Month: October 2011

John Carter Brown Library: Drugs from the Colonies– the New American Medicine Chest

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Last week, just moments after Matt Crawford posted his guest blog on Doing Early Modern Drugs,  Points got word of a fantastic new exhibit at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, R.I. that speaks directly to some of the issues Matt was raising– and will continue to raise as his series continues over the …

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“Stars Don’t Fall”: Felicia G., Marty Mann, and Other Women of the Early Alcoholics Anonymous Movement, Part II

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Editor’s note: We’re pleased to present the second part of Amanda Smith’s three-part series: “‘Stars Don’t Fall’: Felicia G., Marty Mann, and Other Women of the Early Alcoholics Anonymous Movement.”  New readers may wish to check out Part One first.  Points readers interested in learning more about Marty Mann or Blythewood should also take a look at this post by Ron Roizen.   For more on gender and the early history of Alcoholics Anonymous, consider this post by Michelle McClellan.  Of course, readers can always use the subject tags to identify still more relevant Points posts.  As before, our thanks to Amanda Smith for sharing her work here.

“I’ve got a dame here with a name I can’t pronounce,” Bill W. told someone whose number he dialed on Felicia G.’s behalf at the end of the first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting she ever attended, in Hell’s Kitchen in 1943.   When he hung up, he told her he had arranged for her to meet someone named Marty.  “Aha, he’s passing the buck,” Felicia, who had come largely to humor her psychiatrist, suspected inwardly.  “Now comes the questionnaire.”

“I felt like a gangster’s moll about to be interviewed by the Salvation Army,” Countess Felicia Gizycka later remembered of her arrival at the address Bill W. had given her.  To her surprise, however, she found herself welcomed into what turned out to be a tasteful Midtown Manhattan apartment filled with books and artwork, by a woman named Priscilla who told her that the Marty whom Bill W. had put her in touch with was on her way.  Although Felicia’s father had been a Polish count, and her mother was a Chicago Tribune heiress and the publisher of Washington Times-Herald, the most widely read newspaper in the nation’s capital, her life had been derailed by alcohol.  Over the previous decade she had demolished almost all of her personal relationships.  By 1943, she was twice divorced.  She had lost custody of her daughter.  Several months earlier, she had (to use her own phrase) “divorced” her mercurial mother, and renounced the substantial tax-free allowance she had accepted from her family throughout her adulthood.  Now, in reduced circumstances, smelling of “booze and ancient sweat,” with her matted hair and threadbare clothing, her leg crudely bandaged after a recent fall, Felicia was surprised to find that like Priscilla, Marty, once she arrived, was welcoming, genteel and well-groomed:

Felicia
Felicia, herself genteel and well-groomed

“She was attractive; she was like the friends I once had.  Indeed, she had known my cousin in Chicago.”  Without asking Felicia to explain herself or account for her condition, without asking anything at all, Marty “went right into her own story, which was much worse than mine. I couldn’t believe my ears. I tried to interrupt. She wouldn’t let me.”

If this new acquaintance reminded Felicia of former friends who had fallen away, she had even more in common with Felicia herself.  A native of Chicago the same age as Felicia, Mrs. Marty Mann was a “tall, smart-looking blonde” who had married briefly and unsuitably in the late 1920s.  Though her marriage had ended within a year, her incipient alcoholism had progressed unchecked long afterwards.  “Years of drinking and general hijinks had cut her off from old friends.  She too had gone to cheap bars to drink,” Felicia learned, amazed; “With more physical courage than I had possessed, she had twice tried to take her life.”  Marty only began to consider seeking help after learning that she had been heaved bodily down the gangplank of the Queen Mary upon docking in New York Harbor in December 1936; her only hazy memory of the four-day transatlantic crossing had been of Edward VIII’s abdication speech.  Unable to control her drinking, she had been unemployed for three years in the late 1930s during which she began the detoxification process, first on the locked-down neurological ward of Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan and later at Blythewood Sanitarium in Greenwich, Connecticut.  Returning to Manhattan in 1939 after more than a year of in-patient treatment, she became Alcoholics Anonymous’ first woman member when she began attending small meetings on Sutton Place.  Then Marty took up her life in recovery.

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Doing Early Modern Drugs

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Editor’s Note: Points today welcomes the first in a series of guest posts by Matthew Crawford, Assistant Professor of the History of Science and Technology at Kent State University.  A historian of the early modern Atlantic World, he is at work on a book tentatively titled “A Cure for Empire: An American Wonder Drug, Enlightenment Science, and European Imperialism, 1750-1850.” Over the next few weeks, Crawford will draw Points readers deep into his area of specialization, the history of cinchona, the tree bark from which quinine is derived.  Today, however, he offers an overview of the changing pharmacopeias of the contact period and suggests some ways that drugs might help us think about modernity.

