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http://jonathaneig.com

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Jonathan Eig's "Ali: A Life" is the first comprehensive biography worthy of this titanic figure. The author of acclaimed books on Lou Gehrig and Jackie Robinson, Eig weaves together Ali's athletic feats, cultural significance and personal journey. Fortified by hundreds of revealing interviews, "Ali" vigorously narrates the story of the man who transformed the landscape of race and sports.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV4nlP6TRMI

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Ebbets Field & the Civil Rights Movement

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Jonathan Eig, the author of "Opening Day: The story of Jackie Robinson's First Season", spoke about his book during this Aug. 2010 interview at Chautauqua Institution.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/books/review/Jennings-t.html

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Sports anniversaries pile up with insidious regularity. Whereas a D-Day comes around only once a war, the Super Bowl adds another Roman numeral every January (or February), and college basketball gives us the Final Four like clockwork every March (or April). This all but guarantees that in 5- or 10-year increments, we will look back in sepia tones with weepy eyes at various athletic accomplishments, replaying their "firsts" and measuring their importance. Only a few justify such commemoration. Some live on from sheer spontaneous drama, as with Bobby Thomson's 1951 home run. Some gather weight over time, as with the victory of Texas Western's black starting five against an all-white Kentucky team in the 1966 N.C.A.A. basketball finals. And a handful are heavy with significance both at the moment and long beyond, as with Jackie Robinson's entry into major-league baseball as its first modern-day African-American player, 60 years ago this season - an operatic tale cannily orchestrated by Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and brilliantly performed by Robinson.

No American sports story has been so often told, and no athlete so rightly deemed a hero. From the long shelf of books, a number by Robinson himself and his family, we know indisputably that he bore epithets and real threats with stoicism and dignity while executing on the field with consummate skill and characteristic abandon. Rickey, a wily lawyer, gave Robinson the best chance he could to succeed by assigning him to the Dodgers' minor-league team in the outpost of Montreal for a year as a test run and by stage-managing the release of information - like what position he would play - to reduce the pressure on him (and on the player whose job he might take). On Robinson's end, had he produced even a little less spectacularly than he did, batting .297 and scoring 125 runs in leading the Dodgers to the World Series, or exploded in anger even once, the so-called great experiment would have stalled. Yes, integration of baseball was inevitable, but one could not imagine a smoother, more elegant bridge to it than the Brooklyn one constructed by Rickey and Robinson.

In 1997, for the 50th anniversary of Robinson's dash through the color barrier, Arnold Rampersad (whose biography of Ralph Ellison was recently published) came out with the definitive account of Robinson's life, leaving others to atomize the player's career further. Chris Lamb's "Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson's First Spring Training," for example, was published a few years ago. And now we have "Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season," by Jonathan Eig, who crosses boroughs on a subway series of his own after his well-received biography of the Yankees' Lou Gehrig ("Luckiest Man") from two years ago.

History has a way of playing cruel jokes, and this anniversary comes at a time when persuading black athletes to choose baseball (over basketball and football) has proved almost as much of a challenge as allowing them in was more than half a century ago. As of 2005, the number of African-American players in the major leagues had dipped to 8.5 percent, the lowest in 26 years, according to a study by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. In 1985, Vince Coleman of the St. Louis Cardinals answered a Robinson-related query with: "I don't know nothin' about him. Why are you asking me about Jackie Robinson?" Now, according to C. C. Sabathia, the only African-American player on the Cleveland Indians' roster at the end of last year, the question has regressed to kids in his California hometown asking him, "What's baseball?" In "Opening Day," I learned that the 1947 Dodgers, therefore, after they acquired Dan Bankhead in August to join Robinson, had twice the number of African-American players as the Indians of 2006.

That current dearth would seem reason enough to celebrate the publication of another work about Robinson, especially one that compresses the most dramatic year of his career into a tidy package that doesn't pretend to be comprehensive and so promises to be more accessible than a monument like Rampersad's book or Jules Tygiel's "Baseball's Great Experiment." Eig's brisk chronicle is full of local color and period details that recreate a bygone age of athletes who scraped by like other working stiffs, holding down off-season jobs and traversing the city on the subway rather than in tinted-window Escalades. Train travel was still de rigueur for away games; the Brooklyn manager, Burt Shotton, wore street clothes with a bow tie (thus restricting him to the bench, since only those in uniform were allowed on the field); TV viewers saw the World Series on "gray screens no bigger than a lunchbox"; and many players were from the segregated South, including two Dodgers nicknamed Dixie. Robinson and his wife, Rachel, with a new son, Jack Jr., rented a room from a single woman in a Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstone, where they shared her bathroom. Hardly the TriBeCa penthouse that the former Mets catcher Mike Piazza recently showed off in Elle Decor magazine.

Against this backdrop, Eig recounts the flash points that have grown into myths and largely reduces them from grand opera to folk song, a story of endurance and forbearance rather than sturm und drang. Dixie Walker, a popular Alabamian who supposedly led an internal team revolt, is portrayed as mostly concerned about how playing with Robinson might affect his hardware business back home. A famous gesture of support from Pee Wee Reese, the Kentucky-born shortstop who reputedly threw his arm around Robinson on the field to quiet a hostile crowd, is presented as largely apocryphal, and an alleged strike by the Cardinals as very likely a media exaggeration. Eig's deflation of the extremes of both opposition and support seems more complexly true and does justice to the man rather than the legend.

