American History Revised (67 page)

Scapa Flow, Scotland: radiation-free metal under the water

German battleship turret housing retrieved from Scapa Flow. U. S. Atomic Bomb Testing Grounds, Nevada

Because all steel made after 1945 was inherently contaminated (it takes a lot of air to make steel), the American atomic scientists had a problem with their measurements of radioactive fallout—until, that is, some smart fellow remembered his history and came up with the idea of using steel from sunken pre-1945 battleships. Luckily, the harbor at Scapa Flow in northern Scotland is quite shallow, so it was no problem for British divers to dismantle one of the German battleships and deliver several large pieces of radioactivity-free metal to the Nevada test site. In one case, they dismantled an entire turret from a German battleship. That turret then was reassembled in Nevada to house sensitive testing equipment. (For special effect, the scientists added a long gun barrel consisting of empty paint cans.)

In 1963, after the United States and Russia signed a treaty banning atmospheric testing, the Nevada test site was closed down. But radiation doesn’t fade away, it lingers. In the late 1960s, when preparing to land a man on the moon, the United States once again ran into a problem. The scientific instruments and electronics used to guide the landing module are extremely sensitive and need to be totally free of any magnetic interference caused by radioactivity, no matter how slight. No American-made metal would do. Back to Scapa Flow went the divers to bring up some more radiation-free ore. That metal, crafted into the form of a lunar landing module, now rests on the moon.

Today, other remnants of the German navy, now in the form of the U.S. Pioneer probe, have passed the orbit of Pluto and are on their way to distant star systems.

1920
When Alice Paul of the newly formed National Women’s Party proposed the Equal Rights Amendment, prohibiting discrimination against women in the workplace, she set off a storm of controversy. Members of one sex rose up to take a strong position on the measure. Politically active groups of this sex formed marches and political action committees, organized rallies, and hounded their congressmen to block this radical measure. The Democratic Party and the labor unions also took a strong position on the ERA. Taking the totally opposite position were employers and Republicans.

Who was opposed, and who was in favor?

Opposing the ERA were the League of Women Voters, the American Association of University Women, the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor, the Parents and Teachers Association, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and the National Council of Jewish Women. The dispute was so bitter it came to be called the “women’s war.” Also opposing
the ERA were the Democratic Party and labor unions that didn’t want women taking away jobs from their male members.

The reason women activists were so opposed to the ERA was that they saw it as a direct threat to their cherished “protective labor laws” limiting excessive hours, requiring special facilities for women workers, and forbidding the employment of women in certain physically demanding occupations. The ERA, by its implicit demand that the right to work was a paramount right, threatened to undermine these protections.

Those in favor of the ERA were many men, employers, Republicans, and members of the political right, who welcomed the competition of women in the marketplace and who supported the constitutional right of a person—female as well as male—to choose one’s place of employment.

Today the debate still rages: how best to promote greater well-being for women? Right-wing opponents of the ERA use many of the same collectivist arguments used by the earlier left-wing opponents: that women are a special group. If that is so, then one’s support of women’s rights revolves around whether it is fair to give preference to a particular group, for whatever reason. Supporters of the ERA, both now and back in the 1920s, make the individualist argument that women are no different from men, do not need special protection, and should have the right to self-determination.

1935
United States foreign policy has an almost paranoid fear of appeasement, resulting from our disastrous policies of the 1930s, when we let Nazi Germany seize territory after territory, resulting in World War II. Whenever upstarts like Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Miloševi?; invaded neighboring countries, images of Neville Chamberlain were evoked in many newspaper editorials as a spur to U.S. intervention. This is a misreading of history. First, let us review the facts:

What we have here is a lengthy, consistent pattern of appeasement so breathtaking as to defy belief. No one in his right mind would tolerate such aggression—unless
he had a hidden agenda. One or two incidents of appeasement could be called stupidity. But not five years.

Why did the nations of the West—including the United States—do nothing? Because they were hoping Nazi Germany would strike eastward and destroy the menacingly socialist state of Stalinist Russia. Said Winston Churchill in 1927, to Benito Mussolini, “If I had been an Italian, I am sure that I should have been wholeheartedly with you from start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.”

American fear of Bolshevism and socialism had existed even before Lenin arrived on the scene. No fewer than 900,000 people had voted for socialism and Eugene Debs in the 1912 presidential election (won by Wilson against TR and Taft). In the meantime the Industrial Workers of the World had issued their warlike manifesto: “Abolition of the wage system! It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.” In the 1920s, the “Back to Normalcy” Harding administration conducted a hunt for radicals and aliens suspected of subversive activities, and rounded up 150 of them for quick deportation to Russia. The municipality of Cambridge, Massachusetts, passed an ordinance making it a crime to own a book containing the words “Lenin” or “Leningrad.” As one reporter observed, America was “hag-ridden by the specter of Bolshevism….Property was in an agony of fear, and the horrid name ‘Radical’ covered the most innocent departure from conventional thought with a suspicion of desperate purposes.”

It was in such an environment that the U.S. and European nations welcomed the Nazi power as a buffer, and viewed its aggression with concern—but not with alarm. U.S. Brigadier General Charles Sherrill, defending the U.S. Olympic Committee’s controversial decision to participate in the 1936 Games in Berlin despite the obvious propaganda value it would give the Fascists, said he wished Mussolini had an opportunity to come to the United States and “suppress Communism as he had done in Italy.” Said Lord Halifax a year later, “I and other members of the British Government fully realize that the Fuhrer has achieved much not only in Germany itself but, as a result of having destroyed communism in his country, he has barred the latter from Western Europe. And Germany may therefore be considered the West’s bastion against Bolshevism.”

1945
The victors in World War II imposed tougher peace terms than did those in World War I. This stick—followed by the carrot of the Marshall Plan—enabled the victors to ensure a peace that survived for more than sixty years, as opposed
to the earlier twenty. But the important thing to remember is not the successful carrot, but the powerful stick that made it possible.

You wouldn’t know this from reading John Maynard Keynes’s
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
, a polemic lambasting the British and Americans for imposing stiff terms on the defeated Germans of World War I. Keynes’s book drew such a wide following among peace-loving citizens that Winston Churchill exclaimed in frustration, “I think I can save the British Empire from anything—except the British.”

In the Great War (known to Americans as World War I), the victors pretty much left Germany alone, permitting rabble-rousers like Adolf Hitler to gain a popular following. The borders of Germany were left intact. Trials of war criminals were conducted only by Germans. As a result, virtually all German soldiers and politicians were spared execution. Reparations were demanded by the Allies, but what made these penalties onerous was not the amount, but the deliberate policy of the German government to permit runaway inflation. Then when Europe and especially America fell into an economic depression, bringing international trade to a halt, the German government reversed course and permitted severe deflation, thus incurring further hardship on the population.