Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

As Chief Justice Warren predicted, Jacobellis prompted a surge in the number of movies the Court had to review, and adult movie day became a regular event. The films were shown in a large ceremonial room on the first floor. Justice Thurgood Marshall relished the screenings and particularly enjoyed when directors made gratuitous attempts to bestow an element of educational or artistic merit on their otherwise lurid movies. Near the end of a soft-core film called Vixen, one of the female leads is caught up in an attempted hijacking to Cuba, allowing another character to wax philosophical about the differences between communism and democracy. “Ah, the redeeming social value,” Marshall joked. He also took pleasure in needling his fellow justices. After watching a graphic documentary about the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases, Marshall looked over at a visibly mortified Justice Harry Blackmun and deadpanned, “Well, Harry, I didn’t learn anything, how about you?”

Also according to legend, Justice John Harlan would position himself next to his more conservative colleagues and ask them, because of his failing eyesight, to narrate—in meticulous detail—what was happening on-screen. During especially raunchy scenes he would exclaim, “By Jove!” or “Extraordinary!”

In 1946 scientists with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission collaborated with Quaker Oats and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to feed breakfast oatmeal spiked with radioactive calcium to mentally retarded children and teenagers at the Walter E. Fernald State School outside of Boston. (MIT and Quaker Oats paid a $1.85 million settlement to the test’s adult victims in 1998.)