American History Revised (31 page)

Spurred on by money-hungry universities, many wealthy people leave money to their alma mater with their name emblazoned on a building—but it didn’t used to be that way.

Fascinated by the system of “residential colleges” at Oxford and Cambridge as a solution to making large universities more egalitarian and personal for students, Edward Harkness approached his alma mater, Yale, in 1928 and offered to bankroll a transformation of the campus. Yale dithered, so Harkness went to archrival Harvard—and got an acceptance “in ten seconds.” Two years later Harkness and the Harvard president were touring the first two of the Harvard “houses” now completed, and Harkness asked that one of them be named Lowell House in appreciation of the Harvard president’s support. “Certainly,” said Abbott Lawrence Lowell,
“if you will allow another to be named after you.”

It was a major miscalculation. “He dropped my arm,” recalled Lowell, “and moved away almost as if I had suggested a crime.” A year later all seven houses were completed, none of them named for their gentleman benefactor. When Yale, embarrassed at Harvard’s good fortune, asked Harkness to reconsider, Harkness forgave his alma mater and bankrolled a similar project for Yale.

Julius Rosenwald, the chief executive who built up Sears Roebuck, gave away $63 million to charity before he died in 1932. Rosenwald was very clever in the way he gave away his money for five thousand schools: the schools were for African-Americans in eleven Southern states. His reasoning? Having experienced segregation as a Jew, he knew that the city fathers would never tolerate letting white schools fall behind Rosenwald-funded black schools. The result was increased government funding of white schools, and the betterment of schools everywhere.

Dr. Laszlo Tauber escaped a Nazi concentration camp and arrived in America in 1947 with seven hundred dollars in his pocket. He was never interested in making money; he simply wanted to practice surgery. He dreamed of having his own hospital, so in his spare time he got into the construction business, developing office buildings in Washington DC. He practiced surgery all his life, but he also became the U.S. government’s largest landlord, with a net worth of $1 billion. Upon his death in 2003, Dr. Tauber’s will directed that 20 percent of his estate go to philanthropy and 80 percent to his two children and their children, with the stipulation that they can never touch the capital and can never draw a yearly income greater than that of the president of the United States (currently $400,000). The surplus income, added to the capital, eventually will create one of the world’s largest foundations. Upon the death of the last grandchild, the foundation is to be disbanded and the billions are to be distributed, 25 percent to the governments of Israel and the Netherlands, and 75 percent to the government of the United States, “the land of opportunity.”

1900
It is ironic that the heroic vision of the Wild West we remember today comes to us not from Westerners but from Eastern dudes: Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister, and Frederic Remington. Roosevelt and Wister were Harvard graduates;
Remington a Yale graduate. After extensive sojourns to the West to experience the life of the cowboy, each returned home to do his creative work. Observes the historian David McCullough:

If this seems strange, consider that the opportunity to see ourselves as others see us is part of the richness of America’s heritage. Not only the West, but also America itself, has been described best by outsiders: the definitive analysis of early America was written by a Frenchman, the best description of the American commonwealth was written by an Englishman, and the most penetrating analysis of American race relations was written by a Swede. The three outsiders were Alexis de Tocqueville, James Bryce, and Gunnar Myrdal.

Probably no man loved America more than a Frenchman, the Marquis de Lafayette. He not only named his children George Washington and Virginie, but took tons of earth with him back to France so he could be buried in American soil.

1924
America’s most famous sculpture is Mount Rushmore, featuring four presidents. Why those four? According to a tourist brochure put out by the National Park Service, “These four figures symbolize the birth and trials of the first 150 years of the United States.” Actually, when Gutzon Borglum picked his subjects in 1924, he used a different criterion. Three presidents obviously qualified; the fourth president, however, is unlike the other three and was very lucky to make it. To this day, historians dispute the meaning of his inclusion.

How Abraham Lincoln made it, nobody knows. According to Borglum’s widow, Mount Rushmore was intended as a monument to America’s expansion across the continent. Washington as a founder of the republic, Jefferson as the force behind the Louisiana Purchase, and Theodore Roosevelt as the local Badlands cowboy who had become the hero of the expansionist Spanish-American War, were obvious choices.
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How did Lincoln make it? The lame excuse offered by Borglum’s
widow was that although Lincoln had played no role in the nation’s westward expansion, he had been “the savior of the republic” and kept it from shrinking.

1932
Relations between the president and the press have always been adversarial. Even George Washington felt abused and hounded in his second term, and complained about having to undergo such magnifying-glass scrutiny. Every president has felt this way—with the exception of one. Throughout his tenure, the press made a special effort and displayed an extraordinary degree of courtesy and consideration for his physical handicap.

Have you ever wondered why all photos of FDR show him sitting down or show just the upper part of his body? FDR was a cripple, prevented by polio from ever walking again. According to his grandson Curtis Roosevelt, every day for twenty-four years he “could not get out of bed, get dressed, reach the bathroom or get to his desk without the assistance of another person and a wheelchair.” But he wanted no mention of his disability, “particularly any comment that conveyed sympathy. ‘Sob stuff,’ he called it. He was very much of the stiff upper lip tradition.”

The press tacitly agreed not to embarrass the helpless president by photographing him in an awkward physical effort; the dignity of the man and the office must be preserved. He wanted no pictures of him holding on to other people for support; only photographs taken after he had reached a chair and sat down were allowed. For many Americans, the first inkling they had of the severity of their leader’s infirmity was when they saw him hobbling his way on crutches, with aides on both sides, up to the podium to give his first inaugural speech. No photograph was ever printed (one photo was taken; it remained in library archives until recently).

Today, FDR is part of today’s cultural wars, with many advocates complaining that the new FDR Memorial fails to highlight his disability. Said a
USA Today
editorial, “The galleries contain not one reference to FDR’s greatest feat: achieving all that he did while battling the paralysis of polio….That’s wrong. Roosevelt’s disability is part of his history.”

That may be true today, but it was not then. Says another grandson, David Roosevelt, “FDR guarded his condition closely.” Not that FDR was ashamed of it in any way; he simply believed he had to hide his disability to become president and that being recognized as a cripple would diminish his image as a strong wartime leader. He would disagree with today’s revisionists who claim his disability was “his greatest feat.” For him, it was of secondary importance.

In 1942 Winston Churchill visited the
president at Hyde Park. The president took his guest out for a drive. Because FDR couldn’t use his feet on the brake, clutch, or accelerator, he had a car equipped with an ingenious arrangement that enabled him to do everything with his hands. Driving his car with only one hand on its special controls, the president took his visitor on a high-speed spin through the winding forests along the Hudson River. Churchill was terrified. “Don’t worry,” teased the president, “just feel my biceps.” Churchill puts his hands around FDR’s upper right arm, and agreed FDR had the arms of a boxing champion.

Yet nobody suggests that for an FDR memorial.

1935
Built during the Depression, it is one of America’s greatest engineering marvels and major tourist attractions today. Standing sixty stories high, it was built with no prior model for its design—except that it would have to support 45,000 pounds per square foot. “Theories of stress and strain had never before been applied to such immense force.”