One-Night Stands with American History

by Richard Shenkman

  BRINKLEY AND THE BILLY GOATS

  Dr. John R. Brinkley was no ordinary doctor. Since around 1913 he had considered the possibility of performing a sex-gland transplant operation to restore lost potency. It had been done successfully in Europe by transplanting chimpanzee glands in human males. Patients reportedly left the operating table with potency assured. After Brinkley settled in Milford, Kansas, in 1918, he decided to attempt an operation. Instead of chimpanzee glands, however, Dr. Brinkley substituted billy goat’s glands. His first patient was a middle-aged man who had long desired a family. Both doctor and patient knew the operation was an experiment, but they agreed to take the gamble. Some time later the man presented Brinkley with “a small roll of bills.” The man’s wife had had a son. Brinkley then operated on other patients.

  A prominent California newspaperman, following his successful transplant, suggested that Brinkley raise his fee from $50 to at least $750. Fifty dollars was simply too small a sum to sound impressive. Soon Dr. Brinkley had paid off the debt on his new Milford hospital. By 1928 his fame had spread far and wide. Thirty to forty young, vigorous billy goats arrived daily from Arkansas to supply the needed number of sex glands. Willing patients were even easier to obtain. The doctor examined forty each day. Brinkley’s income was estimated at anywhere between $50,000 a year and $30,000 a week. He owned three airplanes and had opened his own bank. Brinkley was also the founder-owner of the first radio station in Kansas.

  But 1928 turned out to be the beginning of hard times for Brinkley. With an article in the journal of the American Medical Association entitled “John R. Brinkley—Quack,” Morris Fishbein and the AMA launched a close-down-Brinkley campaign. There was no medical evidence, they claimed, that substituting billy goat glands for human glands would improve anyone’s potency. The state Board of Medical Examination and Registration soon rescinded Brinkley’s license. The courts upheld the board’s action. To worsen matters, Brinkley’s radio broadcasting permit was about to be revoked. It looked as though Brinkley’s whole world would cave in.

  To save his business and rescue his reputation, Brinkley entered politics. He announced as an independent candidate for governor of Kansas. Unfortunately, the ballots for the 1930 election were already printed, forcing Brinkley to launch a write-in campaign. The state attorney general, after much political haggling, ruled that only ballots marked “J. R. Brinkley” and followed by the proper “X” would be counted. Ballots not properly marked—ballots cast for “Dr. Brinkley,” “Brinkley,” or with the name misspelled—would all be discarded. On election day literally thousands and thousands of Brinkley write-in ballots were invalidated on the flimsiest pretexts. The doctor lost the tight three-way election. Thirty years later both the Republican and Democratic candidates admitted that Brinkley would probably have won had he received every vote cast for him. Brinkley ran for governor again in 1932 and 1934, both times filing early enough to receive a proper place on the ballot. He was defeated in each race, however, by Republican Alf M. Landon.

  The 1930 governor’s race did not ruin Brinkley financially. He opened a new radio station just across the Rio Grande in Mexico—free of Federal Communications Commission regulations—and cranked out 50,000 watts, broadcasting to almost the entire Middle West. Dr. Brinkley did, however, retire from medical practice.

  SOURCE: Francis Schruben, Kansas in Turmoil (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1969), pp. 28–29.

  THE NOT-SO-ROARING TWENTIES

  According to figures on the 1920s compiled by the Brookings Institution, the decade’s reputed bubble of prosperity was never as big as it seemed. A handful of people did indeed make fortunes in the stock market and in real estate, but most people were not so lucky. In 1929 only 2.3 percent of American families enjoyed an income in excess of $10,000 a year. Just 8 percent had incomes greater than $5,000. Of the others, 71 percent lived on incomes below $2,500; 60 percent on incomes below $2,000. And over 21 percent had incomes of less than $1,000.

  The Brookings study established that families living on less than $2,000 did not have enough money to meet the bare necessities of life. Which means that in the golden year of 1929, 60 percent of American families were living in poverty, and another 10 percent were close to it.

  SOURCE: Frederick Lewis Allen, The Big Change (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), p. 144.

