner” — long relegated to dusty shelves — and audiences liked them.
Our booking office began phoning long distance. We were ripe for New York and they had a spot for us. I talked it over with the boys, most of whom had been with the band from the start and knew what had happened before. We decided not to come in, but we made a concession. We would accept dates where there were radio wires. If New York wanted to hear us it would have to be over the air.
How to Get Publicity
How we rehearsed for those short 15-minute and half-hour shots. Everything was against us — microphone setup, acoustics, everything. The best band in the world can sound like an off-key hurdy-gurdy if the balance isn’t right. Most of the time we worked with a portable control board that went on the blink two or three times during the broadcast. But we managed and it couldn’t have been too bad. The trade papers sat up and took notice and radio editors said kind things. Nothing succeeds like success.
We worked East and opened at New England’s Roseland State Ballroom in March 1938. Here we had our first real taste of public acclaim — minus the remuneration that is generally supposed to go with it. The kids liked us, and glowing reports went back to New York. But the summer season was coming on, so we stayed out of the Big City, biding our time for a fall opening. It came in October 1938, when we went into the Blue Room at the Hotel Lincoln. The Lincoln had not been a good spot for bands, but that didn’t bother us. We knew we had it this time.
There was no money in the Lincoln engagement. As a matter of fact, there’s no money in any hotel engagement. Although a theater date now pays me $12,500 a week, there isn’t a hotel in the country able to afford more than $4,000 for music. But top bands willingly take that, and usually a lot less, to get a precious radio wire. Some of them even lose money playing a hotel, but if your name and music go out coast-to-coast four or five times a week, you’re getting publicity that would cost a young fortune to buy — publicity that builds you up to the point where you can demand really big money for theater and out-of-town engagements, proms, recordings, and commercials.
The Great God Mike
Here ends the rags-to-riches saga which, I hope, will serve as an example of how tough the band business can be. Mind you, too, I was no stranger to it. I had been playing in bands from the time I was 14 and had achieved a certain reputation as a clarinetist. Imagine what would have happened if I had been a country boy out of the West with my horn under my arm.
This is as good a time as any to explain further the hotel-band situation, probably one of the greatest obstacles to a newcomer in the field. All the choice spots with radio wires are tied up by contract to three or four big booking agencies. Although a hotel may want my band badly enough to offer a comparatively high price, I can’t ordinarily be booked unless my office controls the hotel. Once in a blue moon this rule is broken by agreement, but it’s mighty rare. Of course, this control changes hands over a period of years as contracts expire, but still it’s almost axiomatic in the business that if a band isn’t booked through one of the Big Four offices, it hasn’t a chance of ever playing a decent spot.
Radio, more than anything else, is responsible for this frantic fight to tie up wired hotel spots. The Great God Microphone is deity to the bandsman, and he worships at its shrine. As a result, enter another major obstacle to the newcomer. The three big broadcasting chains — NBC, CBS, and Mutual — are naturally eager to put only the top bands on the air. It’s a feather in a chain’s cap if it can offer member stations the pick of dance bands. Picture, then, this situation. A new band has been taken on by one of the big booking offices and a wired hotel spot arranged. Three shots a week, coast-to-coast. Absolutely perfect. Who steps in but the broadcasting chain! That three-time wire is precious. Why should they waste the hook-up on a comparative unknown when they can get Shep Fields or Dick Himber? Put someone else in the hotel, the chain suggests. A name band.
You may think I’m painting a very dismal picture, but any honest leader will tell you it’s practically photographic. The public read the fan magazines, learn about Tommy Dorsey’s estate and my new roadster, and figure it’s good money for little work. It is good money — when you get it. Musicianship isn’t the requisite for success. Honesty of purpose isn’t an essential. If, in Broadway parlance, you can finagle, you’ll get places. For instance, few leaders play a new song solely because they think it’s good. They play it only when a publisher assures them it will be the firm’s No. 1 tune — the tune the publisher is going to work on and put money behind. They take no chances of introducing a song and then having it die on them, because they have no faith in their own ability to make a song. And yet they pride themselves on having introduced this hit and that hit. I’m much prouder for having rescued a really good number like “Begin the Beguine” and brought it to public attention.
Song pluggers, whose business it is to talk leaders into playing their company’s tunes, can’t understand my refusing to play musical monstrosities. Why, every band in the country is featuring it! Fifty-five major plugs last week! It’s No. 3 on the Song Parade! So what? It isn’t music, or at least it isn’t my conception of music. If music has to depend on slapstick comedy for its appeal, I’ll throw my horn away. The mere fact that a piece is a hit means nothing. Enough hypoing will make any song a hit.
I never should have been a success or made money in the music business. Having broken every rule and regulation for subservience, having fed the public songs everyone was convinced the public didn’t want to hear, I should have been out in the cold a long time ago. Some big people in the business think I’m either cracked or a poseur. They refuse to believe that, with me, music is first.
That’s why I have more than faint misgivings for the future of dance music in America; misgivings for those who are talented among the amateurs. The making of music — whether it be classical or jazz — is an art.
If the bands of the future are to be led by wisecracking comedians and pash-voiced tenors, a sound talent for music will not be required. But if jazz returns to the golden era of its birth, when every member of a band was a musician at heart, the road to success will be tougher traveling, though far more satisfying.
I’d like very much to lead the way. I’ve always wanted to write the things I feel. Since I can’t do it with a typewriter, maybe I can do it with a clarinet.
