The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History

by Adam Selzer

  Just to end on a happy note, we’ll point out that he also enjoyed square dancing. Yee-haw!

  So, what was so bad about the guy? Well, he did once lose a set of White House china dating back to the Benjamin Harrison administration (which may have been about the only proof that Harrison was ever there to start with) in a poker game. Some say the only reason he even managed to get elected was that people thought that he just looked like a president.

  But the real problem wasn’t him, it was his staff, who turned out to be pretty corrupt. After Harding’s death, a member of his staff leased government land at the Teapot Dome oil reserve in Wyoming to a private oil company. The resulting Teapot Dome Scandal was almost without question the single most boring thing that ever happened in the United States of America. To this day, comedians who want to refer to something boring in American history often go with the Teapot Dome Scandal.

  THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

  When people prior to the 1920s thought of “black culture,” they usually thought of minstrel shows, traveling shows in which white performers would paint their faces black and sing, dance, and act like buffoons.

  While minstrel shows did introduce white audiences to “Negro music” (some of which was authentic, some of which was not), they also promoted an awful lot of awful stereotypes. Well into the twentieth century, they were insanely popular; in fact, the first widely released movie with sound (which the hipsters of the day called a “talkie”) was The Jazz Singer, in which actor Al Jolson performed in blackface.

  But even as minstrel shows spread the idea that black people were obnoxious, ignorant, horny, and hilarious, the 1920s also saw the first great explosion of African American culture in what came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, named for Harlem, a predominantly black neighborhood in New York City. During this period, black writers produced art, novels, poems, plays, and philosophical works that challenged everything people thought they knew about black people. Black pride and the idea of black intellectuals were still pretty new concepts. For artists such as the men pictured here, writers Langston Hughes, Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Rudolph Fisher, and Hubert Delany, the Harlem Renaissance represented a chance to show the world exactly what they could do and to loudly demand equality. The renaissance helped lay the early foundations for the civil rights movement in the decades that followed.

  Warren G. Harding, often said to be the worst president ever.

  Some people probably found the whole thing fascinating, but to most, it was so boring that they actually elected Calvin Coolidge, the vice president who had taken over when Harding died, to a full term in 1924. Coolidge, nicknamed Silent Cal, was known for his tendency to be quiet, polite, and dull at all times. While Theodore Roosevelt’s motto had been “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” Coolidge’s motto seemed to be simply “Sit down and shut up.”

  According to legend, when a D.C. woman sat next to him at dinner, she said, “Mr. President, I made a bet that I can get you to say more than two words at dinner tonight.” He turned to her and said, “You lose.” Yes, even dull people who aren’t very good presidents can be smart alecks.

  In 1928, when he decided not to run for another term, he gathered reporters and, rather than making a big speech, simply said, “I do not choose to run for president in 1928.” He wasn’t a bad president, exactly, but he seemed to go out of his way not to say or do anything particularly memorable. He even took off for three months to go fishing!

  Since Coolidge didn’t want to run for another term, the Republicans nominated Herbert Hoover. At the time, Hoover was one of the most respected men in the world for his tireless work for famine relief. He was known overseas as the great Humanitarian for his heroic efforts to keep most of the world from starving to death during World War I, and his face was one of the first ever to be broadcast on television. In England, he had even been offered a spot in the British Cabinet, which is not something they offer to just anyone.

  Everybody wanted Hoover to run for president—everybody in both parties, in fact, since Hoover had bounced back and forth between parties. He’d been a Republican but then left the party in 1912 to be in the Bull Moose Party with Theodore Roosevelt. The Democrats had tried to recruit him in 1920, but he declined, supposedly on the grounds that the only Democrat in his hometown had also been the town drunk. As a Republican again, he won the 1928 election by the biggest landslide in history. However, less than a year into his term, the U.S. economy was crippled by the Stock Market Crash of 1929, which ushered in the era of the Great Depression (see the next exciting chapter). Rich people became poor overnight and went from selling stocks on Wall Street to selling apples on the street corner. Hoover didn’t cause it, but people blamed him for it, and for the fact that the economy didn’t turn right back around (like he kept saying it would). Many of the newly homeless set up little cities of shacks and boxes that they called Hoovervilles in his honor. The old criminal court and jail buildings in Chicago were converted to a homeless shelter that was nicknamed the Hotel Hoover.

  Hoover responded immediately to the sudden change in the economy. He spent more on unemployment relief than all the presidents who had come before him combined. But it wasn’t nearly enough, and his somewhat radical idea of focusing many relief efforts on the rich—the idea being that they’d pass the money on to the poor by creating jobs for them—didn’t work as well in real life as it seemed like it would on paper. But the real nail in his coffin was …

  Calvin Coolidge: At least as boring as he looked. His real motto was not “Sit down and shut up,” it was “The business of America is business.” His policies of letting business owners do pretty much whatever they liked, with minimal regulation, probably helped set the stage for the Great Depression.

  Herbert Hoover: Poor guy.

