American History Revised (66 page)

But that’s not exactly what he said. Nominated by President Eisenhower in 1953 to be his secretary of defense, Wilson was in Washington DC for his confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Wilson was asked if he would sell all his GM stock, worth a considerable sum; Wilson reluctantly agreed to do so. In the course of several heated exchanges between Wilson
and the senators on this point, Wilson was asked if, as secretary of defense, he would ever make a decision adverse to the interests of GM. Wilson responded yes, sure he would, but went on to say that he could not conceive of such a situation “because for years we at General Motors have always felt that what was good for the country was good for General Motors as well.”

Juicy sound bites have always been red meat for hostile media lions. Like Henry Ford, who got nailed for saying “history is bunk,” Wilson was the victim of having his words taken out of context: “gotcha!” Certainly he meant well: he was speaking as a patriot, not as a corporate bully. After winning confirmation, he went on to be probably the toughest secretary of defense of the twentieth century, constantly battling with the military—and with the big defense contractors like GM—for reduced defense expenditures. When he left, nearly everyone agreed he had worked for what was best for the country.

In 2009, General Motors careened into bankruptcy and had to plead to Congress for repeated bailouts. Its car sales were down 40 percent—but so were almost everyone else’s, including the German, South Korean, and Japanese car companies. The major problem was not GM making bad cars, but the financial collapse affecting all of America. Because the economy had tanked, nobody could get the bank credit they needed to purchase any car—not just a GM car. Sixty years after Wilson had made his statement, he was proven right: what’s good for the U.S. is good for General Motors as well.

1904
The largest employer of blacks in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century was the Pullman Company, the largest hotel chain in the United States—its rooms being on moving railroad cars. The company insisted that all its porters be black because they would be subservient and provide exemplary service to white passengers traveling in Pullman’s luxurious cabins. To his credit, George Pullman opened the way for hundreds of thousands of blacks for the first time to earn a steady living, save money, and enter the American middle class. But he paid them low wages and forced them to rely solely on tips (to ensure full customer service). Working hours—away from home for weeks on end—were long and brutal, often involving only three to four hours of sleep a night.

When employees went on strike in 1894 seeking better wages and working conditions, Pullman crushed them, making it clear he tolerated no dissent. It left such a bad residue of ill will that Pullman, on his deathbed in 1897, feared angry employees might try to dig up and mutilate his body. He instructed that his coffin be
lined with lead, then wrapped in tarpaper, covered with quick-drying asphalt, then covered with another layer of concrete reinforced with heavy steel rails interlocked at right angles, and buried ten feet under the ground, leaving him “more secure than the pharaohs of ancient Egypt.”

His fellow director, Abraham Lincoln’s sole surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln, liked the idea so much he had his father’s grave disinterred and reburied in the same manner.

He also became good friends with George Pullman and eventually the next president of the Pullman Company. Now, one would think that the son of Abraham Lincoln would be magnanimous toward blacks, but such was not the case. He was a man who took more after his mother than his father. Under his direction, the Pullman porters continued to be paid subsistence wages. Called before a congressional committee investigating the condition of Pullman porters, and asked whether $27.50 a month was enough for a porter to support his family in comfort and decency, Lincoln responded, “Absolutely not. I want to say that situation annoys me very much indeed.”

Yet he did nothing. Coasting on his family name—very powerful in those days—he ignored whatever he didn’t want to hear. Hauled before another congressional committee investigating Pullman’s industrial relations, he denied hearing of any bids by porters to unionize, “not the slightest.” In the meantime, Pullman’s enormous profits continued to grow. Lincoln became one of the richest men in America, and built himself a huge, fifty-room summer home in Manchester, Vermont.

Summer home of Robert Lincoln

In 1904, a former porter wrote a book complaining that the Pullman Company was forcing black porters to work double the hours of other (white) train staff for half the pay. He titled his book
Freemen Yet Slaves Under “Abe” Lincoln’s Son.

The early home of Abraham Lincoln

Five years later, there occurred the hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. It was the largest commemoration ever of any person in America. Celebrations were held everywhere—almost all of them segregated. The biggest was in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, where a gala dinner was held, “a lily white affair,” blacks excluded. Robert Todd Lincoln was there, the guest of honor.

Simultaneously, a more poignant celebration took place in Kentucky: the dedication of the so-called Lincoln Cabin. Seven thousand people attended, blacks as well as whites, to hear the keynote speaker, President Theodore Roosevelt. Abe Lincoln’s son chose not to attend.

1913
As a college president and then U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson established himself as one of the world’s most progressive leaders, a man of compassion for the masses.

Not so well known, however, is that Woodrow Wilson was a racist, the only true racist ever to occupy the Oval Office. Historians looking at our long line of presidents for their treatment of blacks have focused on non-issues like Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings or Abraham Lincoln’s early views on colonizing blacks by sending them back to Africa. These are non-issues because they have absolutely nothing to do with their performance as president. With Woodrow Wilson, however, it is a different story. His racist views pervaded his entire term in high office. In public, he was very willing and eager to espouse liberal principles and “Fourteen Points” for mankind; in private, he could be brutal toward “the darkies” in his own
American backyard, and also to Italian, Hungarian, and other non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants.

As a young man in the 1880s, Wilson complained about the influx of immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe—“men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence,” he called them. In 1901 he wrote an article in
The Atlantic Monthly
describing Negroes as “a host of dusky children untimely put out of school.” Conditions in the South since the Civil War had approached “ruin” until “at least the whites who were the real citizens got control again.” One wonders whether this Princeton professor had ever read the Constitution. Still more of Wilson’s Southern heritage was to come. After becoming president, Wilson arranged that the first movie to be shown in the White House was a movie glorifying the Ku Klux Klan. He ordered federal civil service workers to be segregated by race in their employment, with separate eating and toilet facilities. When a Negro leader protested this segregation, Wilson called his words “insulting” and sent him packing. Getting the clue, U.S. Post Office and Treasury officials in the South used Wilson’s order as an excuse to discharge or downgrade black employees. Afro-Americans working in the Post Office found themselves suddenly “relegated to separate and lesser facilities for everything from break rooms to restrooms.” In Atlanta, twenty-five blacks were fired from their post office jobs to create job openings for whites. Said the Georgia head of the Internal Revenue Service in 1913, “There are no Government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro’s place is in the cornfield.”

1919
In World War I the British captured several large German battleships and took them to the Orkney Islands in Scotland, to a place called Scapa Flow. While moored there, the German sailors aboard the vessels managed to sink them so they couldn’t be used in the war. There they remained for decades, a monument to German determination and British carelessness.

In the meantime, the Americans developed the atom bomb and used it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to bring World War II to a quick end. One of the consequences of this act was that it coated the earth with a tiny film of radioactivity. Now, normally this wouldn’t be a problem—radioactivity comes from many everyday sources and doesn’t cause harm—but it did become a problem in the 1950s when the United States needed radiation-free metal for its massive atomic-bomb-testing program in Nevada. During this time the U.S. government exploded eighty-six atom bombs at its Nevada test site, killing lots of local sheep and sending radioactive dust as far as New York.