The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History

by Adam Selzer

  51 And not just conspiracy theorists—anyone who wants to make Roosevelt look bad ends up hovering around this theory sooner or later.

  52 “Nip” was a racist term for the a Japanese person.

  53 For the complete lyrics, see www.smartalecksguide.com

  54 Some idiots still go around saying that this is true, and that the Holocaust was just something the Jews invented to drum up some sympathy. See The Smart Aleck’s Guide to People Even Pacifists Can Enjoy Punching.

  “Haven’t they heard we won the war? What do they keep on fighting for?”

  —Dr. Billy Joel, historian

  INTRODUCTION

  The economy got back on its feet after World War II, but it didn’t happen right away. Millions of soldiers came back home and didn’t have jobs waiting for them. The army had promised to teach them useful skills, but manning a machine gun or flying a fighter plane didn’t really qualify you for very many postwar jobs. In the late 1940s, according to our source,55 you couldn’t buy a job.

  Millions of soldiers celebrated the end of the war by comin’ home, marryin’ their best girl, and gettin’ busy with her. Others took advantage of the free time unemployment afforded them and got even busier, if you get our drift (nudge nudge wink wink). All of this action, of course, led to the baby boom. About twenty-four million babies had been born in the United States in the 1930s. In the 1940s, the jump that occurred after 1946 pushed the number for that decade to thirty-two million.56 By the mid-1950s, four million babies were being born every year. By 1965, four out of ten Americans were under the age of thirty. The generation born just after the war grew up to be known as baby boomers.

  Eisenhower was not named Ike, but having Ike for a nickname made it easy for supporters to come up with a slogan. For our money, no presidential candidate yet has come up with a catchier one.

  Baby boomers grew up rolling their eyes as their parents talked about growing up during the Depression, but they grew up to be just about equally annoying themselves. Even now, you run into a lot of people who think 1956 was America’s best year; to hear them talk, you’d think that in those days, all families got along, there was no crime, neighbors never fought,57 everyone had plenty to eat, TV shows were better than they are now, no one used bad language, everyone went to church, and teenagers never had sex before marriage. They talk about it at great length, and listening to them is about as much fun as winning a gruel-eating contest.

  Billy Joel gets an honorary doctorate from Syracuse University, qualifying him to teach history to slackers like us (probably)!

  These people have apparently mistaken the TV show Leave It to Beaver for a historical documentary. Sure, things were better for most people in the 1950s than they had been in the previous couple of decades, and they finally had television to keep them entertained, but in many cities, black kids still went to different, invariably nastier, schools than the white kids. Interracial marriage was still illegal in many states. Animated cartoons still frequently relied on racist stereotypes for their humor. People could lose their job just by being accused of being or even knowing a Communist. And kids at school had to participate in air-raid drills so they’d know what to do when the Russians started bombing the United States back to the Stone Age.

  Yes, this was the era when teachers told their students that they could duck and cover under their desks and survive a nuclear assault. Make no mistake: people in the 1950s were awfully stupid. We had gotten a lot smarter by the time the Smart Aleck staff was in school; Adam’s high school history teacher told him that the only thing to do in the event of a nuclear assault was bend over, put your head between your legs, and kiss your butt good-bye.

  One of the millions of children who had to participate in air-raid drills was singer-songwriter Billy Joel, who, in the late 1980s, had a hit song called “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” which still gets plenty of radio play today. You’ve probably heard it. The song attempts to list every newsworthy event from 1947 up until the late eighties (or as many as Dr. Joel could cram into the rhyme scheme). Look up the lyrics online and you can get a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen in the next section of this book.

  In fact, we here at the Smart Aleck’s Guide have a theory: you can learn all you need to know about U.S. history from 1947 to about 1990 just by looking up stuff from Billy Joel songs.

  We tested our theory and found that “We Didn’t Start the Fire” alone covers the time period reasonably thoroughly. Odds are fairly good that at some point in your education, a teacher (presumably one who’s been using the same lesson plan since 1970) will make you look up everything from “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” a lesson concept that really caught on in the public education system in the 1990s and is still in use by many teachers today. Everyone here on the Smart Aleck staff who was still in school in the 1990s and 2000s had to do it. Adam had to do it in three different classes—only one of which was even a history class. If (or when) you get the assignment, you can use this chapter as a cheat sheet!

  The Office of Civil Defense produced cartoons to convince kids that getting nuked could be safe—and fun! And yet people wonder why children raised in the fifties didn’t trust the government by the 1960s.

  Oh, sure, we’ll just gloss over some of the stuff, like the reference to Juan Perón, which have little or nothing to do with U.S. history (sorry, but this means we’re also skipping “British politician sex,” a line that turns up about two-thirds of the way into the song).

  And we’ll have to take plenty of side trips, because “We Didn’t Start the Fire” leaves a lot of stuff out. Luckily for us and our harebrained theories, most of these big gaps can be filled in with lines from other Billy Joel songs, most notably “Leningrad,” “Goodnight Saigon,” and his between-song patter at his famous Russia concert, which was recorded and released as a live album. We’ll refer to these, too. There are still a handful of things Billy Joel missed, like Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency (for which he can hardly be blamed), but we’ll throw those in as well, just to make sure we cover all the bases.

