Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  SHATTERED

  Disturbing tales began to circulate about the harmful effects of the glass armonica. Virtuoso player Marion Davies had become extremely ill. Her health and nerves were said to have been ruined by her armonica playing. Other performers were beginning to complain of nervousness, numbness in their hands, muscle spasms, and dizziness. Even some listeners became ill.

  In 1798 the German musicologist Friedrich Rochlitz wrote in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung,

  The armonica excessively stimulates the nerves, plunges the player into a nagging depression and hence into a dark and melancholy mood that it is an apt method for slow self-annihilation. If you are suffering from any nervous disorder, you should not play it; if you are not yet ill you should not play it; if you are feeling melancholy you should not play it.

  Then in 1808, Marianne Kirchgessner, a blind concert artist who had inspired Mozart to write for the armonica, died at the age of 39. Her death was said to be a result of “deterioration of her nerves caused by the vibrations of the armonica.”

  …Because people kept telling him he had spinach in his teeth.

  Many believed the strange nerve disorders were caused by lead poisoning coming from the lead in the glass and in the paint. Others believed that the high-pitched harmonies, having mystical powers, invoked the spirits of the dead and drove listeners insane.

  Nothing was ever proven against the glass armonica, but it didn’t matter—people became so frightened of the instrument that few people would play one and few would even listen to one being played. By 1820 the armonica was all but forgotten.

  THE GLASS IS BACK

  The glass armonica made a comeback in 1984, thanks to the efforts of master glassblower and musician Gerhard Finkenbeiner of Boston. The German-born Finkenbeiner first thought of making a glass instrument in 1956. After many years of experimenting, he finally re-created Franklin’s armonica, using only lead-free quartz crystal for the glass. Some of the rims have gold baked into them to identify the pitches. (The ones with the gold bands are like the “black keys” on a piano. The “white keys” are clear. The gold bands—and they’re real gold—are on the inside of the cups, so the player doesn’t actually touch them.) Today, G. Finkenbeiner Inc. in Waltham, Massachusetts, continues to produce the beautiful singing glass armonica.

  WARNING

  (posted in J. C. Muller’s armonica manual of 1788)

  If you have been upset by harmful novels, false friends, or perhaps a deceiving girl, then abstain from playing the armonica—it will only upset you even more. There are people of this kind—of both sexes—who must be advised not to study the instrument, in order that their state of mind should not be aggravated.

  * * *

  MUSICAL IRONY

  The song “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” was written by a German named George Graff…who never went to Ireland in his life.

  Farting contests were held in ancient Japan. Prizes were awarded for loudness and duration.

  THE RISE AND FALL OF THE WHIGS

  Andrew Jackson was one of the founders of the modern Democratic party (see page 153). But in a sense, he is the founder of two political parties: the Democrats, who loved him, and the Whigs, who hated him.

  JACKSON IN OFFICE

  Andrew Jackson, a.k.a. “Old Hickory,” was probably the most popular man in the United States when he won the presidency in 1828. And when he left office in 1836, he was still considered the champion of the common man—if for no other reason than he angered (and impoverished) a lot of wealthy and powerful people during his two terms.

  For starters, Jackson instituted a policy of filling federal government jobs by firing supporters of former president John Quincy Adams and replacing them with his own. And although he ran on an anti-corruption platform, his appointees were, as Jackson biographer Robert Remini puts it, “generally wretched.” One of the worst was Samuel Swartwout, a Jackson crony who was appointed to the job of collector of customs in New York. In this position, Swartwout oversaw the collection of more cash than any other government official, about $15 million a year. Swartwout absconded to Europe with more than $1.2 million of it, “more money than all the felons in the Adams administration put together,” Remini writes. Adjusting for inflation, Swartwout is still the worst embezzler in the history of the federal government.

  Jackson also managed to alienate many of his fellow Southerners. In 1832 South Carolina passed a law banning exorbitant federal tariffs, and even considered seceding from the union. That prompted Jackson to threaten to personally lead an army into the state, put down the rebellion and hang the ringleaders himself. The crisis was eventually resolved when Congress lowered the tariffs, but by then Jackson had lost a lot of support in the South.

