The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History

by Adam Selzer

  Here’s a serious one, just for good measure: jazz is sometimes said to be the first truly American art form. Why?

  ASSIGNMENT!

  The Teapot Dome Scandal was pretty boring. But it’s not as bad as we made it out to be—it represents a landmark scandal involving big oil companies trying to buy the presidential administration (and the rest of the country), something that they’d work hard at for years to come. Take a look at this picture:

  See if you can find out:

  What in the world is going on here.

  Exactly when it was that big oil companies succeeded in their quest to take over the world.

  45 Except for Professor Rosemont, who isn’t really wild about letting anyone vote.

  46 Well, some of them did, and some of them didn’t. Some of them were sort of prototype feminists, but many of them—perhaps the majority—were just vacuous drunks who jumped on the bandwagon and became an early version of Valley Girls.

  47 Neat fact: In Chicago, Lillian Collier, a teenage flapper who ran the Wind Blew Inn, a tearoom that also served illegal liquor, was arrested for holding petting parties at her establishment. She coined the term “snugglepupping” when she told the judge that there was “no snugglepupping at the Wind Blew Inn.” The judge sentenced her to read a book of fairy tales so she’d learn proper values. Seriously.

  48 These cartoons aren’t actually banned; they just don’t usually get aired on TV nowadays. People like to say that they’re banned so they can whine about political correctness, though.

  “Prosperity is just around the corner.”

  —Herbert Hoover

  INTRODUCTION

  Calvin Coolidge’s idea that “the business of America is business” led to a big economic boom in the 1920s. As the decade began, people had more money to spend than ever before, and it was a good thing, too, since illegal alcohol cost a fortune. But there was a problem, too: more than 5 percent of the country was unemployed. Some economists said that a crash was inevitable if big business and the government didn’t get their act together. But others ignored those economists and poured every cent they could into something they thought was a sure bet: the stock market.

  New York in the 1930s. The rent on the beam this guy is sitting on is now $1,050 per month, plus utilities. No pets. The landlord calls it a “prewar vintage efficiency with free heat, skyline view, roof access.”

  Then, in October of 1929, the market crashed. On October 24, stock certificates that had made people rich the day before were worth significantly less than toilet paper. By 1932, it seemed like everyone was dirt poor and out of work.

  Many people blame the Great Depression on the stock market crash, but the crash didn’t cause the Depression all by itself. It was just another accident waiting to happen as a result of bad economic policies that had been in the boiler for years.

  They didn’t call it the Great Depression for nothing—life really sucked back then. Any time some old guy starts talking about what life was like in the Depression, you can pretty well guess that he’s not going to tell you that life those days was just bags and bags of fun. Well, unless his father was J. P. Morgan or a Hollywood movie star. They did all right.

  Most people, however, were not so lucky. Herbert Hoover, as we mentioned earlier, would have been better off if he’d just stayed home instead of becoming president. Every couple of months, he’d tell people that the worst was over and that things would be better from now on. Then things would get worse. Hoover also avoided setting up government programs to help the poor specifically, which didn’t really endear him to anybody, least of all …

  Just when you thought this book was finished with taking cheap shots at smelly people …

  … HOBOES

  With so many people out of work and no jobs to go around, countless people took up the life of a hobo: wandering from city to city, looking for work anywhere they could get it. Some hitchhiked to get from town to town. Others, finding it awfully hard to find drivers who would give a ride to someone who looked as though he’d never been introduced to a bar of soap, jumped onto freight trains illegally. They hid in railroad yards, jumped onto empty boxcars, and went wherever the trains went. It was dangerous as all get-out (there are tons of ways to get killed while jumping onto, and hiding out on, a moving train), but it got you where you wanted to go, and you got to enjoy the company of other hoboes who were just as dirty as you and could teach you folk songs and recipes for mulligan stew.

  DANCE MARATHONS: BEFORE WE HAD REALITY TV …

  One of the more sadistic pastimes of the 1920s and 1930s was going to watch dance marathons. These were contests in which couples danced forty-five minutes per hour, twenty-four hours per day, until all but one couple had collapsed or been disqualified. They could go on for weeks. Dancers, some of whom competed in marathons for a living, got free food and shelter as long as they were in the competition, and spectators enjoyed watching people who looked even more miserable and dirty than they were. Many of the dancers hoped to use the marathon to become movie stars, but others just needed a job.

  Promoters made up backstories for couples. For instance, there would often be a couple dancing to earn money to get an operation, a couple who’d fallen in love at the marathon, and a girl from Belching Hollow, Indiana, who’d come all the way to the marathon to be a star. Spectators got involved in the stories, picked their favorite couples, and came back night after night to cheer them on. As the weeks wore on, promoters would spice things up by having contests like races and “grinds”—long periods during which there were no rest periods—to bring in more spectators and eliminate couples dramatically.

