American History Revised (16 page)

A bitter Insull, forced out of his sixty presidencies and directorships, fled to Europe. Indicted by the U.S. government, he reluctantly returned to stand trial. The prosecutors had spent two years preparing their case, and FDR—who undoubtedly didn’t know that an Insull company was supplying the power for his Warm Springs, Georgia, retreat—was giving speeches denouncing holding companies like Insull’s and implying they had helped cause the Depression. In the city of Chicago, where 700,000 people were out of work, Insull’s fate in court looked ominous indeed. It was one of the most celebrated trials of the century, with Insull making a dramatic appearance on the witness stand to clear his good name. The trial took fifty-four days and generated a transcript of 9,500 pages. In deliberations lasting only two hours, the jury found him innocent of all charges. Insull returned to Paris, where he soon died, flat broke. In the meantime, during the Depression when some 40 percent of the stock of America’s companies was worth nothing, the stock of Insull’s utility companies maintained its value, dropping less than 1 percent. None of his companies went under, none of his employees lost their jobs, and all of his customers continued to enjoy cheap electricity. Even as late as the 1960s, Insull’s companies were supplying one-eighth of America’s electricity and gas—a remarkable longevity of social and economic performance equal to that of Henry Ford or Thomas Watson.

Compared to today’s CEOs, why is Insull such a remarkable man? Because he put his employees and shareholders ahead of his own personal interests. Unlike Enron executives who stashed away money by building $10-million homes in tax-friendly Florida, where one’s home cannot be taken away, Insull put up everything he had—and paid the price.

1917
President Woodrow Wilson once said the Russian revolution was one of the greatest events in the history of mankind, comparable to 1776 in America.

He was referring to the first revolution—the March overthrow of the tsar, not the subsequent October Revolution led by Lenin. At a time of mounting social unrest in Russia, the loss of the tsar was not missed by anyone, including the tsar’s many cousins who were rulers in Europe—none of whom rushed to his rescue or tried to save him.

At the urging of the British and French, who were active in Russia trying to support the new Russian government under Kerensky, President Wilson sent a military expedition to the port of Archangel on the White Sea in North Russia. A lot of troubles were soon to come, involving insufficient food and clothing supplies as well as disputes with the local British commander over who was in charge. Most troubling of all was the lack of popular support from the Russian population: the Russian peasants showed little inclination to support the Allied campaign against the Germans.

When the Kerensky liberal regime collapsed, Lenin and the Bolsheviks took over and signed a separate peace with Germany. The United States and the Allies now found themselves facing a Germany that could concentrate all its forces on the western front. They also found the Bolsheviks in a weak position, holding power only in Moscow and faced with opposition from no less than twenty-four separate governments “stretching from the Urals to Vladivostok with no common bond except a hatred of Bolshevism and a distrust of Tsarists.” On a more urgent note, there were some fifty thousand Czech-Slovak troops trapped in Russia trying to get home to fight for the liberation of their country. In addition, several million tons of Allied military equipment were stored in warehouses in Siberia. To rescue the troops and equipment, France and Britain begged the United States for more troops. At the urging of the State Department, but against the counsel of his military advisers, President Wilson agreed to send a second expedition, this one to Vladivostok. “Europe and the world,” he said, “could not be at peace if Russia was not.” The U.S. now had fifteen thousand troops in Russia.

From the beginning, Wilson, a professional historian in his early days, was determined to restrict America’s involvement to pure humanitarianism. “Europe had made a great mistake when they attempted to interfere in the French Revolution,” he said. “The Russian people must solve their own problems without outside interference.”

How fifteen thousand troops could be construed as anything other than interference, Wilson did not say. Lofty words often reflect muddled thinking, especially
in international diplomacy. How Wilson and the State Department could possibly think a tiny U.S. force could hold its own against a Red Army of three million men was never explained. Certainly the Bolsheviks of Lenin were hardly about to spare any prisoners in their battle to prevail beyond Moscow. Arrayed against them were the Cossacks in Siberia, known as the White Army, with 250,000 men; they were equally ruthless. All along the Trans-Siberian Railroad, massacres, rapes, and looting were common. Even nurses from the International Red Cross were raped and murdered. Caught in the middle were U.S. troops fighting on one side one day and holding off the other side on another day. Back in Archangel, circumstances were no better. Executions of suspects, individual and wholesale, occurred daily. Prisoners captured by the Bolsheviks were brutally tortured and murdered, terrifying the local population exactly as intended. Unable to defend themselves, the peasant population increasingly blamed the Americans for the chaos. With Germany now defeated and out of the war, American soldiers despaired of being trapped in a never-ending war in a vast wasteland. “What are we here for?” became the popular refrain. One general, sent over from Washington DC to investigate, immediately agreed and urged withdrawal: “Original object of expedition no longer exists. Allies have not been received with hospitality.” For the White Russians whom the Allies were trying to help, intervention was even more disastrous in that it helped the Bolsheviks focus their propaganda on foreign “invaders” and deny the existence of a civil war.

