Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Technically speaking, there are only 46 states in the U.S. Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia are commonwealths.

  5. The border between Texas (a slave state) and Mexico was formalized.

  ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK

  The Compromise of 1850 was intended to cool passions between the North and the South, and it worked…for a while. But as time passed, two of the five provisions in the compromise made things even worse than they already were.

  The Fugitive Slave Act compelled federal marshals to assist in capturing slaves even if they opposed slavery. The marshals faced fines of up to $1,000—a lot of money in the 1850s—if they failed to do so. If a slave escaped while in their custody, they were liable for the full value of the slave. And for the first time, anyone who assisted a slave trying to escape could be fined and even jailed for up to six months. Fugitive slaves were denied a trial by jury and were not allowed to testify on their own behalf.

  The Fugitive Slave Act was supposed to help Southern slave owners, but what it really did was turn many Northerners even more vehemently against slavery.

  SQUATTER SOVEREIGNTY

  But what really inflamed passions was the unresolved status of the Utah and New Mexico territories, and the admission of California as a free state on the grounds that that was what Californians wanted. Letting citizens of a territory organize themselves as they saw fit sounds reasonable enough, but “popular sovereignty,” as its supporters called it (opponents called it “squatter sovereignty”), proved to be very problematic.

  Popular sovereignty undermined an important premise of the Missouri Compromise, which was that Congress, not the people, had the power to ban slavery in the territories. If California, New Mexico, and Utah could decide for themselves, didn’t that mean that all new territories would have that right?

  THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA ACT

  Tensions escalated dramatically in 1854, when Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois introduced legislation opening much of what was then known as “Indian Territory” to white settlement, which had previously been banned from the region.

  Called the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the legislation carved two new territories—Kansas and Nebraska—from land previously used to relocate Native American tribes that had been forcibly moved from their ancestral lands east of the Mississippi River.

  Both Kansas and Nebraska were part of the Louisiana Purchase. Both were entirely above the latitude 36°30' line, and according to the Missouri Compromise that meant that slavery was outlawed. But Douglas was determined to apply the principle of popular sovereignty to the new territories, giving settlers the right to decide the slavery question for themselves.

  Douglas wasn’t motivated by a desire to expand slavery—he wanted to get a northern transcontinental railroad built from Chicago (in his home state) to the Pacific. Running the tracks through Nebraska made the most sense, but to do that he needed to set up a new territory, and to do that he needed the support of the South. They weren’t about to let another free territory evolve into another free state, so Douglas appeased them by applying the principle of popular sovereignty.

  THEM’S FIGHTIN’ WORDS

  Initially Douglas had only wanted to organize one territory—Nebraska. But Southerners had insisted on two, so Douglas proposed organizing both Nebraska and Kansas, applying the principle of popular sovereignty to both. Even that wasn’t enough: Southerners in Congress wanted the language of the bill to specifically repeal the Missouri Compromise.

  Douglas resisted at first, but then he and the Southerners, all Democrats, agreed to let President Franklin Pierce, also a Democrat, decide. Pierce sided with the South.

  The Kansas-Nebraska Act infuriated Northerners, who for more than 30 years had viewed the 36°30' line as sacred. The act “took us by surprise,” an Illinois Whig named Abraham Lincoln wrote later. “We were thunderstruck and stunned.” But Douglas rammed the bill through both houses of Congress and in May 1854, President Pierce signed it into law.

  Theodore Roosevelt was the most prolific presidential author, having written 40 books.

  What followed in the Kansas Territory was four years of violent turmoil, as both sides of the slavery issue rushed settlers into Kansas to try to claim the territory for their side. On May 21, 1856, pro-slavery raiders sacked the town of Lawrence; three days later, a Connecticut abolitionist named John Brown retaliated and attacked some pro-slavery supporters at Pottawatomie Creek, killing five. By the end of the year more than 200 people had been killed in this mini civil war.

  THE PARTY’S OVER

  There were several other casualties of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. President Pierce was one of them—he became so hated that the Democrats didn’t even bother to nominate him for a second term. He just served out the rest of his first term and then went home.

  The Whig Party was another casualty. Already damaged by the fight over the Compromise of 1850, it collapsed completely when anti-slavery Conscience Whigs bolted the party. By the end of 1854, the party—literally—was over.

  So where did the Conscience Whigs go? Many of them joined with other anti-slavery elements to form a brand-new party that made its priority the opposition to slavery in new territories. Drawing its inspiration from the Jeffersonian Republicans, the party named itself the “Republican Party.”

  THE ELECTION OF 1856

  One other thing destroyed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act was Stephen A. Douglas’s bid for the presidency in 1856. The struggle over his act had generated so much controversy that the Democrats passed on his candidacy and instead nominated former Secretary of State James Buchanan. What made Buchanan such an attractive candidate? According to historian David Herbert Donald, he “had the inestimable blessing of having been out of the country, as minister of Great Britain, during the controversy over the Kansas-Nebraska Act.”

  The Republicans nominated former California senator John C. Fremont as their candidate. Buchanan won, but Fremont made an impressive showing, winning 11 states.

  Buzz, hiss, and meow are examples of onomatopoeia—words that mimic sounds.