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opening day: the story of jackie robinson's first season (book)

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Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season - Jonathan Eig - Books - Review

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Sports anniversaries pile up with insidious regularity. Whereas a D-Day comes around only once a war, the Super Bowl adds another Roman numeral every January (or February), and college basketball gives us the Final Four like clockwork every March (or April).

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6xneyC9HjQ

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Jonathan Eig, author of "Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig" reflects on his writings in this 2010 interview at Chautauqua Institution in August 2010.

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Luckiest Man: Talk on anniversary of "Luckiest Man" speech

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Luckiest Man: Talk on anniversary of "Luckiest Man" speech

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https://youtu.be/ssA0UFMyglc

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Jonathan Eig (2014) on Lou Gehrig's Speech

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/books/review/luckiest-man-iron-horse-power.html

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His response, then as ever, was relentless hard work, turning the fat into muscle at his father's turnverein, or German gymnastics club. More muscled than many players in our steroidal age, he had almost freakishly strong legs -- Each thigh was bigger than many a man's waist, each calf the size of a Christmas ham."+His body was low-centered, his devastatingly compact swing pivoting off those overdeveloped thighs, and while his later nickname, the Iron Horse, referred mostly to his reliability, Gehrig does indeed look like a locomotive in close-up photos and film, infinitely powerful and unstoppable.

For all of his work ethic, Gehrig was a great natural athlete.+He excelled in every sport he tried his hand at -- soccer, basketball, football; at the age of 11 he swam the Hudson River to New Jersey. He first came to national attention when, still in high school, he hit a grand slam out of Wrigley Field in Chicago. Not long after, a Yankees scout spotted him playing ball for Columbia University, where he was pursuing his mother's dream for him to become an engineer. (Following class, Lou would help her wash dishes at her job in a rival fraternity's kitchen.)

Within two years he had become a fixture at first base for the Yankees. He would not miss a day for nearly 14 seasons, his famous record of 2,130 consecutive games bested by Cal Ripken Jr. only in 1995. Once again, hard work and persistence were the keys. He played through bouts of lumbago, broken fingers, bone chips and a beaning that left his head so swollen he had to wear Babe Ruth's cap. As happened with Ripken, some of the bright boys in the press box would periodically suggest that Gehrig was hurting himself and his team by not taking a day off, but his record was difficult to argue with. Gehrig scored more than 100 runs, drove in more than 100 more and batted .300 or better in 12 consecutive seasons. Out of the 34 World Series games he played, he drove in the winning run a remarkable eight times. Before he was struck down, he was on a pace to claim most of the game's batting records.

Yet Gehrig spent much of his life in other men's shadows. When he hit an amazing .545 in the 1928 World Series, Ruth hit .625. When Gehrig hit .529 in the 1932 Series, Ruth hit his famous "called shot" home run. Even when Gehrig hit four home runs in one game, robbed of a possible No. 5 by a circus catch, it was the same day the legendary New York Giants manager John McGraw announced his retirement. There is every indication he preferred it that way. Eig suggests that his mother's domination may well have arrested his emotional development. Lou was curiously childlike, a man who lived with his parents -- and may well have been a virgin -- until he was nearly 30. A sensitive, unfailingly considerate person, he spoke out against the color line in baseball and helped his teammates whenever he could. Yet he had few close friends. Acquaintances described him as "worried" and "harassed" even in high school; Eig writes that they felt he was "carrying with him a sense of his own worthlessness."+He possessed a mind agile enough to pass a rigorous university course in Western civilization and weep at Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde." But he often seemed lost away from a ball field, riding the roller coaster at Rye Beach for hours by himself on off days. "He loved baseball so much that he sometimes went home after a game, rounded up a few of the kids from the neighborhood and played in the street until dark."

Eleanor Grace Twitchell, the woman he married in 1933, was the daughter of a former racetrack tout and a "circuit girl" during the Yankees' trips to Chicago -- more of a groupie, or "baseball Annie," than Teresa Wright's girl-next-door. But she finally pried Gehrig out from under his mother, and nudged him into blowing his own horn at least a little. He became the Yankees' captain, signed endorsement deals, even enjoyed playing a small role in a Hollywood western.

Then, around his 35th birthday, came the disease -- Lou Gehrig's disease, as it would be called ever after -- and the true mettle of the man shone through. Eig's account is heartbreaking. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis gradually snuffs out the nerve cells, destroying its victims' physical capacities one by one. Gehrig had to endure the steady, baffling erosion of the muscles he had done so much to build. For once, all his hard work was to no avail.

A visit to the Mayo Clinic in 1939 at last provided a diagnosis, but Gehrig's doctors purposely or naïvely gave him the false hope that his chances of recovery were 50-50. His letters to the clinic reveal a nearly pathetic desire to still be the good son, alternately pleading with the doctors to "PLEASE reveal to me the honest opinions" and hoping they wouldn't think him "a crybaby." He kept a stiff upper lip to the end, when, not yet 38 years of age, his vocal cords shut down by the disease, he ironically mouthed the phrase "50-50" to his wife.

