The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History

by Adam Selzer

  In 1940, England was starting to run out of money and supplies. Roosevelt was starting to get desperate, and began to sell them “surplus” weapons, which was not, technically, something he was allowed to do. Finally, right around the end of 1940, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, which allowed him to aid nations whose defense was vital to America. Under the act, he could loan weapons to countries as long as they promised to return them (or something of equal value) after the war. This allowed America to make money off the war and help the allies without getting the military involved.

  Factories were cranked into production to make bombs, guns, battleships, and airplanes to lend to England. The jobs created pretty much brought an end to the Depression, but it would be nearly a year before the United States finally entered the war.

  SOME OF THE STUFF WE MISSED

  Penny auctions: Sometimes when farms were foreclosed on and auctioned off, other farmers would get together, buy stuff for pennies, and give it back to the original owner. Anyone who tried to interfere and buy stuff at a fair price would be dealt with severely. Awesome.

  Charles Lindbergh was the first guy to make a solo flight across the Atlantic, making him one of the most famous and admired men in the world. As Hitler began taking over Europe, Lindbergh started an isolationist group called America First, which advocated the idea that Americans shouldn’t have anything to do with any other countries. Folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote a song about that, too. He said, “They say America first, but they mean America next.”

  The Empire State Building: A particularly awesome Art Deco skyscraper that opened in New York in 1931. Even now, landlords can jack up the rent on an apartment just by saying it’s in an Art Deco building in the listing.

  Smoot-Hawley Tarriff: Like most tariffs, this is terribly boring to talk about, but Smoot-Hawley is lots of fun to say out loud. And if there’s not a punk singer named Holly Smoot, there should be.

  John Dillinger: A bank robber who revolutionized the bank robbing industry and became the Robin Hood of the age when the end of Prohibition made most gangsters much less interesting. Stories that he was robbing from the rich to give to the poor were complete applesauce, and most people probably knew it, but banks were very unpopular at the time, and robbing them seemed like a win for the common man.

  The Twenty-first Amendment: The amendment to the Constitution that repealed the one banning alcohol. One of the first things Roosevelt pushed through Congress.

  Cole Porter: A hugely popular songwriter of the day, author of such standards as “You’re the Top,” “I Get a Kick out of You,” and “Begin the Beguine.” To this day, knowing a handful of Cole Porter songs is an easy way to show people that you’re sophisticated and classy.

  Amelia Earhart: A spectacular female pilot who disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle.

  The Spanish Civil War: Another war going on at the time. If you want to find out what it was all about, get yourself a world history book, kids.

  The Golden Ages: Old people often refer to the 1930s as the Golden Age of comic books, radio, Hollywood, and whatever else they enjoyed back in the good ol’ days.

  Huey “Kingfish” Long: A Democratic senator who may have been trying to challenge Roosevelt for his party’s nomination in the 1936 election but was assassinated by a doctor named Carl Weiss. What Weiss had against Long isn’t quite known, as Long’s bodyguards pumped the doctor full of lead before he could say anything. Many people think Weiss was framed.

  The Hindenburg: A zeppelin (blimp) that crashed in New Jersey.

  The Dust Bowl: A section of the Great Plains that suffered from a severe drought in the early 1930s. Woody Guthrie wrote many songs about it.

  The Grapes of Wrath: A novel about the Depression and the Dust Bowl era by John Steinbeck. Tom Joad’s last speech is a real showstopper, but you can learn just as much about how bad life during the Depression was from the scene in the movie where Grandpa dreams of one day “scrooging” his butt around in a washtub full of grapes.

  Robert Johnson: A blues singer rumored to have sold his soul to the devil before his death in 1938. His influence on rock and blues music is incalculable. Even if you know the quadratic formula.

  Jazz music: Jazz had been around for some time, but the version known as swing caught on in the 1930s and nearly ended civilization (like most self-respecting musical genres).

  END-OF-CHAPTER QUESTIONS

  MULTIPLE CHOICE

  1. What does your history teacher do during the summer?

  Tour obscure battlefields along the Eastern Seaboard.

  Square-dance competitively under the name Dixie Calhoun.

  Chain-smoke while playing bingo with other teachers.

  Sit around and eat firecake.

  Get a washtub full of grapes, sit down in it, and “scrooge around.”

  (ANSWER: B. WE HAVE PROOF.)

  2. Why all the references to Woody Guthrie?

  His songs captured the Depression era better than those of, say, Cole Porter, whose songs in the 1930s were usually about rich people (though they were excellent songs).

  The Smart Aleck staff is full of Commies.

  The Smart Aleck staff is trying to get a backstage pass to the next Woody Guthrie Folk Fest in Okemah, Oklahoma.

  We know you teens just love folk music!

  (ANSWER: LET’S GO WITH A.)

  3. What should you do if you see a hobo?

  Stop, drop, and roll.

  Hide any pickles you might be carrying.

  Get back in the DeLorean and go back to the future.

