American History Revised (7 page)

But what if the vice president dies first? The second in line is not the Speaker of the House; in fact nobody knows who it might be. There is no provision in the Constitution for this unforeseen contingency because the Founding Fathers never envisioned it.

In a period of eighteen months, a man came out of nowhere to become president because of two deaths in the wrong order. In November 1899, Garret Hobart, vice president of the United States, died of a heart attack. Because there were only a few months left before the 1900 election, President William McKinley left the position unfilled. He sought as his running mate Senator William Allison of Iowa, who turned it down. He then turned to the prominent lawyer Elihu Root, who also turned it down, hoping for the better position of secretary of war. At the convention, McKinley, against the advice of his campaign manager, Mark Hanna, opened up the floor to the delegates, who nominated the young governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt accepted the nomination because he had accomplished pretty much what he could in two years as governor and was making little headway against the powerful political boss of New York City, Thomas Platt. Accepting the vice presidency was hardly a promotion; quite the contrary, it was the case of a man being kicked upstairs because he was such a nuisance in his current position. His wife was not happy with the change because they had six children and the vice presidency paid a much smaller salary than that of governor, plus it did not come with a house.

After several months, she feared her husband was becoming bored in “such a useless and empty position.” Even Theodore Roosevelt was beginning to admit second thoughts. The position, he said, “ought to be abolished.”

The one benefit, of course, is that the job is just a heartbeat away from the big position, which raises the interesting question of just what Theodore Roosevelt’s real thoughts were. He might well have known of the misfortune of General Benjamin Butler, the only man to ever turn down the vice presidency—and lose the presidency as a result. In 1864, Lincoln, in search of a “War Democrat,” preferred General Butler to be his running mate and instructed former secretary of war Simon Cameron to pay him a visit. Butler, who later become governor of Massachusetts, wondered why anyone would possibly want to be vice president, and drafted a whimsical response. Naturally it did not go over very well: “Tell him I would not quit the field to be vice president … unless he will give me bond, with sureties, in the full sum of his four years’
salary, that he will die or resign within three months after his inauguration.” Six weeks after Lincoln’s inauguration, Lincoln died—and the man who took his place was not Benjamin Butler.

Theodore Roosevelt was always guarded whenever he spoke of the presidency. Earlier, when he had been a rising politician as police commissioner of New York, the muckraking journalists Jacob Riis and Lincoln Steffens had asked him if he was actively working to become president someday. TR blew up: “Don’t you dare ask me that. Don’t you put such ideas into my head. No friend of mine would ever say a thing like that.” He continued his rant:

Of course TR—a man who could never sit still—must have thought frequently of becoming president. But he never hesitated to make enemies if that was the price of doing what he thought was right. On one occasion as governor, when he had to decide whether to have a female murderer executed, he was bluntly told, “If you do not pardon this woman, you will never be president.” He rejected the advice and went ahead anyway.

In September 1901, eighteen months after a vice president had died, it became a president’s turn to die, this one by assassination, and so Theodore Roosevelt became president because of two deaths in the wrong order and two men who turned down the opportunity.

1939
One of America’s favorite movies almost never got funded, was rejected by the director’s first choice of male star, and failed to win an Oscar. It is the most famous movie of all time:
Gone with the Wind.
When Louis B. Mayer was considering bidding for the film rights to Margaret Mitchell’s novel, his MGM production chief told him, “Forget it, Louis, no Civil War picture ever made a nickel.” Clark Gable ended up with the Rhett Butler role only because the first choice, Gary Cooper, turned it down. In the Oscar voting that year, the winner was
Wuthering Heights.

In the late 1950s, MGM was going bankrupt, so it bet the house on a blockbuster movie, easily the most expensive movie at the time, requiring three hundred
sets scattered over 340 acres. The movie was about the life of one man. For this all-critical role, it sought the services of Burt Lancaster. He turned it down. So, too, did Paul Newman and Rock Hudson. Finally, Charlton Heston accepted the part, and
Ben-Hur
went on to win eleven Academy Awards and earn five times its original investment, one of the most profitable movies ever made.

Another of America’s cultural icons also was a total “hit or miss”:
Reader’s Digest.
When Dewitt Wallace came up with the idea in 1920, he prepared two hundred copies of a “dummy” issue and sent it to magazine publishers and other potential backers. No one was interested. Finally, on his wedding day in 1928, he made a final effort and tried a new approach to launching a magazine. Foregoing the judgment of publishing industry experts who scorned the newfangled idea of direct mail, Wallace conducted a subscription-solicitation mailing to several thousand potential readers. Upon his return from his honeymoon two weeks later, he found his mailbox stuffed with 1,500 charter subscribers at three dollars apiece. From then on, Wallace proceeded to build up what has become the world’s most popular magazine, published in more than fifty languages.

