American History Revised (17 page)

He was tennis star Bill Tilden. For seven years in the 1920s he was invincible, never losing a single major match anywhere in the world. The runner-up athletes in the 1950 voting were Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Bobby Jones, Red Grange, and Johnny Weissmuller.

In 1950 the Associated Press voted it “the supreme athletic achievement of the century.” It was not Babe Ruth’s sixty home runs in 1927; by a margin of two and a half to one, it was Bobby Jones winning—with ease—all four major golf tournaments in 1930: the U.S. Open (for the fourth time in a row), the British Open (for the third time in a row), the U.S. Amateur (for the fifth time in a row), and the British Amateur (for the first time). It was such an astounding achievement that the phrase “grand slam” was invented. Weeks afterward, at the height of his career at age twenty-eight, Jones retired. Sixteen of
the records Jones set in the U.S. Amateur still stand, more than seventy years since he last played the game. In what has been called “the Golden Age of Sport”—the 1920s era of Babe Ruth, Bill Tilden, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Red Grange, and Johnny Weissmuller—Bobby Jones stands out as the brightest star.

More than just a superb athlete, he was a gentleman. In a 1928 playoff match for the U.S. Open, Jones accidentally touched the ball as he was lining up to make his shot. Nobody noticed it, but Jones called a foul on himself. When the officials demurred that they had noticed nothing and would not call a foul, Jones insisted they do so. When the match finally ended, Jones had lost by one stroke. Afterward, when the chief umpire commended Jones for his integrity, Jones responded, “Do you commend a bank robber for not robbing a bank? No, you don’t. This is how the game of golf should be played at all times.”

Most remarkable of all, Jones only played the game three months out of the year. The rest of the time he was pursuing his education, earning a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech, a B.A. in English literature from Harvard, and spending a year in Emory Law School before dropping out because he had already passed the Georgia bar exam and didn’t need to be in school anymore.

Never a man of brute physical strength like most great athletes, he explained the secret of his success: “Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course, the space between your ears.” He was talking about focus and concentration—exertions that caused him to lose as much as twenty pounds during a five-day match. But he forgot to mention qualities of the heart—modesty, humor, and grace—that won him devoted fans and made him the only man ever to receive two New York City ticker-tape parades. His favorite prize came in 1958, thirty years after he retired, when he was honored as a freeman of the city of St. Andrews in Scotland, the only American so honored since Benjamin Franklin in 1759.

By then he was in a wheelchair. Probably because of his ferocious swinging of a golf club without proper year-round training, he had damaged his spine and contracted syringeomyelia, a progressive disease like Lou Gehrig’s that causes muscle atrophy. He accepted the fact that there was no cure. When he finally died in 1971, he weighed less than eighty pounds. Wrote the
New Yorker
, “As a young man he was able to stand up to just about the best that life can offer, which is not easy, and later he stood up with equal grace to just about the worst.”

Old champions never die. In its eulogy for Bobby Jones and a bygone era, the
New York Times
wrote, “He is the idol for those who love the game for what there is in it, not for what they can get out of it.”

1937
Not Martin Luther King Jr., but A. Philip Randolph, founder and president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters from 1925 to 1968. Long before King became famous, Randolph had paved the way with his successful strike against the Pullman Company in 1937, his 1941 petition to end segregation in the defense industry, his 1948 march demanding an end to segregation in the military, and his facilitating the 1955 Rosa Parks sit-in in Montgomery, Alabama.

“You are truly the Dean of Negro leaders,” Martin Luther King wrote to him in 1958. At the 1963 Washington Mall demonstration of 250,000 people—watched by millions of TV viewers around the globe—the lead speaker was not John Lewis or Roy Wilkins or Martin Luther King, it was the pioneer from the pre-TV days, A. Philip Randolph, then a seventy-two-year-old man making his last hurrah. “For more than forty years, he was a tower and beacon of strength and hope for the entire black community,” said NAACP president Benjamin Hooks. Awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor—the Medal of Freedom—by President Lyndon Johnson in 1969, Randolph faded into obscurity during the highly charged late 1960s and early 1970s. Never one who sought money or personal gain, he spent his last years alone in a Harlem apartment, and got mugged by local hoodlums who had no idea who he was. Upon his death in 1979 at the age of ninety, his obituary in the
New York Times
appeared not on the front page but on page five of Section B (for metropolitan area news). Commented Hooks, “It’s so sad because there are so many young people today for whom that name means very little.”