  By the time the marathon had gone on for a month, people would pile in nightly to watch the couples, who, by this time, were not exactly dancing so much as just pathetically moving their feet, looking dirty, tired, and miserable. Many even learned to sleep while dancing. As they became dirtier and more miserable, the crowds got more and more excited. It was very much like modern reality TV, and like much of reality TV, the marathons were often rigged.49

  At some towns, hoboes would set up hobo jungles, which were pretty much the same things as Hoovervilles. In towns where no such jungle existed, hobos developed a system of signs that they would draw on walls and sidewalks to show other hoboes where the good houses to beg were.

  It’s hard to document exactly how many hoboes there were in the country during the Depression; it’s not like you had to sign up to become one. Most historians estimate that the number was well into the millions, though.

  You don’t see as many hoboes these days, now that the Depression is long over and most of the trains just run from paper mill to paper mill. You see plenty of panhandlers downtown in our major urban centers, but they’re not quite the same thing. Practically no one writes folk songs about panhandlers.

  FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT:

  A MEMORABLE PRESIDENT AT LAST

  In 1932, when he ran for president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered voters what he called the New Deal. Under this deal, he’d offer relief to people who couldn’t get work, try to create more jobs so people would have more money to put into the economy, and save the banks, which had fallen into a nasty habit of failing and taking people’s money with them. He also promised to repeal Prohibition, which by that time was something of a national embarrassment, as it seemed to be doing more harm than good. When the election came around, Roosevelt mopped the floor with Hoover.

  FDR, looking much more vigorous than he does on the dime.

  One of the main differences between Roosevelt and Hoover was that Roosevelt didn’t try to tell people things were about to get better. He told them straight up that it was going to take a while to get out of the Depression but that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” People who were afraid of starving to death, getting run over while trying to hop a freight train, or catching the latest diseases might have taken exception, but the message was clear: If we don’t starve to death, we can rise abo
ve this.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt was fifth cousin to Theodore Roosevelt, which is a pretty distant relationship: you find that practically everybody is related to everyone else, when you really do the research. In fact, one of FDR’s other fifth cousins was Eleanor Roosevelt, his wife (above).

  Exactly how close Franklin and his wife, Eleanor, were is sort of up for debate. We now know that Franklin had a handful of affairs, and that after about 1918, he and Eleanor started living in separate rooms. They most likely stayed married mainly because of politics; being divorced was pretty uncommon in those days, and could have derailed both of their careers.

  Roosevelt’s staff always went to great lengths to cover up the fact that he was frequently seen nipping off to secluded spots in the White House for some red-hot action with Lucy Mercer, his secretary, but covering up his sex life was nothing compared to the trouble they had covering up the fact that Roosevelt was in a wheelchair. He had been stricken with polio (or some similar disease; new theories pop up now and then) around 1920, which left him paralyzed from the waist down.

  Hiding Roosevelt’s disability was a lot easier in those days than it would be today, since nobody had a television set, but it was still no picnic. When Roosevelt appeared in public, he’d have to be propped up against one of his staff members. With the use of a cane and leg braces, he was able to teach himself to walk by swiveling his hips and shaking his legs around. The reason for all this effort was simple: Roosevelt believed, probably correctly, that not enough people would vote for a guy in a wheelchair. Today, many people think Roosevelt was just about the best president we ever had but that he would never manage to get elected today, when covering up the fact that a candidate is paralyzed from the waist down would be impossible.

  Roosevelt’s plan to tackle the Depression had three parts: relief, recovery, and reform. Relief and recovery would be getting people out of the boxcars, into a bathtub, and then into a job to get the economy humming again. Reform would be fixing the problems that had led to the Depression in the first place; Roosevelt blamed greedy bankers, bosses, and robber barons for a pretty good chunk of it.

  He started to work right away. On the day of his inauguration, the country was in the middle of a bank panic. Since banks had been losing everyone’s money, people were demanding to withdraw all their money. The next day, Roosevelt declared a bank holiday, shutting all the banks down for four days and setting up a system to keep them from going under. In his first few days in office, his many relief bills passed through Congress easily. He created laws regulating business and creating jobs for hundreds of thousands of workers, which beat the living heck out of just telling people that the Depression was almost over, like Hoover had done.

  The massive number of bills Roosevelt managed to pass in his famous first hundred days in office didn’t come close to ending the Depression, but they were a good first step to making life better. People who might have starved to death survived the decade and grew up to spend their later years talking endlessly about how much you could get for a nickel back in the olden days. Having to go a whole year sharing three ears of corn among eight brothers and sisters and walking eight miles to get to school (uphill both ways) gave them conversation topics that would last them a lifetime.

  EXPERIMENTS TO TRY AT HOME!

  Can makeshift toy tractors be fun? Find out!

  You still run into the occasional old person who will ramble on about how he and his nine siblings used to make toy tractors out of broken pencils and old spools of thread. Given that tractors are about the least exciting piece of machinery ever, we decided to make our own toy tractors to see if they could possibly be any fun.

