American History Revised (32 page)

The tourist attraction is Hoover Dam, twenty miles outside of Las Vegas. Consisting of 66 million tons of concrete (almost as much as all of the twentieth century’s previous projects built by the Bureau of Reclamation), and designed as a horizontal curved arch facing upstream (rather than a flat embankment), Hoover Dam has withstood earthquakes and water pressure admirably. The biggest problem in building the dam was trying to pour large amounts of concrete into blocks that would remain stable (the interaction of water, crushed stone, sand, and cement causes wet cement to expand, and then contract as it dries). The dam’s size and weight would generate pressures and mass that would heat the concrete to 130 degrees, making the material unstable. “Though the dam would appear solid, it would be, in reality, a pyramid of warm pudding.” The engineers therefore devised an ingenious plan to cool the blocks evenly by circulating ice water through a series of one-inch pipes. By lowering the temperature to 43 degrees near the base and 72 degrees near the crest, the engineers cut down the cooling time from one hundred years to a miraculous twenty months.

After its victory at the Coral Sea in 1942, the Japanese navy looked to wipe out the American navy in the Pacific once and for all. The next battleground was Midway Island. They had every reason to be confident. The U.S. Navy, crippled after Pearl Harbor, had been beaten badly at the Coral Sea, losing many ships, including its mighty aircraft carrier
Yorktown.

Except the
Yorktown
had not sunk. Instead,
it had managed to stay afloat and limp back to Pearl Harbor, where American engineers stared in horror and predicted a three-to-six-month repair job to make her seaworthy. Admiral Chester Nimitz had other ideas. He ordered the ship to be refitted immediately to rejoin the fleet already headed to Midway. Observed the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison:

Less than sixty-eight hours later,
Yorktown
left drydock and headed off to Midway, where its squadrons succeeded in sinking several Japanese aircraft carriers and its firepower attracted the entire Japanese counteroffensive away from the carriers
Enterprise
and
Hornet
, whose firepower won this pivotal battle of the Pacific.
Yorktown
itself sank, but its very existence on the battle scene—thanks to a miraculous sixty-eight hours by American engineers, maintenance technicians, fabricators, and riveters—made victory possible and demonstrated the importance in war of individual initiative all the way down the line from the commander to the lowest worker.

Enter Henry J. Kaiser, the great industrialist of the twentieth century, as George Westinghouse was of the nineteenth: a human dynamo who never stopped and always maintained superb labor relations. Head of the construction consortium that had built the Hoover, Bonneville, and Grand Coulee dams, Kaiser had gone to the White House and told FDR he could build all the ships the country needed to fight World War II. FDR, a former Secretary of the Navy, knew full well Kaiser hadn’t an iota of shipbuilding experience. But he was so mesmerized by the man’s gall that he threw him a bone: build fifty ships. Kaiser went into high gear.

“Hurry-Up Henry” ended up building 1,383 ships. The first ship took one hundred days to build; “I’ll do better,” swore Kaiser. Applying assembly-line methods to shipbuilding—though building a ship of thirty thousand components is a lot more complicated than building a car—Kaiser worked incessantly to speed up the process to the point that he set a record of four days and fifteen hours to make a freighter from start to finish (the paint was still wet). His average time to build a ship was forty days. It was probably the most impressive heavy-engineering feat of all time. Kaiser achieved it by applying new methods: making ships in prefab
sections, and welding them together (instead of using the traditional method of rivets). An additional benefit of this method was that welding was faster and less laborious, meaning that Kaiser could hire women to make up for the labor shortage caused by so many men sent overseas in uniform. By 1944, 18 percent of Kaiser’s workers—almost all of whom had never worked in a shipyard before—were women.

“The fortunes of war were tied to these ships,” it was widely acknowledged. To fight a world war that never touched its shores, the United States had to transport everything across an ocean: troops, food, planes, tanks, landing craft, airfield equipment, guns, ammunition, and fuel. Plus, with the U-boats having a field day in the North Atlantic, there was the attrition rate to worry about. The United States needed more than just lots of ships, it needed them “like, yesterday.” American shipbuilding skyrocketed from 1.1 million deadweight tons to 8 million in 1942 to 19.2 million in 1943. Only then was it clear that the American shipbuilding program had exceeded the attrition gap caused by U-boat sinkings, making victory a matter of time.

The propaganda value of Kaiser’s frenetic shipbuilding feat was enormous. Press and radio headlines all across America trumpeted the launching of every new Liberty ship, and gave Americans hope and pride. Henry Kaiser became so widely admired that FDR even considered him a potential running mate in 1944. By the time the war was over, Kaiser and other shipbuilders had built some 5,500 ships for the U.S. Merchant Marine. It was truly a national effort, “the handiwork of farmers, shopkeepers, housewives, and workers recruited from every walk of life.”

