The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History

by Adam Selzer

  King Peter of Serbia wore a white handlebar ’stache that made it look like he really needed to blow his nose. He wasn’t that active in the war, but he did go to the trenches to visit his troops now and then. In 1918, just after the war, he was declared King of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. After this declaration, he was never seen in public again (being seen in public wasn’t really the safest thing for monarchs to do at the time). He died three years later.

  Sultan Mehmed V of the Ottoman Empire kept his mustache fairly bushy. Known as a peaceful guy himself, he didn’t much want to get into the war but was pushed into it by the guys who really called the shots in the empire. By the time of his death in 1918, the Ottoman Empire was in tatters. His brother, Mehmed VI, took over just in time to surrender, and the sultanship was done away with altogether in 1922.

  King George V of England, who looked an awful lot like Nicholas II of Russia, right down to the handlebar/beard combo—funnily enough, the two were cousins. King George V visited the front lines of the war often, and broke his pelvis when a horse rolled on top of him during one of the visits.

  (ANSWERS: 1—D, 2—B, 3—E, 4—C, 5—F, 6—A.)

  ASSIGNMENT

  Woodrow Wilson was the first president to form an official propaganda department. The posters above are propaganda for the war effort and for Wilson himself. Your assignment: Make a propaganda poster advertising your teacher. Send it in to us at www.smartalecksguide.com!

  37 There were about ten surviving World War I veterans in the world as of the beginning of 2009.

  38 K. A. Chelsea, Smart Aleck staff entrepreneur, used to have a business in which she dressed up in World War I garb, dug a trench outside a school, and lobbed grenades and poison gas at students, but the little brats still didn’t think history was fun. Some things are so unpleasant that it’s best not to want to make them “come alive”—see The Smart Aleck’s Guide to Being Careful What You Wish For.

  39 And by “thingie,” we mean “stamp collection.”

  40 At this point, the historical record is damaged. No one knows what the last word is. According to multiple sources, every time the song was sung, two soldiers would cough, another would drop a book, and a machine gun would go off right when they got to the last word. Really.

  41 The first Gulf War had barely started when Topps issued Gulf War trading cards, teaching a whole generation that war was all kinds of fun—and profitable, too! See The Smart Aleck’s Guide to Really Tacky Attempts to Cash In.

  Yeah, yeah. We’re not going to make that kind of joke here. For once.

  43 The idea of Communism, in a nutshell, is that no one is rich and no one is poor. The government controls the economy, and “the people” control the means of production. See The Smart Aleck’s Guide to Communism, Standardized Testing, and Other Things That Work Pretty Well in Theory but Not Necessarily in Practice.

  44 No, he’s not that St. Nick.

  “All of you young people who served in the war?… You are a lost generation.?… You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death.”

  —Gertrude Stein

  INTRODUCTION

  Soldiers came back from World War I ready to party, and happy to ignore new prohibition laws. These laws banned the sale of alcohol in the United States starting in 1920, which turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to gangsters, who made a fortune selling “bootleg” alcohol. The 1920s became known as the Jazz Age. If you’re studying the Jazz Age, get ready for your teacher to assign The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  Prohibition was one of the most widely ignored laws in history. We’d venture a guess that only speed limit laws have been obeyed less often. In fact, by most estimates, people drank more than they had when alcohol was legal, even though the price of booze skyrocketed. Owners of speakeasies—illegal bars—had to bribe the cops to keep from being shut down, but the cops, who were often not that inclined to uphold prohibition anyway, were only too happy to take the money.

  Two former cops drinking until they’re pretty, which doesn’t work. This caption brought to you by Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

  By this time, though, America was known as one of the greatest powers in the world. New technology was making life more and more exciting all the time, and the feeling of “changing times” was electric. They don’t call it the Roaring Twenties for nothing.

  WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE

  It’s hard to believe now that as World War I wrapped up, women still weren’t allowed to vote in most of the United States.

