John McNulty
APRIL 23, 1955 (“WIPE AND JAB”)
LANS FOR THE polio vaccination of some two hundred and eighty thousand New York City children have been brewing since last October, at which time the Health Department forehandedly established a Polio Task Force, under the command of Dr. Morris Greenberg, chief of its Bureau of Preventable Diseases. It was in October that the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis announced it would provide Salk vaccine for mass inoculations if the Francis report was favorable. “If the report had been unfavorable—and I assure you we had no advance information—we’d have been saddled with some seventy-two thousand dollars’ worth of supplies,” Dr. Greenberg told us the other morning at his office on Worth Street—a busy place, made all the busier by a couple of hundred phone calls each day from citizens wanting to know about some phase of the vaccine situation. “But we had to act as if we knew the report would show maximum effectiveness. We had to be fully prepared for the best, and we are.”
The Polio Task Force, composed of representatives from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, the local office of the Foundation, the Public Health Nursing Bureau, and the Bureau of Handicapped Children, was helped in making its happily justified preparations by last year’s experimental injections. More than forty thousand city children got shots then, half of them receiving authentic Salk vaccine and the other half placebo. (The Health Department’s estimate of the public’s intelligence was vastly increased when it found not a single instance of parents’ trying to pull strings to make sure their children got the real stuff.) All the placebo kids are, of course, eligible for genuine Salk this time. Among the things Dr. Greenberg and his associates learned from last year’s experience were how many children one doctor can conveniently inject in a single hour (thirty-three and a third) and how few children can be expected to faint at the sight or prick of a needle (considerably under the normal rate for the nation’s armed forces). On the basis of these and other pertinent findings, the Task Force plunged ahead, and had soon stockpiled 4,500 syringes, 16,255 hypodermic needles, 156 gallons of alcohol, 800,000 cotton balls, 30,000 gauze pads, 1,300 enamel trays, 1,400 pairs of small forceps, 30 quart cans of detergent, 1,525 rubber-stamp-and-stamp-pad sets, 1,100 white enamel mugs (to hold alcohol for sterilizing), and 170,000 envelopes (in which to keep sterilized needles and syringes). All this matériel was stored in the basement at Worth Street, pending word from Ann Arbor.
Concurrently, letters went out to all school principals, alerting them to the probable state of affairs. A form letter was written for distribution to appropriate parents. Doctors were recruited, and windshield placards prepared to keep them from getting parking tickets while administering vaccine at schools. Through Parent-Teacher Associations, volunteers were lined up to transport vaccine to schools from municipal district health centers—there are twenty-one of these, scattered throughout the city—and to take used needles and syringes back to the centers for resterilization.
Within a day after the great communiqué from Michigan, the Task Force began to roll. Dr. Greenberg, who was in Albany, personally carried back from there a two-foot-high stack of green papers, as well as various corollary documents, indicating, in code, which of last year’s inoculated children had received what. At once, the Health Department began decoding the lists and notifying those parents whose children were vaccinated. Unnotified parents of children who participated in the 1954 tests can assume that their children got placebo. “This year’s operation is enormously simplified,” Dr. Greenberg said. “Last year, to control the test properly, we had to be certain that each child got his second and third shots out of the same bottle as his first, and that made for complicated bookkeeping. This year, it’ll just be wipe and jab, wipe and jab, as fast as we can go.”
In fairness to the armed forces, we ought perhaps to observe that more children might have keeled over last year if the authorities hadn’t distracted them from thoughts of pain by offering them a selection of lollipops of assorted colors. It has been concluded that the necessity of making a choice absorbed the kids so deeply that they tended to forget about the needle.