1944
America has had many families with money, and other families who were aristocratic in terms of style and “class,” but only one such combined family that produced a president of the United States. Most remarkably, this wealthy and aristocratic family produced two presidents, one from each party. And two Medal of Honor winners.

Like other moneyed families that have good taste, the Roosevelts did not flaunt their wealth. They did not live like the Vanderbilts in palatial Fifth Avenue houses or in so-called Newport “cottages.” The entourage of Theodore Roosevelt’s brothers and sisters lived in small brownstone houses in Union Square and later on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, while the Franklin Roosevelt clan all lived in the farming countryside of Hyde Park upstate on the Hudson River. They lived well. Both future presidents led rarefied childhoods. Franklin was raised by a dominating mother who kept him in curls and dresses until he was six, and forbade him
to play with the village children. “The local children touched their hats to him as if he were an English lord.” Theodore, too, led an unusual life. In describing himself, he stressed his genealogy: “I was born in New York, October 27, 1858; my father of old Dutch Knickerbocker stock; my mother was a Georgian, descended from the revolutionary Governor Bullock.” Until age seventeen, he never went to school—he was taught by private tutors, and twice he went on a year-long Grand Tour with his family, one through Europe, the second through the Mediterranean and Palestine. When he enrolled at Harvard, his oldest sister went up to Cambridge to rent him a luxury apartment (the entire second floor of a house), and spent weeks decorating it with imported furniture and hand-sewn lace curtains to make him feel “at home.” No humble dorm room for this fellow. Living in a neighborhood called “the Gold Coast” was fine. Likewise, when Franklin enrolled at Harvard, his mother moved to Cambridge with him to ensure that her son would be living in a comfortable lifestyle, financed by her father, Warren Delano, a giant in the China opium trade. Whenever Theodore or Franklin took a vacation abroad, or moved from one city to another, such movements were duly noted in the
Social Register
, the registry of America’s leading “old” families. (But, of course, the drying out of their alcoholic brothers and cousins was not recorded.)

Their wealth, though not enormous, was substantial. Theodore Roosevelt’s mother and sisters spent half their time visiting relatives and friends and traveling through Europe in private railroad cars. Theodore Roosevelt could squander much of his inheritance on illiquid investments such as property in the Dakota Badlands. When Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt married in 1905, their annual unearned income in present-day dollars amounted to almost $250,000, virtually tax-free—plus all their major expenses (their first home and their five sons’ private education) were paid separately, by Franklin’s mother.

Yet it was these two men “born with silver spoons in their mouths” who turned out to be our most populist presidents: Theodore attacking corporate monopolies and “malefactors of ill-found wealth,” and Franklin instituting the New Deal.

Then there’s the story of His Father’s Son.

When Theodore Roosevelt was growing up, he would see his father leave the house after Sunday dinner and walk over to the Newsboys Lodging House to give moral and financial support to the orphaned boys trying to survive by selling newspapers on the streets of New York. Many years later, living in the White House, he met one of those newsboys—who had since become very successful. The president was thrilled to be saluted by this former newsboy who told him, “I am so pleased to meet you,” not as president
of the United States, but “as the son of your father.”

In a magazine article in 1900, President Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “What we have a right to expect of the American boy is that he shall turn out to be a good American man.” Such a son, after making a small fortune on Wall Street, volunteered for service in World War I, became the youngest regimental commander and was awarded the Distinguished Silver Cross and the Silver Star. After the war he founded the American Legion and became assistant secretary of the Navy. Defeated for the governorship of New York, he was appointed by President Taft to serve as governor of Puerto Rico. When a banking crisis hit the island, he did one of the most remarkable things ever done by an American consul: he reached into his own pocket and posted a $100,000 personal guarantee to successfully stop a run on the Puerto Rican banks.

When World War II came, he petitioned to return to active duty as a colonel. Despite his poor sight, fibrillating heart, and arthritis so bad he needed a cane to hobble around, he was accepted and became one of the few fighting generals in the entire army. Promoted to brigadier general after distinguished service in North Africa and Sicily, he begged to command the initial charge of the D-Day invasion. Knowing this man was not one to sit back in the rear and would put himself in the line of fire, his commanding superior voiced hesitation.

“I am Theodore Roosevelt’s son!” the man shouted. Knowing the emotional power of a president’s son fighting in the middle of his troops, the commander relented, and so the brigadier general got his wish. He led the charge, and for the full day of fighting, was everywhere exhorting his men. “The bravest soldier I ever knew,” said General George Patton. Exhausted by the victorious battle, his heart gave out and he died two days later and was buried at Normandy. Six months later he was awarded the Medal of Honor. Asked to name the most impressive exploit he had ever seen in war, General Omar Bradley said: “Theodore Roosevelt Jr. at Utah Beach.”