American History Revised (20 page)

Understanding the past takes imagination. Continues Gunderson, “It is hard to visualize a time when owning a few books denoted wealth, and donating a thousand volumes was sufficient to have colleges such as Harvard and Yale named for you.” Indeed!

Imagine the Bill of Rights, a document taken for granted by all of us, only not always so. For many, the Bill of Rights was too radical, too incendiary, too “un-American.” In 1923, Upton Sinclair, the famous author and candidate for governor of California, was arrested by the Los Angeles police for reading from the Bill of Rights and charged with expressing ideas “calculated to cause hatred and contempt” of the United States government. He was held for twenty-two hours before a lawyer got him off.

A question that frequently comes up has to do with American behavior during the Nazi Holocaust. During World War II the Nazi war machine killed more than six million Jews; the response of the Allies was passive at best. At times the Allies even looked the other way. The U.S. War Department was urged by the War Refugee Board to bomb the industrial installations and mass-extermination equipment at Auschwitz. The United States refused because such an effort would be “an unwarranted diversion of planes needed elsewhere.”

The War Refugee Board persisted. Armed with secret information from the Czech underground concerning supply routes, key bombing locations, and train schedules, John Pehle, director of the board, proposed that the Allies bomb the railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz. Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy turned it down: “The War Department is of the opinion that the suggested air operation is impracticable….It would not amount to a practical project.” When pressed again with a positive example of how Allied pilots had successfully precision-bombed a French prison, McCloy still demurred. Auschwitz and Birkenau, he said, were one thousand miles into enemy territory. “The positive solution to the problem,” he wrote, “is the earliest possible victory over Germany.”

Many people now criticize FDR’s handling of the Jewish rescue question. PBS in the early 1990s aired a TV program indicting FDR for “deceit and indifference.” In his defense, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger
Jr. points out that FDR was the strongest and most consistent opponent of Hitler, and had appointed so many Jewish professionals to high positions that some called his administration “the Jew Deal.” In addition, FDR continually had to maintain popular support for World War II and keep public attention focused on the main issue: to defeat Germany (not to rescue Jews). Before World War II started, the U.S. had admitted more refugees from Germany and Austria than all other Western countries combined. But FDR was not about to make a crusade out of his quiet efforts to save Jews.

“The attack on FDR,” says Schlesinger, “shows a striking disregard of historical context.”

For a similar example of how revisionism disregards the historical context, consider the rising reputation of Herbert Hoover today. In the 1932 presidential election, Herbert Hoover never knew what hit him. After having implemented aggressive tax cuts to revive the economy, and having enacted the most progressive legislation in history, he was getting attacked from the left for not doing enough—to be expected, perhaps, at a time of widespread economic crisis and thousands of people losing their jobs. What really flummoxed him was the attack from the right. His opponent, Governor Franklin Roosevelt, accused him of being irresponsible and busting the budget.

If we take Hoover’s actions and Roosevelt’s words literally, then the argument can be made that Hoover was a progressive and Roosevelt’s New Deal was merely an evolution, not a revolution. Indeed, many historians today are seeking to embellish Hoover’s reputation, and over the past fifteen or twenty years Herbert Hoover has risen in the ranking of presidents. Yet the fact remains: the voters threw out Hoover because they didn’t feel good about a man who, regardless of his humanitarian and administrative skills and his having been the only president ever to donate his entire salary to charity, could utter incredible statements such as, “Many people have left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.”

1600
When America celebrated its Bicentennial in July 1976, everyone knew the nation was two hundred years old. How quaint America was back then, with men wearing powdered wigs and writing with quill pens! How far the nation had come in such a short time!

Actually there was another two hundred years that most people forget: the first two hundred. The Declaration of Independence occurred a full 284 years after Columbus, 189 years after the second Virginia colony, and 169 years after Plymouth Rock. What took America so long to develop?