Thomas Whiteside
MAY 3, 1958 (FROM “GETTING THERE FIRST WITH TRANQUILLITY”)
QUANIL AND MODERIL, Pacatal and Dartal, Suavitil and Harmonyl, Compazine and Sparine, Atarax and Ultran, Trilafon and Deprol—these are representative of the trade names designating the multitude of new tranquillizing agents, and on behalf of them, and tranquillity, their manufacturers have been waging unrelenting warfare against each other, not only with fusillades of pills but also, on many sectors, with kaleidoscopic bursts of promotional literature and volleys of publicity. While this war has been raging as fiercely as any of the struggles between the manufacturers of soap, the general public is not nearly as conscious of it, for the makers of prescription drugs—or ethical drugs, as they are called in the profession—are prevented by venerable medical custom from advertising their products directly to the laity. They may, however, plant stories in the lay press—as long as these do not constitute paid advertising—and, even more important, they are free to advertise their drugs to doctors with all the zest, ingenuity, and cash at their command.
In keeping with the grand themes involved, much of the printed matter extolling drugs is marked by lavish layout and elegant typography. It is also marked by a use of visual symbolism so determined that it has perhaps been equalled only by the jackets of long-playing phonograph records. The symbolism used in pushing tranquillizers, for instance, ranges from a spiky-looking black-and-white drawing of a hand nervously stubbing out a cigarette in an ashtray full of twisted butts—denoting pre-tranquillized humanity—to large photographs tinted in what one company calls “precisely the right psychological shade of blue” and showing cool, refreshing vistas of snowclad mountains and pine-fringed lakes to represent post-tranquillizer serenity. One favorite visual device is a highly stylized, multicolored human brain, its nerves—thin, red, and aquiver with tension—extending downward into an expanse of white space. Another is humanity itself in as jittery a state as the ad men can dream up; male and female models are shown being bawled out by the boss, climbing into the dentist’s chair, waiting to be put on the operating table, and even, in one case, groping through a mauve labyrinth on which is superimposed, in gray halftone, a dizzying montage of office clocks, medicine bottles, Martini glasses, and rumpled bedclothes.
Equanil is one brand of meprobamate, and another brand—the original one, in fact—is put out by Wallace Laboratories, a fairly small and until three years ago altogether obscure pharmaceutical company that is a division of Carter Products, Inc., of New Brunswick, New Jersey, the makers of, among other things, Carter’s Little Liver Pills. The Wallace brand is called Miltown, and it is one of the paradoxes of the tranquillizer industry that, while Equanil outsells Miltown by at least two to one, Miltown is by far the better-known drug. During the three years that Miltown has been on the market, its name has been bandied about not only as a handy label for tranquillizing drugs in general but as a synonym for tranquillity itself; indeed, it seems at times that Miltown has as many semantic uses as pharmacological ones. “Be my little Miltown,” one of last year’s more enterprising valentines read, employing the word in a blissful sense, but it has also been used to convey the idea of far from blissful conditions, as in the title of S. J. Perelman’s latest book—The Road to Miltown.
Henry H. Hoyt, the president of Carter Products, Inc., a short, somewhat wizened middle-aged man, had, through shrewd merchandising and endless repetition of the old slogan “Wake Up Your Liver Bile!,” brought the company to a state of glowing financial health. Now he was in the process of expanding operations beyond the limits of patent medicine. Hoyt decided to strike for Miltown while the iron was hot. He asked Ted Bates & Co., which had been touting Little Liver Pills for a number of years, to take on Miltown, too, not only placing ads in the pages of the medical journals but also furnishing stories and
background material to the lay press. In the fall of 1955 swarms of articles about tranquillizing drugs, which gave considerable space to Miltown—and little to Equanil—began to appear in newspapers and national magazines.
As the winter progressed, dramatic shortages of the drug developed in many parts of the country. Toward the end of January, the Charlotte, North Carolina, Observer published an article, subheaded “CAROLINIANS LINE UP FOR NEW DRUG,” in which a local wholesale druggist was quoted as remarking that Miltown pills were in such short supply “that we are having to ration them out on a wartime basis.” Shortly thereafter, the Louisville Courier-Journal quoted a physician as saying that the local drugstores had run so short of Miltown that some of his patients had orders waiting at two or three stores. The paper also reported, in an interview with another doctor, this example of the effectiveness of Miltown:
A Louisville truck driver was the excitable type and would get “mad” when another driver cut in front of him. He would cuss out the other driver and perhaps run into his car. But since he has been taking the new drug, he remains calm and hasn’t had an accident.