  Still, after careful research, we’re pretty confident that we were right: you can learn just about all you need to know about the second half of the twentieth century from Billy Joel. Read on. “We Didn’t Start the Fire” opens with a mention of …

  Harry S. Truman, who probably always imagined that his first week as president would consist of picking out pretty new curtains for the Oval Office. Sorry, Harry. His middle name was simply the letter “S”—it didn’t stand for anything.

  … HARRY TRUMAN

  No one really expected Truman to win reelection in 1948. As of that spring, when the election process got going, his approval rating stood at a paltry 36 percent.

  One reason Truman was unpopular was probably his stance on civil rights. He was in favor of them, but many Democrats of the day were still truly members of the old, pre-FDR, more conservative version of the party. When Truman adopted a civil rights—heavy platform at the Democratic National Convention, representatives from several Southern states objected. Senator Strom Thurmond addressed the convention, echoing William Jennings Bryan by saying, “You shall not crucify the South on this cross of civil rights!” He then led all the delegates from Alabama, and several from Mississippi, out of the convention. They proceeded to form the States Rights Democratic Party, also known as the Dixiecrats, which adopted the slogan “Segregation Forever” and nominated Thurmond for president. The States Rights Democratic Party actually ended up winning a few of the Southern states in the general election.58

  Without these states, which the Democratic party generally counted on in those days, nobody thought Truman had a chance at winning another term, and several Democrats tried to nominate other candidates, such as General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was not even a member of the party (or any other party) at the time. But Truman won the nomination and vowed to press on, win the election, “and make these Republicans like it.” He embarked on a whistle-stop tour in which he
traveled by train from one small town to another, giving a speech from the back of the train at every stop.

  Most political analysts thought Truman would be crushed by his Republican opponent, Thomas E. Dewey (the same guy who had lost to FDR before), but they turned out to be wrong. Maybe people just got freaked out by Dewey’s mustache at the last minute. Maybe the whistle-stop tour really made people see Truman in a different light. Or maybe all the postwar action that brought about the baby boom just put everyone in a good mood. Whatever the reason, Truman surprised everyone by narrowly defeating Dewey and winning a second term.

  Thomas Dewey, Truman’s Republican challenger, attempting to bring the mustache back to national politics. Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice (remember Alice? There was a whole sidebar about Alice) said that he looked like the little guy on top of a wedding cake.

  That term was no picnic for him, though. In 1949, the Soviet Union successfully tested an atomic bomb of their own, and everyone assumed that World War III was just around the corner. People started accusing their neighbors of being Soviet spies (see the section on Joseph McCarthy), and an age of serious paranoia began.

  It barely took half a century for the Korean War to be pretty well forgotten.

  TRUMAN AND THE KOREAN WAR

  In 1950, North Korean Communists invaded South Korea, quickly taking over the capital, Seoul. In those days, many Americans believed that if one country went Communist, others would soon follow, and if we weren’t careful, the whole world could go Communist. Truman sent American troops into South Korea in an attempt to push the Communists back, and America was at war again—unofficially, at least. He didn’t get formal approval from Congress, which would eventually make things tricky for him.

  American forces weren’t the only ones fighting. After World War II, many of the nations of the world had come together to form the United Nations, an organization based on Wilson’s League of Nations. While American troops pretty much got their butts kicked across South Korea in the early days of the conflict, UN forces, led by America’s favorite pain in the butt, General MacArthur, landed in Korea and started kicking North Korea’s butt.

  China, now led by Communist chairman Mao Zedong, stepped in with an army of its own and started pushing the UN forces back. In 1951, the war had basically become a draw, with both sides stuck at a spot known as the thirty-eighth parallel (as Billy Joel reported in the song “Leningrad”).

  MacArthur wanted to start attacking supply bases in China and break out the nuclear weapons, but Truman told him not to. Casualties had already been high, and the president was afraid that if the fighting got any worse, the Soviet Union might join in on China and North Korea’s side. But MacArthur, ever a pain in the neck, leaked his plan to the press, hoping to turn public opinion to his side.

  In response, Truman fired MacArthur, which proved to be just about the least popular thing a president had ever done. Newspapers began to call for Truman to be impeached.

  The war remained a draw, with neither side really gaining any ground while thousands of soldiers were being killed, for a good two years before a peace agreement was drawn up. By 1952, the Twenty-second Amendment, which limited presidents to two terms, had been added to the Constitution, so that no one could be elected to four terms, like Roosevelt had been (most other presidents had stuck to an unofficial tradition, started by Washington, of stepping down after two terms so no one started thinking they were kings or anything like that). The amendment actually didn’t apply to Truman, though, only to presidents that came after him, and he did plan to run for a third term. However, polls at the time put Truman’s approval rating at 22 percent, the lowest ever recorded for a president up to that time. He ended up losing the first primary and pulling out of the race.

