January 2011

How are we to win our national struggle with cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and other illegal drugs? Everyone agrees that drug-related problems are a plague on our society, destroying lives, helping wreck neighborhoods, poisoning schools, feeding crime, bleeding the economy. Lately, strong voices are saying that the war against drugs as we are now fighting it cannot be won, that the best solution is legalization, or at least decriminalization. What does history, with its case studies of past substance-bans and attempts at regulation and decontrol, tell us might happen if drugs were no longer outlawed? Could we close the criminal marketplace? Make drugs safer for those who use them? Reduce demand? Cut enforcement costs and raise tax revenues? Or would things get worse? Two scholars, Ethan A. Nadelmann of Princeton University and David T. Courtwright of the University of North Florida, have studied the historical record closely. Their answers could hardly be more different.

Lyndon Johnson had considered giving up his pursuit of a second term long before he actually did it, in a surprise ending to a nationally televised speech on March 31. The advance press copy of Johnson’s address contained his announcement of a halt to bombing in North Vietnam and proposals on American troop levels—dramatic stuff by itself—but gave no warning that the troubled President would then read on to say, “With American sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge here at home, with our hopes … for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes. … Accordingly, I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

The hopes of the antiwar movement turned temporarily to the reticent senator from Minnesota. Having said little more than that he opposed the war in Vietnam, Eugene McCarthy took 42 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary on March 12 against a President from his own party.

McCarthy’s scruffier young volunteers had agreed to shave and keep “Clean for Gene” to help him make the case against Lyndon Johnson’s war. McCarthy, who had published spare, declarative poems (“Now, far-sighted I see the distant/danger/beyond the coffin confines of/telephone booths”), came across as muted and bookish on the stump, more like a professor secure in his tenure than a man hungry for the Presidency. “I am prepared to be your candidate,” he red-bloodedly declared in his announcement.

On February 6 a Los Angeles jury acquitted Errol Flynn of statutory rape. His accuser, the dancer Peggy La Rue Satterlee, claimed Flynn had attacked her and another underage girl in August 1941, aboard his yacht en route to Catalina. After the film star had entered her room and climbed into her bed, the New York Post quoted Satterlee as testifying, “I believe I slapped him on the nose. … I might have kicked him, but I don’t think so. I cried.”

A certain seaminess clung to Flynn despite his acquittal: there were just too many bad stories, and after the war the Australian-born movie actor never recovered the drawing power that he had shown with earlier films like The Adventures of Robin Hood .

The Colorado judge Benjamin B. Lindsey, admired for his progressive decisions and feared for his unorthodox writings on youth and marriage in the 1920s, died on March 26 in Los Angeles.

Ben Lindsey had been born in 1869 in Jackson, Tennessee, and had grown up in Tennessee and Colorado before being admitted to the bar in 1894. He became a county judge in Denver in 1901, and over the next twenty-six years there he worked up his theories of juvenile rights while gathering case histories for his most notable books, The Revolt of Modern Youth and The Companionate Marriage .

“Barnyard marriage,” was the evangelist Billy Sunday’s pithy appraisal of the judge’s 1927 work, which also drew fire from the Daughters of the American Revolution and a nation of preachers, many of whom declared Lindsey’s idea “Bolshevistic.” “Pal marriage,” “free love,” or “jazz marriage” were the preferred choices of editorial writers.

Borrowing the idea from its English proponent, William Willet, Congress passed a bill effective March 30 to make the most of summer days by setting clocks ahead one hour in spring and back again in fall. The move was not tremendously popular. Farmers were especially suspicious of the change. One reportedly objected, “My corn needs the morning sun.” National Daylight Savings was repealed the following year but sustained state by state until World War II, when it was imposed year-round in 1942. It has been universal in the United States since 1986.

Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani was overthrown on January 17 by a coalition of sugar speculators and missionaries (and some rogue Marines) who had felt compelled to act by the recent course of her government. Some 160 U.S. Marines who had been stationed nearby were recruited for the coup effort, but they joined the action only unofficially. Sanford Dole, who had lived most of his life in the Hawaiian Islands as the child of missionaries, had, before his election to the legislature in 1884, been part of the revolution of 1887 that established a constitutional monarchy. He now assumed temporary powers as head of the provisional government while the movement waited for the United States to proclaim its annexation of Hawaii.

I still live on the farm where my father was born in 1898. When I was small, my grandmother lived with us in the summer and spent the winter with her oldest son’s family in Baltimore. At Easter time in 1928 my mother and I took the train to Baltimore to visit before bringing Grandmother back with us to the upstate New York farm.

After the invasion of Sicily in World War II, my infantry company was ordered to clear one of the secondary roads to Palermo. By late in the afternoon we were about ten miles from Palermo when our advance people were fired on by an Italian machine gun along the mountainous road. We had no armor to quiet the gun, so we called back for an armored car or a light tank. Before too long we heard a vehicle approaching, but we knew from the sound that this wasn’t the armor we requested. When it rounded the corner behind us, I saw it was a military sedan with the top down and somebody standing up in back.