For the Americans it was like Iraq would be eighty-five years later: a war undertaken in a large faraway land and hindered from the start by over-optimism, poor planning, insufficient troops, lack of clear strategy, and angry conflicts between the Defense Department and the State Department (except that in this case it was the State Department that was bellicose). President Wilson in his instructions made it abundantly clear that American troops were not to take one side or another, but in the middle of a civil war, neither local side was going to observe the rules set by an invading occupier claiming to be neutral. American soldiers sent on a humanitarian mission found themselves fighting for their own survival.

Soldiers’ letters were censored to prevent any bad news from getting back home, but some letters got through. Said the
Chicago Tribune
, “Our men are dying for a cause, the purpose of which they are no more certain than we in America. America has not declared war on Russia, but Americans are killing Russians and are being killed by them.” The isolationist senator from California, Hiram Johnson, famous for his epigram “The first casualty when war comes is truth,” jumped into the fray and observed that the U.S. soldiers in Russia “served under conditions that were the
most confusing and perplexing that an American army was ever asked to contend with.” Some five hundred Americans died in the conflict. The last of the American soldiers came home in 1921, their mission to promote democracy in Russia a shambles. Unable to admit defeat—though it ranks as America’s greatest military failure—the United States withheld establishing diplomatic relations until 1934, while Leninism ran rampant. Such was the sorry end of the war formally called the Allied Intervention into Russia, more accurately called by veterans the Frozen War, the Winter War, the Unknown War, the Secret War, the Forgotten War.

1925
For almost five years he was the best left-handed pitcher in baseball. In his last full season he pitched an incredible thirty-five complete games out of thirty-eight starts, and won twenty-four. He pitched twenty-seven scoreless World Series innings—a record that lasted forty years—and his record for most shutouts in a season by a lefthander still stands. He compiled a lifetime winning percentage of .671 and an ERA of 2.28. Yet his pitching exploits are not recorded in the Cooperstown Hall of Fame. Why?

Because he went on to even greater exploits as a hitter, the Great Bambino, the Sultan of Swat: Babe Ruth. With a lifetime batting average of .342 and 714 home runs, he has to be the best hitter of all time. But he was also an amazing pitcher, so good in fact that when he announced his plan to become an outfielder and focus on his hitting, Hall of Famer Tris Speaker predicted, “Ruth is making a big mistake.”
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The highest-paid athlete of the era was not Babe Ruth, who made $20,000 a year, but bike racer Fred Spencer, who made more than $100,000. The most popular sport in America was six-day bicycle racing, nonexistent in America now, but still popular in Europe. It was the most grueling sport of any, equaled only by heavyweight boxing: for six days, pairs of cyclists would race around an indoor track nonstop day and night, pausing only for naps and a quick meal of steak and eggs. Crowds went wild cheering as bicyclists, exhausted to the core, bumped into each other and sent each other sprawling on the wooden track, generating severe sprains and broken bones. But because cyclists were paid a percentage of the gate, a champion cyclist could earn as much as one thousand dollars a day. It was “a hard way to earn an easy living.” In 1925, after a six-day race at Madison Square Garden in New York, a sports promoter arranged a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria
Hotel for the eight greatest athletes of the day. Two of them were bicycle racers.

Dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Standing from left: baseball’s Babe Ruth, heavyweight champion Gene Tunney, swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, and hockey player Bill Cook. Seated from left: tennis champion Bill Tilden, golfer Bobby Jones, and bike racers Fred Spencer and Charley Winters

In 1950 the nation’s sportswriters voted for the outstanding athlete of the first half of the century. Out of six leading candidates, one received twice as many votes as anyone else.