Eig's triumph lies not only in illuminating the man, bringing out his full, human tragedy, but also in framing the America Gehrig lived in -- both a harder and a more innocent place, where ballplayers were considered barely a notch above carnies, but would sing "The Sidewalks of New York" after winning a World Series and give a teammate a trophy with a poem inscribed on it. Eig is obviously knowledgeable about baseball, and doesn't slight the game, but nonfans will find this story captivating nonetheless. "Luckiest Man" stands in the first rank of sports biographies.

Kevin Baker is the author of two novels, "Dreamland" and "Paradise Alley."

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luckiest man: the life and death of lou gehrig (book)

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His response, then as ever, was relentless hard work, turning the fat into muscle at his father's turnverein, or German gymnastics club.

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https://youtu.be/b94cgzL-NzU-

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https://youtu.be/BiyOwcJYTZQ?t=1m7s

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2010 Chicago Tribune Printers Row Lit Fest: Jonathan Eig, author of "Get Capone"

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Jonathan Eig talked about his book Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America's Most Wanted Gangster and responded to questions from members of the audience.

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http://www.getcapone.com

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Jonathan Eig - The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (Video Clip) | Comedy Central

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Jonathan Eig explains how the story of Al Capone has taken off in ways that make no sense.

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"In its effects I believe that the pill ranks in importance with the discovery of fire," wrote the British-American anthropologist Ashley Montagu in 1969, excited that the invention was already upturning "age-old beliefs, practices and institutions". The bestower of this Promethean gift, and the hero of Jonathan Eig's book, was an unlikely figure: Gregory Pincus, "a scientist with a genius IQ and a dubious reputation". He was an expert in mammalian reproduction, famous for having created a test-tube rabbit, which saw him vilified in the press as a new Frankenstein. With his bristling moustache and uncombed hair, the chain-smoking biologist resembled "a cross between Albert Einstein and Groucho Marx".

In the winter of 1950, the 47-year-old Pincus met Margaret Sanger, introduced in the first line of Eig's book as "an old woman [she was 71] who loved sex and had spent 40 years seeking a way to make it better"; her friend Mabel Dodge Luhan described her as "a propagandist for the joys of the flesh". She had numerous lovers - enjoying, she said, being "ravaged by romances". In 1914, when facing charges of breaking the obscenity laws because of an article she published in her radical newspaper, the Women Rebel, she abandoned her long-suffering husband and fled to Europe. There she had an affair with the English sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis, who wrote that he "had never been so quickly or completely drawn to a woman in the whole of his life", as well as with HG Wells and the Spanish anarchist Lorenzo Portet. She was, writes Eig, "a copper-haired, blunt-talking bundle of energy".

Two years later, after returning to the States - where she was appalled to discover that one in three pregnancies ended in abortions, which were often self-administered in brutal ways - Sanger opened the country's first birth‑control clinic in Brooklyn. After 10 days it was raided by the police and she was prosecuted for illegally selling contraceptive devices, though her conviction was later overturned, allowing her to start more clinics. Her initiative would become the seed of Planned Parenthood, which she founded with money she inherited on the death of her second husband, the president of an oil company and a staunch Republican who described Sanger as "the greatest adventure of my life". Planned Parenthood is now the largest provider of "reproductive services" in the US.

Sanger had long dreamed of a "magic pill" to prevent conception and had invited Pincus to her apartment in Park Avenue to commission him to try and invent one. He wasn't an obvious choice of collaborator, but no reputable institution would sign up to such controversial research. Harvard had denied Pincus tenure and, in response, he had set up the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, a private research facility that occupied a family home in Massachusetts. His office was a disused garage and he was engaged in research on, among other things, hormone injections as a cure for baldness. However, with an initial $2,000 in funding from Sanger, he began experimenting on rabbits and rats with progesterone, which shuts down the ovaries when an egg is fertilised, in the hope he could trick the female body into thinking it was already pregnant.

Simmering below Eig's readable, racy tale of heroic scientific discovery, and jarring with that narrative, is the less salubrious subject of eugenics. Many of the pill's early funders and supporters were committed eugenicists. Sanger, who had been introduced to Malthusian economics by Havelock Ellis, originally thought of calling "birth control" by another name: "race control". She saw it as an urgent imperative: "The world and almost all of our civilisation for the next 25 years is going to depend upon a simple, cheap, safe contraceptive to be used in poverty-stricken slums and jungles, and among the most ignorant people." Sanger thought that those with untreatable hereditary conditions, as well as criminals, prostitutes and drug addicts, should be sterilised. "That these views were widely embraced in the 1920s and 1930s doesn't make them easier to fathom," Eig writes. He seems unconvincing when he adds: "she was not necessarily a racist".

Sanger held these views long after Nazism made them unfashionable. At a 1953 conference of Planned Parenthood, Sanger told her audience that they should "do something definite about the breeding and multiplication of diseased families ... mental defectives, morons; unhealthy, diseased people". Parenthood, she thought, was a privilege, not a right. She appointed as the head of her organisation William Vogt, the author of the controversial book Road to Survival (1948), which sold over 20m copies, and in which he argued that population control - a global sterilisation programme - should become a cornerstone of American foreign policy. If the $2bn that had been spent developing the atomic bomb had been spent on developing an efficient contraceptive, he wrote, it would have contributed more to national security and improved living standards.

