On February 5, as the nation struggled with Watergate, food shortages, and the energy crisis, John Tower of Texas took the Senate floor to address a topic of more immediate concern: chili. The previous week, in a speech at the National Press Club, Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona had said: “I have heard that the club serves only Texas chili. Tell me this is not true. A Texan does not know chili from leavings in a corral.” Harsh words, perhaps, but extremism in the defense of chili is no vice. In the Old West such intemperate remarks might have led to a shootout, but Tower confined his weaponry to ridicule ("Comparing Arizona chili to Texas chili is like comparing Phyllis Diller to Sophia Loren") and challenged his opponent to nothing more dangerous than a cook-off. Goldwater eagerly accepted. Years before, he had been Tower’s mentor, but some things are bigger than politics, even in Washington.
Other senators quickly joined the fray, continuing a long-time tradition that through the years had seen floor debates over the proper way to prepare fish chowder and crab cakes as well as whether corn pone should be dunked or crumbled into potlikker. Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico scoffed that when it came to chili, Texas and Arizona were merely fighting for second place. Sen. Robert A. Taft, Jr., from the well-known cow-punching territory of Ohio, audaciously proclaimed that “the only real chili comes from Cincinnati.” In support he offered an article by S. Frederick Starr, who would later become president of Oberlin College. Starr was particularly effusive in praise of the Five-Way, a specialty of Cincinnati’s Skyline and Empress restaurants that combined chili, spaghetti, grated cheese, onions, and beans. Southwesterners reacted to this sacrilege the way a New Yorker would to a cinnamonraisin “bagel” with peanut butter and jelly, or a Georgian to salmon teriyaki “barbecue.”
The cook-off, at the National Press Club on April 4, matched seven chilies from six states. Sen. Henry Bellmon’s Oklahoma recipe included white beans, Rep. Lindy Boggs put Louisiana sausage in her “bayou chili,” and New Mexico’s senators entered separate versions, Domenici’s using red chilies and Joseph Montoya’s using green. As for Ohio, Starr recalls that a group of Cincinnatians “drove up to Washington in a big old Cadillac with a ton of the stuff in the trunk"—presumably after obtaining a permit to transport hazardous materials.
In the end none of the pretenders made much headway against the original pair of combatants. Tower’s chili won first place in an audience poll (amid charges of Lone Star-style vote rigging by the club’s Texan president), while a panel of judges found Goldwater’s version tops in a blind test. Goldwater’s chili put the purists to shame, shunning exotic ingredients in favor of supermarket fare like ground beef, canned beans, tomato purée, and chili powder. Goldwater was a shop-keeper’s son, so it’s no surprise that his recipe read as if it could have come from a special advertising section in Woman’s Day.
As creative and ingenious as the various chilies may have been, they paled beside the elaborate insults the partisans devised to disparage one another’s products. The Phoenix Gazette said Texas chili was redolent of “gasoline or diesel fuel” and good only for paving runways at the new Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. The newspaper maintained that “a bowl of it dumped into the Gulf of Mexico could poison marine life as far away as the Straits of Magellan.” Less elegantly, Goldwater was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that chili “was a good stew until it hit Texas and picked up +$%’”(∗ rat ∗%’#.” Tower replied that “Arizona chili is a contradiction in terms” (like Texas modesty, he might have added). Meanwhile, Taft promised his colleagues that Cincinnati chili would “deflate both their provincial egos and their lower tracts.”
A few years earlier H. Allen Smith, the veteran journalist and self-proclaimed chili expert, had written a book called The Great Chili Confrontation that contains many such putdowns. One Texan dismissed Smith’s New York chili by saying, “Texas hospitals have to heat that stuff up before they feed it to newborn babies.” Another Lone Star epicure said, “A man could get more flavor from a set of stewed piano keys,” with yet another calling it “thinner than diluted water.” Chili haters, of course, can be every bit as passionate as chili lovers. Smith also quoted a New Jersey friend’s concise and emphatic verdict on any variety of the stuff: “I’d rather eat the bindings off a set of Winston Churchill.”
1949 Fifty Years Ago
An End to Seasickness
On February 14 Drs. Leslie H. Gay and Paul Carliner, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, announced a cure for something that had plagued mankind since the very beginnings of civilization: seasickness. Like many momentous medical advances, their discovery had come about by accident. The doctors had been testing an experimental antihistamine prepared by G. D. Searle & Company on a woman suffering from hives. The patient was also prone to motion sickness, but she noticed that she never got sick on the streetcar ride home from their office if she took a dose of the antihistamine first. Intrigued, Gay and Carliner arranged to test the drug on soldiers traveling to Germany on a troopship.
