The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History

by Adam Selzer

  Another guy named Walter Hunt invented a sewing machine, but decided not to patent it for fear that it would put seamstresses out of work. He then invented the safety pin and sold all the rights to it for four hundred bucks. That was decent money at the time, but the guy who bought the rights got seriously rich.

  Other people did strike it rich because of, and became famous for, their inventions. Alexander Graham Bell, along with his assistant, Thomas Watson, invented the telephone. Four years later, there were sixty thousand phones in the United States. In those days, you couldn’t actually dial phones—you picked up the phone and said, “Hello, Central, get me Henry Whittington, Esquire, please. I want to tell him his wife is ugly and his feet smell,” and the operator at Central would connect you. Anyone else who happened to be on the line could listen in, too, if they felt like it. Listening to people over the phone on these “party lines” (which remained common in small towns, in particular, for decades) became a good way to pick up gossip—and was entirely legal, if not particularly polite. You could even chime in and say you happened to know that Henry’s wife smelled like roses, if you wanted.

  Alexander Graham Bell was really disappointed when people started answering the phone by saying “Hello.” He wanted people to say “Ahoy.”

  But no inventor became more famous than Thomas Edison, who held 1,093 patents. The irony here is that he didn’t really invent much of anything. Many of the inventions were actually made by his staff. Others were things that other people invented; Edison just modified them slightly and took all the credit for them.

  There are plenty of nasty things you can say about Edison: for example, when he wanted to show the world that his competitor’s brand of electricity was dangerous, he electrocuted an elephant. He also encouraged the use of electricity to execute a condemned criminal. Then again, it can’t be denied that the inventions he’s credited with (and certainly helped promote) still benefit us today; in fact, odds are pretty good that you can see this page because of an electric light. And in addition to getting the credit for inventing the bulbs (at least twenty people invented versions of lightbulbs before him—his was simply better), Edison played a huge role in wiring the country for electricity in the first place. Providing electricity to cities is where Edison made his real money.

  Thomas Edison will show them. He’ll show them all! Mu-hahahahahaa!

  In the nineteenth century, there were inventions and discoveries that led, eventually, to just about every major technological breakthrough of the twentieth century, from television to computers to all sorts of weapons. Not bad, considering that many people back then still thought that if you left some corn on a rag in the corner of a barn, the corn kernels would turn into mice.

  IMMIGRATION

  In 1830, only one in a hundred Americans had been born in another country. In 1850, it was one in ten. The number of people who came to America between 1815 and 1915 was roughly the equivalent of the entire modern populations of Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Denmark, Austria, and Switzerland combined: somewhere around thirty-five million.

  Ellis Island gets a bad rap these days, but it does seem like it would have been a breeze for anyone who’s been through security at Midway Airport in Chicago.

  The government set up several processing stations to handle all the necessary paperwork and examinations of new arrivals, the most famous of which was on Ellis Island, just outside New York City. Seeing the Statue of Liberty looming on the horizon after weeks in a smelly boat must have been pretty amazing—certainly more inspiring than seeing the butt end of the statue from the New Jersey turnpike is today. But there were plenty of horror stories about arriving at Ellis Island. Fresh off the boat, immigrants were thoroughly examined, poked and prodded, then often assigned a new, “more American” name, if they were lucky enough not to be turned away. Actually, while the place was crowded (it was built to process about a thousand people per day but often had to process about five times that many), only about one in fifty people were turned away (mostly due to illness), and very few people were actually forced to change their name. Millions, however, did voluntarily change their names—sometimes to make them easier to spell, and sometimes to forget their past and start fresh in their new home.

  A great many immigrants had no choice but to stay in whatever city they landed in, since they couldn’t afford to travel any farther. Hence, New York became a major immigrant center. For example, about a third of all Jews in Europe came to America (European countries were in the habit of kicking Jews out); most stayed in New York. And there were soon more Italians in New York than in most Italian cities.

  Most of these immigrants, especially the ones who weren’t white, had a rough time in America. But white immigrants didn’t get treated that well, either. In the late 1800s, many stores that needed to hire someone put signs in their windows saying “No Irish Need Apply.” Anti-Irish prejudice was rampant.

  THE VICTORIAN ERA

  The late 1800s are known as the Victorian era because Victoria was Queen of England. She wasn’t queen of America, of course, but we still call Americans from that era Victorians, because there was no American president worth naming an era after at the time.

  If one group can truly claim to have been worse off than everyone else, it’s probably the Chinese. In 1882, the government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigration. Its real purposes were to keep the Chinese from coming to California and getting the gold that white people were already digging for and to keep the Chinese who were already present from becoming citizens. The act wouldn’t be repealed for sixty-one years.

  Those Chinese who were already present had been treated very badly from the start. In some places, especially in the West, mobs attacked Chinese settlements, killing some and wounding others. Those who fought back weren’t even allowed to plead self-defense in court if they were arrested for fighting a white person. There may not have been signs saying “No Chinese Need Apply,” but that was only because it went without saying.

  MORE PRESIDENTS YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF

  Andrew Johnson was a conservative Democrat who was made the running mate of Lincoln (a Republican) merely to balance the ticket. If anyone in the Republican Party at the time had thought he’d actually become president, they never, ever would have given him the vice presidential slot. After Lincoln won the election, Johnson arrived for the inauguration drunk as a sailor on shore leave.

  We here at the Smart Aleck’s Guide aren’t sure we fully understand this cartoon, but we’re pretty sure that it’s horribly offensive.

  When Johnson became president after Lincoln’s death, Congress hated his guts, and many Americans even thought that he had been in on Lincoln’s assassination. Probably the most racist president ever (and this will sound like a pretty bold statement after you see the excerpts from Nixon’s Watergate tapes), he vetoed many bills that would have given rights to former slaves and became the first president to be impeached.

  Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb? No one. Grant and his wife are interred there, but not buried.

  Johnson was impeached for a violation of the Tenure of Office Act, a boring law dealing with firing cabinet members that Congress enacted mainly because they knew Johnson would break it. Break it he did, by firing the secretary of war, and he was put on trial before the Senate. A single vote allowed him to stay in office for a few more months, but the Democratic Party decided not to nominate him for reelection. Instead, they went with Horatio Seymour, who lost—though he probably wasn’t whipped as badly as Johnson would have been—to Ulysses S. Grant, the war hero.

  Johnson was long regarded as a good president by racist historians who thought giving black people the right to vote was a big mistake, but today he’s generally thought of as a big jerk. If he did one thing right, it was letting Secretary of State William Seward purchase Alaska from Russia. People thought Seward was nuts at the time, since gold hadn’t been discovered in Alaska yet, but having Alaska as an American territor
y may have saved our butts from getting nuked by Russia a century or so later since it gave us a convenient place close to Russia to put our missiles. Johnson spent the rest of his life trying to get elected to the Senate in Tennessee. He finally managed it in 1875, but made only one speech as a senator before dying of a stroke.

  Ulysses S. Grant spent two terms trying to put the country back together while also trying to help America stay afloat through one financial crisis and scandal after another. Running the White House like a general leads his troops, as he tried to do, couldn’t keep the corruption out. If he hadn’t been a war hero, there’s no way he would have ended up on the fifty-dollar bill.

  Rutherford B. Hayes came in next, despite the fact that he didn’t actually win the election. The winner of the popular vote was a guy named Samuel Tilden (Tilden won the popular vote 51 percent to 48 percent, as a matter of fact), but Tilden didn’t have enough electoral votes to be the official winner, and the committee that picked the president went with Hayes. No one knows exactly how he convinced the committee to name him president, but most people agree on two things: he probably didn’t win fair and square, and the administration he formed as a result was so forgettable that it’s a wonder he even bothered.

  After Hayes came James Garfield, who was in office only six months. A man named Charles Guiteau (see inset next page) repeatedly asked Garfield to make him consul to Paris, despite the fact that he was in no way qualified for the job, and was repeatedly turned down. When being an annoying little booger didn’t get him the gig, Guiteau decided to move to plan B: shooting Garfield in the back.

  Garfield might have survived if his doctors had been better, but the treatment he got was lousy even by the standards of the day. Doctors stuck their bare fingers into the wound to get the bullet, and one of them accidentally poked him in the liver. This doctor is probably the only person ever to touch a sitting president’s liver. If he’s not, it’s still probably a pretty exclusive club.

  Johnson became president without ever spending a day in school. Before you point this out to your teacher, keep in mind that he sucked as a president.

  CHARLES GUITEAU

  Charles Guiteau may have been the strangest of all presidential assassins. He’s an interesting example of a guy who failed his way through life.

  He was born in 1855, and as a young man he joined a religious sect that was into free love. Even the free-love people just couldn’t find it in their hearts to love him, though, and they nicknamed him Charles Get Out. He was eventually kicked out and moved to Chicago, where he lied his way into being a lawyer. He wasn’t successful at it, but he attracted a lot of attention just by being really annoying. He then tried his hand at theology, and published a whole book on the subject, though most of it was plagiarized.

  Deciding to try his hand at politics, he wrote a speech in support of James Garfield that he delivered to two small crowds. When Garfield won the election, Guiteau convinced himself that Garfield had only won because of his speech, and demanded a job as consul general to Paris. He made a nuisance of himself at the White House until the secretary of state told him to get lost and stay lost. So he decided on another career move: shooting Garfield. For once in his life, he succeeded.

  After his arrest, Guiteau’s bizarre trial became the social event of the season. Everybody who was anybody went to see it. Guiteau was known for wild outbursts and antics during the trial (as could probably be expected). The spectators stared at Guiteau like he was a monkey in the zoo, and he appeared to love it.

  The media circus around his trial delighted him. Even after two people tried to shoot him, he considered himself highly popular, and was so sure that he would be found innocent that he made plans to run for president himself. After all, he noted, “The doctors killed [Garfield]. I did not kill him.”

  The fact that this was true didn’t get Guiteau off the hook, and he was convicted and sentenced to be hanged. While in prison, he wrote an autobiography that ended with a note saying that he’d like to meet a nice “Christian lady of wealth under thirty.” Guiteau used his hanging as a chance to promote his new career as a songwriter, and sang a song called “I Am Going to the Lordy” just before they hanged him (it was even worse than it sounds). He had asked for an orchestra to play along as he sang, but the request was denied.

  Guiteau is mostly forgotten today, but he probably had more folk songs written about him than any other assassin before or since. Songs about hangings just never seem to go out of style among folk balladeers.

  Alexander Graham Bell even showed up to help doctors find the bullet in Garfield’s chest. He invented a sort of metal detector to locate the thing, but the tests were inconclusive; no one realized that the metal frame and springs in the president’s bed were screwing up the metal detector until it was too late. Oops!

  When Garfield died, Chester A. Arthur, a New York big shot who had been about the only person willing to take the job of vice president, took over. He entered office widely despised—many believed he’d had a hand in Garfield’s murder, which is just something vice presidents who take over for murdered presidents have to live with. It seemed like not a single person trusted the guy while he was in office, but most people ended up feeling that he actually did a pretty good job, under the circumstances. Not so good that his party would nominate him for a full term, but then he didn’t try that hard to get the nomination. By the time the 1884 election rolled around, Arthur was dying of kidney disease. Knowing that he didn’t have long to live may have been what allowed Arthur to do such a good job as president—he was above party politics and didn’t care who he annoyed. What could they do, kill him? Not caring who he annoyed allowed him to get a lot done.

  EXPERIMENTS TO TRY AT HOME!

  You can’t normally feel your liver floating around, so would it hurt to get poked there? Find out! You’ll need a biology textbook, a pair of good scissors, and some rubber gloves. If you don’t want to poke your own liver, put an ad in the paper asking for a research assistant (or an intern, if you don’t want to have to pay anybody). Don’t come running to us if, unable to tell we’re kidding, you end up really hurting yourself or others.

  Rutherford B. Hayes. Researchers on staff have been unable to determine whether he was actually cross-eyed or just had a real talent for looking confused.

  James Garfield was a smart guy. You could ask him a question in English, and he’d write the answer in Latin with his right hand and in Greek with his left, at the same time. Ask your teacher to demonstrate!

  Chester A. Arthur was a hard partier and a power shopper. As president, he was considered competent, which was about all anyone could ask in those days. He died in 1886, barely a year after leaving office.

  Grover Cleveland kinda reminds us of Cap’n Crunch.

  Still, Arthur’s refusal to toe the party line led the Republicans to nominate a guy named James Blaine for the next election. Blaine lost to Grover Cleveland, who spent a full term doing little besides, apparently in his own words, “blocking other people’s bad ideas.” After failing to get reelected, he waited four years and then won a second term, making him the only man ever to serve two nonconsecutive terms. This can really screw with people making lists of presidents in chronological order, or counting how many presidents there have been, since you never know whether to count Cleveland twice.

  Between Cleveland’s terms was Benjamin Harrison, whose four years weren’t much more memorable or productive than those of his grandfather, William Henry Harrison (the guy who died in thirty days), unless you’re the kind of person who thinks tariffs and attempts to pass antitrust legislation are really exciting.

  Since you’re not, we’ll move right along to the guy who came after Cleveland: William McKinley. McKinley imposed even more tariffs and established the gold standard, which meant that paper money was backed only by gold, not both gold and silver. Par-tay!

  McKinley was only a year into his second term when he was shot to death by an anarchist named Leon Frank
Czolgosz. It was right around this time that people started to figure out that maybe, just maybe, presidents could stand to have a few more bodyguards.

  RICH INDUSTRIAL JERKS

  The huge growth of industry, including factories, steel mills, and railroads, made a handful of people filthy, stinking rich. There’s a reason they call it filthy, stinking rich, and not shining, happy rich. There were accounts of these guys hanging around smoking cigarettes rolled in hundred-dollar bills and buying their dogs necklaces that cost fifteen thousand dollars—about the amount their employees would earn in forty years of hard work. But they weren’t just decadent, they were also remarkably corrupt—so much so that they came to be known as robber barons.

  J. P. Morgan, a banker, started making money through various schemes to profit from the Civil War (in which he didn’t serve—he was one of the guys who paid to get out of it). There was barely a big financial deal in the country that he wasn’t involved in, and, at the height of his wealth, he and his companies were by one estimate worth more than everything in the country west of the Mississippi River. He owned almost half of all the railroads in the country, and the rest were owned by his friends.

  Will beards just hurry up and go out of style already? We’re tired of beard jokes. Harrison was the last president to sport one—at least so far! He was also afraid of light switches, having once gotten a bad shock from one. True story.