  Start singing “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad” to entice him to share his stew.

  Bow deeply.

  (ANSWER: DEPENDS ON THE HOBO.)

  4. How did people survive during the Depression?

  By doing hard work and not complainin’.

  By borrowing money from Al Capone (or whatever gangster ran their neighborhood).

  They survived because they had values in those days, by gum!

  By dropping out of school in fourth grade and going to work in the mines.

  (ANSWER: ANY ANSWER IS ACCEPTABLE; GANGSTERS DID OFTEN OFFER LOWER INTEREST RATES ON LOANS THAN THE BANKS DID.)

  OTHER WOODIE GUTHRIE SONGS YOU SHOULD LOOK UP AND WRITE A REPORT ON

  “Deportee”

  “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Ya”

  “Going Down the Road”

  “I Ain’t Got No Home”

  “Jesus Christ”

  “Do Re Mi” (not to be confused with the show tune of the same name)

  “Jarama Valley”

  “Grand Coulee Dam” (The Grand Coulee Dam people paid Guthrie to write songs about the dam. Yes, even Guthrie was a sell-out.)

  “Pastures of Plenty”

  THE BIGGEST EXPERIMENT OF ALL!

  We can give you all sorts of rhymes and wisecracks about pickles and stoves, but the truth is that the best way to learn something is to experience it for yourself. To help you learn about the Depression—and to make sure you remember what you learn—we suggest you find out for youself what it was like.

  First, get a railroad. Make it run. Make it race against time. And build a tower while you’re at it. Build it up to the sky.

  Then lose it. Lose everything.

  Drop out of school and get a job at a factory (plenty of them still play fast and loose with child labor laws), then get fired after an on-the-job injury makes it impossible for you to do your job (plenty of them also still find ways to step around the concept of workers’ compensation).

  Stand in line for bread. Get as dirty as possible, then sit around on the corner asking passersby for change. Sell them apples, if you can get any. Complete the effect by calling “Say, don’t you remember me? I’m your pal!”

  By now, you should be pret-ty depressed. Write some poetry about how no one likes you, then hop a freight train. Eat stew when you can get it.

  If that doesn’t teach you any lessons, at least find out what song w
e’re alluding to in this section. We’ll put a few versions of it on www.smartalecksguide.com.

  49 We here on the Smart Aleck staff would like to state, at the request of a couple of tough-looking guys with brass knuckles, that reality TV is never rigged.

  50 Though this and a couple other verses were left out of most versions for years on the grounds that they were dangerously radical, Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen sang a version with every verse at a concert to celebrate President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

  “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

  —Albert Einstein, who worked on the atomic bomb (and really regretted it)

  INTRODUCTION

  Obviously, World War I turned out not to be the War to End all Wars. In fact, in many ways, it was just a warm-up for World War II, which was even deadlier than World War I. For the first time, civilians were in just as much danger as soldiers. All the old-fashioned ideas about the nobility of war were swept away. The war ended with the first, and to date the only, use of an atomic bomb in warfare. It didn’t end all wars, either, but warfare would certainly never be the same.

  In our desperate quest to say something snarky, we’ll just wonder how that one guy from the 1778 side ever managed to keep his clothes so sparklingly white. Whatever detergent he was using, we’ll buy.

  DECEMBER 7, 1941: A DATE THAT USED TO LIVE IN INFAMY

  Roosevelt badly wanted to get into a war with Hitler but wasn’t able to rally the country around the idea until America was attacked on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, an army base in Hawaii (which was not yet a state). Generations of Americans remembered the date of December 7 the same way people today remember September 11.

  Lots of people today51 say that Roosevelt knew that the Pearl Harbor attack was coming and did nothing to stop it in order to get the country into war. Whether this is true, however, will probably never be known. There’s plenty of proof that Roosevelt knew the Japanese were planning an attack, but he doesn’t seem to have believed they could actually pull it off.

  FIRE BALLOONS

  Though no battles were fought on the U.S. mainland, the Japanese did manage at least a couple of mainland attacks. In 1942, one sea plane was catapulted from a submarine and flown over Oregon, where it dropped a couple of incendiary bombs intended to start massive forest fires. It might have succeeded if the forest hadn’t been too wet for a fire to get started. The Japanese also managed to float a few bombs across the ocean attached to balloons; about nine thousand “fire balloons,” or “balloon bombs,” were launched in 1944 and 1945, and around 10 percent actually made it across the ocean. A few even managed to kill people, though this was a well-kept secret at the time. A few are still thought to be out there in the forests of the Northwest—still armed and dangerous.

  Roosevelt may have been a great president, but he was still living with the prejudices that were common at the time. Neither he nor any of his advisors seemed to believe that the Japanese could successfully attack, not just because they were far from being a world power at the time, but probably also partly because of a belief that they weren’t biologically capable of it. Even after the bombing, General MacArthur, who was well on his way to being the country’s most famous pain in the butt, insisted that the pilots must have been mercenaries, on the grounds that the Japanese didn’t have good enough eyesight to fly airplanes. And this is the guy they put in charge of fighting the Japanese.