  THE BANK WAR

  But what galvanized Old Hickory’s opposition more than anything else was what he did to the American banking system.

  Charles Dickens’s original phrase for Scrooge was “Bah Christmas,” not “Bah Humbug.”

  Like Thomas Jefferson before him, Jackson hated banks, believing them to be corrupt institutions that enriched the wealthy and well-connected. He especially hated the Second Bank of the United States. He hated it all the more when the bank and its director, Nicholas Biddle, sided with presidential candidate Henry Clay in the election of 1832 and even offered to lend money to pro-Clay newspapers to attack Jackson.

  Big mistake—Jackson was furious that the bank would try to influence the outcome of the election. “The bank is trying to kill me,” he complained, “but I will kill it.”

  FROM SECOND TO NONE

  When Jackson won reelection against Clay in a landslide in 1832, he set out to make good on his word. He ordered the Secretary of the Treasury to pay government expenditures out of the Treasury’s Second Bank accounts, while making any deposits to state banks. (Critics called them Jackson’s “pet” banks.) In less than three months, the federal government’s deposits to the Second Bank dwindled to almost nothing.

  Biddle was determined to save his bank and believed that the best way to do it was by maximizing the economic damage from Jackson’s measures. He drastically cut back on lending, prompting banks all across the country to follow suit; the financial panic that resulted sent the country into a recession.

  Businesses in every major American city failed, throwing thousands out of work. Yet somehow, the plan backfired—Jackson’s popularity actually increased, and his image grew as the protector of the common person against the greed of aristocrats and bankers. In the end, Jackson got what he wanted: the Second Bank finally collapsed in 1841.

  BACKLASH

  But the Bank War crystallized the political opposition to Jackson. Robert Remini writes in The Life of Andrew Jackson:

  The pressures of the Bank War and Jackson’s imperial presidency finally brought a new party into being.…National Republicans, bank men, nullifiers, high-tariff advocates, friends of internal improvements, states’ righters, and—most particularly—all those who abominated Jackson or his reforms slowly converged into a new political coalition that quite appropriately assumed the name “Whig.”

  Because of the rotation of the Earth, an object can be thrown farther if it’s thrown west.

  The word whig, a Scottish-Gaelic term that was first applied to horse thieves, later became the name for anti-royalists in the American Revolution. Now it would be used by the opponents of the executive tyranny of the man some called King Andrew I.

  WHAT GOES UP…

  Had Jackson limited his economic meddling, perhaps the Panic of 1833–34 would have run its course without the Whigs emerging as a major political force. But he didn’t.

  By January 1835, he had managed to pay down the entire U.S. national debt ($60 million), and the federal government was collecting more revenues than it was spending. Jackson returned some of the surplus to the states, most of whom promptly spent it. Then, anticipating similar federal windfalls in the years to come, many states began borrowing against these futur
e funds and spending that, too. In addition, Jackson’s “pet” banks were now bulging with federal deposits, which allowed them to print and issue paper currency backed by federal monies. (In the 1830s, banks printed their own currency.) The country was soon awash with cash. Result: disaster.

  The influx of so much capital into the economy led to huge inflation and soaring real-estate prices, creating a speculative economic bubble that burst in 1836 after bad weather led to crop failures in many parts of the country.

  …MUST COME DOWN

  As the U.S. economy began to teeter, foreign creditors started demanding payment in gold and silver out of a fear that American paper currency was losing its value. Jackson decided it would be good for the federal government to return to “sound money,” too. On July 11, 1836, he ordered that all future payments for the sale of public lands (a major source of government income in the 1830s) be made in precious metals. Bank notes were no longer acceptable for these transactions, so they began to lose their value.

  More bad news: A financial crisis rocked England, then the world’s financial capital and a major buyer of American cotton, the country’s largest export. The slump in the U.S. cotton market in turn caused the failure of hundreds of other related businesses.