  Many people dream of having their picture in the history books, but few dream of getting there by sitting through the Teapot Dome hearings, like these poor saps.

  … THE BONUS ARMY

  Sometimes, we here at the Smart Aleck Staff feel sorry for ol’ Hoover. Everyone loved him and thought he was a hero before he became president, but by the time he left office, he was seen as a regular villain. That’s the way it goes: it sometimes seems that people start hating presidents the minute they get voted in.

  Burning the shacks put up by the Bonus Army. Not something you want your people to do in front of photographers when you’re running for office. That’s a tip, kids. Write it down.

  The Depression alone might not have actually been enough to ruin Hoover’s reputation, though. The last nail in his political coffin was his handling of the Bonus Army in 1932.

  In 1924, army veterans had been granted certificates that entitled them to the equivalent of their pay, plus a bonus payable in 1945. When the Depression hit, many veterans decided to ask for their pay early on the grounds that if they didn’t come up with some cash, they weren’t going to live until 1945. In June of 1932, a group of about seventeen thousand veterans got together and began a march to Washington, D.C., to demand immediate payment of the bonus. They became known as the Bonus Army.

  The marchers set up a Hooverville of their own near Washington, D.C., hoping to pressure Congress into granting them their money.

  Led by General Douglas MacArthur, who would eventually become famous for being a pain in presidents’ butts, the U.S. Army attacked the camp, setting fire to the shacks, shooting off tear gas, and making noise to get the veterans to disperse. Normally, the army is not allowed to be used for general law enforcement, but it was okay in Washington, D.C., which wasn’t—and still isn’t—part of any state. MacArthur was convinced that the Bonus Army was part of a big Communist plot to overthrow the government and figured that using force was totally justified. Hundreds of the veterans were injured and quite a few of them were killed.

  This whole incident shed light on the extent to which the government was ignoring the veterans of World War I. They had sent them off to fight a war that turn
ed out not to have had too much of a point, then, having chewed them up, promptly spit them out. While vets wouldn’t manage to get the bonus for a few more years, the public outrage at their being attacked led to the creation of the G.I. Bill of Rights and the Veterans Administration.

  Public outrage also whisked away the last bit of support Hoover had. The fact that the whole thing happened just months before the 1932 election made it into a regular nightmare scenario for him. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hoover’s successor, wasn’t in favor of early payment, either, but the very fact that he wasn’t Hoover got him elected. Hoover had been swept into office in what was then the biggest landslide in history, but he was swept out in an even bigger one.

  The Bonus Army makes itself right at home.

  SACCO AND VANZETTI

  For decades, there were two kinds of people in America: people who thought Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, and people who thought they were guilty, no-good foreigners.

  Despite the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s was an era when bigotry and racism still ran rampant. See if you can find copies of “banned” cartoons from that era, and you’ll notice that cartoon audiences of the 1920s seemed to be very much in favor of every form of prejudice you can name.48 Most of the cartoons of the day that weren’t about animals seem to base their humor on ethnic stereotypes. One of the first live television demonstrations featured a guy making jokes about black and Irish people.

  Sacco and Vanzetti.

  When a “foreigner,” or immigrant, was accused of a crime, people tended to assume that he or she was guilty. Some said that whenever a terrible crime was committed, the police’s first order of business was to find someone foreign to blame it on.

  In 1920, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested for the robbery and murder of a shoe factory employee and a security guard, who were carrying the factory’s payroll. To many Americans of the day, these guys just looked guilty—in addition to being Italians with funny names, they also happened to be anarchists. By 1920, most people were so busy being afraid of Communists that they had forgotten all about anarchists. Communists had just taken over Russia, and a lot of people were afraid that if they could take over Russia, they could take America over, too. Anarchists were yesterday’s news. But Sacco and Vanzetti brought antianarchist sentiment roaring back.

  To be fair, these were real anarchists, not the posers who listen to punk rock, make fun of people who wear name-brand clothes, and complain about big corporations and think that makes them anarchists. They were followers of a particular group of Italian anarchists that favored the violent overthrow of society through bombings and assassinations. But the fact that they were into that sort of thing didn’t mean they were the robbers and murderers in this particular case, and neither of them had a criminal record.

  The trial was a pretty big story, and was full of action and drama. The prosecution claimed to have proved that one of the four bullets used in the murder had to have come from Sacco’s gun, and the defense asked where the others had come from. Some thought that the prosecution had planted the bullet in question. One of the prosecution’s biggest pieces of evidence was a hat found on the scene that they claimed was Sacco’s, but when he tried it on, it appeared to be too small to have been his.

  Witnesses’ stories were contradictory. Some people said they had seen Sacco and Vanzetti on the scene, but even more couldn’t identify them. One witness described Sacco exactly, but it turned out that all she had seen was a quick glimpse of the getaway car from half a block away. Seeing as how she didn’t have super vision, this didn’t seem like very reliable testimony.