But Woodrow Wilson knew. Many years earlier, his administration had branded him “the most dangerous Negro in America.” So, too, did Franklin Roosevelt, who took a quite different posture and invited him to the White House. “You and I share a kinship in our great interest in human and social justice,” he said. So, too, did Harry Truman, who agreed to desegregate the armed forces. So, too, did Richard Nixon, who greeted him warmly as “the grand old man of American labor.”

Today, young people barely know the name, and they miss the opportunity to draw inspiration from a remarkable life story of determination and sacrifice. They miss the struggle of a man who “had no soles on his shoes. His blue serge suit, he wore it so long it began to shine like a looking glass. He came out sometimes with just his fare, one way. He had nothing else.” In 1933, when his friend Fiorello La Guardia became mayor of New York and offered him a job with the city government at a desperately needed salary of $7,000 a year, Randolph turned it down. Regardless of his poverty, he kept his eye on the goal: “Nothing can keep us from winning.” Offered the opportunity to run
for Congress in a safe district, he declined. His entire life was devoted to advancing the cause of black workers in the labor movement.

Singlehandedly he took on the most powerful company in the United States, the Pullman Company, a fearful union buster. It took twelve years of work, but in 1937 there occurred the most dramatic moment in the history of American labor relations when the Pullman Company entered the negotiating session with Randolph’s union and announced, to everyone’s shock and surprise, “Gentlemen, the Pullman Company is ready to sign.”

It was a defining moment in the fledgling civil rights movement, at a time when jobs and wages were the priority, not equal rights.

1940
Like Nikola Tesla, this person was one of our great scientists who never got credit because of being too far ahead of her time. Yes, she was a woman—and a Hollywood sex goddess at that. Singlehandedly, she changed the face of the U.S. missile defense system. Her radio-frequency patent eventually led to “spectrum technology,” later used for guiding weapons in the Gulf War and now the basis for cell phones and Internet access.

At the peak of her career in 1940, known as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” the Austrian-born Hedy Lamarr was at a Hollywood dinner party, where she got into a conversation with composer George Antheil. She got so excited she left the party and scrawled her phone number in lipstick on his car windshield. Right away they got together, not for a love affair, but to develop her invention to beat the Nazis who had overrun her native Austria. Two years later Lamarr and Antheil got a U.S. patent for a “secret communications system” (filed jointly, but Antheil gave Lamarr all the credit).

Hedy Lamarr

In war, the only way a ship can adjust the direction of a torpedo toward another moving ship is by radio signal. The problem with radio communications is that
sender and receiver need to send a message on the same wavelength in order to communicate, but a single wavelength can be easily identified or jammed by the target ship. Lamarr’s idea was to “hop” from one frequency to another, so that the listener could not figure out what was going on. To do this, she and Antheil devised a system of eighty-eight frequencies, the same number of notes a piano has.

United States Patent #2,292,387 reads as follows:

Lamarr’s patent goes into great technical detail describing a sophisticated antijamming device for use in radio-controlled torpedoes, whereby a signal is broadcast over a random series of radio frequencies, hopping from frequency to frequency at split-second intervals: would-be eavesdroppers hear only unintelligible blips. The patent design utilized a mix of radio transmitters, modulators, relays, control logic, electric motors, pneumatic actuators, and suction pumps.

The U.S. generals were so dumbfounded by a Hollywood movie star telling them what to do that they ignored her idea and told her the best contribution she could make to the war effort was to give a kiss to every person who bought a war savings bond. This she did: in one evening she raised $6 million. Said the
New York Times
, “She knew what Nazism would do to this country because she knew what it did to her native country, Austria. ‘I’m giving all I can because I have found a home here and want to keep it.’”

Alas, Lamarr’s invention was so advanced that it could not be commercialized until 1962—three years after the seventeen-year patent expired. Even though her invention formed the basis of the $25-billion U.S. defense communications system, she earned not a dime. Remembered later only for her stunning beauty, she told
Forbes
magazine in 1990, “I guess they just take and forget about a person.” Even more might-have-been sorrows were to come. In the 1990s, new patents based on Lamarr’s invention led to the explosion of “spectrum wave” technologies that are now used in billions of computers, database systems, and cell phones around the world to ensure privacy. Hedy Lamarr, in the meantime, had gone through six expensive husbands and was reduced to living alone in a one-bedroom apartment in Miami, on a Screen Actors Guild pension and social security. But thanks to efforts of engineers at Lockheed Martin and other contractors who appreciated what she had created, and although
she was too frail to attend, she received honors at computer technology conferences before she died in 2000. In 2002 she was inducted into the Electronic Design Hall of Fame (along with twenty-five others, including Marconi, Tesla, Steve Jobs, William Hewlett, and David Packard). Her inscription reads: