The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History
Page 17
Less than a month before the election, while on a campaign stop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Roosevelt stood up in a car to wave to the crowd. As he did, a man some seven feet away pulled out a gun and shot him in the chest. The bullet went through a glasses case and a fifty-page speech in Roosevelt’s pocket; the length of the speech probably saved his life, as its bulk narrowly kept the bullet from piercing his heart.
William Howard Taft, Roosevelt’s successor, really only became president because his wife, a tireless social climber, wanted him to. At about 330 pounds, he was by far the heaviest president up to that time. He didn’t really seem to want to win reelection in 1912 and barely campaigned at all, unwilling to speak against his friend Teddy Roosevelt any more than he had to. He was thrilled to leave office and ended up as chief justice of the Supreme Court, the job he’d really wanted to begin with.
Roosevelt, always ready to act tougher than was probably necessary (or safe), didn’t even cancel an appearance that was scheduled for that morning. With the bullet still in his chest and his shirt getting bloodier and bloodier, he made a ninety-minute speech, which he opened by saying, “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose!” He would have gone on longer than ninety minutes, but blood was still gushing out of his chest as he spoke, and eventually he got woozy enough to agree to get off the stage and go to the hospital. He let the bullet stay in his chest for the rest of his life, preferring not to risk the good old-fashioned liver-poking that could have resulted from having doctors try to remove it.
Taft, looking terribly jolly at the inauguration of his successor, Woodrow Wilson, who appears to be due for a dental appointment. Note the grinning goofball in the background.
But the wound kept him from being able to campaign much more, and in the end, the Republican vote was split. Most of the Republican voters went to Roosevelt, but many stayed with Taft, and neither of the two garnered enough votes to beat Woodrow Wilson, who became the first Democratic president in sixteen years.
The Bull Moose Party was effectively out of business after that (Roosevelt eventually made peace with the Republicans), but they had formed a template for what the Democratic Party would become under the leadership of Roosevelt’s fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was elected president twenty years later.
Roosevelt was depressed by the loss, and dealt with his depression by going on another safari, this time in South America. While on this safari, he and his crew explored a previously uncharted 625-mile river named the River of Doubt, in a dangerous expedition that pitted him against deadly rapids, poisonous snakes, starvation, murderous crew members, and possibly violent natives (a dog was killed by a blow gun, but the natives were never seen). He survived to see the river renamed the Rio Roosevelt in his honor, but he never fully recovered from the diseases he contracted in the jungle; he later estimated that the trip took ten years off his life.
If we here on staff may paraphrase Roosevelt, our motto is: A student who studies a bit may get a good grade, but a smart aleck who studies more may take over the whole class.
The remains of the Progressive Party tried to nominate him again in 1916, but Roosevelt told them that the best thing Progressives could do was back Charles Evans Hughes, the Republican who ran against and lost to Woodrow Wilson that year. At the time of his death, Roosevelt was laying the groundwork to run for the Republican nomination again in 1920. Most people believe that had he lived, he would probably have won a third term at last, and the Republicans would have become the liberal party after all.
Roosevelt is often ranked among the top five presidents, despite not being associated with any major wars. This fact seems all the more remarkable considering how unremarkable nearly every president—other than Lincoln—had been for the previous few generations. Today, candidates of both parties quote him endlessly.
The Freedmen’s Bureau, a government agency established to help former slaves, had its work cut out for it, as no amendment to the Constitution was about to make white Southern voters happy about working alongside freed slaves. Congress shut the bureau down in 1872.
SOME OF THE STUFF WE MISSED
The Panic of 1893: A major economic depression that lasted until 1897.
The World’s Columbian Exposition: A World’s Fair held in Chicago in 1893 that showed everyone how America had come up in the world.
Bourbon Democrats: A name for conservative Democrats, mainly applied to those who supported Grover Cleveland.
Scalawag: An unfriendly term given to white Southern voters who became radical Republicans during Reconstruction.
The Great White Fleet: A new navy that Roosevelt pushed for (and got). He sent it all around the world to show off how tough America had become.
The RMS Titanic: A giant luxury ship that was said to be unsinkable in 1912. It sank on its first voyage, which was to be from Southampton, England, to New York, and more than fifteen hundred people died. The government quickly passed laws requiring ships to have enough lifeboats for everyone.
The Eastland: A cruise ship that tipped over in 1915 in the Chicago River, killing more than eight hundred people. The extra lifeboats they’d tied to the top in accordance with new laws (see above) may have contributed to the tipping.
The Panama Canal: A canal that allows ships to pass through Central America instead of having to go clear around South America. Roosevelt was a big supporter of building this canal. He went so far as to help overthrow the Colombian government to make Panama an independent country and help the plan along.
Boss Tweed: The guy who ran the Tammany Hall political machine (the political group whose name is still synonymous with corruption—mentioned in a Chapter 3 sidebar, in case you’ve forgotten). He eventually stole about a hundred million dollars (billions in today’s money) from New York taxpayers.
