Events

President Franklin Roosevelt and Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov exchanged diplomatic notes in Washington, formally establishing relations between the United States and the Soviet Union after sixteen years of official non-recognition. The agreement ended the longest diplomatic freeze between two major world powers in the twentieth century and began an uneasy partnership that would prove indispensable when both nations faced a common enemy less than a decade later. The United States had refused to recognize the Bolshevik government since the 1917 Revolution. American objections were both ideological and practical. The Soviets had repudiated tsarist debts owed to American creditors, nationalized foreign-owned property without compensation, promoted worldwide communist revolution through the Comintern, and maintained a system of government that Americans found fundamentally repugnant. Three successive Republican administrations maintained that recognition would legitimize a regime built on repression. Roosevelt, inaugurated in March 1933, took a more pragmatic view. The Great Depression had devastated American manufacturing, and the Soviet Union represented a potentially enormous export market. More urgently, Japan's 1931 invasion of Manchuria and Hitler's rise to power in Germany created a security landscape where American isolation from a major Eurasian power looked increasingly dangerous. Roosevelt also faced domestic pressure from American businesses eager to trade with the Soviets. The negotiations were conducted largely through back channels before Litvinov's arrival in Washington. The Soviets agreed to stop funding communist propaganda in the United States, promised to protect the rights of American citizens in the USSR, and pledged to negotiate a settlement of the debt question. Roosevelt sent a warm telegram expressing hope for permanently "normal and friendly" relations.

Albert Hofmann, a 32-year-old Swiss chemist at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide for the first time while researching ergot alkaloids for potential pharmaceutical applications. The compound, catalogued as LSD-25 because it was the twenty-fifth in a series of lysergic acid derivatives, showed no immediately promising properties and was shelved for five years. Hofmann had no inkling that he had created one of the most potent psychoactive substances ever discovered. Hofmann's research was focused on finding medically useful compounds derived from ergot, a fungus that grows on grain and had been used in folk medicine for centuries. Ergot alkaloids had already yielded drugs that could stimulate uterine contractions and treat migraines. Hofmann was systematically exploring variations on the lysergic acid molecule, hoping to find a compound that would stimulate the circulatory or respiratory system. LSD-25 was tested on animals in 1938, which noted only a restless quality in the subjects, and Sandoz lost interest. The substance sat in Hofmann's files until April 16, 1943, when he re-synthesized it following what he described as "a peculiar presentiment." During the process, he accidentally absorbed a small amount through his fingertips and experienced an unusual state of altered consciousness, including vivid closed-eye imagery. Three days later he deliberately ingested 250 micrograms, an amount he assumed would be a threshold dose but which turned out to be powerfully psychoactive. His famous bicycle ride home through Basel under the influence became the founding story of the psychedelic era. Sandoz marketed LSD under the trade name Delysid beginning in 1947, promoting it as a tool for psychotherapy and psychiatric research. Through the 1950s and early 1960s, legitimate researchers published over a thousand scientific papers exploring its potential for treating alcoholism, depression, and end-of-life anxiety.