The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History

by Adam Selzer

  For Grandpa Carl

  (who won World War II)

  and the rest of my awesome family

  Thanks to the whole Smart Aleck staff (even the interns) and all the people who helped make this project work, including (but not limited to) Eli Selzer; Nadia Cornier; Jonathan Spring; Ronica Selzer; Aidan Davis (thanks for playing quietly!); Kathleen Cromie; Carol White; Sherman Dorn; Marc Federman at Joelsongs; Stephanie Elliott, Colleen Fellingham, Marci Senders, and everyone at Delacorte Press; Troy Taylor; Ken Melvoin-Berg; Hector Reyes; Willie Williams; Lindsey Harper; Michael G. Smith; Mike Falkstrom; Jennifer Laughran; Daniel Pinkwater (and everyone else at the speakeasy); Peter Stone Brown; Robert Zalas; and, of course, lonely ol’ Charles Carroll. We still remember you, Chuck!

  And a big thanks to Davy Crockett, Andrew Jackson, Martin Frobisher, Ulysses S. Grant, and Bjarni Herjólfsson—even though you’re dead, I’m sure you guys can still kick my butt any time you like. So no hard feelings, okay? Give Preston Brooks a big slap for me. I also wish to apologize to the many people who had to be left out of this book because they weren’t funny enough. Try growing some comical facial hair next time, geniuses!

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1

  THE EARLIEST AMERICAN SETTLERS:

  BRAVE, BOLD, AND RICH IN MINERALS

  CHAPTER 2

  THE COLONISTS ARE REVOLTING

  CHAPTER 3

  A NATION DECLINES TO BATHE

  CHAPTER 4

  THE CIVIL WAR:

  AMERICA’S CHANGING BODY

  CHAPTER 5

  THE GILDED AGE (OR, SCREW THE POOR!)

  CHAPTER 6

  WORLD WAR I:

  “THE WAR TO END ALL WARS”

  CHAPTER 7

  THE ROARING TWENTIES

  CHAPTER 8

  THE DEPRESSING THIRTIES

  CHAPTER 9

  WORLD WAR II (OUT OF … ?)

  CHAPTER 10

  1947-89:

  THE “WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE” ERA

  CHAPTER 11

  AND ON INTO THE FUTURE

  THE END

  INTRODUCTION

  Let’s get the main question out of the way: why do you need to know this stuff? Teachers may hate us for saying this, but frankly, you kinda don’t. Oh, sure, we could throw in some line about “those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it,” but, in reality, you’ll probably just have to repeat History 101.

  Most people know next to nothing about history—and even what they think they know is mostly wrong. Indeed, most people don’t know George Washington from a washing machine, but they seem to get along reasonably well in the world anyway.

  There are a lot of things out there that you don’t really need to know. For instance, unless you live in Vermont and plan to run for state government, we can’t think of a single good reason why you’d need to know that the capital of Vermont is Montpelier.

  Here’s the thing, though: just because you won’t be able to use this stuff to get a job doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know it. Knowing history will, quite simply, make you a smarter and more well-rounded person. You might find a section here that’s so interesting you want to go learn more about it from more reputable historians. In fact, we hope you do. Knowing the basics of history—and knowing that some of the bits of trivia people like to bring up all the time aren’t really true at all—will give you one major advantage over people who don’t: you’ll be better than they are.

  We also think that you should understand that nobody really knows all that much about history. When your teacher tells you about some battle or another, it may be that the only accurate thing in the story is the date.1 What we know of history is often just what the winners of the battle described, and they weren’t always telling the truth. Many famous stories were written down hundreds of years after they happened by people who based what they wrote on rumors and hearsay. There’s a lot left to find out and a lot left to argue about; for instance, people still get into fights over what the Civil War was all about, and no one really has a clue what Christopher Columbus looked like (though we’re betting he was one ugly fellow).

  Yes, your teacher is probably wrong about lots of stuff. Being a smart aleck in history class is easy if you know how.

  We’re the Smart Aleck staff. We’re here to help.

  MEET YOUR SMART ALECK STAFF!

  They say that “history is written by the winners,” which makes the Smart Aleck staff winners (even if we are the back-row hooligans of the textbook industry)! Our motto: a smart aleck who coasts may get a passing grade, but one who reads ahead may take over the entire class.

  ADAM SELZER is the author of a handful of subversive young adult and middle-grade novels that get banned occasionally. He snuck into being a historian through the back door, initially by becoming a professional ghost investigator and tour guide in Chicago and then by organizing the Smart Aleck staff to sort out this American history business once and for all. He is the boss around the Smart Aleck headquarters and enjoys making other people bring him coffee.

  ELI SELZER is a big Billy Joel fan. Dr. Joel once asked, in song form, “Should I try to be a straight-A student?” Using an obscure algebraic formula, he determined that “if you are, then you think too much.” Eli was a straight-A student, but he sure didn’t think too much. He lives in Los Angeles now, and got a job on the Smart Aleck staff by being the boss’s brother.