  GREAT SCOTT

  Just two days after Buchanan was inaugurated as president, the Supreme Court handed down its infamous Dred Scott decision. Years earlier, Scott, a slave, had been taken by his owner, a U.S. Army surgeon, to live in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, both of which outlawed slavery. Scott sued for his freedom, arguing that living where slavery was banned had made him a free man.

  The Supreme Court disagreed, finding that as a Negro, Scott was not an American citizen to begin with and thus had no right to sue in federal court. And even if he did, the chief justice argued, any laws excluding slavery from U.S. territories were unconstitutional, because they violated the Fifth Amendment by depriving slave owners of their property without due process of law. “The right of property in a slave,” he wrote, “is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.”

  Suddenly, it seemed as if every state in the Union might become a slave state.

  THE FREEPORT FUMBLE

  For many Americans the Dred Scott decision was the final straw. It seemed impossible that the North and the South could remain together as a country much longer. Even Abraham Lincoln observed (in a debate with Stephen A. Douglas the following year): “This government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.”

  Lincoln was challenging Douglas for his seat in the U.S. Senate, and it was during the second of their seven debates that Douglas ruined his last chance to win the presidency. In Freeport, Illinois, on August 27, 1858, Lincoln challenged Douglas to reconcile popular sovereignty with the Dred Scott decision: If anti-slavery laws were unconstitutional, how were anti-slavery settlers supposed to ban slavery?

  Douglas replied that if settlers refused to legislate a local “slave code” (local regulations that protected the rights of slave owners), slave owners would not bring their slaves into the territory because their property rights were not guaranteed.

  Do
uglas’s “Freeport Doctrine,” as it became known, did little to appease Northerners and it cost him nearly all of his support in the South. He still managed to win the 1860 Democratic nomination for president, but Southern Democrats were so angry with him that, rather than support him, they split off from the party and nominated their own candidate, John C. Breckinridge.

  First subject ever photographed by National Geographic: The city of Lhasa, Tibet, in 1905.

  AND THE WINNER IS…

  Abraham Lincoln, who’d just lost the race for Senate, became the Republican nominee for president. The Republican Party was barely six years old, but slavery was such a powerful issue—and Douglas’s “Freeport Doctrine” such a huge blunder—that Douglas and Breckinridge split the Democratic vote…and Lincoln, a brand-new Republican, won.

  But “it was ominous,” David Herbert Donald writes, “that Lincoln had received not a single vote in 10 of the Southern states.”

  Lincoln was elected president on November 6, 1860; barely a month later, South Carolina seceded from the Union, and by the time Lincoln was sworn into office on March 4, 1861, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had also seceded. The first shots of the Civil War were just five weeks away.

  With the secession of the Southern states (and all of the Southern Democrats), the Republican Party was left in full control of the federal government. As the Civil War dragged on year after year, it seemed that Lincoln’s reelection was doomed and that General George McClellan, a Northern Democrat running as a peace candidate, would defeat him. But the tide of the war eventually turned in the North’s favor, and in 1864 Lincoln was reelected with 55% of the popular vote. The Civil War finally ended on April 9, 1865; Lincoln was assassinated five days later.

  THE RISE OF THE REPUBLICANS

  Victory in the Civil War ushered in an era of Republican domination that lasted until the Great Depression of the early 1930s: of the 18 presidential elections held between 1860 and 1932, the Republicans won 14.

  Born in an era of terrible crisis that threatened to destroy the Union, the Republican Party managed to save the Union and, in the process, established itself in very short order as one of the great political parties in American history.

  That’s how America’s major political parties, the Democratic

  and the Republican, began. A lot has changed in the last

  100 years…but that’s another story. Stay tuned.

  What is the only crime defined in the U.S. Constitution? Treason.

  SGT. PEPPERS LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND

  “It was twenty years ago today” begins a record album that was released in 1967 and will still be celebrated many years from now. It wasn’t actually the first pop concept record, its songs aren’t necessarily the Beatles’ best, and its supposed theme really isn’t one…so why do people consider it one of the greatest albums ever made?

  BACKGROUND

  Fans may debate whether Sgt. Peppers is the best album the Beatles made, but no group, the Beatles included, ever made a more revolutionary one.

  As great an achievement as Sgt. Peppers was, it wasn’t produced in a vacuum. In the years leading up to its release, forces much broader than the Beatles themselves had been setting the stage for an industry-changing album to happen.

  In fact, the artistic creativity released by the era’s cultural and political turbulence was reaching boundary-busting proportions in 1966, the year that work on Sgt. Peppers began. Nowhere was that better reflected than in popular music. Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, the Who’s A Quick One, the Beach Boys’ Smile, the Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out, and the Rolling Stone’s Aftermath all broke important new ground in pop music that year.

  WHATEVER YOU CAN DO, I CAN DO BETTER

  These landmark releases—and others of similar quality—pushed the Beatles to even greater creative heights than they’d already achieved. No musician or band in that period could stay on top by mimicking earlier successes. With each new record, pop groups in both England and America sought to up the creative ante. It wasn’t just a game—it was commercial survival.