  THE PRIDE OF A GANGSTER

  Joe Saltis, a bootlegger from Chicago’s South Side, had a special dream. Like most gangsters from the 1920s era, Saltis had a large ego. When he retired from the rackets in 1930, he planned to feed that ego.

  Saltis moved to a farm at Barker Lake, Wisconsin, a luxury accommodation complete with a nine-hole golf course, clubhouse, ponies, deer, and good fishing grounds. The small town nearby had sixty-two voters, twenty-six of whom worked for Saltis. But that was not enough for a majority at the polls, so the former gangster hired five more people and changed the name of the town to Saltisville.

  “What I want is for my kids to be able to look in the United States Postal Guide and see their town, Saltisville,” claimed the unabashed bootlegger. A check with the Post Office, however, reveals that the town of Saltisville no longer exists.

  SOURCE: Jay Robert Nash, Bloodletters and Badmen (New York: M. Evans and Company, 1973), p. 484.

  War on Depression, War on Europe

  “These really are good times, but only a few know it.”

  ’HENRY FORD, MARCH 15, 1931

  SCRAPBOOK OF THE TIMES

  • When Herbert Hoover invited the Negro wife of a congressman to the White House for tea, he was officially denounced by the state legislature of Texas.

  • Just a month before the stock market crashed in October 1929, the vice-chairman of General Motors wrote an article for the Ladies Home Journal entitled “Everybody Ought to Be Rich.”

  • The Democratic theme song, “Happy Days Are Here Again,” comes from a movie called Chasing Rainbows, which opened to universal derision two months after the Great Crash.

  • During the 1930s, Bernard E. Smith made a fortune in the stock market by following the rule of thumb that the market would decline every time Hoover issued an optimistic statement about recovery.

  • A common sign held up by hitchhikers during the fall of 1932 read: “If you don’t give me a ride, I’ll vote for Hoover.”

  • In the midst of the 1932 campaign, when it appeared that Hoover would lose badly to FDR, the Republican vice presidential nominee blurted out at one stop that the problem with the country was that the average voter was “too damn dumb” to understand the administration’s policies.

  • Despite his radical politics, John L. Lewis, head of the powerful United Mine Workers, voted for Hoover over FDR in 1932. Lewis voted Republican his whole life except in the election of 1936, when he cast a ballot for Roosevelt.

  • When one of the Du Ponts was advised by an advertising agency in the middle of the depression to sponsor a radio program on Sunday afternoon, he remarked, “At three o’clock on Sunday afternoon everybody is playing polo.”

  • Eleanor Roosevelt did not like to smoke, but she often smoked at White House dinners as part of her campaign to “help” women.

  • In 1933, U.S. customs prohibited the importation of a book which contained a picture of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. The ban was lifted when publicized in the newspapers.

  • In the 1930s, Mae West’s name was never allowed to be mentioned in the Hearst chain of newspapers.

  • During the 1936 campaign William Randolph Hearst advised the Republican party that presidential candidate Alf Landon should be encouraged to make as few speeches as possible.

  • Encouraged by the success of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, which in 1936 persuaded Congress to give a bonus to the veterans of World War I, students at Princeton University established an organization to demand compensation for another group of veterans: the Veterans of Future Wars. The students argued that the government should immediately give every male citi
zen between the ages of eighteen and thirty-six a bonus of $1,000 each. Then, when the next war came along, every soldier would know that dying would not cheat him out of an extra paycheck. Within ten days, more than 120 branches of the organization were established at other colleges. Female college students founded their own group: the Future Gold Star Mothers.

  • To give businessmen in 1939 a longer Christmas season, FDR ordered that Thanksgiving be celebrated one week earlier than usual.

  • While running for president in 1940, Wendell Willkie used the slogan: “Roosevelt for ex-President.”

  • During the campaign of 1940, Fortune magazine reported that only 7.3 percent of American women and only 5.8 percent of American men believed that Eleanor Roosevelt should remain active in politics if her husband lost the election.

  • The first freeway in America was opened on December 30, 1940, in Los Angeles.

  THE INDIAN WHO BECAME VICE PRESIDENT

  He is almost forgotten now, but America once elected a part Indian as vice president, literally a heartbeat away from the presidency. Charles Curtis was a U.S. senator from Kansas, Senate majority leader, and vice president of the United States under Herbert Hoover.

