On August 16 the pioneering punk-rock band the Ramones made its debut at CBGB’s, a seedy Bowery bar that one French reference work extravagantly calls le temple new-yorkais du punk. Only someone who has never been to CBGB’s could use the word temple to describe it; in truth it was, and is, a miserable hole that you would compliment by calling a dive. Even today a visit will open the eyes of anyone who thinks a flannel shirt defines grunge.
To be sure, the 1970s CBGB’s clientele had its share of posers. As the Ramones’ drummer, Tommy Ramone, said in 1976, “We developed a small following of weirdos. Then we got the intellectuals. Now the kids are coming.” But the Ramones’ punk image was no act. The bassist, Dee Dee Ramone, was a dropout and former male prostitute with numerous knife scars, and all of them had been drug takers and general delinquents in their teens. (The members of the band were not related; they adopted a common last name because, as the singer, Joey Ramone, explained, “It had a ring to it, like ‘Eli Wallach’ does.”)
America was in sad shape in the summer of 1974. President Nixon had just resigned in disgrace, inflation and unemployment were skyrocketing, and dictators and terrorists around the world were spitting in Uncle Sam’s face. Worst of all, 1974 marked the lowest ebb ever for top-forty pop music. The week of the Ramones’ debut, the number one song in Billboard was Paper Lace’s “The Night Chicago Died.” Other 1974 chart toppers included “Seasons in the Sun,” “Billy Don’t Be a Hero,” “(You’re) Having My Baby,” and “Kung Fu Fighting,” as well as two apiece from John Denver and Barry White. At this zenith of despair the Ramones came out of nowhere (Forest Hills, Queens, to be precise) to save mankind.
They weren’t the only punk band on the scene, far from it. Anybody with a secondhand guitar could start one; knowing how to play was optional. Yet somehow, amid all the din, the Ramones created something that no other band could match. The Dead Boys had the lifestyle but not the sound. Blondie was retro before retro was cool. Patti Smith wrote poetry; Talking Heads went to art school; Television played seven-minute songs. Marbles, the Miamis, Milk ’n’ Cookies, and dozens of others simply weren’t any good.
But the Ramones! They would come out on stage in torn jeans and leather jackets and rip through ten songs in a twenty-minute set that left listeners slack-jawed with astonishment. Part of the charm lay in their lyrics, like these from “I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You”: “I don’t wanna walk around with you / I don’t wanna walk around with you / I don’t wanna walk around with you / So why you wanna walk around with me?”
As the guitarist, Johnny Ramone, later said, “We were new at writing songs and new at playing our instruments, so we couldn’t write anything too complicated, really.” Despite, or perhaps because of, this handicap, they made a vital discovery: Even if you know only three chords, all you have to do is strum them really fast in succession to create a chain-saw buzz that will irresistibly impel listeners to nod their heads back and forth 240 times a minute.
Skeptics said it would never last, and in a way they were right. It has been rare for any punk band to make more than two or three good albums, since success makes it hard to maintain the requisite level of stupidity. Nevertheless, the movement spread, and by the early 1980s punk had vanquished the terrible menace of disco. More recently, in an irony that no 1974 CBGB’s barfly could have foreseen, punk has become mainstream, to the point where the Ramones have appeared on “The Tonight Show,” and their song “Blitzkrieg Bop,” once known only to a handful of fringe characters in New York’s demimonde, can be heard on the PA system at baseball games.
1874One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
The March of Progress
July 1874 saw the unveiling of three American technological advances that would have great importance in years to come. On July 4 the Eads Bridge in St. Louis was ceremonially inaugurated. The bridge consisted of three arches, each with a span of more than 500 feet, at a time when anything longer than 350 feet was thought to be unsafe. The controversial design worked because the arches were made of steel, which had just recently, with the introduction of the Bessemer process in the 186Os, become cheap enough to use in large quantities. Moreover, to anchor the bridge in the Mississippi’s muddy bottom, the designer, James Buchanan Eads, had sunk its piers all the way down to bedrock, 100 feet or more below the river’s swirling surface. As impressive as this accomplishment was, it had taken a heavy toll in lives.
The extra-deep piers had been excavated with caissons—sealed chambers with no floor, filled with compressed air, that sat on the riverbed as workers dug out the sand. As the caissons penetrated farther and farther below the surface, they required greater and greater air pressures inside. The technology was new to America, and dignitaries visiting the pressurized chambers laughed as they tried unsuccessfully to whistle or blow out candles. Workers were less amused when they started feeling intense pains in their limbs and joints upon returning to the surface.
