American History Revised (72 page)

Then a most bizarre thing happened. The local Democrats in Illinois—acting independently of the national Democrats—chose one of their fellow Democrats on the Electoral Commission to run for U.S. senator, thereby compelling him to resign from the commission. The person chosen to replace him, Judge Joseph Bradley, was a Republican. In his sudden new role of kingmaker, Bradley cast the critical fifteenth vote in favor of Hayes in each of the four states, 8–7. “It is done,” said the
Cincinnati Enquirer
, “and done fitly in the dark….R. B. Hayes is ‘Commissioned’ as President, and the monster fraud of the century is consummated.”

The supreme irony of it all was that
Hayes originally had opposed the creation of the Electoral Commission, thinking he could not win, whereas Tilden had supported it, thinking he could not lose. A major miscalculation.

Could such a scenario happen again, whereby the leader of the popular vote and electoral vote fails to become president? Yes indeed, it almost happened in 1992.

If a candidate were to win just eleven states (California, New York, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, and either Georgia or Virginia), he would have enough electoral votes to become president with only 28 percent of the popular vote. If, however, there were a three-way race and no candidate were to have a majority of the electoral votes, the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives, where the ruling congressional party would dictate who was the winner—even if he had come in last in the popular election or in the electoral count.

In 1992, there actually was a moment when it looked as though Ross Perot’s candidacy would prevent George H. W. Bush from winning outright, thereby allowing the Democratic House of Representatives to put in Bill Clinton. As it turned out, though, Clinton won anyway.

W
ho says history doesn’t repeat itself?

Every time there is a change in political administrations, a portrait in the Roosevelt Room in the White House comes down and a new one is put up. When a Democrat occupies the White House, a portrait of FDR hangs above the mantel. When a Republican is president, a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt occupies the spot.

“We use historical precedents and analogies all the time,” says Walter Bock. “Most of the time we use them as if history repeats itself. It doesn’t.” A more accurate description of what really happens, he says, is Mark Twain’s aphorism, “History does not repeat, but it does rhyme.”

Karl Marx said that when history repeats itself, the original tragedy returns as farce. He might well have described a modern-day American who typified “all motion, not a moment for reflection.” Many years before he became famous, this college professor was asked what he thought of John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state. He thought for a moment and responded, “He travels too much.”

The man was Henry Kissinger. Years later, as secretary of state himself, he became a perpetual-motion machine, always on a plane, rushing
from one negotiation to the next. “It was not,” observed historian Barbara Tuchman, “the most creative use of his time.”

On a lighter note, perhaps Karl Marx was talking about evil spirits—you know, the kind that recur frequently. Anybody privileged to get a private tour of the White House may want to spend time scrutinizing the gardens in the back, wondering where the voodoo doll is. A voodoo doll? Indeed, a voodoo doll is buried in the White House garden, planted in 1919 by the outgoing president’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, to haunt her father’s successor, William Howard Taft—who proceeded, of course, to have a disastrous one-term presidency. Silly, yes, but it does stimulate one’s imagination about later presidents like Wilson and Nixon and Clinton, who claimed they were being jinxed and hounded by their enemies—or like Gerald Ford, who lost his marbles in the Carter presidential debate about how Poland was not a prisoner of the Soviet empire—or like George W. Bush, who rambled on and on in the Kerry debate about how “it’s a hard job … it’s a …
hard
… job.” Now we know.

Back to serious matters: certainly many people would have performed better had they studied their history and allowed time for reflection. Writes H. D. S. Greenway in a recent column in the
International Herald Tribune:

Greenway goes on to quote several leaders about the situation in Iraq:

These quotes do not come from George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld, but from British diplomats and generals describing Mesopotamia in the 1920s, when the British policy “ultimately changed from nation-building to doing anything to get out.”

To dramatize an argument about historical
interpretation, it helps sometimes to use prolepsis, or flash-forward. Representing a future action as imminently accomplished, or a present action as already completed, provides historical perspective: so what else is new?

Take 9/11. This sudden attack on an American landmark unified the nation overnight. In the space of an hour, Americans concerned about a potential enemy were ready to go to war. “The whole population, men, women, children, seem to be in the streets with (______) favors and flags … (______) war is freely accepted everywhere.” People “switched from pacifism to militarism overnight.” It was, wrote one historian in 2001, “as though all the floors had given way at once, and everyone found themselves sitting on the ground together. Overnight, the one solution no one had advocated became the one solution everyone agreed on … go to war.” The nation’s leading advocate of nonviolence now sang a different tune: “Sometimes gunpowder smells good.”

Substitute “Union” in the first blank and “civil” in the second, and you describe the aftermath of the April 12, 1861, Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, which unified the North overnight as 9/11 did for America (the one exception being that there were no deaths at Fort Sumter). The pacifist who liked the smell of gunpowder was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Abraham Lincoln, elected president by the narrowest of margins in a four-way race, now had his mandate for war. Within three days, he issued a call for volunteers, and thousands of Northerners responded. In one state, Vermont, 34,000 out of 37,000 men eligible for military service volunteered. The all-out war was on.

Take another war. Flouting the rights of neutrality on the high seas, the British navy exerted control over seaports on the Atlantic and prevented American ships from trading with European countries. Trade plummeted. American vessels languished in their home ports, and more and more Americans urged their president to declare war on Great Britain. The president, knowing his country was ill-prepared to take on a European power, stalled as best he could. He sent a delegation to London to work things out, but to no avail. Britain, seeing the weak state of the American fleet in 1914, tightened the blockade. Americans seethed with fury. According to adviser Colonel Edward House, Woodrow Wilson:

“We cannot escape history,” said Lincoln.

“No, don’t!” says one proverb. “Don’t dig up the past! Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye.” Fair enough, but listen to what the rest of the proverb says: “Forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes.” Anything in the past can happen again. What has happened twice may happen thrice. The late legendary investor Sir John Templeton used to say that the most dangerous words in investing were “This time it’s different.” Almost always it’s not different, it’s another variation of the same.

1837
The first major depression was not in 1930–33, but in 1837–43. Like Herbert Hoover, this president-elect came into office with a sterling résumé: secretary of state, ambassador to the Court of St. James, and vice president. Like Hoover, he was a firm believer in states’ rights and individual responsibility. When Hoover said that federal aid would cause “degeneration of that independence and initiative which are the very foundation of democracy,” he was emulating Martin Van Buren, the only president who came into office with no national debt. “All communities are apt to look to government for too much,” said Van Buren. “It is not the objective of government to make men rich—nor repair their losses.” In a message to Congress that predated Herbert Hoover, he pronounced, “The less Government interferes with private pursuits, the better for the general prosperity.”

“In both cases,” observed the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman about 1837 and 1930, “erratic or unwise government policy with respect to money played an important part.”

In 1835 the federal government had finally repaid all its war debts, and was now running a budget surplus. But in reality the U.S. economy was only sputtering along, supported by credit from abroad. From 1830 to 1836, American imports had tripled from $62 million to $181 million, causing the nation’s trade balance to go from $8 million positive to $62 million negative. All Americans relished the gravy train of easy credit. They’d never had it so good. Said the senator from New York, “The credit system is the distinguishing feature between despotism and liberty. It is the offspring of free institutions.”

Foreigners, however, thought differently: they became alarmed and wanted their money back. When the Bank of England raised the discount rate from 3 to 6 percent and cut the volume of commercial credits available to finance the import trade in the United States, hard currency began to flow out of the United States, and American banks found themselves unable to grant any more credit. In increasing numbers, they found themselves unable to repay their own debts, and started to go under.