  PROFESSOR WILLIAM ROSEMONT, ESQ., our resident conspiracy theorist (historians have to deal with a lot of these), spent most of his time at headquarters shouting that everything we say about the South in the Civil War chapter is a “dirty Yankee lie” (so, yes, we’ve already heard it). He has PhDs in history, Aztec anthropology, engineering, and Lithuanian literature, but we really just keep him around to fix the pinball machines.

  BRIAN EDDLEBECK is the guy who wrote all the jokes in this book about things that smell bad. Blame him. All references to nudity that didn’t get cut by the good folks in the standards and practices department are his, too.

  KENSINGTON ANN CHELSEA is an ex-con (and is still wanted in six states) but showed up (uninvited) at the office one day to teach us a song about how to build an Anderson shelter (see Chapter 9). Hiring her for the staff got us a wicked tax break, and the shelter came in surprisingly handy.

  NOT PICTURED:

  Fifty interns not important enough to name!

  1 Actually, we’re focused on the big picture, so we’re leaving out as many specific dates as possible. You’ll never remember them anyway, and on the off chance that you ever do need to know the exact date of the Battle of Tinkledribble, we figure you can look it up without too much trouble. You’re welcome.

  “For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps.”—Christopher Columbus, who wasn’t kidding about the intelligence part

  INTRODUCTION

  Imagine that it’s about 1493. You were born a manure shoveler in some rural European village, and odds are pretty good that you’ll die with manure on your boots, if you can afford boots in the first place. If you can’t afford boots, you’ll die with crap between your toes. Either way, your life will be hard, smelly, and unpleasant. There’s no chance you’ll ever work your way up to being head manure engineer or anything; that just isn’t the way it works. If you were born poor, you’re almost certainly going to die poor.

  Then, one day, you get word that a whole new world has been discovered, and that it’s full of wonders and treasures that are yours for the taking if only you’ll go on a voyage to explore it and cram your religion down the locals’ throats.
If you survive the voyage, you can trade in your manure shovel for a life of endless riches and adventure.

  How could anyone have turned that chance down?

  The earliest European explorers and settlers had absolutely no idea what they might find in the Americas. This is difficult to imagine today, when we have a general idea of what exists in the world—we can even be pretty sure that we won’t run into a two-headed monster or a city made out of gold even if we ever go to Mars. But in those days, they had no idea what might be hiding behind the trees on the new continent on the other side of the ocean. At no point since have people been confronted with anything quite so big and mysterious as the New World must have looked to those sailors.

  Of course, very few of the early explorers and settlers actually ended up getting as rich as they planned to. Most of them probably got plenty of adventure, but settling a new world was dangerous work, so much so that explorer and settler are probably right at the top of the list of Jobs in Which You’re Most Likely to End Up Being Eaten. But working in manure piles wasn’t exactly safe, either, and there was no chance that they’d ever name a new country after you because of something you did at that job.

  Are these guys saying “There goes the neighborhood” or “Boy, I hope those guys are bringing us beads and trinkets”? Incidentally, the story that Manhattan Island was purchased from Native Americans for twenty bucks’ worth of beads and trinkets is one of those “fascinating facts” that doesn’t happen to be true.

  And so, all across Europe, adventurous people threw down their shovels and sailed across the sea.

  WHO WAS HERE FIRST?

  So who discovered America? Any idiot will tell you it was Christopher Columbus, but that’s just proof that he or she is an idiot, or uninformed, anyway. Most modern historians are of the opinion that Columbus couldn’t navigate his way out of an outhouse if you gave him a compass and a map. He did bump into a new continent that none of his contemporaries knew was there, though, and kick-started a whole new era of exploration, which probably ought to count for something, but he wasn’t the first guy, or even the first European, to get there. He also never set foot on what is now the United States—or, for that matter, on the North American continent. On his famous voyage in 1492, with his fleet the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, the first land they came to was what we now call San Salvador, an island near the Central American isthmus.2 The sailors, many of whom had been stuck on a boat with Columbus for months, rejoiced—Columbus was not the most popular guy in town. Some say that the Spanish queen only funded his voyage because it would get him out of her hair for a while.

  “Man must have held his breath … face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald, a direct descendant of Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” on what the discovery of the New World must have been like

  Costumed guys “make history come alive” for tourists by reenacting a Viking battle. Witnessing a real one would scar most people for life. For the record, the guys with cameras are not authentic.

  Leif Eriksson Day is October 9. Stay home from school! Then, on Columbus Day, show up in class and use the phone in the office to call your teachers and tell them they’re poorly educated revisionist historian pigs!

  No one knows what Christopher Columbus looked like. The guy in this famous painting, known as the Piombo portrait, is probably just some random jerk from Bologna, not Columbus himself. In fact, many famous pictures of historical figures from precamera days are unlikely to be even remotely accurate.

