January 2011

In the 1640s, John Casor was brought from Africa to America, where he toiled as a servant for a Virginia landowner. In 1654, Casor filed a complaint in Northampton County Court, claiming that his master, Anthony Johnson, had unjustly extended the terms of his indenture with the intention of keeping Casor his slave for life. Johnson, insisting he knew nothing of any indenture, fought hard to retain what he regarded as his personal property. After much wrangling, on March 8, 1655, the court ruled that “the said Jno Casor Negro shall forthwith bee returned unto the service of his master Anthony Johnson,” consigning him to a lifetime of bondage. Given the vulnerable legal status of servants—black and white—in colonial America, the decision was not surprising. But the documents reveal one additional fact of interest: Anthony Johnson, like his chattel, Casor, was black.

Our “Winter Art Show” made its debut early in the February/March 1986 issue, but its wellsprings are far, far older. One of the great pleasures of this job is the number of eloquent, significant, and startling American paintings the editors come across in the course of the year. One of the great frustrations is—or was—how many of them we had to pass by because even the most devious caption writing could not plausibly tie them to a particular story. Everyone on the staff had a mental inventory of favorite pictures that had never made it into print.

One day, a few of us were grumbling about having had to sacrifice some treasure or other, when my predecessor, Byron Dobell, said, “Galleries are always having winter art shows. Why can’t we?” So we did.

Our traditional picture of colonial New England is essentially a still life. Peaceful little villages. Solid, strait-laced, steadily productive people. A landscape serene, if not bountiful. A history of purposeful, and largely successful, endeavor.

In describing the suicide of Hurstwood in Sister Carrie (1900), Dreiser adheres to reportorial realism yet achieves a profound note of dignified pathos. The fallen saloon manager has gone to a shabby flophouse and patiently waits among the mass of homeless men until the doors are opened.

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Theodore Dreiser dominated the American literary landscape in the first quarter of the twentieth century. To his contemporaries he seemed to have risen sui generis, like a newly formed volcano, and as Norman Mailer said, “Dreiser came closer to understanding the social machine than any other American writer who ever lived.” But he was more than a chronicler of social forces; he was a self-conscious artist, a literary pioneer, a bridge between the Victorian and the modern sensibility. His friend and critical champion H. L. Mencken summed up his importance: “American writing before and after Dreiser differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin.”

The first musical I ever saw was South Pacific . I was taken to see it on my fifth birthday, only a month after it opened. Overprivileged brat that I was, I had no idea that I was being treated to the toughest ticket in the history of Broadway.

My sole memory of the original production today is Mary Martin washing that man right out of her hair. But my mother later told me I was so excited by it that I couldn’t go to sleep that night and that I sang—off key—tunes from the show for weeks afterward. I’ve been hopelessly in love with a wonderful kind of theater, the American musical, ever since.

But while I’ve seen South Pacific in other productions when I was more grown-up, it doesn’t—quite—make my top-ten list. It is not that there is anything wrong with South Pacific . Far from it; it’s a masterpiece. It’s just that there are ten other masterpieces that for reasons entirely arbitrary, capricious, and idiosyncratic, I happen to like even better.

Only in retrospect does it seem surprising that there were empty seats in the St. James Theatre the night Oklahoma! opened, on March 31, 1943.

After all, no member of the cast could have remotely been called a star. The Theatre Guild, which produced it, was at the end of its financial rope after a disastrous series of failure. Agnes de Mille, the choreographer, well known and respected in the small world of serious dance, had not yet had a Broadway success. Rouben Mamoulian, principally a film director, had done only one prior Broadway musical, Porgy and Bess , an artistic success but a financial failure. Richard Rodgers, for the first time in his career, was writing songs with someone other than Lorenz Hart, and no one, including himself, knew how he would do. Oscar Hammerstein II, meanwhile, had had six Broadway flops in a row.

Very late on the night of November 4,1928, Arnold Rothstein was found shot and critically wounded in the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan. Identified by The New York Times as “Broadway’s greatest chance-taker” and the accused but acquitted fixer of the 1919 World Series, the forty-six-year-old gambler was rushed to the hospital, where he held tight to the code of the underworld, refusing to shed light on his shooting. He lingered silently for forty-eight hours to die on election day, posthumously winning more than five hundred thousand dollars for having bet on Herbert Hoover.

But those early newspaper articles that described Rothstein merely as a clever gambler had assigned him too modest a role. In fact, he was an all-around criminal genius, one whose prodigious energy, imagination, and intellect had catapulted him to supremacy in an underworld that he changed forever. Rothstein, said one historian, permanently transformed American crime “from petty larceny into big business.”

One thing that all parties in the American drug-policy debate agree on is that they want to eliminate the traffic in illicit drugs and the criminal syndicates that control it. There are two divergent strategies for achieving this end: the drug war and drug legalization, or, more precisely, controlled legalization, since few people want the government to simply abandon drug control and proclaim laissez faire.

The drug war was launched during the Reagan administration. It is actually the fourth such campaign, there having been sustained legislative and governmental efforts against drug abuse between 1909 and 1923, 1951 and 1956, and 1971 and 1973. What distinguishes the current war is that it is more concerned with stimulants like cocaine than with opiates, it is larger, and—no surprise in our age of many zeros—it is much more expensive.

The better title for this article, let me suggest at the outset, would be (“Drug Prohibition: Con.” Most opponents of “drug legalization” assume that it would involve making cocaine and heroin available the way alcohol and tobacco are today. But most legalization supporters favor nothing of the kind] in fact, we disagree widely as to which drugs should be legalized, how they should be controlled, and what the consequences are likely to be. Where drug-policy reformers do agree is in our critique of the drug-prohibition system that has evolved in the United States—a system, we contend, that has proved ineffective, costly, counterproductive, and immoral.