  Women’s rights wasn’t a new issue, of course. In the nineteenth century, Susan B. Anthony had made a lot of headway in getting the country used to the idea of women being allowed to vote. She isn’t in this book much, because there’s simply nothing very funny you can say about her without taking a swipe at the fact that she always looks really, really sour in her pictures, and even we think that’s a cheap shot. She wanted to vote and couldn’t—how happy could she be?

  Once again, civilization comes crashing to a halt, as it often did in the 1920s, according to people who were less thrilled than others about the changing times.

  A suffragette promotes the then-radical concept of female police officers. Perhaps the idea of women in pants was too much even for some suffragettes.

  Other women had also agitated for women’s rights—and not just voting. Take Victoria Woodhull, for instance. She and her sister, who had the somewhat unfortunate name of Tennessee, published a newspaper that advocated not only voting rights but also free love. For women to hold such positions in 1870 was a pretty big deal. Woodhull even ran for president in 1872, with Frederick Douglass as her running mate (though she didn’t bother to tell Douglass about this), as the candidate of the Equal Rights Party. Some historians make a really big deal out of this, but in reality, whether she ever actually appeared on any ballots seems to be debatable, and she’s only known to have gotten one vote for sure. Not only was she unable to vote for herself on election day, she was also unable to go to the polling place. She spent election day in prison after being arrested for passing obscene material (her newspaper) by mail. So Woodhull wasn’t exactly a serious candidate (in fact, she wasn’t even thirty-five, the minimum age for a president according to the Constitution), but it’s hard to imagine she would have been any worse as president than Grant turned out to be.

  As is often the case, people who were against giving women the vote had what seemed to them perfectly sound reasons for their opinions. One idea brought up regularly was that if women had the right to vote, it would just be giving husbands a second vote, since women would vote for whoever their husbands told them to. This sounded perfectly reasonable to many people back then.

  But in the twentieth century, women began focusing on getting voting rights state by state, rather than pushing for new national laws, and were fairly successful. By the time the election of 1912 arrived, women were voting in a handful of states and, more importantly, voting against Woodrow Wilson in pretty large numbers. Had more women been allowed to vote, the Bull Moose Party might have had a better shot.

  A newspaper portrays Victoria Woodhull as Mrs. Satan. Over a century later, we still haven’t had a president who openly advocated free love (though a handful of them certainly did get around in private). At least a few presidents have been known to carry on extramarital affairs, and several more are suspected to have. But no one’s about to brag about this during a campaign.

  But Wilson won anyway, and after his reelection, women began to picket outside the White House all day and all night. Now, the government was not particularly fair to the protesting women at first. Some had been imprisoned, and the public was starting to sympathize with them, enough so that an amendment eventually managed to pass Congress, if only barely. It was passed on to President Wilson in 1919. Knowing that women would start to turn against the Democratic Party just because he was in it if he refused to sign the amendment, Wilson decided to support it. The Nineteenth Amendment wa
s added to the Constitution in August of 1920.

  Some people thought this would be the end of society. They thought that if you gave women the right to vote, it would lead to outright anarchy. If you gave women the vote, they said, next they’d be drinking, smoking, sleeping around, and wearing short skirts.

  “By what right do you refuse to accept the vote of a citizen of the United States?”—Victoria Woodhull.

  Did she just mean adult citizens?

  Today, people say that citizens under age eighteen shouldn’t be allowed to vote because they’d just vote for whoever their parents tell them to, or that kids just aren’t smart enough to vote. Sound familiar? Many of the arguments against letting kids vote are the same ones that people used to stop women and black people from voting in centuries past. Some people say that the voting age should be lowered, and we here on the Smart Aleck staff are all for it.45 Some of us on staff (Adam, for instance) have been paying income tax since the age of fourteen. And we could all have been tried as adults in court at twelve. And while some might point out that kids aren’t always savvy enough to make wise political decisions, we can surely point out that most adults aren’t, either. So why keep the voting age at eighteen? Why not let anyone who pays income taxes vote? Make noise. Act up. Call your congressman.