In 1952, to promote this political worldview, John D Rockefeller III (whose family was one of Planned Parenthood's major sponsors) started the Population Council, which was directed by Frederick Osborn, the leader of the American Eugenics Society. Populations were growing twice as fast in "developing" countries, Rockefeller argued, and this "population bomb" threatened to create a breeding ground for communism: something had to be done. Pincus, who was Jewish, and had worked in the late 1920s at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin and been horrified by its embrace of racist theories, echoed such explosive language when he said: "Our globe is facing a threat that could be far more serious than the atomic bomb." His colleague, the Harvard gynaecologist John Rock, who conducted the first human trials of the contraceptive pill, also wrote that "the greatest menace to world peace and decent standards of life today is not atomic energy but sexual energy".

In 1953, Sanger arranged for the 76-year-old philanthropist Katharine McCormick, with whom she had been friends since the 1920s, to meet Pincus. McCormick, who was the second woman to graduate from MIT with a degree in biology, had become interested in endocrinology when seeking a cure for her late husband's schizophrenia. He was the heir to the International Harvester fortune and had left her, according to Rock, "as rich as Croesus ... She couldn't even spend the interest on her interest." With Sanger's encouragement, she would invest $2m of her fortune into Pincus's research, allowing him to conduct human trials. McCormick and Sanger, veterans of the first sexual revolution in Greenwich Village in the 1920s, would coordinate and fund the second.

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The pill was marketed at the 'miracle tablet' women had been waiting for. Photograph: RGB Ventures/SuperStock/Alamy

Pincus chose to conduct large-scale clinical trials of the pill in Puerto Rico, a nation whose citizens, as Vogt wrote in his book, were prone to "reproduce recklessly and irresponsibly". Despite birth control having been legal since 1937, the average 55-year-old mother there had seven children. Many Americans were disturbed at the large wave of immigration from the country; nearly one in 10 residents of Manhattan were Puerto Rican. In 1955, tests began on female medical students in San Juan, who were told non-participation would effect their grades; almost half dropped out because of nausea or abdominal pain. Another study began the following year with more test subjects, none of whom were informed of the purpose of the study, or made aware of the risks. Pincus deemed the pill 100% effective and chose to ignore the serious side effects, which he deemed psychosomatic. It was, writes Eig, "one of the boldest and most controversial field trials in the history of modern drugs".

In 1956, Reader's Digest estimated - perhaps conservatively - that 330,000 illegal abortions had been performed in the US, resulting in the deaths of 5,000 women. The year after that, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted a licence for the pill: a pink tablet sold under the trade name Enovid, to be used to treat menstrual disorders. In Massachusetts, where Pincus was based, anyone caught supplying contraceptives faced up to five years in prison, so it was too controversial to market for that purpose. But doctors advised that a "side effect" was that it prevented ovulation. Over the next two years, 500,000 women took the pill. In 1960, the FDA allowed the pill to be properly registered as a contraceptive and by 1964, despite it being banned in eight states, six million American and half a million British women were taking it.

The pill was marketed as the "miracle tablet" women had been waiting for (the Vatican, of course, had no time for such miracles and publicly condemned it). There's no doubt that this technological breakthrough fuelled the sexual revolution, freeing women to have sex without consequence. However, there were concerns about its serious side effects, which eventually resulted in a 1970 Senate hearing and a brief 24% dip in sales. And African-American activists, observing how Planned Parenthood were distributing the pill in minority neighbourhoods, saw it as a symbol of genocide. In August 1967, the so-called Summer of Love, Pincus died of cancer; he outlived Sanger only by a year. Before his death, Pincus was asked to address accusations that he was "playing with the lives of women". He reminded the journalist that he'd created the pill for women at the request of a woman.

* To order The Birth of the Pill for £13.59 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p on online orders of more than £10. A £1.99 charge applies to phone orders.
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The Birth of the Pill by Jonathan Eig review - sex, drugs and population control

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"In its effects I believe that the pill ranks in importance with the discovery of fire," wrote the British-American anthropologist Ashley Montagu in 1969, excited that the invention was already upturning "age-old beliefs, practices and institutions".

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http://www.cc.com/video-clips/yw7uw7/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-jonathan-eig

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Jonathan Eig - The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (Video Clip) | Comedy Central

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Jonathan Eig explains how the story of Al Capone has taken off in ways that make no sense.

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https://youtu.be/Lt3sjwMgwAo

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Birth of the Pill: Chicago Tribune Interview

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Birth of the Pill: Chicago Tribune Interview

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http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-birth-of-the-pill-jonathan-eig-20141016-story.html

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Of all the inventions of the 20th century, the birth control pill arguably had the most profound effect on the everyday lives of human beings. By making widely available a convenient and effective form of contraception, the pill gave women control over their reproductive lives and, in the process, struck the greatest blow for equality of the sexes in America since the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.

In his new book, "The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution," Chicago author Jonathan Eig tells the largely unknown story of the pill's difficult genesis and gestation, culminating in its approval by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960. As Eig explains, four key figures brought about this historic feat: Margaret Sanger, the women's rights activist and co-founder of Planned Parenthood; Gregory Pincus, an independent biologist who had been fired by Harvard University for his controversial research on in vitro fertilization; John Rock, a Catholic doctor who ran the pill's clinical trials and served as the team's intermediary with the Catholic Church; and Katharine McCormick, a wealthy heiress who almost single-handedly funded the research.