The General C. C. Ballou, originally a freighter, was known to be highly unstable. Nevertheless, during a rough autumn crossing only 2 percent of those given the experimental drug in advance became seasick, compared with 25 percent of those given a placebo. Among soldiers not treated ahead of time, the drug was better than 90 percent effective in curing seasickness within half an hour after its onset. Although the generic name of the soldiers’ savior is dimenhydrinate, it has become universally known by its trademark, Dramamine.
Many people still feel ill during a rough journey by sea, land, or air, but such queasiness is nothing compared with an old-fashioned case of true seasickness. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “At first the contents of the stomach only are ejected; but thereafter bilious matter, and occasionally even blood, are brought up by the violence of the retching…. With the sickness there is great physical prostration, as shown in the pallor of the skin, cold sweats and feeble pulse, accompanied with mental depression and wretchedness.” The dedicated sea traveler John Malcolm Brinnin called it “the only and ultimate sickness: the one living death of faculty and will.” The best thing that medical texts could say about seasickness was that it was rarely fatal, though to someone in the throes of a violent attack, this could seem more a curse than a blessing.
Before Dramamine, cures for seasickness had been just as numerous as those for hiccups, and just as effective. They ranged from the commonplace (ice, bicarbonate of soda, Worcestershire sauce, aspirin, seawater, dry toast, thin gruel, strong coffee) to the narcotic (morphine, cocaine, opium) to the downright poisonous (hydrocyanic acid, belladonna). Champagne was said to counteract the urge to vomit, and brandy, crème de menthe, and other cordials supposedly reduced anxiety. The ancient Roman poet Horace called for swallowing large cups of dry wine. Folk preventatives included chewing a piece of fatty pork, lying down and warming the feet, breathing into a bag, stuffing the ears with cotton, and gluing a piece of brown paper to the chest.
Another school of thought held that seasickness was mental in origin and could be overcome by willpower. One writer asserted that “thinkers, brain workers, women, nervous and fearful types, and Latins” were especially vulnerable, while the very young and old, “phlegmatic Anglo-Saxons,” courageous people, and newly acquainted lovers were said to be nearly immune. In fact seasickness has always been one of history’s great levelers. Not only was Gen. Douglas MacArthur susceptible (as readers of last November’s “My Brush With History” column will recall); Adm. Horatio Nelson and Julius Caesar were also famous sufferers.
Shortly after results of the General Ballou test were announced, one newspaper quoted a naval veteran who sneered, “Any drug that will keep an Army man from getting sick at sea is the marvel of the ages.” When pressed, however, he admitted that sailors were not immune either. The old salt told of one young, determined Navy recruit who had kept watch with a bucket at his side during the recent war. Through the ravages of seasickness he doggedly stayed at his post, though every now and then he would give in to despair. The veteran remembered once when a German bomb whizzed over the top of the ship and the youngster’s voice could be heard clearly from the bridge: “Missed us again, dammit!”
1924 Seventy-five Years Ago
Gershwin’s Rhapsody
Music lovers and trend chasers thronged New York City’s Aeolian Hall on February 12 to hear Paul Whiteman and his twenty-two-piece Palais Royal Orchestra present “An Experiment in Modern Music.” The unconventional concert was scheduled to include works by Irving Berlin, Victor Herbert. Jerome Kern, and others, as well as a performance by the pianist Zez Confrey, writer of “Kitten on the Keys.” To top it off, a brand-new composition was promised from an upand-coming young songwriter named George Gershwin.
The idea of the concert, Whiteman’s manager had explained, was “to point out …the tremendous strides which have been made in popular music from the day of the discordant jazz, which sprang into existence about ten years ago from nowhere in particular, to the really melodious music of today which —for no good reason—is still being called jazz.” By bringing jazz and popular music into a formal concert hall (a daring notion at the time), Whiteman hoped to show that those genres were worthy of serious consideration, especially when played by his tightly rehearsed, clean-cut (and incidentally all-white) orchestra.
The program listed twenty-three numbers, which over a long afternoon turned out to contain more misses than hits. By the time of the next-tolast piece—Gershwin’s premiere, titled Rhapsody in Blue—many in the stifling auditorium had begun to nod off. Russ Gorman of Whiteman’s band woke them up in a hurry with the famous opening clarinet glissando (something most clarinetists of the day would not think of attempting) that has since become as familiar as the start of Beethoven’s Fifth. He slithered into a sinuous jazz melody, and by the time the piece ended, about eighteen minutes later, Gershwin (who played the piano part himself) had arrived as a major composer. Overnight critical reaction was mixed, but by the end of 1924 Whiteman’s band had played the piece eighty-four times. Eager fans snapped up one million copies of the Whiteman/Gershwin recording, and despite the difficulty of the piano part, even sheet music sold briskly. By the time of his death, in 1937, Gershwin had made more than a quarter-million dollars from the piece.