  THE FLAPPERS

  In the 1920s, women started drinking, smoking, sleeping around, and wearing short skirts. Of course, they’d always done these things (except for the skirts part—right up through World War I, women kept their ankles pretty well covered), but in the 1920s, women, particularly those known as flappers, became much more open about them.

  This wasn’t because the women got the right to vote, though a few jerks probably said it was. It was just a natural progression for society after the war and the famously stuffy Victorian era.

  Soldiers returned from the war disillusioned (every history book has to say something like this, even though it probably ought to be obvious that soldiers who saw their friends maimed, gassed, and killed, then decided it hadn’t really accomplished much would be a little ticked off). When they returned, many decided to just kick up their heels, forget about their cares, and party down. And women decided to party right along with them.

  If history has taught us one thing (and if it hasn’t, we here at the Smart Aleck’s Guide are out of a job), it’s that periods of repression like the Victorian era, which come about every now and then, are always, always, followed by periods in which anything goes. Throughout the Roaring Twenties, people acted up in ways that their Victorian parents could never have imagined.

  Historians have come to call the 1920s the Jazz Age (in addition to its other nicknames). Old-fashioned ideas about morality, modesty, and stuff like that were thrown aside. Jazz replaced depressing parlor songs as the popular music of the day, which was certainly progress.

  The illegal drinking of the 1920s introduced a whole generation of disaffected youth to the joys of breaking the law. If the Great War had been the real beginning of the twentieth century, the era of prohibition was solid proof (for those who just didn’t trust that sneaky ol’ calendar) that the nineteenth century was over. People from the nineteenth century—the Victorians—are famous today for their modesty and repression. Many people would have been terribly embarrassed to say words like “toes” or “pants” out loud in mixed company. This isn’t to say that sex didn’t exist in the Victorian era—in fact, it was a regular boom time for prostitution—but people were supposed to keep quiet about it.

  A flapper giving away the secret hiding place for her liquor. Is this your great-great-grandmother? Of course, most people who were sneaking alcohol around illegally didn’t pose for photographers. It’s just common sense. The fact that this one did shows just how open people were about ignoring the prohibition laws.

  With this new sense of freedom and abandon came a new kind of woman, known as flappers. Flappers kicked butt.46

  Flappers were wild and crazy. They were often living on their own, which was a very new concept for women, who, in earlier times, would have been shipped off to live in someone’s attic if they weren’t married by the time they were about twenty-five or thirty. They smoked cigarettes, danced to jazz music with people they had no intention of marrying, treated sex fairly casually, and drank hard liquor. Some said these women would be the end of society, but others said they were ushering in a new era when women would be “liberated.” Nearly a century later, we can at least say that the appearance of women who drank and swore openly wasn’t the end of the world.

  FLAPPER SLANG!

  Flappers had a rich vocabulary all their own. Some of their slang terms, like “nookie,” “knocked up,” “hootch,” “java,” and “necking,” are still in use today, but others have, sadly, fallen by the wayside. It is up to you, the new generation, to bring ’em back! Here’s a sample:

  applesauce: nonsense

  barney mugging: sex. How the heck did this term die?

  cake basket: limousine

  cake eater: ladies’ man or lounge lizard

  corn shredder: one who steps on women’s toes while dancing

  cuddle cootie: man whose idea of a good date is to take a girl for a ride on the bus. Par-tay!

  dead soldiers: empty bottles

  dogs: feet

  dog kennels: shoes

  ducky: excellent

  egg: one who lives the life of Riley (see below)

  egg harbor: a dance

  getaway sticks: legs

  handcuff: engagement ring

  “I have to see a man about a dog/horse”: another way of saying “I have to go buy some liquor” or “I have to pee” (The exact meaning of each varied from city to city.)

  to “know your onions”: to know what you’re talking about (as in “those guys at the Smart Aleck’s Guide really know their onions!”)

  life of Riley: high life

  “mind your potatoes”: mind your own business

  pearl diver: dish washer

  petting pantry: movie theater

  quiff: cheap prostitute

  snugglepupping:47somewhat more illicit form of snuggling than the normal kind, practiced at “petting parties,” precursors of makeout parties

  snugglepuppy: girl who enjoys snugglepupping (The male version was “snugglepup.”)