Printers Row Journal caught up with Eig, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal whose books include biographies of Jackie Robinson, Lou Gehrig and Al Capone, for an interview over breakfast at a diner in his Lakeview neighborhood. Here's an edited transcript of our chat.
Q: "The Birth of the Pill" seems to be a break in pattern for you, in that your previous books have been biographies.
A: Well, "Get Capone" was a hybrid biography - it was the story of how the government finally got him, as well as a true biography; I thought of it as two books in one. Even Jackie Robinson was a bit of a hybrid; you get the biography, but it's told in the format of his first season.

I never felt like I was wedded to the form of the biography, even though I love biographies, and my next book (about Muhammad Ali) is a biography. In this case, I was working on a straight biography that fell through; I spent more than a year on it, and I didn't like it anymore. And at that point I went into extreme survival/desperation mode: I've wasted a year on a book that didn't work out, so what am I going to do?
Q: So ...?
A: So I went back to the drawing board, and my wife said, "You should do a book that women might want to read." And I began making lists: Greatest Women of the Century. Greatest Jews of the Century. Greatest Inventions of the Century.

The birth control pill was on that list, and then I remembered a sermon at Anshe Emet Synagogue (in Lakeview) about the pill, and the rabbi was making the argument that it was the greatest invention of all time. He made the point that it fundamentally changed human dynamics. It changes the way men and women get along. It changes the very means of reproduction. It changes the equality of an entire gender.

That stuck with me, and when I saw the pill on my list of inventions, it occurred to me that I had no idea how we got it. I knew it came around in the '50s or '60s, but that was about all I knew about it. Why would a man invent the birth control pill? It had to be a man, right, because women were not much in science at the time; women were not running drug companies. What little I knew about the 1950s suggests that we should never have had the pill.
Q: At the time, in fact, birth control was illegal in 30 states, and the federal government had ...
A: Many obstructions to obtaining birth control, yes. You had to go to a doctor, and you had to have a medical problem. You couldn't just get it because you wanted to have sex without getting pregnant. Anyway, I started doing some research on the pill, and it turned out that the guy who invented it, Gregory Pincus, was Jewish; he showed up on my list of important Jews.
Q: And that was the beginning of it.
A: Absolutely. Here's a guy who was fired from Harvard and can't get a job anywhere. He's working out of, at first, a barn, and then a garage, when Sanger finds him and says, "I have this dream of a birth control pill." And off the top of his head, he says, "Here's how a birth control pill would work." She's been looking for 40 years, and everybody's been telling her it's impossible.
Q: He knew about work that had been done on rabbits.
A: At the University of Pennsylvania, right. He knew that a hormone called progesterone stopped ovulation in rabbits. And he told Sanger, "If you just use progesterone as a birth control pill, it would stop ovulation in humans, just as it does in rabbits." Nobody had tried it before, but he didn't see why it wouldn't work. And because he had nothing to lose - nobody would hire him - he was willing to try it.
Q: It wasn't so much about discovering how the pill would work; it was about how to prove that it would.
A: Right. It was really a logistical problem. How do you test something that's illegal? How do you think about developing something that, in all likelihood, nobody's going to want to manufacture and bring to market? So it took an incredible amount of chutzpah and courage, really, to try it, because the odds against it were so steep.