The mysterious “caisson disease,” nowadays known as the bends, ended up killing fourteen workers and sending scores more to the hospital. By the time the digging ended, doctors had found that the disease could be mitigated by depressurizing slowly after workers left the chamber. Still, the ailment was poorly understood, and the physiological cause—nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream, clogging capillaries—would not be appreciated for decades. Prevention and treatment remained a matter of trial and error. Over the next few years, despite the cautionary experience of the Eads Bridge, many workers on the Brooklyn Bridge (including its chief engineer, Washington A. Roebling) would be severely disabled by caisson disease.
On July 8 Thomas Edison successfully demonstrated his quadruplex telegraph, which allowed four messages to be sent along a single wire, two in each direction. The twenty-seven-year-old Edison had been working in telegraphy for more than a decade, as an operator and then as an inventor. He had come up with some useful improvements, enough to support himself and start a family, but he had lived hand to mouth for much of that time and was constantly borrowing money. The quadruplex was Edison’s first big score. He sold his rights to the financier Jay Gould for thirty thousand dollars, which he used to pay off debts, rent larger quarters for his business, and move his family from a small apartment over a drugstore to a house in a residential area. Tellingly, though, the first thing Edison did after receiving his payment was to splurge on several hundred dollars’ worth of books and instruments for his laboratory.
July also saw the world’s first successful typewriter go on sale: the Remington No. 1, designed by Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee. Many other writing machines had been invented over the years, and a few had even made it to the manufacturing stage, but the Remington was the first to be bought in significant numbers, and it established the basic design that all other typewriter makers soon adopted. Even the Remington sold slowly at the start; by the end of 1874 only two hundred had been purchased, and only four thousand by the end of 1878. The $125 price tag was part of the reason; a greater hurdle was the lack of a perceived need for the product. Some people even resented receiving a typed letter, with its implication that they could not read handwriting. Not until the 188Os did sales take off, as users began to appreciate the typewriter’s advantages over handwriting in speed, legibility, and—with carbon paper, patented in 1869—the capacity to make multiple copies at once.
Day of the Locusts
Settlers on the Great Plains needed all the resiliency they could muster in the summer of 1874. Even as drought made prospects for the harvest uncertain, a financial panic was causing food prices to plummet. While serious, these troubles were not an immediate threat to survival; homesteaders could raise enough to feed themselves and hope for better luck the following year. Then the grasshoppers came.
Grasshoppers, also known as locusts, had been descending on the Plains sporadically ever since cultivation began, and presumably long before. By devastating crops in scattered areas, they had made themselves a nuisance, albeit a severe one. The 1874 infestation, however, was no nuisance but a plague of biblical proportions.
Descriptions of grasshopper attacks from the 187Os have a chilling sameness. The insects typically descended without warning in a ravenous horde out of a bright summer sky. As they got nearer, their faint buzzing built up to a terrifying cyclonelike roar. (One German farmer, hearing a swarm approach, fell to his knees and shouted, “Der jüngste Tag! [Judgment Day!]”) In the space of a few minutes, they blocked out the sun, noticeably lowering the temperature. Grasshopper swarms resembled snowstorms, with insects seeming to fall out of the sky as far upward as the eye could see. When they began to feed, the crunching of millions upon millions of tiny jaws sounded like a prairie fire. A crawling layer several inches thick carpeted the ground and covered every growing thing. When the hoppers moved on, the area they left behind looked as if it had been burned to the ground.
Grasshoppers liked grain and garden produce best, but they would eat any sort of vegetation, from grass to weeds to buried roots and bulbs to the bark, leaves, and branches of trees, which they sometimes broke off by their sheer weight. Nor did they stop with living plants; straw hats, the bindings on shocks of grain, and tobacco all were devoured, as were wooden items (tool handles, window frames, fence planks, even paper) and fabrics (clothing, curtains, bedclothes, mosquito netting, canvas). Leather, too, was considered tasty: harnesses, the sweatband of a hat, a wallet (along with the currency inside it), old boots. One settler saw a swarm eating wool off the back of a live sheep. And when everything else had been consumed, the grasshoppers ate each other.