The Pullman strike: An 1894 strike of workers of the Pullman Palace Car Company, which led to sympathy strikes and protests nationwide. More than ten thousand U.S. soldiers were deployed to break up the strike.
The Philippine-American War: A largely forgotten war (officially from 1899 to 1902, though there were still fights as late as 1913) between the United States and insurgents in the Philippines. Ended with the Philippines becoming a U.S. territory.
END-OF-CHAPTER QUESTIONS
MULTIPLE CHOICE
1. How do you pronounce “Czolgosz”?
“Coal-gash.”
“Cuh-zuhl-gosh.”
“Cuz-ole-ghosh.”
“Coal-gosh.”
(ANSWER: IT’S A, FOR THE RECORD, THOUGH WE’VE ALSO HEARD PEOPLE USE D, AND AREN’T SURE WHO TO BELIEVE. THEN AGAIN, SOME PEOPLE ALSO SAY THAT JOHN WILKES BOOTH PRONOUNCED HIS NAME “BOWTH” (RHYMES WITH “MOUTH”), WHICH MAKES YOU WONDER HOW MUCH IT REALLY MATTERS HOW IT WAS PRONOUNCED BACK THEN.)
2. Which president was the least effective?
Benjamin Harrison.
Grover Cleveland.
William McKinley (pre-assassination).
Grover Cleveland (second term).
(ANSWER: ANY ANSWER IS ACCEPTABLE HERE, IF YOU’RE PREPARED TO JUSTIFY IT IN AN ESSAY!)
3. Which would be better for the country?
The gold standard.
The silver standard.
No standard (which is what we have now, despite the objections of a few fanatics).
Forget gold and silver—how about a pickle standard?
(ANSWER: NO ONE CAN SAY FOR SURE, SO WE’LL LET YOU HAVE CREDIT FOR ANY ANSWER EXCEPT D.)
ESSAY
Were robber barons good or bad for the economy and the growth of the nation? Why?
How might the nation be different today if Roosevelt had won a third term in 1912?
Who would win in a fight, Theodore Roosevelt or Giles Corey?
Charles Guiteau, singing his little heart out.
ASSIGNMENT!
Be like William Randolph Hearst! Write an editorial that could push the nation into
war against Freedonia.35 Send it to your local paper and see if you get any reaction! Use of facts is optional.
MORE STUFF TO HELP YOU REMEMBER
Here’s the song Charles Guiteau sang on the scaffold before he was hanged. He’d written it that very morning (all by himself). He apparently sang the first verse but ended up just chanting the rest, not being much better at singing than he was at songwriting, poetry, politics, preaching, law, or free love.
I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad,
I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad,
I am going to the Lordy,
Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah!
I am going to the Lordy.
I love the Lordy with all my soul,
Glory hallelujah!
And that is the reason I am going to the Lord,
Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah!
I am going to the Lord.
I saved my party and my land,
Glory hallelujah!
But they have murdered me for it,
And that is the reason I am going to the Lordy,
Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah!
I am going to the Lordy!
I wonder what I will do when I get to the Lordy,
I guess that I will weep no more
When I get to the Lordy!
Glory hallelujah!
I wonder what I will see when I get to the Lordy,
I expect to see most glorious things,
Beyond all earthly conception
When I am with the Lordy!
Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah!
I am with the Lord.
ASSIGNMENT
Using only stuff from this chapter, complete this sentence:
“I Am Going to the Lordy” sucks even more than__________________.
A few sample responses:
working for J. P. Morgan.
being a capitalist at one of Leon Czolgosz’s dinner parties.
getting poked in the liver.
being General Custer in a field of Indians.
being Rutherford B. Hayes’s optometrist.
showing up at Ellis Island with a rash.
getting Woodrow Wilson’s dental bill.
standing downwind of Taft on three-bean casserole day.
trying to get anyone to notice you when Teddy Roosevelt is in the room.
33 Well, maybe if you count the picnic at the Battle of Bull Run.
34 The Constitution sets thirty-five as the minimum age for presidents. What’s the point of this, do you think? Could someone younger even get elected to begin with?
35 Freedonia was the name of the country Groucho Marx ran in the movie Duck Soup. In 1992, Spy magazine asked several members of Congress about the situation in Freedonia, and they all talked about it as though it were a real place. They didn’t want to admit that they’d never heard of it. If the government can be fooled, the people who read your paper can, too. Give it a shot!
“God grant we may not have a European war thrust upon us, and for such a stupid reason, too.”
—Mary, wife of King George V of England
INTRODUCTION
You don’t hear a whole lot about World War I these days. There are many reasons for this. One is that practically everyone who was involved in it is dead by now,37 and unlike the case of, say, the Civil War, their surviving descendants seem to be over it. Hence, there’s no one who is all that eager to come to your class and “make World War I come alive” for you.38 Most of the best twentieth-century war movies are either about World War II or Vietnam (though there are plenty of good sci-fi movies about World War III and the unholy monsters and motorcycle gangs that will stalk the earth afterward). World War I mainly survives in popular culture through things like the novels of Ernest Hemingway, and if teachers assign those, parents might complain. Hemingway was a pretty rowdy fellow.