For all its momentous impact, Gershwin had dashed off Rhapsody in Blue in just a few weeks. He first got wind of the Aeolian Hall concert on the evening of January 3 while shooting pool with a friend. His brother and lyricist, Ira, saw an item in the next day’s paper announcing the event for February 12 and saying that Gershwin would write a “jazz concerto” for it. Whiteman had previously told Gershwin of his plans for such a concert, and Gershwin had begun mentally sketching out possible contributions in his spare moments, but he had no idea it would happen so soon. On January 7 he started writing out a score, and around January 25 he turned the last of it over to Ferde Grofé, Whiteman’s orchestrator, to be arranged for the Palais Royal band. Gershwin was so rushed that he left several blank spots in his piano score to be filled in with improvisation at the performance.
Whiteman’s “Experiment” had been designed to show that jazz could sound respectable. Instead it ended up showing that respectable music could sound jazzy. As usual when “serious” and popular art meet, borrowings by the former from the latter turned out much better than those in the opposite direction. While most jazz musicians shrugged off Whiteman’s invitation to join polite society, Rhapsody in Blue (in its expanded 1942 arrangement) has become a favorite way for classical orchestras to liven up their programs and placate subscribers discouraged by too much Mahler. Although most of Whiteman’s “symphonic jazz” sounds irretrievably quaint today, Rhapsody in Blue stands as the first big step in the long and still incomplete process of breaking down America’s musical barriers between highbrow and lowbrow, popular and “serious,” and even black and white.
1649 Three Hundred and Fifty Years Ago
Sara and Mary
On March 6 the General Court of Plymouth Plantation convened to dispose of a number of routine matters. It settled a child-custody case, directed the inhabitants of three towns to pay for the construction of a bridge, granted licenses to sell wine, and authorized payment of some witness fees. One colonist was charged with “letting … an Indian haue a gun” and two others with receiving stolen goods. Then came the case of Mary Hammon and Sara Norman of Yarmouth, who were accused of “leude behauior each with other vpon a bed"—in other words, committing a lesbian act.
The record, unlike in today’s highprofile sex cases, is imprecise about exactly what the defendants were doing. Certainly there was nothing unusual about two women sharing a bed; it would be centuries before Americans expected to have beds of their own. A later entry in the case mentions “diuers lasiuious speeches” but goes no further. Whatever they were up to, it must have been quite flagrant, because prosecutions for lesbian behavior were exceedingly rare. In fact, with the possible exception of a 1642 citation for “unseemly practices” between two maids, the Hammon-Norman incident was the only such recorded case in the history of the New England colonies.
For men, by contrast, sodomy was a capital crime, and executions were not unknown. Even in borderline cases an offender could be sentenced to be “whiped … & have one of his nostrills slit so high as may well be, & then to be seared, & kept in prison, till he bee fit … & then to be whiped again, & to have the other nostrill slit & seared.” But sodomy required bodily penetration and “effusion of seed,” and the same was true of the lesser crimes of adultery and fornication. Legally, if there was no male involved, there could be no sex. (This principle, which goes back to the ancient Hittites and the Talmud, would be widely observed in America—and most of the world—well into the twentieth century.) The two Yarmouth women could be punished for their conduct, but nowhere near as harshly as they would have been for a sex crime.
Circumstances point to Sara Norman as the one who instigated the affair. The General Court may have feared she would corrupt Mary Hammon, who was fifteen years old and just married. Sara was a mother, married for nine years to Hugh Norman (who had recently abandoned her), and apparently something of a femme fatale who ran with a loose crowd. In the fall of 1649 one Richard Berry accused her and a man named Teage Joanes of “sodomy & other vnclean practisses.” A few months later Berry recanted and was whipped. The case of Berry and Joanes is tantalizingly incomplete as well; later records reveal them to have been infamous libertines who were ordered to “part theire uncivell living together.”
Mary Hammon was “cleared with admonision” by the General Court. Sara Norman, who was held responsible for the “lasiuious speeches,” was ordered in October 1650 “to make a publick acknowlidgment” of her “vnchast behauior” and “take heed of such cariages for the future, lest her former cariage come in remembrance against her to make her punishment the greater.” This she evidently did, for there is no further mention of her or Hammon in the colonial records.
Plymouth’s governor, William Bradford, writing at around the time Sara Norman was at her wildest, put a positive spin on the recent “breaking out of sundrie notorious sins” (some of which he described in detail) in his colony. Perhaps, he speculated, the devil was making especial efforts to corrupt the people of Plymouth because they were so virtuous. Alternatively, the colony’s vigilant pursuit of evil may have made it seem more common than it really was. In any case, he wrote, the prevalence of wickedness should “cause us to fear and tremble at the consideration of our corrupte natures, which are so hardly bridled, subdued, and mortified; nay, cannot by any other means but the powerful worke and grace of Gods spirite.”