  Truman left office an unpopular man, and a broke one. He hadn’t been rich to start with, and didn’t feel that it was ethical to take any of the high-paying positions that people offered him after his term just because he had been president. He said later that if he hadn’t been able to sell some property that he and his siblings had inherited, he would have practically been on welfare.

  MacArthur on the front lines. We think he’s the one on the right, but frankly it’s hard to tell. This could practically be a MacArthur look-alike contest. Eventually, a park was named after MacArthur, and someone wrote a song about it. “MacArthur Park,” made famous by Richard “Dumbledore” Harris, features some of the most overwrought and ridiculous metaphors ever.

  Joltin’ Joe before he met Marilyn Monroe (obviously).

  Largely because Truman was broke, Congress began giving benefit packages to former presidents in 1958. At the time this law passed, only two former presidents were alive: Truman and Herbert Hoover, who had spent his postpresidential years writing books that slammed Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, dodging rumors that he was trying to get nominated for president again, and, at Truman’s request, helping to keep postwar Europe from starving to death. Keeping war-torn countries from starving had always been his real strength.

  Though Truman was unpopular when he left office, after the dust of the Korean War and the civil rights upheavals started to clear, people started to look on Truman more favorably. His move to get rid of MacArthur had ruined his career, but it may also have stopped the Korean War from becoming World War III. Today when historians rank the presidents, he often ends up in the top ten.

  JOE DIMAGGIO

  So far, we’ve neglected a major part of American history: baseball. Long before modern steroid scandals, baseball dominated American culture. There were other sports, of course, but baseball was far and away the most popular for much of the twentieth century.

  No one really knows how baseball got started; most likely, it was adapted from earlier British games. Credit is often given to Abner Doubleday, a Civil War big shot, for inventing the game, but this is complete nonsense. In 1905, the National League appointed a commission to figure out the origin of the game, and they came upon the story that Doubleday had invented it in a cow pasture in Cooperstown, New York. Most likely, they knew at the time that this was a myth; the whole point of the commission was really to make it look like baseball had been invented in America, not in England. The story of Doubleday came from a guy named Abner Graves, who almost certainly made the whole thing up. Graves went on to murder his wife.

  But if baseball wasn’t an American invention, it was certainly America’s pastime. Players such as Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig, and Babe Ruth became a part of America’s mythology.

  Joe DiMaggio of the New York Yankees (Billy Joel’s favorite team) is widely believed to have been one of the greatest players of all time; he’s the only player who ever made the All-Star team every year that he played. In 1941, he got a hit in fifty-six consecutive games, setting a major-league record that still stands today and will probably stand for years, as no amount of steroids can help batters connect bat with ball.

  Once Babe Ruth was out of the picture, DiMaggio was widely believed to be the best player in the game throughout his career. His mention by Billy Joel probably commemorates his retirement in 1951, which was brought about by injuries, but his marriage to Marilyn Monroe (more on that later) made him even more of a national icon.

  Babe Ruth. Part of what made baseball America’s national pastime was that you could look like this and still be the greatest player in the world.

  JOSEPH MCCARTHY

  Perhaps no political figure symbolizes the 1950s better than Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who became one of the most popular men in America before being revealed as a national embarrassment.

  McCarthy made a career for himself by being loudly outspoken about Communism. Politicians who build their careers on being anti anything generally end up looking like jerks, and McCarthy was no exception.

  In the early 1950s, he began telling people that there was a big Communist conspiracy in the United States, and that many movie stars, writers, and even governmen
t officials were secretly Communists. He famously gave a speech in which he held up a sheet of paper and said, “I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five … names that were made known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”

  Here’s a schoolyard ditty sung to the tune of “The Mickey Mouse Club March”: “Who’s the leader of the cult of personality? M-A-O, T-S-E-, dash T-U-N-G! Chairman Mao (Mao Tse-tung!) Chairman Mao (Mao Tse-tung!).” The fact that his name is now usually spelled “Mao Zedong” is probably the only reason you don’t hear this one much anymore.

  The list was a bunch of crap; he never made it public, and the number of names on it seemed to change every time he mentioned it. Still, many people believed him, and America was thrust into the era of McCarthyism (“McCarthy Time,” as Billy Joel called it in the song “Leningrad”). It was an era in which just being accused of being a Communist could ruin your career, but naming other people as Communists could make your career.

  Congress had formed the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1938 to find out who was a Communist and who wasn’t (this was, of course, a rather un-American thing to do, but the irony seems to have been lost on them). The committee’s hearings in 1947 led to the creation of the Hollywood blacklist, an unofficial list of names of suspected Communists who were never able to work in Hollywood again. Some famous stars, such as Charlie Chaplin, had to leave the United States to find work after people accused them of being Communists. Meanwhile, people called before the committee who “named names” of those they knew to be Communists went on to careers that lasted decades, though many people thought that naming names was a really slimy thing to do. Even decades later, when director Elia Kazan won a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Oscars in 1999, some people refused to applaud—and comedian Chris Rock called him a rat onstage—because he had named names in the McCarthy era.