Pinball Wizard

In 1920, the United States passed the Eighteenth Amendment, effectively banning the production and sale of alcohol nationwide.  This of course made the drinking of alcohol cool as all get out, and as a result a bunch of people became willing to pay out the nose to get their hands on some sweet sweet booze.  If you have any sense of history whatsoever you probably already know what happened next, but for the ignorant bastards amongst you, I’ll go ahead and just say it.  Prohibition led directly to the rise of organized crime.  Local thugs, who once made their living shaking down local small business owners, suddenly found themselves raking in obscene amounts of dough from black market liquor sales, some of which they used to bribe local officials and to buy firearms to use on their competition.  However, the whole shebang came crashing down in 1933 when the government, realizing that they could be the crooks making money off of booze, ended Prohibition.

It should probably go without saying that the end of Prohibition was not seen as a good thing by organized crime.  With a good chunk of their income suddenly gone, the gangsters were forced to increasingly rely upon their other sources of illicit funds, the largest being illegal gambling.  The most popular of such games of chance were slot machines, mostly because they were easy to move around, didn’t take many people to oversee or maintain, and could be easily rigged.  During Prohibition, slot machines were seen as pretty low level crimes, but the legalization of booze quickly changed that.  Vice cops who wanted to keep their jobs, and politicians who still wanted to be seen as tough on crime, shifted their focus to wiping slot machines off the map, destroying thousands over the next several years.  That’s when the entrepreneurial criminals got creative.

In 1931, some dude named David Gottlieb invented what we today call the pinball machine.  The early pinball machines were similar to the modern version in that they involved shooting a ball via a spring loaded plunger.  However, they lacked flippers to keep the ball in play.  Pinball proved to be extremely popular, both amongst adults and children, with machines quickly popping up across the country in bars, drug stores, and other such places.  Hundreds of companies started manufacturing the machines, which collectively around the country made more money a year than the entire motion picture industry.  However, though many were owned by legitimate businesses, the pinball machine turned out to be a godsend to organized crime.  While slot machines were being increasingly targeted, purveyors of illegal games of chance shifted to pinball machines to make up the difference, turning them into a form of gambling by promising payouts if players reached certain scores.

The politicians and vice squads of the day were of course not blind to such shenanigans, but it was difficult to prove whether or not a pinball machine was being used for gambling or just for fun.  This left the enforcers of law in a bit of a quandary, which they eventually solved by calling for the outright ban of the machines.  In 1942, buoyed by claims that pinball was teaching children to gamble, New York City became the first major city to outlaw pinball.  Over the next decade, almost every major city in the country followed suit.  Thousands of machines were seized and destroyed.

Despite such setbacks, the pinball industry continued to stagger onward over the next several decades.  Organized crime moved on, shifting their focus to legal gambling in Las Vegas and eventually illegal drugs, but low-level crooks continued to run illegal pinball machines in various bars and other locations.  Many of these were ignored by police, what with other actual crimes occurring, though the occasional raid or palm greasing still took place.  For their part, the pinball manufacturers tried to distance themselves from the idea that the machines were games of chance by introducing more features requiring skill, including the addition of flippers in 1947.  However, the stigma proved hard to remove.  Throughout the 1950’s and most of the 1960’s, various media used the playing of pinball as shorthand for the rebelliousness of youth.

The ban on pinball machines didn’t start to end until 1976, when a pinball wizard named Roger Sharpe proved to the New York City Council that it was a game of skill by calling his shots.  The ban was soon after ended in most other cities, though some bans remained on the books as late as 2016.  Suddenly legal, pinball entered a new heyday which came to an abrupt end as video game arcades became popular in the 1980’s.  Eventually the industry collapsed to only a single manufacturer, though it has found new popularity again in recent years.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gottlieb_Pinball_-_24155803169.jpg

Posture

Professor William Sheldon was a man of his time, by which I of course mean he was a sexist racist who did considerable study in the field of eugenics. Starting in the 1930’s, Sheldon developed a strange theory, called somatotyping, that physical measurements could be used to determine an individual’s character. He divided human beings into three extremes; skinny and nervous ectomorphs, fat and jolly endomorphs, and confident and buffed mesomorphs; and hypothesized that not only did all people express these extremes to one degree or another, but that these ratios could be measured using a three digit number which would reveal someone’s personality. If this all sounds like a bunch of garbage to you, then good, because it is. However, at the time, such theories, rigorously pursued by flawed uses of the scientific method, were given a large amount of credence.