The centuries after Christopher Columbus’ encounter with the Americas must have been an exciting time for all kinds of drug users in the early modern world. As noted several decades ago by environmental historian Alfred Crosby, the encounter between Europe, the Americas and Africa after 1450 resulted in the intentional and unintentional movement and exchange of flora and fauna on a massive scale – a phenomenon that Crosby called the Columbian Exchange. One result of this process – in addition to the environmental and biological changes outlined by Crosby – was the expansion and enrichment of both European and American pharmacopoeias.

Cataloging the Global Pharmacopoeia: Leonhart Fuchs, De Historia Stirpium, 1542

As geographer Robert Voeks has suggested, the “disturbance pharmacopoeias” that result from cross-cultural contact and exchange often make use of a broader variety of plant materials than the pharmacopoeias of the original cultures. Along with Crosby’s Columbian Exchange, there emerged what we might call a Columbian Drug Trade as well. During the early modern period in Europe, physicians, pharmacists, patients and other drug users gradually had access to many novel drugs including cacao, tobacco, ipecac, guaiacum, and, later, cinchona bark, which we now know contains the anti-malarial alkaloid, quinine. As other historians have noted, if we’re looking for the roots of the modern global drug trade, the early modern Atlantic World is a good place to look.

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“Stars Don’t Fall”: Felicia G., Marty Mann, and Other Women of the Early Alcoholics Anonymous Movement, Part I

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Editor’s Note: We’re pleased to bring Points readers a short series of posts from Amanda Smith, author of the recently-released Newspaper Titan: The Infamous Life and Monumental Times of Cissy Patterson (Knopf, 2011).  This historical exploration of the life of famed newspaper editor Cissy Patterson has earned Amanda plenty of positive press of her own (see, for example, Richard Norton Smith’s review in the Weekly Standard, here).  Newspaper Titan touches upon the drinking life of Patterson’s daughter Felicia, who then encountered Alcoholics Anonymous in 1943.  In this three-part series, Amanda focuses more directly on Felicia’s story; Part I, below, follows the road to her initial encounter with Bill W.

In 1943, at the age of thirty-eight, Countess Felicia Gizycka “divorced” her mother, the

Cissy and Felicia
Felicia and Cissy : happier times?

notorious Washington, DC, newspaper publisher and Chicago Tribune heiress, Cissy Patterson. Falling into old habits on that decisive wartime evening during one of Felicia’s rare visits home, mother and daughter left the dinner table “in the middle of the night, both of us drunk as skunks,” to continue drinking and bickering in the living room.  When Cissy began toying with Felicia by proposing to favor others in her will, and taunting her daughter for her personal failings as she had done many times over the years, Felicia finally exploded. “God damn you and may you roast in Hell.  If there is a Hell.  You’ve already made my life one long Hell from the time I was a baby, you stupid bitch! . . . And you can take all your Goddamn fucking money and stuff it!”

Legal Battle over Felicia
A Toddler, Notorious Already

Felicia had lived in luxury up to that point, but in other regards her life had not been an easy one.  As a toddler, she had become a pawn in the sensational international custody battle that followed the violent end of her parents’ marriage in 1908.  Her father, a volatile, hard-drinking Polish aristocrat, kidnapped her and held her for ransom when she was two; only after President Taft and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia intervened did Count Gizycki finally return Felicia, then almost four, to her mother.  Although Cissy had fought hard to bring her child safely home to the United States, she was a critical, unpredictable mother. One particularly nasty mother-daughter “knock-down drag-out fight, which included hair pulling and clothing tearing” persuaded Felicia to run away from home in 1924, at the age of eighteen.

To outward appearances, Felicia and Cissy reconciled six months later, but only after Felicia allowed herself to be corralled into a loveless marriage she hoped would end her mother’s authority over her.  But marriage and motherhood held little interest for her, particularly after she began to realize her dreams of becoming a writer — and discovered, at the height of Prohibition, that “if I had a drink or two, I could relax and dance, laugh, joke.  And feel popular.  Feel accepted.”  Following her first divorce, a failed love affair prompted Felicia to “get dead drunk that very night, and stay drunk for a month.”  Instead, the binge would last a decade.  

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Ken Burns and Me– Charles Ambler’s Brief Career as a Talking Head

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Let me admit it up front.  It was an indirect connection.  My local public TV station in El Paso, KCOS, decided to produce a short piece on “Prohibition on the Border” that would be tacked on to the third segment of Ken Burns’s documentary on Prohibition.  Judging from the relatively small number of comments along the lines of “hey I saw you on TV last night,” I’m guessing that not that many local viewers made it to the end of the third night.  I certainly didn’t.  But I set the record button so that I would be sure not to miss my own insightful commentary.