  Curtis was born in 1860 in Kansas. His mother died in 1863 and his father was dishonorably discharged from the Union Army and served time in the Missouri State Penitentiary. By 1866, Charley Curtis was being raised by his maternal grandparents on the Kaw Indian reservation in Council Grove, Kansas. Curtis’s grandmother, Julie Gonville Pappan, was the granddaughter of White Plume, the Kansa-Kaw chief who had helped Lewis and Clark in 1804. White Plume’s daughter had married a French-Canadian fur trapper, Louis Gonville, and their daughter Julie had married another French-Canadian fur trapper, Louis Pappan. Reflecting his mother’s and grandparents’ heritage, Curtis grew up speaking Kaw and French before he learned English.

  Because he spoke Kaw, Curtis fit in easily on the reservation. He was a good horse rider and shot bows and arrows. In those frontier days, the Kaw reservation was frequently raided by still nomadic Cheyenne Indians. On one such attack, the horses were hidden and Curtis volunteered to make the sixty-mile trip from Council Grove to Topeka on foot to get help. This “cross-country run” made Curtis a celebrity in Topeka, but convinced his paternal grandparents that he should be raised in the more “civilized” atmosphere of Topeka. Curtis lived the next few years of his life in Topeka, where he often jockeyed horses in the local races.

  In 1873, Curtis’s paternal grandfather died. Curtis left Topeka and wanted to join his maternal grandparents, who were moving with the Kaw tribe to the new reservation in the Indian Territory of present-day Oklahoma. His grandmother Julie Pappan, however, talked him out of rejoining the tribe. While she would have loved to have him live with her, she told her grandson that if he lived on the reservation, he would end up without an education or future prospects. The next morning, as the Kaw wagons pulled out and headed south to what would become Oklahoma, young Charles Curtis mounted his pony and returned to Topeka. He had irrevocably entered the white man’s world. “It was the turning point in my life,” he later recounted.

  Back in Topeka, Curtis lived with his paternal grandmother, a woman who “regarded being both a Methodist and a Republican as essential for anyone who expected to go to heaven.” Curtis graduated from high school, studied law, and was admitted to the Kansas bar at age 21. At age 24, he married and won his first political race, as Shawnee County attorney.

  Curtis had started on a long and very successful political career. In 1892, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican, in a year when the state of Kansas voted for the Populist candidate for president and elected a Populist governor. In 1907 he was elected to the U.S. Senate, and in 1925 became Senate majority leader.

  In 1924, Curtis was widely discussed as a vice presidential candidate for Calvin Coolidge. His wife, however, was seriously ill at the time, and Curtis did not attend the Republican convention. He told his sister, “I would not leave [my wife] Anna now to become president of the United States, and certainly not for the vice presidency.” His wife died later that year.

  In 1928, Curtis announced his candidacy for president, but ran an ineffectual campaign. Herbert Hoover was nominated on the first ballot. To balance the ticket, Republicans needed a farm state man and Curtis was it. That November, America elected as vice president the man who had grown up on the Kaw reservation.

  Hoover and Curtis had never been political allies, and their distrust of each other lasted throughout Hoover’s term. Curtis was never an inside player in the administration. By 1932, with the onset of the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover and Charles Curtis met defeat at the polls. Curtis’s political career was over. He died four years later.

  Source: Mark O. Hatfield, Vice Presidents of the United States, 1789–1993 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997), pp. 373–81.

  HOOVER COLLAGE

  • While a student at Stanford, Hoover opposed elitist fraternities and founded his own group, the Barbarians.

  • At Hoover’s inauguration in 1929, Chief Justice William Howard Taft bungled the swearing-in ceremony. Instead of asking Hoover to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” he used the words, “preserve, maintain, and protect.” The slip caused low murmurs among the spectators.

  • Hoover was the first president to have a telephone right on his desk. All previous presidents kept the instrument in an adjoining room.

  • While an engineer, Hoover translated a sixteenth-century work on mining written in Latin.