In order to prove his theory, Sheldon of course needed to examine and measure a large number of naked people. Luckily for him, he was not the only scientist interested in measuring naked bodies. Since as early as the 1880’s, Harvard University, then a men’s only institution, had been doing posture studies on its students, by which I mean they were coercing many of them to have naked photographs taken for various somatological studies. Sheldon used these photographs, along with measurements taken at nearby outpatient clinics, to create two major studies linking physique and temperament which were released in the early 1940’s. The studies were met with a great amount of interest, because at the time anything declaring ways you could scientifically prove you were better than other people was of interest. However, further research was curtailed by a little thing called World War II, during which Sheldon worked in the medical corp.

By the end of the war, people were a little less enthused with the idea of eugenics, for reasons. However, Sheldon’s work was seen as being different since it wasn’t based on nationality. After getting himself setup at a sweet ass lab at Columbia University, he began collecting measurements from people visiting nearby clinics, juvenile delinquents, and mental patients. The resulting studies, while debated amongst the scientific community, received a lot of press in magazines and newspapers, exploding Sheldon and his theories onto the national stage almost overnight. Suddenly everyone was talking about what types of bodies they had. Sheldon leveraged his new found popularity and acclaim to further his research, by which I mean he convinced dozens of universities to start taking nude photos of their students.

In the mid-twentieth century, most universities believed it was their duty to help students excel not just mentally, but also physically. As part of this, most freshman students underwent posture exams, where doctors would look at them naked and then decide whether or not they needed to be enrolled in posture correcting programs. Taking advantage of these existing programs, Sheldon went to the men’s only Ivy League schools (Harvard, Yale, etc.) and convinced them to start taking naked photos from the front, side, and rear for his studies. The universities readily agreed. Sheldon’s hope was to use the photographs and measurements to create what he called an Atlas of Men. Of course if he was going to have an Atlas of Men, he needed an Atlas of Women as well, so soon after he also convinced the women’s only Seven Sisters (Vassar, Smith, etc.) to start taking naked posture photographs as well. Again, the university leaders were totally okay with all of this. From there he convinced half a dozen Midwestern universities to join the fun.

The strange thing about all of this was how quickly it became normalized. Aside from threats of a lawsuit in Seattle when Sheldon tried to spread the practice to the West Coast, everyone just kind of went along with the idea that it was perfectly normal for prestigious schools to take nude photographs of incoming freshman. The practice continued throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, with some of those photographed later becoming famous business people, politicians, actors, and other such folk of note. It wasn’t until rumors began to spread that some of the photographs, mostly women, were ending up in the hands of the non-scientific types that protests began, leading to the practice being ended completely by the early 1970’s. It probably didn’t hurt that by then Sheldon’s theories had largely been debunked.

Under public pressure from those whose photographs were taken, many who had become powerful people, most of the posture photographs were burned to make sure they never got out to the public. However, even into the 1990’s, caches of the pictures were still being discovered in random drawers and boxes. A significant collection even found its way to the Smithsonian, though much of that collection was believed to have been burned by 2005. Though Sheldon’s broader theories have largely been debunked, the methods he created for measuring body shape remain widely used in science to this day.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Somatotypes_of_three_18yo_boys_-_back.jpg

Real Estate and Blue Dresses Part 3

In May of 1994, a 28 year old woman by the name of Paula Jones filed a lawsuit against sitting president Bill Clinton, claiming that he had pulled out his dick and stroked it in front of her three years prior when he was governor.  The charge came a few months after a pair of Arkansas State Troopers claimed that they had helped the president find random women to fuck, citing the first name of one such woman as Paula.  The Jones lawsuit quickly became mired down in legal mumbo jumbo.  Clinton attempted to claim presidential immunity, meaning that the case wouldn’t be allowed to proceed until he was no longer president, a maneuver that delayed the case for years as it worked its way through the court system.  In May of 1997, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the court case could proceed.  Throughout this period, Jones’ lawyers had her hitting the news and talk show circuit in hopes of getting more women to come forward.  The lawyers hoped to establish a pattern of impropriety to help prove Jones’ claim.  While no victims chose to come forward at the time, someone did leave an anonymous tip about a woman they should talk to.  That woman was Monica Lewinsky.