Truck drivers were not the only people of volatile disposition to give Miltown a whirl. Toward the end of 1955, the drug had begun to be fashionable in show business, a highly nervous field of endeavor; then, around February, the craze hit the motion-picture colony in Los Angeles. Everybody—producers, directors, actors, writers—seemed to be talking about tranquillizers at studios, restaurants, and social gatherings, and when they talked about tranquillizers, they generally talked about Miltown. Some actors took to swallowing Miltown by the fistful, and since the supply was still running far behind the demand, many people were willing to pay black-market prices for their pills. Some drugstores sold the drug without a prescription—and, of course, at a stiff markup. The arrival of fresh supplies in Hollywood drugstores became an important local event. “YES, WE HAVE MILTOWN!” a sign in huge letters running the length of a plate-glass window triumphantly proclaimed on the front of a big drugstore at Sunset and Gower, and another establishment took out an ad in Daily Variety promising free and fast delivery of Miltown upon receipt of a call from the reader’s physician. Miltown tablets were sometimes served to the guests at Hollywood and New York theatrical parties, and Frances Kaye, a publicity woman, described for the press a party in Palm Springs, at which tranquillizers “were passed around like peanuts,” adding, “Some of the people drank what they called a Miltown cocktail—a tranquillizing pill mixed with a Bloody Mary.” Kendis Rochlen, who reports on motion pictures for the Los Angeles Mirror-News, pretty well summed up the atmosphere in Hollywood at the time when she wrote, “I went from Ginger Rogers’ party to José Ferrer’s party to a dinner party, and everywhere they were talking about it [Miltown]. My husband is on it now. He used to be very nervous, really just miserable. Now he doesn’t get mad as quick or stay mad as long. He has no energy, of course.”
From its victory in Hollywood, Miltown had no trouble moving on to triumph after triumph in television. One of the product’s earliest gratuitous public endorsements came from Milton Berle, a theretofore far from subdued personality, whom the February 27, 1956, issue of Time quoted as saying, “It’s worked wonders for me. In fact, I’m thinking of changing my name to Miltown Berle.” It was not long before the air was clogged with gags about “happy pills” and “I-don’t-care pills,” and in these the name Miltown invariably figured. The monitored script of an N.B.C. television program featuring Bob Hope affords a sufficient example of the Miltown jokes splashing from the home screen that spring:
HOPE: Whether you like them or not, Khrushy and Bulgy are two of the smartest Russians alive. [Laughter.] The fact that they’re alive still proves it. Now they want to come to the United States and sell us peace. Is this a switch? They must be spiking their vodka with Miltown. [Laughter.]
Have you heard about Miltown? The doctors call Miltown the “I-don’t-care” pill. The government hands them out with your income-tax blanks. [Laughter.]
While some of these comments scarcely tended to add to the dignity of a prescription drug, Hoyt, who over the years had spent millions on brief plugs for Little Liver Pills, could not help being impressed by the babble of publicity that Miltown was getting free. “I was frankly amazed at all the exposure we were getting,” he said not long ago. “We had never anticipated such a development. Those television actors—hell, we hadn’t even sent them free Miltown, or anything.”
Altogether, the Wallace people thought that the publicity was wonderful. It did not occur to them until a little later on, when the full impact of the Miltown promotion had made itself felt, that it might be almost too wonderful. The unfortunate truth, it developed, was that many physicians were becoming increasingly hesitant about putting the word Miltown on prescriptions, because it was so familiar and easy to recognize—a clear breach of the hallowed medical tradition of not telling patients what they are getting. As a result, quite a few doctors who had been prescribing Miltown switched to the comfortably cryptic Equanil.
