The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History

by Adam Selzer

  MORE “WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE” LINES

  DORIS DAY: A singer and actress known for her squeaky-clean image.

  RED CHINA: In 1949, China became the People’s Republic of China, a Communist nation led by Chairman Mao Zedong. People in the West often called it Red China, because Communists are known to be attracted to the color red.

  JOHNNIE RAY: A popular singer who, though he wasn’t a rocker, used to beat up his piano and roll around on the floor.

  SOUTH PACIFIC: A musical.

  WALTER WINCHELL: A journalist who pioneered the gossip column.

  Though he wasn’t actually involved in the committee, McCarthy continued to build his own career by accusing anyone who disagreed with him of being a Commie spy. In 1954, when the U.S. Army accused McCarthy and his chief aide, Roy Cohn (who would show up later in “We Didn’t Start the Fire”) of pressuring them to give preferential treatment to one of McCarthy’s friends, the Senate began the famous Army-McCarthy hearings, during which McCarthy was exposed as a loudmouth bully.

  During these hearings, whenever he found himself losing an argument, he’d just start accusing people of being Communists. Finally, in response to this, the army’s attorney said, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” McCarthy quickly spoke up to accuse someone who worked in that attorney’s office of being a Commie, but the attorney interrupted and said, “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency at all?” The Senate gallery, which was filled with people who were getting heartily sick of McCarthy’s bullying, applauded.

  McCarthy hated the Russians, but must have had a soft spot for Transylvanians. We like to imagine that one day Senator McCarthy went to the barber, showed him a picture of Dracula, and said, “Here! make me look like this!” The barber, not wanting to be accused of working for the Russians, did as he was told.

  At the end of 1954, the Senate voted to censure McCarthy. A censure doesn’t really do anything to punish the censuree, but it had only happened to a couple of senators before. McCarthy finished out his term, but his remaining speeches were usually made to nearly empty rooms, as his fellow senators had started to avoid him. After the censure, he descended into alcoholism, frequently showing up drunk in the Senate chambers, and when he died in 1957, it was generally agreed that he had drunk himself to death.

  “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity.”—Dwight D. Eisenhower

  But the blacklist endured for years.

  EISENHOWER59

  Dwight D. Eisenhower wasn’t a member of either political party during the war. This is fairly common for generals, though Eisenhower may not have been so extreme; many of them are actually sort of fanatical about not voting—or even having any political opinions of their own—since they have to work for whoever the commander in chief happens to be.

  Everyone agreed that Eisenhower was a heck of a general—even though he never fought on the front lines himself—and after the war, both parties tried to recruit him to run for president in 1948. He turned both of them down.

  But in 1952, Republicans launched a Draft Eisenhower movement. Over on the Democratic side, President Truman himself tried to get Eisenhower to run as a Democrat. Eisenhower continued to turn both of them down, even after the Draft Eisenhower guys started using the slogan “We Like Ike,” which really caught on, helping him win the Republican New Hampshire primary despite the fact that he’d never spoken about his poitical views and wasn’t even on the ballot—he’s one of just a few modern candidates who have ever won primaries as write-ins. Figuring that he had better chances as a Republican, he announced his candidacy the next day as an official Republican.

  He ended up in a campaign for the nomination against Robert Taft, the son of President William H. Taft, that lasted all the way to the convention. Voters at the convention might have been concerned that Eisenhower wasn’t a “real” Republican, since he’d just joined the party a few months before, but they decided that Eisenhower was a safer bet than Taft to win the election, and he won the nomination on the first ballot. He went on to win the general election against Adlai Stevenson, the governor of Illinois.

  As president, one of his most notable acts was to vastly improve the interstate highway system. Back in 1919, when he was in the army, he had been involved in the Transcontinental Motor Convoy, an experiment the army conducted to see if it was possible to drive automobiles all the way across the country. It was, but it took two months at an average speed of six miles per hour over lousy dirt roads and mud.

  Eisenhower, who had been impressed by the Autobahn system in Germany while he was over there during the war, felt that America was going to need better interstates. The age of the automobile was clearly at hand. For another, he felt that American cities might be targets if there was a World War III, and a good interstate system was essential if they were to be evacuated.

  Given Eisenhower’s popularity, the Democrats hardly bothered with the 1956 election. They ran Adlai Stevenson again, despite the fact that he’d been pretty well crushed back in ’52. He was crushed again in ’56, but Stevenson still got an expressway named after him, which is more than a lot of people who win presidential elections get.

  Adlai Stevenson tried to get nominated again in 1960, but the Democrats had learned their lesson by then.

  After winning his second term, Eisenhower was the first president to be constitutionally barred from seeking a third term under the new law limiting presidents to two terms. In his farewell address, Eisenhower spoke about what he called the military-industrial complex, warning that while a strong army was essential, people were going to have to watch out for big businesses, which stood to make a whole pile of money manufacturing weapons, and which might push the country to go to war—and stay at war—just because it was profitable for them.