  The smallest known frog is found in Cuba, and is about the size of a dime.

  “By the time Jackson finally retired in 1837, America was in the early stages of its biggest financial crisis to date,” Paul Johnson writes in A History of the American People. “Far from getting back to ‘sound money,’ Jackson had paralyzed the system completely.”

  Jackson’s heir apparent, Martin Van Buren, managed to squeak into office in the 1836 election, partly because the economic crisis was just beginning and nobody knew how bad it would be. But the 1840 election would be another story.

  The recession deepened into a full-blown depression that dragged on for five long years, wiping out more than 600 banks and shuttering most of the factories in the East. Thousands of people lost their jobs, and food riots broke out in cities all over the nation.

  Van Buren never had the popularity that Jackson enjoyed, and the depression ruined his chances for reelection.

  WHIGS TRIUMPHANT

  In 1840 the Whigs borrowed heavily from the Jackson-Van Buren formula for victory. They put a war hero at the top of the ticket: General William Henry Harrison, who had defeated the Shawnee Indians at the Battle of Tippecanoe 30 years earlier. They staged “monster” rallies all over the country. And when a Democratic writer made the mistake of claiming that Harrison would just as soon “spend the rest of his days in a log cabin with a barrel of cider,” he gave the Whigs a perfect campaign theme that they could use to distinguish their man from a sharp-dressing New York dandy like President Van Buren. Harrison rallies became “Log Cabin and Hard Cyder” rallies: supporters built log cabins at every campaign event and served copious amounts of hard cider to the crowds.

  Van Buren, vilified by the Whigs as an effete elitist who drank wine from “coolers of silver,” seemed a sissy by comparison. On election day, he carried only 7 states to Harrison’s 19, and lost in the electoral college, 60 votes to Harrison’s 234.

  The Whigs also won their first majorities in both houses of Congress, and in 1840 there were Whig governors in 20 of the 26 United States—not bad for a party that was barely seven years old.

  WINNING THE BATTLE

  The Whigs seemed to be on the brink of becoming permanently established as the second major party alongside the Democrats. But then their luck ran out.

  Pretty goofy: Disney’s Goofy was once married…to an unnamed mystery woman.

  • Sixty-seven-year-old Harrison delivered his inaugural address outdoors in the snow without wearing a hat, gloves, or overcoat. He spoke for more than an hour and a half (the longest inaugural speech in American history), contracted pneumonia, and died a month after taking office (the shortest presidency in American history).

  • Vice President John Tyler, a former Democrat who joined the Whigs after falling out with Andrew Jackson, became president. But he was still a Democrat at heart, and he vetoed a number of pieces of Whig legislation, prompting all but one member of his cabinet to resign and splitting the Whig party in two. The Whig congressional caucus wrote Tyler out of the party.

  • In 1844 the Whigs, still bitterly divided, lost the White House to Democrat James Knox Polk. In 1848 the Whigs repeated their 1840 strategy by putting a war hero at the top of the ticket—General Zachary Taylor, hero of the Mexican War—and won the White House. But on July 4, 1850, history repeated itself when President Taylor consumed large quantities of raw fruit, cabbages, and cucumbers, washed it all down with iced water…and then died from acute gastroenteritis five days later, a little more than a year into his first term as president.

  WHIGGING OUT

  The Whig party was also divided over the issue of slavery. President Taylor himself had contributed to the split: as a plantation owner with more than 300 slaves, he so alienated anti-slavery Whigs in the north that many of them split off to form the Free Soil Party.

  When Taylor died, Vice President Millard Fillmore (also a Whig) became president. He added to the controversy by signing the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which required the government to assist in the capture and return of runaway slaves to their owners, even in the anti-slavery states of the North. (Though Fillmore was personally opposed to slavery, he feared that ending it would lead to civil war, so he signed the law to cool the secessionist passions of the South.)