And that's when I fell in love with the story, because it's a classic underdog story, with huge stakes. It's "Rocky," it's "Seabiscuit," only they're not just winning a big sporting event. They're changing the world as profoundly as any handful of people has in (the last) century, really.
Q: You'd have to go back to Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project to think of something comparable.
A: Among scientists, certainly; even among world leaders and politicians. So it's a compelling story that has never been told before. Some scientists and maybe gynecologists would know about Pincus and Rock, but the vast majority of people have no idea how we got the pill. Most people today, especially younger people, take it for granted that it's just always been there.
Q: It all started with Sanger, who was an interesting character, and flawed in many ways.
A: That's true, but I like my characters flawed. Sanger was very complicated, and as a writer, that makes me love her more and more. She's absolutely driven to do this thing, to fight for a better method of birth control and for greater equality for women. And for more sex.
Q: That was really central for her - sex, I mean; it wasn't about population control or whatever for her.
A: It began with the sex, yes. And then she began to realize that if she could give women the power to have sex without getting pregnant - to control their own bodies - all the other things could happen, too. Population control and family size were a lot more politically correct than saying she was in this so that women could have more orgasms. The same thing happens with the eugenicists, who are driven by the goal of reducing the number of poor people being born in the world, and in some cases the number of black and Hispanic people being born in the world. There was a huge racist element in the eugenics movement.
Q: Which Sanger was a proponent of, early on.
A: She definitely got in bed with the eugenicists. And she said some things that suggested she was perhaps racist, too, although at the same time she was operating clinics in Harlem and working with W.E.B. Du Bois. So she's a very complicated woman, very difficult to pin down - except for the fact that she's a pragmatist who wants to get this thing done by any means necessary. So I lay it out there, all those flaws, and let the readers decide whether they like her or not.
Q: Then there's Pincus, who was brilliant but maybe a bit megalomaniacal.
A: Yeah, he was absolutely driven by ego. He believes that he's a genius and should be recognized as such. And yet he can't get a job at a big university or research laboratory, so he has to start his own. He manages to establish himself as an authority, a leader in his field, but without anything behind it. He's middle-aged and hasn't really accomplished anything yet. His biggest funder, Searle, is ready to kick him to the curb. And then he meets Sanger. He knows it's a longshot, probably another failure in a long list of his failures, but he sees the potential for doing something big.
Q: Certainly there were ethical flaws in their methods of testing the pill in Puerto Rico. They were giving women larger doses than the researchers knew were really required - because it had to be proven 100 percent effective to pass government muster - which caused significant side effects.
A: Yeah, there were a lot of questionable ethics in the testing process, which was in some ways normal for this era. There was no privacy, no requirement for informed consent. They began the first tests by disguising it as a fertility treatment. They're flying by the seat of their pants, making it up as they go along, taking ridiculous risks - partly because they believe they're right and everything's going to be OK in the end.
Q: Today, of course, we're so conscious of drug side effects - those long lists on TV commercials.
A: Oh, the pill never would have been approved today. It wouldn't have been approved five years later than it was, because of the thalidomide scandal. So they knew they had to work fast. They knew that the Catholic Church or the government could shut this thing down in an instant if something went wrong. Pushing hard and fast to get this thing approved before they'd really tested it on a handful of women, relatively, was absolutely the best thing Pincus did, even though it was borderline unethical.
Q: Another key aspect of the story is Dr. Rock's role in smoothing things over with the Catholic Church.
A: Right. If the Catholic Church had come out hard and strong against this thing before it had FDA approval, that political pressure might have been enough to shut it down. So the fact that Rock engaged them, and put this kind of Marcus Welby face on the pill - the good Catholic doctor thinks this is OK - made a huge difference. It bought them time to go to the FDA before the Catholic Church really knew what they were dealing with. The Vatican even came close to endorsing the pill because of Rock's work. There were committees within the Vatican that recommended that the Church should accept the pill as a natural form of the rhythm method.
Q: Which was a bit of a stretch.
A: Oh, his argument was philosophically flawed.
Q: And in fact disingenuous.
A: Absolutely. But it was a great idea to try it. (Laughs.) If this is the best idea to take before the judge, you take it. You take your shot. And if the Vatican had decided on a progressive approach, and needed a way to defend it to the flock, they could have endorsed the pill and drawn the line on abortion. There was an uprising in the Church, with Catholic women saying, "This is one area where I don't have to do what the Church tells me to do." And if the Church had decided to go that route, it would have changed a lot of what happened over the next 30 years in terms of women and their relationship with the Church.
Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer. Twitter: @KevinNance1. "The Birth of the Pill"
By Jonathan Eig, W.W. Norton, 388 pages, $27.95

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Of all the inventions of the 20th century, the birth control pill arguably had the most profound effect on the everyday lives of human beings. By making widely available a convenient and effective form of contraception, the pill gave women control over their reproductive lives and, in the process, struck the greatest blow for equality of the sexes in America since the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/18/the-birth-of-the-pill-jonathan-eig-review-sex-drugs-population-control

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"In its effects I believe that the pill ranks in importance with the discovery of fire," wrote the British-American anthropologist Ashley Montagu in 1969, excited that the invention was already upturning "age-old beliefs, practices and institutions". The bestower of this Promethean gift, and the hero of Jonathan Eig's book, was an unlikely figure: Gregory Pincus, "a scientist with a genius IQ and a dubious reputation". He was an expert in mammalian reproduction, famous for having created a test-tube rabbit, which saw him vilified in the press as a new Frankenstein. With his bristling moustache and uncombed hair, the chain-smoking biologist resembled "a cross between Albert Einstein and Groucho Marx".

In the winter of 1950, the 47-year-old Pincus met Margaret Sanger, introduced in the first line of Eig's book as "an old woman [she was 71] who loved sex and had spent 40 years seeking a way to make it better"; her friend Mabel Dodge Luhan described her as "a propagandist for the joys of the flesh". She had numerous lovers - enjoying, she said, being "ravaged by romances". In 1914, when facing charges of breaking the obscenity laws because of an article she published in her radical newspaper, the Women Rebel, she abandoned her long-suffering husband and fled to Europe. There she had an affair with the English sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis, who wrote that he "had never been so quickly or completely drawn to a woman in the whole of his life", as well as with HG Wells and the Spanish anarchist Lorenzo Portet. She was, writes Eig, "a copper-haired, blunt-talking bundle of energy".

Two years later, after returning to the States - where she was appalled to discover that one in three pregnancies ended in abortions, which were often self-administered in brutal ways - Sanger opened the country's first birth‑control clinic in Brooklyn. After 10 days it was raided by the police and she was prosecuted for illegally selling contraceptive devices, though her conviction was later overturned, allowing her to start more clinics. Her initiative would become the seed of Planned Parenthood, which she founded with money she inherited on the death of her second husband, the president of an oil company and a staunch Republican who described Sanger as "the greatest adventure of my life". Planned Parenthood is now the largest provider of "reproductive services" in the US.

Sanger had long dreamed of a "magic pill" to prevent conception and had invited Pincus to her apartment in Park Avenue to commission him to try and invent one. He wasn't an obvious choice of collaborator, but no reputable institution would sign up to such controversial research. Harvard had denied Pincus tenure and, in response, he had set up the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, a private research facility that occupied a family home in Massachusetts. His office was a disused garage and he was engaged in research on, among other things, hormone injections as a cure for baldness. However, with an initial $2,000 in funding from Sanger, he began experimenting on rabbits and rats with progesterone, which shuts down the ovaries when an egg is fertilised, in the hope he could trick the female body into thinking it was already pregnant.