  In this competitive environment, the Beatles and the Beach Boys viewed each other as the primary challengers and tried to outdo the other with each new album. The Beach Boys released Pet Sounds in May 1966 as their answer to the Beatles’ 1965 masterpiece Rubber Soul (itself spurred by the music of Bob Dylan). Pet Sounds’ clever songwriting and complex arrangements stunned the Beatles. Paul McCartney called it “the album of all time.” But a new contender for that title was already in the can: the Beatles’ Revolver. The new Beatles album had been completed a few weeks before Pet Sounds’ release. It hit the record stores in August. And it was just the Beatles’ opening shot across the Beach Boys’ bow.

  Bird brains: Male cardinals take 3 times as long as females to learn a new song.

  BEATLE EVOLUTION

  Although cultural forces laid the groundwork for Sgt. Peppers, tensions and changes within the band also played a major role. As they entered the studio in November 1966 to begin recording their new album, the four group members were conflicted: exhausted and bitter on the one hand, restless to reinvent themselves on the other.

  Their exhaustion came from a brutal touring schedule arranged by their manager, Brian Epstein. They were also enraged at Epstein for not protecting them from rough treatment by police in the cities they were playing. And they were frustrated artistically—the new directions they’d taken on Revolver couldn’t be reproduced live, which forced them to fulfill their touring contracts by playing in an earlier style that, in their minds, they’d moved beyond. But that didn’t matter to their live audiences, especially their female fans, who screamed too loud to hear the music anyway.

  Epstein was able (barely) to hold the Beatles together by promising to end the touring. The wild enthusiasm with which fans and critics greeted Revolver helped prepare them for the next phase of their careers. As producer George Martin said, the Beatles “all but owned the music business at that time.” The size of their audience, their almost universal critical acclaim, and their unprecedented commercial success gave them the power to do whatever they wanted in the studio. They were ready to do something great.

  RECORDING THE ALBUM

  Despite its legend as one of pop music’s greatest “concept” albums, the making of Sgt. Peppers was hardly a carefully thought-out affair. Instead, the album came together in a serendipitous, almost haphazard fashion. Two of the best songs written for the new album never even appeared on it: “Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane.”

  The album had been intended to have an autobiographical theme that would reflect the band’s early lives in Liverpool. Those plans had to be trashed when manager Epstein informed the group that they were overdue for a single. So they reluctantly decided, with producer Martin’s pushing, to release “Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane” as a single with two “A” sides. It disqualified the songs from the new album, because in England songs appearing on the singles chart couldn’t also appear on an album released in the same year. The change left only one finished track, Paul’s “When I’m Sixty-Four,” for the album project. Martin later called the decision to yank the songs “the biggest mistake of my professional life,” but it cleared the way for the record that Sgt. Peppers would eventually become.

  Art History quiz: Q. What’s the actual title of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa? A. La Gioconda.

  THE SONGS

  Side 1

  • “Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Not only was this theme not the original concept, but the title song wasn’t even written until the album was half completed. Paul, who wrote the song, came up with the idea of basing the album on the notion that the Pepper band was real. He then suggested to Martin that he use studio effects to weave all the material together around that theme. (John didn’t object to Paul taking control of the project. LSD had blurred the edges of his personality, leaving him content—and maybe grateful—to let someone else take
charge.)

  The Sgt. Pepper persona did something else for the band: it let them step outside themselves. “One of the problems of success was that people had begun to expect so much from them,” writes Steve Turner in A Hard Day’s Write. “As Beatles they had become self-conscious, but as the Lonely Hearts Club Band they had no expectations to live up to.”

  • “With a Little Help from My Friends.” Paul and John “wanted to do a Ringo type of song,” remembers journalist Hunter Davies, who witnessed them writing it. “That was what they thought was missing on the album so far.” Keeping with the theme of the alternate band, Ringo sang under the guise of “Billy Shears.” As with some of the other songs, “Little Help” has been accused of promoting drug use. But Paul maintains that the line “I get high with a little help from my friends” means “high” in the spiritual sense.

  • “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Despite rumors to the contrary that persist to this day, it has nothing to do with LSD. The title, George Martin writes, refers to a drawing that John’s then-young son Julian had brought home from school. It depicted a little girl hovering in a black sky, surrounded by stars. Julian explained, “It’s Lucy, in the sky, with diamonds.” (Lucy O’Donnel was his best friend in school at the time.) The song’s imagery—tangerine trees, marmalade skies, and cellophane flowers—was mostly inspired by Lewis Carrol’s Through the Looking Glass. “Surrealism to me is reality,” said John. “Psychedelic vision is reality to me and always was.”

  Top ticket price to the first Super Bowl in 1967: $12. Top price in 2003: $500.

  • “Getting Better.” On a 1964 tour, Ringo got sick and session drummer Jimmy Nichol subbed for five nights. After each concert, Paul and John would ask Nichol what he thought of his performance. Each time Nichol would reply, “It’s getting better.” They loved the phrase and laughed every time they thought of it. A real Lennon-McCartney song—Paul put down the optimistic foundation of the song: “It’s getting better all the time.” And John added his cynicism: “Can’t get much worse.”