  But the jury only deliberated for five hours before returning a guilty verdict. The appeals in the trial dragged on for a good six years, with many people claiming that the judge and jury had been prejudiced against Sacco and Vanzetti because they were Italian and that they hadn’t been given a fair trial. As time went on, it became clear that the trial hadn’t been exactly fair, as key witnesses came forward and admitted that they’d been coerced into lying on the stand. It also turned out that the evidence had been tampered with, and a story went around that the judge who had presided over the trial had been calling Sacco and Vanzetti “long-haired anarchists” and bragging that he’d “get them good and proper,” which sort of implies that he wasn’t exactly impartial.

  Sacco and Vanzetti wrote a bunch of letters from prison swearing that they were innocent and demanding a new trial. Scores of intellectuals, writers, and celebrities of the day also argued for them to get a new trial with a judge who wasn’t so biased and evidence that hadn’t been tampered with. Folk singers wrote song after song about them. But the judge denied every request for a new trial. Though more and more evidence backing up their claims of innocence was coming to light, in 1927 Sacco and Vanzetti were both executed in the electric chair.

  Riots and strikes erupted, and anarchists took the convictions as cues to throw some bombs around. The judge became so unpopular with people who advocated the violent overthrow of the American system—who were not necessarily the safest people to anger—that he had to be protected by armed guards twenty-four hours a day for the rest of his life.

  This was one of the first national cases that led to widespread public demand for retrials of people convicted of a crime, which would become more and more common. For years, what you thought of Sacco and Vanzetti sort of defined your political leanings: liberals thought they were innocent, or at least deserving of a second trial, and conservatives thought they were guilty. In the end, it seems that the truth lay somewhere in between. Modern forensic testing has indicated that Sacco was probably guilty but Vanzetti was probably innocent.

  SOME OF THE STUFF WE MISSED

  Hooverball: A sport played daily by Hoover and his staff. Find out how to play it on www.smartalecksguide.com!

  A game of Hooverball keeps Hoover’s staff from having to work.

  Ziegfeld Follies: A series of musical revues on Broadway that featured many of the biggest stars of the day.

  The Lindy Hop: A dance based on the Charleston and named after Charles “Lucky Lindy” Lindbergh.

  Palmer Raids: A series of raids on suspected political radicals, launched by A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general under Wilson. The raids led to the largest mass arrests in U.S. history.

  Bonnie and Clyde: A couple of lovers/murderers who became alarmingly popular with people who thought their story was charming.

  The Scopes Monkey Trial: A famous trial over whether John Scopes could teach human evolution in a Tennessee school; the lawyers were Clarence Darrow, probably the greatest lawyer of the day, and William Jennings Bryan, the “Cross of Gold” guy, who spent a good chunk of his later years arguing against evolution.

  Admiral Richard Byrd: An explorer who made the first flights over the North Pole in 1926 (though some doubt that he actually made it that far north) and over the South Pole in 1929.

  “On with the Show”: The first all-color, all-talking movie. Featured the song “Lift the Juleps to Your Two Lips.”

  George Gershwin: A phenomenally popular songwriter who also wrote “Rhapsody in Blue,” an American classical piece.

  END-OF-CHAPTER QUESTIONS

  MULTIPLE CHOICE

  1. What did Coolidge say to that woman at that dinner when she said she’d made a bet that she could get him to talk?

  “You lose.”

  “I do not approve of gambling, young lady.”

  “Are you going to eat that pickle?”

  (ANSWER: A.)

  2. Who would have made a better president than Harding?

  Roosevelt in 1920 (he would have run if he hadn’t died the year before).

  Victoria Woodhull.

  Gouverneur Morris.

  David Lloyd George.

  Any of the above, even though three of them were dead and one was busy running England.

  (ANSWER: BE REALISTIC; IT AIN’T E. ANY OTHER ANSWER WILL DO, BUT BE PREPARED TO JUSTIFY IT.)

 
; 3. All the regulars at the Algonquin Round Table thought very highly of themselves—they certainly thought they were better than you. Who was really the best writer of the bunch?

  Dorothy Parker.

  Robert Benchley.

  Alexander Woollcott.

  Franklin Pierce Adams.

  (ANSWER: PROBABLY PARKER, IN THAT SHE’S THE ONLY ONE WHOSE WORKS ARE STILL WIDELY READ—AND THE ONLY ONE MENTIONED IN THIS CHAPTER!)

  4. Flappers had all sorts of hats, few of which were really all that stupid. What did they call the ones with enormous peacock feathers stuck in them?

  Caps.

  Bobtops.

  Turbans.

  Macaroni.

  (ANSWER: NONE OF THE ABOVE; WE JUST WANTED TO THROW IN ONE MORE “STUCK A FEATHER IN HIS HAT” CRACK—BECAUSE THAT’S THE WAY WE ROLL, SON.)

  DISCUSSION

  Does your mom vote for whoever your dad tells her to?

  Think of the oldest people you saw at your last family reunion. Were they flappers back in the day?