  Richard Nixon: A guy Billy Joel was just getting started with, showing a no-cavities smile that makes us suspect he must have just stolen something. The photographer’s wallet, perhaps.

  Apparently, few people paid attention.

  RICHARD NIXON

  Richard Nixon’s real fame wouldn’t come for another decade or so, but his loudly anti-Communist stance made him a good vice presidential candidate for Eisenhower, who some worried was soft on Commies. He was elected to the vice presidency in 1952.

  GREAT MYTHS OF HISTORY

  Lots of history books still say that Eisenhower declared that one mile of every five on the interstates had to be straight so that it could be used as a runway for airplanes in the event of a war. This, however, is a myth.

  He was best known at this time for his “Checkers Speech.” In September of 1952, during the campaign, he was accused of keeping a chunk of campaign money as a slush fund for personal use. He became so unpopular that people began to pressure Eisenhower to replace him with another running mate.

  Nixon took to the airwaves, making a televised speech in which he detailed his personal finances and claimed that he had, in fact, received only one contribution that was for personal use: a cocker spaniel that a donor had given to his daughters, who named the dog Checkers. “The kids,” he said, “… love the dog … and regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.” The Republican Party let him keep the dog, and decided to keep Nixon, too, though many thought that the Nixons got the better end of the deal.

  Nixon went on to serve as vice president throughout the 1950s, taking the office at the young age of thirty-nine. He went on to narrowly lose the presidential election in 1960 to John F. Kennedy. After that, he tried to run for governor of California. When he lost that, too, he held a press conference in which he told reporters that he was retiring from politics, and that he felt bad for them, since “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

  In reality, the world was just getting its kicking shoes warmed up for Nixon’s behind.


  TELEVISION

  Television, or TV, as the youngsters called it, had been around for a long time by the early 1950s, but it took a while for it to catch on. Early models cost a fortune, and during World War II, only about five cities even had television stations. Even people who lived in cities that did have stations didn’t have many good programs to watch; one of the bigger shows of the day was something called Missus Goes a-Shopping. Does that sound awful or what?

  OTHER STUFF IN THIS VERSE OF “WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE”

  STUDEBAKER: A car that was about the size of a tank. Interstate highway systems improved remarkably in the 1950s, making cross-country road trips a whole lot easier.

  NORTH KOREA, SOUTH KOREA: Here, Joel gives only a passing mention to the Korean War.

  In 1947, the year of TV’s first hit (The Howdy Doody Show, a puppet show), there weren’t quite two hundred thousand television sets in all of the United States. But by 1952, roughly the year Billy Joel has worked his way up to when he mentions television in the song, there were more than twenty million sets in the country. The number would keep growing until practically everyone had one and couldn’t think of a single thing better to do than watch it, despite the fact that there was never anything good on. It was a running joke at the time that when you could get TVs to get a good picture in the first place (which practically required a degree in engineering), the only thing on was cowboy shows.

  It’s tempting to make wisecracks to the effect that most of the shows from back then couldn’t have been any worse than they are right now, but the fact is that, despite what nostalgic baby boomers will tell you, practically everything on the air in those days really stank. Sure, there were some hits, like I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners, that are still watchable today, but most of the programs from the early days of TV have slinked off into obscurity by now because no one can possibly sit through them.

  Among the biggest hits of the day were quiz shows, which were sort of like modern game shows, only a lot less goofy. Most of the shows were simple question-and-answer shows, and right from the start, many of them were rigged. There was no grand conspiracy behind this or anything—producers figured out all on their own that supplying answers to popular candidates would help keep ratings up by keeping the popular people on the show longer. They were eventually caught, and people learned a valuable lesson about believing what they saw on TV.

  The quiz show Twenty-one. Why, just looking at it makes us want some Geritol!

  MARILYN MONROE

  Probably the biggest movie star of the 1950s was Marilyn Monroe, who became famous right around the time nude pictures of her began to spread around. Her ability to absolutely own every frame of a movie she appeared in made her a star, but it was the nude-photo scandal (which hadn’t really happened to a movie star before), and her own casual reaction to it, that made her an icon. Few stars had ever been so risqué; when asked what she’d had on during the photo shoot, Monroe casually replied, “The radio.”

  But perhaps what truly made Monroe a legend in America was her 1954 marriage to Joe DiMaggio, even though the marriage didn’t last a year. The era of short-lived celebrity marriages had begun decades ago—movie stars had been getting married and promptly divorced from day one—but the marriage of two such icons was huge. And unlike so many others who marry movie stars, DiMaggio was a class act. He never blabbed about the marriage in public, even though he lived for decades after Monroe’s death.

  Monroe then married Arthur Miller, a playwright whose 1953 hit, The Crucible, made several less-than-subtle comparisons between McCarthyism and the Salem witch trials.