  • Hoover required White House servants to be “invisible.” Whenever he or the first lady appeared, the servants would jump into the nearest closet to avoid being seen.

  • After learning that Maine had gone Democratic in the September election in 1932, Hoover ordered an aide to determine the truth of the old saying, “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.”

  • In his memoirs Hoover asserted that people did not turn to apple-selling in the depression because they were unemployed, but because apple-selling was a highly profitable business. “Many persons,” he wrote, “left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.”

  AN EMPTY POT AND A VACANT GARAGE

  With the coming of the depression, the Republican slogan of 1928, “A chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage,” seemed a hideously bad joke—especially to the reporter who coined the phrase. By 1933 the author of the slogan was out of work and driven to begging to keep his wife and children from starving.

  SOURCE: Olive Clapper, Washington Tapestry (New York: Whittlesey House, 1946), p. 10.

  MICKEY MOUSE BANNED

  The banning of a Mickey Mouse cartoon is the last thing one would expect, but in 1932 it happened. The cartoon showed a cow in a pasture reading a book that was considered obscene. The book was Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks, which told the story of a young Englishman’s affair with a Russian queen. The book had been banned in Boston in 1908 and was considered vulgar and boring by moralists and critics alike. It is a mystery how the book came to be put in a Walt Disney cartoon.

  SOURCE: Anne Lyon Haight, Banned Books, 3d ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1970), pp. 67, 92.

  FDR COLLAGE

  • While president, Franklin Roosevelt always slept with a gun under his pillow. Eleanor usually carried a pistol in her pocket-book and glove compartment. White House servants called the presidential weapons “His” and “Hers.”

  • Because he was handicapped by polio, FDR’s greatest fear was fire. He never liked being left alone in a room with a fire burning in a fireplace.

  • One of Roosevelt’s favorite stories concerned the wife of a foreign diplomat who lost her panties as she was going up to shake the President’s hand during a state dinner.

  FDR’S IMPRESSIVE LINEAGE

  Genealogists have determined that FDR was related to the following eleven presidents:

  George Washington

&n
bsp; John Adams

  James Madison

  John Quincy Adams

  Martin Van Buren

  William Henry Harrison

  Zachary Taylor

  U. S. Grant

  Benjamin Harrison

  Theodore Roosevelt

  William Howard Taft

  SOURCE: Joseph Kane, Facts About the Presidents, 2d ed. (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1968), p. 223.

  FDR A GREATER MAN THAN CHRIST

  “A hillman told me the other day that Roosevelt was the greatest man that ever lived. ‘Greater’n Jesus Christ,’ he said solemnly. ‘Christ said, “Follow me and ye shall not want.” Roosevelt says, “Set down, boys, and I’ll bring hit to ye!”’”

  SOURCE: Esquire, April 1937, p. 95.

  LETTER FROM A JACKASS

  California congressman John Steven McGroarty, responding to a letter from a constituent in 1934: “One of the countless drawbacks of being in Congress is that I am compelled to receive impertinent letters from a jackass like you in which you say I promised to have the Sierra Madre mountains reforested and I have been in Congress two months and haven’t done it. Will you please take two running jumps and go to hell.”

  SOURCE: John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (1956; rpt. New York: Perennial Library, 1964), p. 9.

  THE WORD THAT DOES NOT EXIST

  One day a tired linguist working on the highly esteemed second edition of the 1934 Merriam-Webster New International Dictionary carelessly placed a slip of paper containing the abbreviation for the word “density” (“D. or d. Density”) on the pile of slips for words beginning with the letter d. Then another linguist, thinking the slip was in the right place but that the entry on it had been wrongly punctuated, pushed the first four letters together to form the word “dord.” He thoughtfully added the descriptive letter n for “noun.” Clearly “dord” was a noun—it rhymed with “board,” “cord,” and “lord.”

  The astute editors of the dictionary soon discovered the errant entry but decided to play a joke on the public and leave it in. They wanted to find out if anyone would catch the “mistake.” So, appearing in the August second edition of the 1934 Merriam-Webster dictionary, on page 771, in the right-hand column, sandwiched in between the words “Dorcopsis” and “doré,” is the following entry: “dord (dôrd), n. Physics & Chem. Density.”