Going back in history, we find the talented painter of birds, John James Audubon, one of the many people in the trans-Appalachian West who was forced into bankruptcy during the Panic of 1819. To support his wife and two children, he took up portrait painting and taught school, then embarked by himself on a five-year expedition down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, looking for more undiscovered birds. Finally satisfied, he envisioned immortality by producing
The Birds of America.
It would be a four-volume, leather-bound set of 400 two- by three-foot engraved, hand-colored plates, accompanied by five volumes of his field notes. Because there was no one in America capable of engraving, hand-coloring, and printing such large plates, Audubon had to go to Europe. He found a printer, and sold advance subscriptions to finance the project. The printing of almost two hundred copies took ten years, and cost $115,640 (equivalent to more than $2.1 million today). The result was a monumental work that today is the envy of collectors everywhere. Today an original complete set goes for $8.8 million.

Emily Dickinson is regarded as one of America’s finest poets of the nineteenth century, and many of her 1,775 poems are required reading in literature courses. Yet in her lifetime all she was able to get published were seven poems, all of them anonymously. That her other 1,668 lyrics weren’t tossed into the fire after her death is “one of the great miracles of American literary history.” But her emergence, while lucky, was no fluke. “Melville and Thoreau,” says the historian Don Gifford, “also had their troubles in the lost-and-found department of that century.” Herman Melville’s
Moby-Dick
was rejected by five book publishers; Henry David Thoreau’s
Walden
was rejected by eight publishers, and took him two years to find a publisher.

No subject has a more explicit accepted/rejected ratio than book publishing. Noah Webster couldn’t find a publisher for his 1825 book,
An American Dictionary of the English Language
, and had to pay for the first printing himself (it eventually sold 60 million copies). Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
, the 1906 exposé of the meat-packing industry that eventually resulted in the creation of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, was turned down by five publishers; Sinclair was down to his last penny paying to have his book self-published before Doubleday came along and agreed to take it on. It became an instant international best-seller. Another major path-breaking book of the twentieth century also had the same trouble: Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring.
In 1962 it finally got published by Houghton Mifflin after several publishers had turned it down.

Even F. Scott Fitzgerald had his share of disappointments. He received more than 120 rejection slips before he got his first short story published (“This Side of Paradise,” 1931). “The anger of rejection motivated me to keep going,” he said.

The best-selling author of the first half of the twentieth century was Zane Grey, “the man who made the West famous.” His ninety-plus books sold 17 million copies and provided the stories for 130 movies. From 1910 to 1930 he had a novel in the top ten best-sellers every year. Yet his first book was self-published. His second book got published, but with only modest royalties. His third book was rejected by several publishers, leaving him totally out of money and living on loans from his brother. Only after he took a trip out west and saw the area firsthand, and wrote a book about it, did he find a publisher and launch his prolific career.

Many writers—especially women—had to publish their early works by themselves. Gertrude Stein, after three years failing to find a publisher for
Three Lives
, had the book printed by a vanity publisher. Before Anaïs Nin finally found a publisher for her best-selling
Diary
, she had to pay a printer to produce her first two books and had her third book published only after eleven rejections. Mae West, earning the second-highest salary in America during the Depression as an actress and screenwriter, never got anything published because the number-one person, William Randolph Hearst, used his influence to make sure no publisher would touch this sex comedienne. Equally thwarted by male jealousy was Margaret Mitchell: William Faulkner, unable to sell his work and annoyed that an unknown writer could produce a runaway bestseller, refused a lucrative offer to write the screenplay for
Gone with the Wind.
Ayn Rand, whose
Atlas Shrugged
was admitted by a poll of Americans in a 1991 survey to be the most influential book in their lives after the Bible, saw her first book rejected by every publisher. When she persevered
and transformed the book into a play, she finally found a publisher, thus providing her the income she needed to pursue her literary aspirations. She then wrote
The Fountainhead
, only to be rejected by twelve publishers.
The Fountainhead
went on to become “the greatest word-of-mouth book” in publishing history.

More recent best-sellers that almost never made it include Frank Herbert’s
Dune
, the most popular science fiction book ever written, selling 12 million copies (plus millions more of five sequels); twenty publishers had rejected it before it was published in 1965. In 1982 there appeared “the greatest business book of all time”: Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman’s
In Search of Excellence
, rejected by forty-eight publishers. In 1994 another book phenomenon appeared, one that became the romantic classic of the decade and remained on the
New York Times
best-seller list for 156 weeks and sold 50 million copies: Robert James Waller’s
The Bridges of Madison County.
It was rejected by twenty-six publishers.

1943
It was a race to the death, the race between Germany and America to develop the atom bomb. Whoever won the race could win the war overnight. Germany had the head start. A militarist state, Germany under Hitler commanded people at will and had nine facilities working round the clock to develop nuclear reactors, heavy-water production, and isotope separation. The U.S. had no plan, no strategy, just a couple of university research labs scattered around the country.