  Historians generally credit such actions with postponing the Civil War for 10 years, but they doomed Fillmore’s chances for reelection and contributed to the destruction of the Whig Party. By 1848 Fillmore’s hedging on slavery had cost the party support in the North; at the same time, the presence of anti-slavery politicians at the top of the party killed its support in the South. “Cotton Whigs,” as the party’s pro-slavery Southern faction was called, defected to the states-rights appeal of the Democratic Party. And by 1854, most anti-slavery “Conscience Whigs” had defected to a new party founded for the purpose of opposing slavery: the Republicans.

  At last count, 1,013 U.S. buildings have a sign that reads, “George Washington slept here.”

  To read about the rise of the Republican Party, turn to page 483.

  * * *

  AN “OBSCURE” TALE

  One morning, a valgus hobberdehoy was cornobbled by a very old leptorrhinian calcographer. “You twiddlepoopy liripoop!” faffled the hobberdehoy, “You’ve given me a wem that smells of bodewash!”

  “So sorry,” belched the saprostomous calcographer. “I was unaware that my jumentous mundungus was cornobbling you.”

  “Whatever, you spodogenous whipjack! Now I must go to my xystus and run my balbriggan galligaskin through my chirogymnasts to get this wem out!”

  The calcographer felt like a dasypygal pismire. “I have lost my toxophily,” he said sadly.

  “Wait a second,” faffled the hobberdehoy. “Did you say toxiphily? You remind me of my toxophillic atmatertera. You have the same anisognathous mouth as she.”

  “Does she go by the name Esmerelda?” asked the calcographer.

  “Why yes, yes she does. She was brideloped by a calcographer many moons ago.”

  And then they looked at each other.

  “Bob?”

  “Jim?”

  And then Bob and his great great great grandfather Jim went happily to Bob’s xystus to de-wem his ballbriggan galligaskin.

  (What are we saying? Turn to page 227 to find out.)

  A species of fern has the most chromosomes of all living things: 630 pairs.

  WHO KILLED JIMI HENDRIX?

  Jimi Hendrix had an astounding influence on pop culture. Yet few people of the 1960s were truly shocked when the musician died in 1970—he had a reputation for living hard and fast. Most people assumed he just burned out like a shooting star. But did he? Or was there more to it?

  DEATH, DRUGS, AND ROCK �
��N’ ROLL

  Hours before Jimi Hendrix died, he was working on a song entitled “The Story of Life.” The last lines:

  The story of life is quicker than the wink of an eye.

  The story of love is hello and goodbye,

  Until we meet again.

  Perhaps no rock musician is more emblematic of the psychedelic 1960s than Hendrix. The flamboyant guitarist became famous not only for such onstage antics as lighting his guitar on fire, but also for the blistering performances that earned him recognition as a musical genius. Although only five albums were released during his lifetime, he was—and is—considered one of the greatest rock guitarists ever.

  OVER-EXPERIENCED

  James Marshall Hendrix died in the squalid flat of a German girlfriend in London on September 18, 1970, after a long night of drinking and partying. After indulging in a smorgasbord of drugs and alcohol, he and his girlfriend returned to her apartment in the early hours of the morning where, according to the girlfriend, they both took some barbiturate pills to help them sleep.

  A normal dose of the downers would have been just half a pill. The girlfriend claimed she took one pill. After Hendrix’s death, an autopsy showed he had swallowed nine—18 times the recommended dosage. The autopsy also revealed “massive” quantities of red wine not only in his stomach, but also in his lungs. The quantity and combination of substances might well have been fatal if he hadn’t first suffocated on the wine and his own vomit.

  Egyptians used urine tests to diagnose pregnancy as early as the 14th century.

  There is little mystery as to what killed Jimi Hendrix. The question is: How did it happen? Was it suicide, an accident…or murder? Ever since Hendrix’s death, there have been those who believe there may have been more to the story than just another rock star done in by wretched excess. For some, things don’t quite add up.

  FATAL MISTAKE OR FOUL PLAY?

  Friends of Hendrix rule out suicide. According to them, Hendrix believed the soul of a person who committed suicide would never rest. In spite of his many personal and professional problems, he would never take his own life.