  Japan was being run at the time by a group of people who were really, really into warfare and expansion. While Hitler stomped around Europe, Japan was stomping around the Pacific, looking to expand its territories, and Roosevelt had been trying to stop them, or at least slow them down, by building U.S. military bases around the Pacific. Roosevelt didn’t want a war with Japan, he wanted a war with Hitler. Though he knew that the Japanese were ticked off at him, he surely hoped they wouldn’t really attack.

  But attack they did. On December 7, a fleet of more than three hundred Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, killing more than twenty-three hundred American soldiers and wounding over a thousand more. Only sixty-five Japanese soldiers were killed in the process.

  That night, Roosevelt took to the airwaves, famously describing December 7, 1941, as “a date which will live in infamy,” and told people that we were now at war with Japan. The next day, Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war, and they almost unanimously approved. A few days later, Germany and Italy, which were allied with Japan, declared war on America. World War II had “begun.”

  Actually, it had begun years before. Hitler had been throwing everything he had at basically everyone in Europe, and America had sat on its hands, pretending it was someone else’s problem, for years. Low-rent smart alecks in America love to gloat that we saved England’s butt in World War II, but the English rightly point out that it certainly took us long enough to realize that it was our problem, too, not just England’s.

  General Douglas MacArthur was one of only about five guys ever to achieve the rank of general of the army. He earned more medals than any other officer in World War I, and often led his men into battle while refusing to wear a gas mask. After achieving the rank of general, MacArthur rose to national fame by attacking the Bonus Army in 1932. The attack was actually made in defiance of President Hoover, but defying orders had always been a habit of MacArthur’s. His tendency to attack what he wanted, where he wanted, when he wanted, no matter what the president wanted him to do, would make him one of the most admired—and most controversial—of all U.S. military figures.

  As the army began to prepare for war, Americans on the home front decided to do their part by beating the crap out of anyone who looked remotely Japanese. Grocery stores owned by Japanese Americans were vandalized, and Warner Bros. rushed to the studio to create cartoons such as “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips”52 and “Tokio Jokio” that made the racial stereotypes in earlier cartoons seem downright tame.

  Uncle Sam: “Seriously … pull my finger!”

  Roosevelt did his part by ordering all resident aliens to be registered with the government about five weeks after the attack. This was the beginning of the biggest smear on Roosevelt’s record: a month after the order was given, Roosevelt approved a plan to remove Japanese Americans from their homes and make them live in camps in states like Colorado and Utah, to keep them from aiding the enemy. Eventually about a hundred thousand Japanese Americans were forced to give up their homes and possessions and move to these camps. They weren’t nearly as bad as some of the camps in Germany, but they weren’t exactly the Ritz, either. Only one elected official—Ralph Lawrence Carr, the governor of Colorado—had the stones to stand up for Japanese citizens during the war. It cost him his job.

  In the early days of the war with Japan, things didn’t go very well. American forces had a tendency to be absolutely routed by Japanese forces, and were eventually driven out of the Philippines and forced to set up a base in Australia until more troops could be amassed. Having been forced to retreat, General MacArthur dramatically stated, “I shall return.” Roosevelt asked him to change the statement to “We shall return,” but MacArthur refused to comply. At times, it seemed that if Roosevelt had ordered MacArthur to refrain from picking his nose, MacArthur would have started digging.

  WAR BRIDES

  Australian women loved the U.S. soldiers stationed in Australia during the war. As many as fifteen thousand of them ended up marrying soldiers. Australian men, as a whole, had been glad when the U.S. Army showed up to keep the Japanese away, but after they started losing their girlfriends, men around Australia complained that the U.S. troops were “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.”

  Command of the Philippines was given to another general, Jonathan Wainwright, but MacArthur continued to try to run the war himself from afar. Though he ordered Wainwright not to surrender the Philippines, Wainwright eventually had no choice, and in May 1942, he surren
dered all U.S. forces in the Philippines to the Japanese army, which sent about sixty-six thousand Filipino soldiers, along with about ten thousand American soldiers, on a brutal sixty-mile march that came to be known as the Bataan Death March. Around ten thousand of the soldiers died during the march. General Wainwright and his men remained prisoners of war for three years.

  A week later, though, U.S. planes began to bomb mainland Japan. They didn’t do much in the way of real damage with these bombing raids, but the raids helped build U.S. morale, which was pretty badly hurt after the loss in the Philippines.

  MEANWHILE, BACK ON THE HOME FRONT

  Exactly how many Americans ended up serving in the war is one of those questions to which different people will give you different answers, but it was somewhere along the lines of sixteen million. That sixteen million, however, only represents the number who served in the military. Everyone in the country was involved in the war whether they liked it or not. Opposition to American involvement in World War II dried up very quickly; guys like Charles Lindbergh who initially said it was none of our business shut their big yaps pretty quickly after Pearl Harbor.