  Columbus hung around the Canary Islands for about a month, explored Cuba for a bit, and eventually headed home in 1493. He made two return voyages to explore more of Central America and the nearby islands, but he had no idea what sort of discovery he’d made—he insisted to the last day he was alive that he had been in Asia, which is what he’d been looking for in the first place. He also went to great lengths to make sure his crew told people he’d been in Asia—he threatened to cut out their tongues if they said otherwise. The crew, who enjoyed having their tongues for both talking and tasting things, kept their mouths shut.

  The first European thought to have sighted mainland North America was a Norwegian Viking by the name of (get this) Bjarni Herjólfsson. He first spotted land in 986, 506 years before Columbus and his band of hooligans arrived, but he never stopped—he was lost at sea at the time, trying to find Iceland.

  Later, another bunch of hoodlums would follow Bjarni’s route. They were led by Leif Eriksson, a Viking who bought a boat from Bjarni. Eriksson and his men became the first Europeans known to have set foot in North America around the year 1000; while no one has proven that they ever made it as far as the modern-day United States, there’s some evidence suggesting that Vikings were in Minnesota in 1030. They would have felt right at home in the cold there, and everyone knows that Vikings loved lutefisk.3

  “HOW’D THEY GET HERE?”

  For years, we called the people who were already here when the European explorers arrived Indians, since Columbus thought he was in India. Now, they’re usually called Native Americans (or First Nations, if you’re in Canada). But that’s probably not much more accurate than calling them Indians, since their ancestors probably migrated to North America, too. So, how did they get here in the first place? Some of the theories include:

  THE BERING STRAIT LAND BRIDGE: The most popular theory has long been that a small group of people walked over from Siberia between nine and twenty thousand years ago, back when there was a land bridge connecting the two continents.

  ABORIGINAL THEORY: Some say that Australian aborigines could have sailed here more than twenty thousand years ago.

  NORTH ATLANTIC THEORY: Ancient Europeans may have traveled over by boat, following ice routes from Greenland, to the East Coast.

  THE TOURIST THEORY: This theory holds that there were actually ancient tourists who got lost trying to find the Grand Canyon gift shop. Scientists reject this theory and call us mean things for suggesting it.

  John Cabot (real name Giovanni Caboto), explorer and snappy dresser, was an early explorer of North America who ended up being written out of history for the most part just because he was working for the British. Here, he points at something gross on the ground and says, “Okay, guys, who did that?”

  MYTHS OF HISTORY

  Stories that Columbus had trouble getting funding because of a belief that the Earth was flat were supposedly made up by Washington Irving, who is best known today for writing “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” That the Earth was a sphere had been well known since the days of the ancient Greeks, though you could still sometimes get in trouble for saying it out loud in front of big shots from the local church.

  Of course, there’s no way to tell if Leif and Bjarni were really the first Europeans to arrive; even the Vikings themselves didn’t think they were. Early Viking explorers said they were attacked by groups of white people as soon as they landed, and the natives told them there were other pale people nearby who worshipped a wooden cross that they carried around—which was a pretty darned European thing to do in those days. That the natives were able to communicate with the Vikings at all is a pretty good indication that fishermen from Europe had been there before; in fact, there are also some records that were discovered a few years back that pretty much prove it. However, we’ll never know who these fishermen who discovered the New World were. Having found a good fishing spot, they apparently kept it a secret.

  STUPID HATS OF HISTORY:

  THE CONQUISTADOR

  HELMET

  Francisco Pizarro, who conquered the Inca empire, shows off his conquistador helmet. Like most conquistadores, he stuck a feather in his helmet—and called it macaroni!4

  Some say that all this evidence that white people who worshipped crosses showed up before Columbus supports the theory that St. Brendan, an Irish explorer, had been to North America as early as the sixth century. According
to the stories, he and sixty pilgrims sailed across the Atlantic in search of the Garden of Eden. They ended up on a “blessed isle” that may or may not have been North America. But there’s no solid proof that Brendan actually existed, let alone sailed across the ocean. The stories about him were written down centuries after his death.

  So how did we come to get a day off on Columbus Day but not on Bjarni Day? In the 1700s, few people in America had ever heard of Columbus, and wouldn’t have cared about him if they had. In those days, credit for “discovering” America was usually given to John Cabot, an Italian guy who explored Canada (while working for the British) in 1497 and 1498. Nobody mentioned Columbus until America started to become a nation of its own. When the United States started up, people needed to have some new national heroes to admire, and they wanted some that weren’t associated with the British. Someone suggested Columbus, and people started naming everything in sight after him. He went from a historical footnote5 to a national hero very quickly, and stayed a national hero for a good couple of hundred years before people went back to thinking he was a jerk.

  PONCE DE LEÓN: HOW GULLIBLE WAS HE?

  Ponce de León founded the first colony in Puerto Rico in 1508. He and his sailors brought diseases that killed the natives in great numbers, but he ended up pretty rich himself. In 1513, he started to explore the area north of Cuba—now Florida—making him the first European who we absolutely know set foot on the land that would become the United States. But others had probably been there before; he’s said to have run into at least one Native American who spoke Spanish.