Simmering below Eig's readable, racy tale of heroic scientific discovery, and jarring with that narrative, is the less salubrious subject of eugenics. Many of the pill's early funders and supporters were committed eugenicists. Sanger, who had been introduced to Malthusian economics by Havelock Ellis, originally thought of calling "birth control" by another name: "race control". She saw it as an urgent imperative: "The world and almost all of our civilisation for the next 25 years is going to depend upon a simple, cheap, safe contraceptive to be used in poverty-stricken slums and jungles, and among the most ignorant people." Sanger thought that those with untreatable hereditary conditions, as well as criminals, prostitutes and drug addicts, should be sterilised. "That these views were widely embraced in the 1920s and 1930s doesn't make them easier to fathom," Eig writes. He seems unconvincing when he adds: "she was not necessarily a racist".

Sanger held these views long after Nazism made them unfashionable. At a 1953 conference of Planned Parenthood, Sanger told her audience that they should "do something definite about the breeding and multiplication of diseased families ... mental defectives, morons; unhealthy, diseased people". Parenthood, she thought, was a privilege, not a right. She appointed as the head of her organisation William Vogt, the author of the controversial book Road to Survival (1948), which sold over 20m copies, and in which he argued that population control - a global sterilisation programme - should become a cornerstone of American foreign policy. If the $2bn that had been spent developing the atomic bomb had been spent on developing an efficient contraceptive, he wrote, it would have contributed more to national security and improved living standards.

In 1952, to promote this political worldview, John D Rockefeller III (whose family was one of Planned Parenthood's major sponsors) started the Population Council, which was directed by Frederick Osborn, the leader of the American Eugenics Society. Populations were growing twice as fast in "developing" countries, Rockefeller argued, and this "population bomb" threatened to create a breeding ground for communism: something had to be done. Pincus, who was Jewish, and had worked in the late 1920s at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin and been horrified by its embrace of racist theories, echoed such explosive language when he said: "Our globe is facing a threat that could be far more serious than the atomic bomb." His colleague, the Harvard gynaecologist John Rock, who conducted the first human trials of the contraceptive pill, also wrote that "the greatest menace to world peace and decent standards of life today is not atomic energy but sexual energy".

In 1953, Sanger arranged for the 76-year-old philanthropist Katharine McCormick, with whom she had been friends since the 1920s, to meet Pincus. McCormick, who was the second woman to graduate from MIT with a degree in biology, had become interested in endocrinology when seeking a cure for her late husband's schizophrenia. He was the heir to the International Harvester fortune and had left her, according to Rock, "as rich as Croesus ... She couldn't even spend the interest on her interest." With Sanger's encouragement, she would invest $2m of her fortune into Pincus's research, allowing him to conduct human trials. McCormick and Sanger, veterans of the first sexual revolution in Greenwich Village in the 1920s, would coordinate and fund the second.

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The pill was marketed at the 'miracle tablet' women had been waiting for. Photograph: RGB Ventures/SuperStock/Alamy

Pincus chose to conduct large-scale clinical trials of the pill in Puerto Rico, a nation whose citizens, as Vogt wrote in his book, were prone to "reproduce recklessly and irresponsibly". Despite birth control having been legal since 1937, the average 55-year-old mother there had seven children. Many Americans were disturbed at the large wave of immigration from the country; nearly one in 10 residents of Manhattan were Puerto Rican. In 1955, tests began on female medical students in San Juan, who were told non-participation would effect their grades; almost half dropped out because of nausea or abdominal pain. Another study began the following year with more test subjects, none of whom were informed of the purpose of the study, or made aware of the risks. Pincus deemed the pill 100% effective and chose to ignore the serious side effects, which he deemed psychosomatic. It was, writes Eig, "one of the boldest and most controversial field trials in the history of modern drugs".

In 1956, Reader's Digest estimated - perhaps conservatively - that 330,000 illegal abortions had been performed in the US, resulting in the deaths of 5,000 women. The year after that, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted a licence for the pill: a pink tablet sold under the trade name Enovid, to be used to treat menstrual disorders. In Massachusetts, where Pincus was based, anyone caught supplying contraceptives faced up to five years in prison, so it was too controversial to market for that purpose. But doctors advised that a "side effect" was that it prevented ovulation. Over the next two years, 500,000 women took the pill. In 1960, the FDA allowed the pill to be properly registered as a contraceptive and by 1964, despite it being banned in eight states, six million American and half a million British women were taking it.

The pill was marketed as the "miracle tablet" women had been waiting for (the Vatican, of course, had no time for such miracles and publicly condemned it). There's no doubt that this technological breakthrough fuelled the sexual revolution, freeing women to have sex without consequence. However, there were concerns about its serious side effects, which eventually resulted in a 1970 Senate hearing and a brief 24% dip in sales. And African-American activists, observing how Planned Parenthood were distributing the pill in minority neighbourhoods, saw it as a symbol of genocide. In August 1967, the so-called Summer of Love, Pincus died of cancer; he outlived Sanger only by a year. Before his death, Pincus was asked to address accusations that he was "playing with the lives of women". He reminded the journalist that he'd created the pill for women at the request of a woman.