In 1997, Monica Lewinsky was a 24 year old Pentagon employee who for a ten month period between 1995 and 1996 had worked as a White House intern.  During this period, she began an affair with the president that involved blowjobs and putting cigars in places where cigars probably shouldn’t go.  Worried about such behavior, the White House staff had Lewinsky transferred to the Pentagon, but the affair continued off and on.  When Lewinsky was subpoenaed by the Jones case in January of 1998, she testified that no such affair had occurred.  Within days, a so-called friend and confidante of Lewinsky’s, named Linda Tripp, approached Independent Counsel Ken Starr with over twenty hours of secretly taped conversations with Lewinsky talking about the affair, including claims that the president had asked Lewinsky to lie under oath.

It should go without saying that such news got Starr all sorts of hot and bothered.  Working fast, he got permission from a judiciary panel to look into the matter, and then waited for Clinton to testify in the Jones case a few days later.  In his testimony, the president denied having an affair with Lewinsky.  For the beleaguered Ken Starr, facing a failing Whitewater investigation, it was a godsend.  As news of the affair began getting leaked to the press, three more women came forward claiming that they had at one time or another been groped by Bill Clinton.  Another woman would come forward a year later, claiming that Clinton had raped her.  The president denied all of it, basically calling Lewinsky a lying slut, and his wife Hillary proclaimed a whole thing a massive right wing conspiracy.  Over a six month period, Starr negotiated with Lewinsky in an attempt to get her to admit the truth, during which time she did a modeling spread for Vogue magazine.  In July, she made a deal to testify in return for immunity, sweetening the deal by handing over a blue dress with a presidential cum stain.  She soon after testified before a grand jury.

Ken Starr was undoubtedly enjoying the whole thing.  President Clinton, facing insurmountable evidence, was subpoenaed by the grand jury and forced to testify that he had indeed had an affair.  However, he refused to admit that he had lied under oath in the Jones case, claiming he did not consider a blowjob sex and arguing over the definition of the word ‘is’.  Soon after, the independent counsel released his Starr Report, which contained every lurid detail of the Lewinsky affair, to the House of Representatives and to the public, calling for impeachment on the basis of perjury and obstruction of justice.  The Judiciary Committee of the House began impeachment proceedings soon after, which stretched over the next several months.  A period Clinton used to settle the Jones case out of court, Starr used to announce the Whitewater investigation as inconclusive, and Hustler magazine used to pay a bounty for proof of infidelity by any member of Congress.  Due to Hustlers efforts, several Republicans were forced to resign, one of them being both Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and his replacement as speaker.

In December of 1998, the Judiciary Committee passed articles of impeachment and the matter moved on to the full House.  Though the vote was delayed by the president calling airstrikes on Iraq, a mission actually planned months earlier, the Republican led House voted to impeach President Clinton.  The impeachment trial began in the Senate in January of 1999.  After a month and a half of testimony and debate, the Republican majority Senate failed to meet the two-thirds vote required for impeachment.  Many felt that lying about where you put your dick just wasn’t a good enough reason to declare somebody to be unfit to be president.  Bill Clinton served out the remainder of his second term.

Ken Starr continued to pursue the Watergate investigation until late 1999, when he stepped down and was replaced by a federal prosecutor named Robert Ray.  Under direction to wrap things up, Robert Ray announced in 2000 that there was not enough evidence to pursue a charge of wrongdoing by either Bill or Hillary Clinton in relation to any of the accusations.  In total, 15 associates of the Clintons were convicted of over 40 crimes; including fraud, embezzlement, and conspiracy.  In November of 2000, Hillary Clinton won a Senate seat in New York, launching her own political career.  As for Bill, likely facing charges of perjury in relation to the Jones case as soon as he left office, he made a deal with Ray on his second to last day, agreeing to admit to making false statements in return for surrendering his law license.  The next day he pardoned four of the people convicted by the investigation, including Susan McDougal.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bill_Clinton_and_Monica_Lewinsky_on_February_28,_1997_A3e06420664168d9466c84c3e31ccc2f.jpg