It was a hard thing for the Wallace people, after all their educational efforts, to find themselves thus hoist with their own petard, and Hoyt, in particular, was chagrined at the new twist of events. “I think it was primarily the unusual name of the product that caused us trouble,” he said a while ago. “All those jokes on television—Miltown Berle! It was my own fault. I suppose I just shouldn’t have got that idea of using the code name as a product name; I should have picked something more technical-sounding, I guess. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it wasn’t. Hell, when we went into research on shaving creams we code-named one of our experimental pressurized shaves Yonkers. Do you think we called it Yonkers? No, we called it Rise, and it’s the best-seller in its field! Of course, I had no idea how the name Miltown was going to catch on. Frankly, I had no idea at the outset of the potential size of the meprobamate market. Well, the more I see in this business the more I know I just don’t know. Let me tell you, when you’re dealing with the general public, you’re dealing with the great unknown. You’re dealing with the public’s subconscious, and when you’re dealing with that, you just never know where you are. Never. Boy, if you ever really hit on the source of human motivations, you’d have something—you’d hit the jackpot.”
Dwight Macdonald
NOVEMBER 29, 1958 (FROM “A CASTE, A CULTURE, A MARKET”)
OCK ’N’ ROLL—the very term is orthographically unsettling. Here teenism reaches its climax, or its nadir—at any rate, its least inhibited expression. Here one may observe in their purest forms the teenagers’ defiance of adult control, their dominance of certain markets, their tendency to set themselves up as a caste, and the tribal rituals and special dialect they have evolved. “The Big Beat is here to stay. The music market, for the first time in history, is completely dominated by the young set.” So wrote Mr. Charles Laufer, editor of ’Teen. In a later issue, a couple of tribesmen responded from Danbury, Connecticut: “We absolutely, positively agree that rock ’n’ roll has to be here to stay. It’s our music! The older generation has a tendency to go for classical music and standards. They have their place but so does rock ’n’ roll, so why do they knock the beat? Rock ’n’ roll is our way of showing how we feel. Fast music is a way of keeping up with the pace of the world. The world will be ours in a few years—so why fight it?” This tocsin rings ominously in adult ears, which find rock ’n’ roll even less interesting musically than the insipid ballads that Crosby and Sinatra crooned to earlier generations of adolescents. It seems to consist of nothing but a simple beat and lots of noise; submerged in the pounding surf of rhythm, the tune is as hard to find as it is in Schoenberg.
Almost the only adult—except the adults making money from it—who regards rock ’n’ roll as something more than a pain in the neck is the British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, who published some speculations on the subject in the magazine Encounter about a year ago. While he agreed that rock ’n’ roll is musicall
y dull (“remarkable only for its resolute rejection of the rhythmic complications and subtleties of jazz and ragtime”), he saw in the craze a great deal more than mere foolishness or perversity. Taking off from Nietzsche’s contrast between Apollonian and Dionysian types (in the former “the values are order and proportion,” in the latter “sensation and self-abandonment”), he suggested that rock ’n’ roll is a Dionysian revolt against a predominantly Apollonian society, an instinctive effort to redress a balance that has swung too far from spontaneity, ecstasy, and “the full use…of the striped muscles.”
One of the many reasons adults dislike rock ’n’ roll is that it has largely driven other kinds of popular music off the airwaves. The disc jockeys play only the most popular records (the Top Twenty is the usual formula), and because their largest and most enthusiastic audience is teenage, rock ’n’ roll seems to pound out twenty-four hours a day. There are now some three thousand disc jockeys—it is hard to believe that before 1935, when Martin Block invented the art form, there wasn’t a single one—and they are a powerful force in the music market. Mr. Miller, of Columbia Records, thinks they have abused their power. Not long ago, he spoke bluntly to a convention of disc jockeys: “You went and abdicated your programming to the eight-to-fourteen-year-olds, to the preshave crowd that makes up twelve percent of the country’s population and zero percent of its buying power, once you eliminate pony-tail ribbons, Popsicles, and peanut brittle. Youth must be served—but how about some music for the rest of us?”
The 50s Page 54