This week (May 9) in 1960, the Food and Drug Administration approved Enovid-10, the world’s first commercially produced birth control pill.  This is the very short story of the four very different people who made it happen.

Margaret Sanger was one of 11 children. Her father was a radical Irishman whose sexual appetite Margaret blamed for the early death of her mother.  Thus did the idea of giving women more reproductive freedom come to Sanger early, and it was certainly reinforced when she moved to New York City and saw so many poor women, saddled with children they could not support, living hopeless, squalid lives.  Sanger became the driving force behind creating a convenient, readily available contraceptive for women.

Katherine McCormick became the financier. A wealthy blue-blood who had married Stanley McCormick — his father founded International Harvester — she became involved with Planned Parenthood, where she met and befriended Margaret Sanger. She promised to financially support any research designed to develop an oral contraceptive.

That research was conducted by Gregory “Goody” Pincus, the son of Russian Jews who immigrated to America.   A child genius, he majored in biology at Cornell University before teaching at Harvard, where his research won Harvard worldwide acclaim.  Denied tenure because he was a maverick, but also because he was a Jew, Pincus went to Clark University in Massachusetts, where he became the leader of a group of independent biochemists doing experimental work in animal reproduction.  Learning of his work, Sanger challenged him to develop an oral contraceptive and McCormick promised him funding.

Pincus believed that he could prevent conception by chemically imitating the hormonal condition that occurs during pregnancy when the body naturally blocks ovulation, and in lab experiments the work went surprisingly well—so well that Pincus realized he needed to recruit a medical doctor to join the team. Laboratory research was one thing. Applying it to real people was another.

Dr. John Rock of Harvard Medical School was to Goody Pincus as night was to day. Tall, charming, handsome, and devoutly Catholic, Rock’s original reproductive goals were the exact opposite of Pincus’.  A gynecologist, he hoped to cure infertility in women.

But Rock became increasingly flexible on birth control and his real-world applications of Pincus’ laboratory achievements were the final piece of the puzzle.  In tests on poor women in Puerto Rico and Haiti, “the pill,” as it was called, was a total success.

And so, one of the most life-altering phenomenon of the 20^th century was started by two women — one a radical Irish atheist, the other a wealthy Protestant socialite — and two men — one a short, homely, Jewish lab rat, the other a tall, handsome Catholic physician.

Only in America.

In 1854, the place where the Father of Our Country played father to his family was a run-down, dilapidated shambles.  Washington’s home, Mount Vernon, which was so beloved to him that he kept giving up power to return to it, had a collapsed roof and rotted front portico. Most of the windows were broken, the inside staircases were destroyed, the furniture was in disrepair, and it needed a coat of paint. Someone wrote that a strong wind would likely blow the entire edifice down.

It was, in short, a national disgrace, as Louisa Cunningham discovered when she viewed Mount Vernon from the deck of a boat that passed by it on the Potomac River. Shocked by its ruinous state, she wrote her daughter Ann that something must be done. Ann Cunningham decided to do something.

She created the Mount Vernon Ladies Association with the aim of publicizing Mount Vernon’s tragic condition in order to raise enough money to buy it from its current owner, John Washington (a great grandnephew of Washington), and restore it.  To this end, she and the other association members wrote letters to newspapers, held fundraisers, gave speeches and even lobbied politicians both in Congress and in the Virginia legislature

At first progress was slow, both in terms of raising funds and negotiating with John Washington, who refused to even consider selling the home to a group of ladies.  Fortunately, Cunningham’s cause came to the attention of the age’s most famous orator, Edward Everett (whose much admired address would precede Lincoln’s at the Gettysburg battlefield in 1863), who volunteered not only to make Washington’s home the subject of future orations and newspaper articles but also to donate his fees to the association’s fundraising efforts.

With their financial picture brightened, the ladies turned to negotiating with John Washington, whose refusal to sell the famous, but endangered home had generated widespread condemnation from the many newspapers that increasingly were taking up the ladies’ cause. This only hardened Washington’s position, but at a meeting between Cunningham and Washington, Cunningham — rather than condemning him as well — expressed condolences for the criticism he was receiving.  That set in motion a change of heart and finally Washington agreed to sell Mount Vernon to the Mount Vernon Ladies Association for $200,000.  The sale was consummated this week (April 6) in 1858, and by 1860 Mount Vernon was on its way to becoming what it is today — a majestic, much visited memorial to America’s greatest leader.

As for Ann Cunningham and the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, they are honored today as the pioneers of America’s historic preservation movement, whose national association, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, once employed me — albeit briefly — as a writer.

There are many hardships to endure if you live or work, as I do, in our nation’s capital.  Traffic into Washington from surrounding suburbs is, as my old English professor would say, “an anathema, lads, which means ‘worthy of a vile curse.’”  The weather in the summer is a horrific combination of polluted air, high heat and humidity, and frequent thunderstorms.  Washington in the winter means one traffic accident for every two snowflakes.

As for local government, a former Washington mayor, Marion Barry, was once re-elected in a landslide after spending time in prison for crack cocaine possession.  And don’t get me started on the federal government.

But there is one week in Washington that almost makes it all worthwhile.  That is in the spring, during the week of the Cherry Blossom Festival, when the cherry trees are in bloom along the Potomac River’s Tidal Basin, which adjoins the Jefferson Memorial.  There is no sight quite like it in the world.

The first two of these cherry trees were planted 100 years ago this week (March 27, 1912) by Helen Taft, the wife of then-President William Taft, and the Viscountess Chinda, the wife of the Japanese ambassador, whose country had proposed giving 3,000 cherry trees to America as a gift.  The two women dug up enough soil to plant two trees taken from the famous collection of cherry trees along the bank of the Arakawa River, near Japan’s capital city of Tokyo.  The other trees were later planted around the Tidal Basin, as well as in East Potomac Park and on the White House grounds.

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