  Our results are pretty inconclusive; we sure didn’t manage to have any fun, even when we tried to mix things up by getting some Star Wars action figures involved. We had Darth Vader try to invade the rebel base (an old cardboard box) on his spool-and-pencil tractor, and had Obi-Wan Kenobi be a crotchety old guy who hangs around outside the base, talking about how cheap things used to be and turning the hose on invaders, but though we were amused for a minute, we couldn’t get past the fact that a starship would have been a lot more practical than a tractor as an invasion vehicle.

  We realize that during the Depression, sometimes a pencil and a spool were all you had, but we have still not yet determined why, of all the vehicles in the world, anyone would want to make these items into toy tractors when they could just as easily be toy tanks, spaceships, or monster trucks.

  The lesson here: Don’t believe everything old people tell you about the olden days!

  Hitler and Mussolini, the most famous fascists of the day, as photographed by Hitler’s girlfriend. The Black Hand could’ve come in mighty handy at this parade.

  MEANWHILE, OUTSIDE AMERICA

  Franklin D. Roosevelt seemed willing to try pretty much anything to help people out—but not everything he tried worked. One of his more famous efforts was the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), in which he attempted to give himself the power to regulate business and other things. Two years later the Supreme Court unanimously decided that parts of it were unconstitutional.

  Meanwhile, Europe was inching toward another major war. Germany was in bad, bad shape after World War I. People were humiliated by their loss, inflation was out of control, and, around 1930, a depression similar to the one that had hit America took hold in Germany. Adolf Hitler, who was Austrian by birth, spent about fifteen years crawling his way to the top, eventually taking over Germany completely in 1933.

  A TERM POPULAR IN HISTORY BOOKS

  Fascist: An authoritarian, nationalistic dictator. Some teachers get a kick out of being called a fascist, but most aren’t amused by it in the slightest. Call your teacher one at your own risk.

  Hitler took a lot of cues from the Fascists who had taken over in Italy as he rose to power. Through a series of speeches, propaganda, and various underhanded tricks, he gave people in Germany reason to be optimistic again, telling them that Germany was the greatest country in the world, and that they (well, most of them) were the “master race.” And he gave them people to blame for all their problems: mostly Jews, Communists, and minorities.

  Hitler had a big plan to reunite all the German-speaking countries that had been divided up after World War I and turn them into one big country, and he started with his native Austria. He didn’t even have to start a war there; the Anschluss, or annexation, occurred when Austria just sort of let him take over without a fight in 1938.

  Next on his list was the Sudetenland, a German-speaking area of Czechoslovakia. At a conference in Munich, the prime ministers of England and France agreed to let Hitler take over the Sudetenland if he promised not to pick a fight with them next. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain thought that that would be the end of that, and proudly came back to England saying there will be “peace in our time.”

  Neville Chamberlain: Not a fascist, but also not the guy you want to hear on the other end of the phone when you call the Psychic Hotline.

  Winston Churchill, another British politician, said, “Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonor. They chose dishonor. They will have war.” Obviously blessed with better instincts than Neville Chamberlain, Churchill ended up becoming prime minister and eventually got a rather dumpy-looking statue of himself put up in London.

  From the evidence of this statue of Churchill in London, we can state that while he may have had foresight, alas, ladies and gentlemen, the man had no neck.

  Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” was written as an angry response to the song “God Bless America.” There are a few verses they surely didn’t teach you at camp, including “In the shadow of the steeple / I saw my people / By the relief office / I seen my people; / As they stood there hungry, / I stood there asking / Is this land made for you and me?”50 Note the writing on his guitar, which reads, “This machine kills fascists.” Kabong!

  As it turned out, Hitler was not content with just march
ing into the Sudetenland. Six months later, in 1939, he took over the rest of Czechoslovakia, and started to seem intent on taking over the whole world. In September, he took over Poland. Never having agreed to let him do this, England and France finally declared war on Germany.

  Hitler ordered his Nazi troops into France and took over Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Luxembourg along the way, giving him a pretty large collection of European countries. In June of 1940, he invaded France. Unable to take on an army the size of the one Hitler had amassed, France surrendered in less than three weeks.

  In July, the Nazis began bombing England and came pretty close to taking over. Around this time, Italy formed an alliance with Germany. Italy was being led by Fascists, too, after all, and it looked like siding with Hitler would put them on the winning team.

  So where were we in all of this? America, for the most part, just sat around, twiddling its proverbial thumbs, listening to the “Little Orphan Annie” program on the radio and going around repeating such catchphrases as “leapin’ lizards.”

  Roosevelt wanted to get into a war with Hitler—partly because it was the right thing to do and partly because he knew how much it would benefit the ailing economy. But most Americans were opposed to getting involved, on the grounds that what was happening in Europe was none of our business. In fact, Hitler wasn’t totally disliked in America. A lot of prominent people (such as Henry Ford) thought he was pretty keen.

  The general mood in America was one of isolationism. Americans knew that war wasn’t exactly bad for the economy, but recent investigations had shown that weapons builders had made a mint in World War I, and people were pretty ticked off about it. They began to believe, not without reason, that these builders had pushed America into the war just to make money. Responding to people’s concern that it would happen again, Congress had passed a neutrality act in 1935 that wouldn’t even allow Roosevelt to take sides.