  “That’s the bee’s knees!”: “That’s fantastic!” A variation of this was “That’s the cat’s pajamas!”

  FADS OF THE TWENTIES

  For a couple of decades after 1899, the world still seemed to be about the same as it had been in the nineteenth century, but by the 1920s, the new century had truly arrived. Mass communication, particularly in the form of radio, really took off. Movies had existed for a while, but talking movies began to appear in this decade; before then people had known how to match the sound up to the picture, but theaters hadn’t had the capabilities to amplify the sound well enough for anyone to hear it. The proliferation of both movie theaters and automobiles gave young couples great new places to make out. Telephones became more common, making communication a whole lot easier. Practically no one owned a television, but TVs began to be tested and demonstrated in the 1920s.

  THE ALGONQUIN ROUND TABLE: SMART ALECKS

  Throughout the 1920s, a group of the sharpest literary minds in New York met every day at a big round table at the Algonquin Hotel to eat lunch and crack jokes, which they then worked into their books, plays, and newspaper columns. They ushered in what Dorothy Parker, a founding member of the group, called the Terrible Day of the Wisecrack. They were a clever bunch, but if they’d been half as clever as they thought they were, they probably could have cured all disease and landed a man on the moon by 1930.

  And strange fads began to go around. One was flagpole sitting, the practice of sitting on top of a flagpole for a really long time. Crowds would gather to watch people do this and pray that inventors would hurry up and get televisions on the market so there’d be something better to watch. After all, they had
to find something to distract them from the famously boring Teapot Dome Scandal, which dominated the newspapers (we’ll explain later and apologize in advance).

  Today, we generally remember the Roaring Twenties as one big party. But it had its dark side as well. For instance, the 1920s ushered in an era of …

  … EVEN MORE FORGETTABLE PRESIDENTS!

  The 1920s began with the election of Warren G. Harding, who, following the end of World War I, ran on a platform of a “return to normalcy.” He died before he could finish his first term, but during the time he was in office, he did a pretty lousy job. In fact, through the end of the twentieth century, he routinely topped lists of the worst presidents of all time.

  HENRY FORD

  Henry Ford did not invent the automobile. He didn’t invent the assembly line, either. But he was an inventor—he held more than 150 U.S. patents. And he used the assembly line and the automobile to become one of the richest men in the country.

  Ford attracted the best workers to his company by offering five dollars a day in pay—more than twice what most mechanics made—and, eventually, a forty-hour work week, for which labor unions had been clamoring for years. But this is not to say that the guy was a good employer—in fact, in the view of many historians, Henry Ford was one of the most colossal jerks ever to walk the face of the earth.

  From 1918 to 1927, Ford published a newspaper called the Dearborn Independent. To call the Dearborn Independent anti-Semitic (anti-Jewish) would be to put it pretty mildly; the view expressed freely in the paper was that Jews were the world’s biggest problem. Hitler was a big fan; he reportedly hung a picture of Ford on the wall of his office. Exactly how anti-Semitic Ford was personally isn’t really known. Some say that he had several Jewish friends, and he certainly didn’t write any of what was in the Dearborn Independent himself. In fact, he claimed that he didn’t know what it said, he only read the headlines. But the idea that the paper could run for eight years without anyone telling him that it was violently anti-Semitic suggests that either he was lying or unbelievably ill-informed about his own business.