I found myself strangely reluctant to watch.  Finally, several nights later, battling insomnia, I fast-forwarded through the eminent historians (although it seemed to me some odd choices?) recruited by Burns to get to the really significant stuff—me.  After about 30 seconds I’d had enough and put off watching it all the way through for several more days.  Bad camera angle. Creepy voice.  Aging professor.  Hair loss.  Too painful.

Charles Ambler, Expert on Drugs

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Washington State’s Prop. 1183: The Iowa Dustup and Trends Thereafter

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This is the second of two Points posts on Prop. 1183; the first is here.

Arguably the best available historical evidence on the consumption effects following a U.S. state’s privatization of distilled spirits sales derives from Iowa’s experience in the 1980s.  In March, 1987 Iowa abandoned its retail (though not its wholesale) monopoly on spirits sales.  This change followed Iowa’s earlier abandonment of retail and wholesale monopolies on bottled wine in 1985, which was preceded in 1981 by licensing some wine sales to grocery stores, drug stores, and other consumer outlets.  Harold A. Mulford and colleagues depicted the sweeping scope of these events in a 1992 Journal of Studies on Alcohol article.  “This shift from a state monopoly to a private distribution system,” they wrote,

constituted the most abrupt and dramatic increase in alcohol availability that any state has experienced since the repeal of Prohibition (Holder, 1988). Not only did the number of outlets rapidly increase from approximately 200 state stores to approximately 800 private off-premise wine outlets and 400 spirits outlets, but also wine and spirits were brought within arm’s reach of nearly all grocery and convenience store shoppers.  Sunday sales were legalized, hours of sales were extended, advertising was allowed and purchases could be made on credit terms.

No monopoly state had abandoned its control over retail liquor sales before, although a number had abandoned monopolies on wine sales in earlier years. 

What happened after liquor’s privatization in Iowa?

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From the Hindsfoot Foundation: AA History Resources

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Editor’s Note: Points readers who enjoyed Ernie Kurtz’s post of a few weeks back, which talked about the challenges and subtleties of “AA History,” may be interested in the following announcement from Glenn Chesnut, moderator of the AA History Lovers listerv and founder of the Hindsfoot Foundation, “a not-for-profit organization founded in 1993 for the …

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Freaky Friday: Exploring the “Secrets Mushroomic”: R. Gordon Wasson in Mexico

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Editor’s Note: Today’s Freaky Friday brings Points readers the insights of Tace Hedrick, Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Florida and a specialist in 20th-century Latin American literature and culture.  Having written previously on Mestizo Modernisms, Hedrick is now at work on a study of national and cosmic identity discourse across the Latin American and Latino Americas diaspora.  Her meditation on the mid-20th century Mexican mushroom vogue is drawn from that project, whose working title is Queering the Cosmic Race: Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Mendieta, and Walter Mercado, 1968-2010.  She will return in a few weeks to discuss the psychedelic journeys of Gloria Anzaldúa.

Plants of the Gods, 1979

Most people do not think of the middle of the 20th century—the super square 1950s—as a time when indigenous drug rituals and experiments with psychoactive plants were topics of popular interest for the average Joes and Janes (or Ozzies and Harriets) of the United States.  In Mexico, however, traditional rituals with psychoactive plants had been a sometimes intense focus of interest (for Mexicans and people from the United States alike) since the post-armed phase of the Revolution, beginning in the 1920s, and in the U.S. the 1950s brought a resurgence in the popularity of earlier texts about indigenous drug use. Among these were Carl Lumholtz’s 1902 Unknown Mexico, which detailed Mexican Huichol peyote rituals, and Robert Zingg’s 1938 writing on Huichol artwork, commonly assumed to be psychedelic because of their religious use of peyote.  Also during the 1930s, Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes traveled with anthropologist and ethnobotanist Raoul Weston LaBarre throughout Oklahoma (not quite as exotic as Mexico) to study Plains Indians’ peyote use. Their disparate findings, published in 1938, were among the texts revived first in the 1950s and again in the ’70s:  LaBarre’s The Peyote Cult sought to psychologize the indigenous use of peyote visions, while Schultes’ “The Appeal of Peyote [Lophophora Williamsii] as a Medicine” (published in American Anthropologist) argued that the substance’s value lay in its therapeutic and stimulating properties more than in its psychoactive ones.

Research performed in the 1930s and ‘40s, then, formed the basis of many of the bestselling ‘70s volumes on the indigenous roots of psychedelic culture. 

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