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The Birth of the Pill by Jonathan Eig review - sex, drugs and population control

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"In its effects I believe that the pill ranks in importance with the discovery of fire," wrote the British-American anthropologist Ashley Montagu in 1969, excited that the invention was already upturning "age-old beliefs, practices and institutions".

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https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/books/review/jonathan-eig-the-birth-of-the-pill-review.html?_r=0

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The creation story of oral contraception, along with the social upheavals attributed to it, is not new territory. The life of Sanger, who founded the precursor to Planned Parenthood, is well documented too, including in a 2013 graphic novel by Peter Bagge, "Woman Rebel," and a 1992 biography by Ellen Chesler, "Woman of Valor." Eig, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, brings a lively, jocular approach to the story, casting an unlikely four-part ensemble comedy starring Sanger; the iconoclastic lead scientist, Gregory Goodwin Pincus; the Roman Catholic physician John Rock; and the supplier of cash behind it all, Katharine McCormick.

Though "The Birth of the Pill" is more popular history than feminist tract, Eig's decision to focus on those four has its revisionist political implications. When Pincus died in 1967, the first line of his obituary in The New York Times noted that he was "one of the three 'fathers' of the birth-control pill," along with M. C. Chang and Rock. Eig reminds us there were at least two "mothers." (Poor Chang is relegated to a handful of mentions.)

Still, at least in the book, this is not a party of equals. McCormick is represented mostly by firmly worded letters and the tale of a sad, if financially propitious, marriage to a schizophrenic scion. Rock, whose involvement in the clinical trials ran afoul of his Catholic faith and who was disappointed that the church never came around to his product, arrives late and generally stays in the shadows of the narrative. Eig suggests Sanger was, by the time of the events in the book, cranky and embarrassing. (She does get the benefit of Eig's excellent first line: "She was an old woman who loved sex and she had spent 40 years seeking a way to make it better." Regrettably, he also describes her as having been "a sexy slip of a woman, a redheaded fireball of lust and curiosity.")

Above all, Eig is plainly most compelled by Pincus, whom he paints as a cowboy among buttoned-up scientists. His Pincus is wild-haired and stubborn, given to reckless bluffs, possessing "the I.Q. of an Einstein and the nerves of a card shark." Booted from Harvard for his indecorous ways, Pincus funds his initial research by going door to door to the Wear-Well Trouser and Worcester Baking Companies, and moves his family into an insane asylum to maximize research efficiency.

In other words, he was just the one Sanger needed. He eagerly took up her challenge to find an effective and convenient way to prevent pregnancy. McCormick and Sanger's desire was to free women from biology as destiny, to create a world where, as Eig puts it, "womanhood would no longer mean the same thing as motherhood." It's not clear Pincus was motivated by that so much as by his zest for an unorthodox challenge. But he had a decidedly modern view of sexuality. As an undergraduate at Cornell, he wrote in a letter to his mother: "The sexual impulse is to me neither a low, degrading thing nor something extremely sacrosanct and holy. I regard [it] rather as a fundamentally normal, clean, lifeful instinct."

Along the way, as Eig shows with due detail, Pincus was perfectly happy to cut corners, presiding over the dubious ethical conditions under which the pill was tested. At one point, female medical students at the University of Puerto Rico were told they had to enroll in the clinical trials and submit to urine tests and Pap smears, on penalty of having their grades docked. More than half dropped out of the trials anyway. Eig also doesn't let Sanger off the hook for her willingness to ally with eugenicists, and to allow their Malthusian horror at overpopulation in the developed world to supersede her politics of liberation.

The book is nimbly paced and conversational, but its breezy style can trip on the rails of those politics, particularly when it comes to what the pill, and all the forms of effective hormonal contraception that followed it, meant to women's lives. Shifting social mores are reduced to postage stamps, and though the analysis is infrequent, it jars.

When it comes to delineating contraception's downsides, Eig doesn't seem to think he has to prove the offhand and highly arguable claim that in the years that followed, "birth control would also contribute to the spread of divorce, infidelity, single parenthood, abortion and pornography." He also blithely dismisses as futile Sanger's hope that "the pill might lift women out of poverty and stop the world's rapid population growth. In fact, the pill has been far more popular and had greater impact among the affluent than the poor and has been far more widely used in developed countries than developing ones." Contraception hasn't been a panacea for broader inequality, and it will never be, even if IUDs were available free on demand on every street corner. But no serious accounting of women's progress over the past decades, however incomplete, can leave out the transformative role controlling their fertility has already had in allowing women to chart their own destinies. That radical transformation also helps account for the enduring fierceness of contraception's opponents.

It is an old argument to blame social ills on too much freedom for women, or on the tools of it. Eig notes that when Sanger gave an interview to Mike Wallace she was asked, "Could it be that women in the United States have become too independent - that they followed the lead of women like Margaret Sanger by neglecting family life for a career?" The year was 1957.

THE BIRTH OF THE PILL

By Jonathan Eig

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the birth of the pill: how four crusaders reinvented sex and launched a revolution (book)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The creation story of oral contraception, along with the social upheavals attributed to it, is not new territory. The life of Sanger, who founded the precursor to Planned Parenthood, is well documented too, including in a 2013 graphic novel by Peter Bagge, "Woman Rebel," and a 1992 biography by Ellen Chesler, "Woman of Valor."