“The American economy got started late,” explains one historian. European governments and trading companies in 1600 were reaping phenomenal returns of more than 200 percent a year from their ventures in India and Russia. America could not match this return, for three reasons:

Because England and Holland controlled almost all the eastern seaboard, anyone trying to start a settlement needed to get a charter from the home government. This required having a good agent in London or Amsterdam to mount a lobbying campaign. The agent also needed to attract private investment syndicates to put up the money. Because America was a new, highly risky market, investors were demanding in their appraisal. Only ventures headed by an experienced governor, and offering a clear business plan for generating exports to repay investors, got funded.

The East India Company model for making money—shipping manufactured goods to Asia in exchange for local products—did not work in America because tradeable indigenous products did not exist, and the local economy was not sufficiently developed to generate trade in its own right. Instead of being a trading post, a settlement in America had to become large enough to become economically self-sufficient, including generating its own exports. This took many decades to accomplish.

America had abundant natural resources, but not the kind of high-value items like gold or silks that could justify the cost of transporting them many thousands of miles to developed European markets. The only local product that was profitable was furs—and Canada was a better place to hunt for furs. It was not until the 1700s that the colonists were able to master the trick of extracting concentrated value out of cheap raw materials. Successful colonial innovations included pig iron, potash, barrel staves, whale oil, and tobacco.

In sum, America during the first two hundred years was a struggling territory, rich in land and agricultural resources, but too large and too thinly populated to make economic sense.

In 1763, when Britain signed the Treaty of Paris, obtaining Canada in return for Martinique and Guadeloupe, the British public rose up in rage. They were even more upset when the British government gave away Cuba and the Philippines to Spain in return for Florida and all Spanish territory east of the Mississippi except New Orleans. What did Britain want a North American continent for, with its
wild, uncleared land offering little in the way of natural riches? Far more valuable were the Caribbean islands, which offered sugar and trade.

1675
Some forty years after its founding, this training school for the ministry almost went belly-up. Enrollment had dwindled to just twenty students. The school’s sole assets consisted of a president’s house, a small brick Indian school that was used as a printing shop, and a run-down college hall containing a library, a dormitory, and lecture rooms. Forced to face the reality of the school’s “languishing and dying condition,” the state legislature terminated all salaried professionals; within a month, seventeen of the twenty students had dropped out. The school went begging to the Massachusetts legislature, but to no avail: the legislature had the Indians to worry about.

In the following year, 1675, there occurred King Philip’s War, between the European settlers and the Indians, in which twelve towns were burned to the ground and the state incurred debts that exceeded the value of all personal property in Massachusetts. The college’s future president prayed to God to cut off the head of the Indian leader; within a week his prayers were answered, and the Indian chief’s head was delivered to the college, where the president-elect’s son, a sophomore, took pleasure in personally removing the jaw. Gory times.

That school became Harvard University.

1700
In America today, the anti-tobacco lobby continues to grow, with more and more government regulations and public buildings insisting on a smoke-free environment, whereas in Europe smoking is much more common.

It used to be just the reverse. Tobacco originated in Virginia, and flourished there to such an extent that there arose the popular saying, “Virginia’s prosperity is based on smoke,” whereas in Europe the reaction to tobacco was rabidly negative. In the early to mid-1600s, King James I of England wrote a treatise on tobacco in which he called it “a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fumes thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.” The pope forbade members of the church to use snuff. In Transylvania (now Romania), farmers found to be growing tobacco would have their farms confiscated. In Russia, by order of the tsar, anyone caught smoking had his nose cut off.

The rationale behind these government attitudes toward tobacco—pro in America and con in Europe—had nothing to do with
health or polite manners, but with economics. Tobacco is extremely demanding on the soil, and requires ever-expanding amounts of land just to keep production constant. Europe, aware of the need to maintain land to be able to raise sufficient food, recognized the shortsightedness of cultivating tobacco. Colonial America, with millions of new acres available, never had this constraint.