Also, there’s simply nothing pleasant about World War I. Nothing. No war is a lot of jolly fun, but at least the Revolution freed us from England, the Civil War ended slavery, and World War II defeated Hitler. It’s hard to be all that proud of World War I, since no one can really explain what we accomplished—or why we fought it to begin with.
See, that’s probably the biggest reason you don’t hear much about World War I these days: no one wants to go to the trouble of trying to explain what it was all about, why it happened, or who fought who, because they know they can’t do it without confusing the snot out of you. Many history books take the easy way out and just gloss over the whole affair. Even if you went back in time and went out to the front lines (which, incidentally, we don’t recommend) and asked someone who was actually fighting in the war, there’s a pretty good chance that they themselves would only have a loose grasp of just who was fighting who.
SO WHAT WAS THAT WHOLE THING ABOUT?
What happened was that a whole bunch of countries started to form alliances with one another. And when one country declared war on another one, that set off a chain reaction in which a whole bunch of countries declared war on a whole bunch of other countries.
What was it all about, exactly?
We’ll try to make it short. See, around the beginning of the twentieth century, the world was changing very quickly. The Industrial Revolution (the growth of factories, machines, and mass-produced goods, etc., in the nineteenth century) didn’t just change the way societies were shaped, it led to lots of new kinds of weapons like battleships, tanks, airplanes, submarines, machine guns, and other stuff that made every army in the world obsolete. Countries that thought of themselves as major powers in the world suddenly found themselves vulnerable; their armies were now useless. Any country that could build up a big, modern arsenal could, at least in theory, become the greatest power in the world, and any country that couldn’t keep up with the Joneses risked becoming an extra on the world stage.
So countries like England, France, Russia, and Germany got into an arms race. As with any arms race, though, it sort of went beyond just modernizing their armies and started to veer into a “who has the biggest thingie”39 contest. By about 1910, countries across Europe had lots and lots of shiny new weapons, and it seemed like they were all just itching to use them.
Propaganda, a form of advertising that goes out of its way to manipulate opinions, made it look as though the army really took care of its veterans and that soldiers would come home in better shape than ever. As Bob Dylan sings: “Propaganda all is phony.”
Many of these countries began teaming up with each other, and pretty soon Europe was divided, more or less, into two teams: the Allied powers, which included England, France, the Russian Empire, Japan, and eventually Italy, and the Central Powers, which had Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire, which extended to the former home of the Barbary pirates.
Meanwhile, democracy had been slowly spreading across the globe, but much of Europe was still controlled by kings, kaisers, czars, and other autocrats who wanted to flex their muscles to show that they were still in charge, even though they were becoming more obsolete by the minute. They could probably see the writing on the wall and thought that a big-enough military display might erase it.
It was the assassination of some nobody in 1914 that kicked the war into gear.
On June 28 of that year, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria, was killed in Bosnia. There was a group in Bosnia known as the Black Hand that was dedicated to turning a bunch of Austrian provinces into independent countries. These guys became really, really determined to kill the archduke. Ferdinand and his wife managed to survive having a bomb thrown into their car but were then shot to death by an assassin. If they’d only had a Pope-mobile, the whole war might have been avoided—but it probably would have just been delayed. World War I was really an accident waiting to happen. If the assassination hadn’t started it up, something else would have sooner or later.
As a result of the assassination, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. And then Germany joined in
on Austria-Hungary’s side, and soon everyone was declaring war on everyone else.
Meanwhile, over in America, people got confused right away; no one could really keep track of who was fighting who. All most Americans knew was that none of it concerned them. Unfortunately, the war was so big that America eventually had no choice but to join in.
We tried to stay out of it. We really did. In 1915, the Germans sank the Lusitania, a British passenger ship that happened to have 128 Americans aboard, and people began to call for America to enter the war (England was kind of miffed that we hadn’t yet). But President Wilson declared that America was too proud to fight. To win reelection in 1916, he even promised to keep America out of the war. But most people felt that Wilson, too, was just itching to get into the fight. William Jennings Bryan, the “Cross of Gold” guy, who was now secretary of state, resigned over Wilson’s warmongering.
Wilson had the idea to organize all the big countries into a League of Nations, an international organization that would push to get rid of the weapons, promote global welfare, and avoid war (Theodore Roosevelt had pushed for a League of Peace years earlier). Wilson knew he was going to need a seat at the table when all of the countries got together at the end of the war to figure out how the world was going to work for the rest of the twentieth century—and he felt like he’d have a much better seat if his country had been fighting. He also believed a theory going around at the time that this war was going to turn into “the War to End All Wars.” The idea was that this war could somehow resolve all conflicts and make future wars unnecessary. Seriously.