  As if that weren’t enough to make her notorious, by the 1960s, rumors were going around that she was having an affair with none other than the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy. Her birthday serenade to Kennedy may be the sexiest song anyone ever sang to a president in public.

  And if that didn’t make her enough of an icon, she went on to do something that will make almost any star a legend: she died young under mysterious circumstances. She was found dead in her house in 1962, an apparent suicide, though many people believed, and many still believe, that it was murder.

  Cheapskate historians like us can’t find free pictures of Marilyn Monroe to use, so here’s one of James Monroe, our fifth president, whom we didn’t show anywhere else in the book. His administration is best remembered for the Monroe Doctrine, the Missouri Compromise, and the Era of Good Feelings. He was not related to Marilyn, whose real name was Norma Jean Baker. Heck, in this shot, you don’t even get to drool over his dynamite gams!

  THE ROSENBERGS

  Being a Communist in America was never illegal, but it could get you into a whole lot of trouble. It may, in fact, have been all that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were guilty of.

  In 1951, the Rosenbergs were accused of being employed by the KGB (the big Russian spy organization) and of passing secrets about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. At the time, McCarthyism was in full swing. The Rosenbergs were quickly convicted and were executed in the electric chair in 1953. The executions fueled people’s fears that their neighbors might be working for the Russians.

  The Rosenbergs’ children were adopted by the writer of the antilynching song “Strange Fruit,” which was a hit for Billie Holiday, despite being about the least cheery song ever written.

  Unlike many similar suspects, the Rosenbergs were widely believed to be guilty. However, as years passed, it became evident that they didn’t really tell the Soviets anything of any consequence, and many began to believe they were convicted and executed for reasons more to do with McCarthyism than with anything they actually did (though we now know that they were indeed guilty).

  VACCINE

  Do you know anyone who has polio? You probably don’t. And that’s because of the Salk vaccine.

  No disease was more feared by parents in the early 1950s than polio. It was a crippling disease that usually attacked children and could lead to paralysis and death, and no one really knew how it spread or how to keep their children from getting it.

  In 1955 Jonas Salk introduced a vaccine that protected people from the disease. When it was announced in 1955 that polio could now be prevented, bells rang and drivers honked their horns for joy. Children everywhere rejoiced—until they found out they were going to have to get a shot, of course.

  This began a huge push to get every kid in the country vaccinated against polio in an effort to eradicate the disease, which was pretty successful. Polio still exists around the world, but the last naturally occurring case in America was reported in 1979.

  OTHER STUFF IN THE SONG

  H-BOMB: The hydrogen bomb, a newer, even deadlier version of the atomic bomb that the United States first tested in 1952. The Soviets had one soon after.

  SUGAR RAY: A boxer, six-time world champion Sugar Ray Robinson.

  PANMUNJOM: A village in Korea where peace accords were worked out.

  BRANDO: Marlon Brando, an actor, a proponent of Method acting, the technique of “becoming” your character, which really caught on in the 1950s.

  THE KING AND I: A musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

  THE CATCHER IN THE RYE: A novel by J. D. Salinger that got banned a lot—and still does. Any book that’s still getting banned six decades after publication is sure to be worth reading.

  Salk, who famously refused to patent the vaccine (which would have made him ridiculously rich) on the grounds that it would be wrong to profit from a scientific discovery, went on to spend his later years trying to develop a vaccine for AIDS.

  ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK (OR, WHY WE ALL WORSHIP SATAN NOW)

  Popular music hadn’t exactly sucked since about 1920; the Jazz Age ushered in an era when depressing parlor songs began to fall out of favor as the sound of the day. But it was rock ’n’ roll that really began to shape the musical landscape of youth culture in the 1950s.

  Rock ’n’ roll music had been around for a long time; its origins go back at least a
s far as the blues music of the late nineteenth century, which combined European melodies and African rhythms. What we came to call rock ’n’ roll mixed jazz, blues, country, gospel, and nearly every other kind of music into one big cultural mishmash. The wild (for its time) style began to catch on in America around the late 1940s.

  The style was generally thought of as exclusively “black music,” but Alan Freed, a Cleveland disc jockey, began playing rock music for mixed-race audiences in 1951. He’s usually credited with being the first to call the music “rock and roll,” at least on the radio, but the term was a euphemism for sex and was used in rhythm and blues music frequently at the time. It was a “neutral” term racewise, which helped it cross over to a mainstream audience that would have been afraid of “black music.”

  COMMUNIST BLOC

  A song to the tune of “Jingle Bell Rock,” by the Smart Aleck Staff!

  Communist, Communist, Communist bloc,

  Spend all our time just waitin’ in line.

  All of the bourgeoisie60 feared revolution—

  Now the Commie regime’s begun!

  Communist, Communist, Communist bloc,

  Seizin’ the means to halt the machines,

  Dancin’ and prancin’ around in Red Square