Except in rare cases, once a swarm descended, there was little anyone could do except watch. Farmers in Wright County, Iowa, having prepared in advance for the pests’ arrival, had some success with burning straw around the edges of their wheat fields to drive them off with the smoke. The method was occasionally copied elsewhere, especially in Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakota Territory, where the grasshopper problem was greatest. When the invaders hit O’Brien County, Iowa, Thomas Barry rushed home to see his wife calmly cutting down the clothesline. She suggested swinging it in the air to keep a small area clear, which he “figured…a useless procedure” but went along with in the time-honored fashion of husbands everywhere. Barry and his wife “tied together all the rope we could find and, each taking an end, we swung it back and forth most of the day.” To his surprise, “We saved enough wheat for seed.”
Other settlers were less fortunate, as whole tiers of counties were denuded, even as neighboring ones escaped with little damage. For the next two years invading clouds of grasshoppers were an annual event. Farmers with the resources to stay put diversified into crops like flax and rye that were less attractive to grasshoppers, adjusted their planting times to avoid peak season, and shifted to stock raising. After 1877 infestations tended to be less frequent and less severe. But the problem remained serious well into the twentieth century, with the last big outbreak coming in 1939. Following World War II, insecticides such as chlordane and DDT finally made dense clouds of voracious grasshoppers a thing of the past.
1774Two Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
Enter Hamilton and Jefferson
During the summer of 1774 colonists throughout America reacted with rage and disgust to the Intolerable Acts recently passed by Parliament. In mid-May word had arrived of the first of these, the Boston Port Act, which shut down waterborne commerce into and out of Boston until that city paid reparations for the Boston Tea Party. The British government had expected Boston’s defiance to crumble as the other colonies abandoned it. Instead June 1, the day the act went into effect, was observed as a day of mourning, fasting, and prayer up and down the coast. Communities sent supplies to help feed their Boston brethren; delegates were chosen for the Continental Congress, set to meet in September; and public assemblies passed resolutions by the bushel.
Perhaps the most important of these assemblies, in light of future events, was New York City’s Meeting in the Fields, held on July 6. The resolutions adopted there—protesting the Port Act, affirming colonial solidarity, supporting nonimportation from Britain, and the like—did not differ greatly from those passed at many other places. The meeting’s significance lay in the identity of the speaker who stirred the crowd to action, a nineteen-year-old student at King’s College (now Columbia University) named Alexander Hamilton.
According to tradition, on the morning of the meeting, Hamilton was strolling on a street near the college when he fell into conversation with a passer-by. Impressed with the young man’s forceful arguments, the neighbor urged him to speak that afternoon. When the meeting convened, at what is now City Hall Park, Hamilton lingered on the outskirts. As the debate heated up, he impulsively mounted the platform, ignoring shouted jests about his youth, and, after a hesitant beginning, held the audience spellbound with his fiery oratory in favor of liberty. Thus did the teenaged Hamilton—a Tory until a few months before—inaugurate his career as a Revolutionary propagandist and establish a still-flourishing Columbia tradition of disrespect for authority.
While this account shows, at the least, signs of embroidery—the sole source is an old man’s recollection, as published in an 1840 biography written by Hamilton’s son—the record is clear that Hamilton quickly plunged into the thick of New York’s Revolutionary politics. He went on to write a number of highly effective tracts, serve with distinction in the Continental Army, lead the fight for a strong central government, and put the new nation’s economy on a firm footing. He also set a less laudable precedent by becoming America’s first career politician.
Later in July, in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, a respected lawyer and legislator, wrote his first major statement on relations between the colonies and the mother country. Although only recently involved in the patriot cause, Jefferson was much less of a new-comer to the field than Hamilton, having spent five years methodically researching the legal and historical precedents. A meeting was scheduled for August in Williamsburg to frame instructions for Virginia’s Continental Congress delegates. In preparation Jefferson drew up a set of proposed resolutions that called King George III “no more than the chief officer of the people, appointed by the laws, and…subject to their superintendence.” In fact, Jefferson asserted, “his Majesty has no right to land a single armed man on our shores.” Moreover, “the British Parliament has no right to exercise authority over us.”
Jefferson missed the meeting because of illness but sent copies of the resolutions to his colleagues. Although his inflammatory sentiments proved too extreme for his fellow Virginians to endorse, they were published and widely circulated under the title A Summary View of the Rights of British America. From then on events developed at such a pace that less than two years later Jefferson’s radical views of 1774 would be conventional wisdom, and his pamphlet, with its respectful addresses to the king as “Sire” and earnest plea for reconciliation, would even start sounding a bit reactionary.
