American History Revised (2 page)

We all know Santayana’s dictum that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, but what is it we are trying to remember? We need to dig beneath the surface to understand what actually happened, and
why people did what they did. What happened in “the past” is fixed in stone; what we say about it later is “history.” The two are not always the same. What makes history intriguing is discovering these discrepancies—to learn that what we know is not necessarily so, to discover “secrets” we didn’t know, and to recognize that what happened almost didn’t happen. This is the delightful stuff of cocktail party conversation: Did you know … ?

Every day we open the newspaper and read stories about the inability of Congress to reach a decision and pass a bill. So what else is new? During the days of Valley Forge, when Washington’s troops were freezing and starving, Congress’s reaction to the problem was to give it to a committee. There were only twenty-five active members of Congress, but they managed to create 114 committees in 1777, then another 258 in 1778. General Washington got so fed up handling all the inquiries, he wondered how he would find time to fight the war. Several years later, after the war was over, the Confederation of American States sent the thirteen states a $3-million bill to pay the war debts incurred in fighting the British. A legitimate bill, you say? Well, by 1787 it had collected less than $120,000—4 percent. Congress could no better manage the country’s affairs then than it can now.

“The past is a foreign country,” a historian once wrote. Perhaps. But the closer one looks, the less foreign it becomes. Even the “godlike” Washington, the founder of our country, the only man to be elected by unanimous vote, had his problems. Was his presidential holiness really the case (the way we view it through “history”)? Halfway through his presidential term he made a treaty with the British that made many congressmen so angry they sought to have him impeached. Hard to believe? Well, the leader of this movement was a man who later became president himself, one of our great ones: Andrew Jackson.

A popular buzzword nowadays is “bipartisanship,” with many people pleading for better relations and cooperation between the two major parties and between the White House and Congress. Back in the 1830s President Andrew Jackson had such acrimonious relations with Congress, especially with Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House, that when the new Treasury Building was being built, he had it situated right next to the White House so as to block his view of the Capitol. “Now I can’t see the Capitol anymore!” he bragged. For this great president, “bipartisanship” meant drawing a line in the sand.

History teaches us facts, but understanding history requires going beyond the facts and learning the full story, especially the human element. Go to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC and gaze upward at the solemn face of
Abraham Lincoln. Our greatest president, yes—but also a virtual manic-depressive who hired a gravedigger on two separate occasions to dig up his dead son Willy so he could see him again (a privilege exercised, so far as we know, by no other president). And to have a wife like he did! In 1864 she was telling friends that Mr. Lincoln must win reelection so she could use his $25,000 salary to pay off her $27,000 in clothing bills. When he won, she still went out and splurged on three hundred pairs of gloves and a $2,000 dress for the inauguration. Trivia? Hardly: maybe having such a wife was what brought out Lincoln’s innate qualities of sagacity and patience. Said Lincoln to a merchant annoyed at the First Lady: “You ought to stand, for fifteen minutes, what I have stood for fifteen years.”

Go down the road to the Jefferson Memorial, and stand in awe of the powerful phrase “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Except for one thing: Jefferson never wrote it. A major landowner, he wrote “Life, Liberty and Property,” and when his fellow members of the Constitutional Convention objected and changed “Property” to “Pursuit of Happiness,” Jefferson got so upset he went to all his friends and tried to mount a lobby to get “Property” restored. He failed, and so we glorify him—for sentiments he did not feel. Even today, historians teach children misunderstandings: by “liberty,” Jefferson meant not liberty from tyranny, but liberty for property (later immortalized in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution protecting Americans from being deprived of “life, liberty or property without due process of law”).

It is fine to read about great people and great deeds, but how can we relate to people at such a high level? They seem to live on another planet. In the late 1940s, Eleanor Roosevelt was the closing speaker at an international conference, and she was asked, “Mrs. Roosevelt, how did you come to be such a great woman?” She responded in a very interesting way:

Concluded Eleanor Roosevelt, “That made a difference.” A small difference, but by paying attention to detail and constantly asking questions, are great people made.

We all know about the radiation unleashed by the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Recently, I was on a business flight from Athens to Cyprus, reading the Olympic Airways in-flight magazine, when I came across this astounding statistic: “The radiation released at Chernobyl … is estimated to have been at least 200 times greater than that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”

But don’t stop there; keep asking questions like Eleanor Roosevelt did. The country that suffered the greatest radiation, it turned out, was the United States. In top-secret tests hidden from the public, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission conducted 126 atmospheric tests in Nevada from 1951 to 1962. Those tests released 148 times the radiation of Chernobyl. How much compared with Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Multiply 148 by 200, and the answer is almost 30,000!

Our most creative insights come from questioning what we hear, and exerting the effort to dig deeper and use our imagination to make connections. Said Oliver Wendell Holmes:

What follows is history through the skylight. We let it fall where it may—like it or not, liberal or conservative, friendly or unfriendly, achievement or pure chance. By showing events that are surprising or not widely known, we enlarge our understanding and appreciation of the richness of America’s past. Unlike most “revisionist” or “multicultural” histories being written nowadays that focus on injustices, we have no particular preconception other than a fascination and curiosity about what really happened.

Truth and insights rarely come in a neat package wrapped with a ribbon. “It is better to be vaguely right,” said John Maynard Keynes, “than precisely wrong.” It is better to have judgment and common sense and be able to see the big picture, than to possess detailed minutiae that really are not important (like a lawyer trying to trip up the other side on a technicality). In all of American history, there is probably no better example of this than the ongoing dispute about Pearl Harbor, a controversy that refuses to die. Rather than stirring up the controversy further, let us take a different approach and look at how the world was back then. Everyone knew full well Japan was pounding the war drums; the only question was where and when. When war finally came on an early Sunday morning, it came as a jolt, but it was, in historian John Lukacs’s memorable words, “a surprise that was expected.” Yet for decades now, academicians bent on proving conspiracy have been poring over every document coming in and out of the White House, trying to find incriminating memos proving FDR secretly knew about the coming attack. They could have saved themselves a whole lot of trouble by asking one fundamental question that cuts through all the fog: Assuming FDR wanted war, why not warn the fleet and make the first battle a victory? Wouldn’t that be the logical thing to do? End of discussion.

Or take the other great twentieth-century event that has every conspiracy buff looking under unturned stones: the JFK assassination. Maybe there was a “second shot” from the grassy knoll, maybe there wasn’t. Because of the configuration of the surrounding buildings, which created an echo, it was scientifically impossible to say exactly where the gunshot sounds were coming from. But no matter, the more important fact was that “the area was teeming with people.” Assassins do not use rifles when there are a lot of people around; they use handguns. Observes one historian, “It is conceivable that a man with a rifle might have escaped notice. However, not only is this most unlikely, but attempting to assassinate from the knoll would be so dangerous that it is hard to believe any assassin with even minimum rationality would have chosen such a spot.” Again, end of discussion.

Re-creating history does not require genius; sometimes it takes common sense and an ability to recognize the obvious. Beware of too much history, for often the causes are quite superficial. Ever wonder why so many Irish immigrants to America settled in Boston rather than New York? Very simple:

The boat fare was $6.50 cheaper.

Ever ask yourself why the British drive on the “wrong” side of the road? Back in the early days of the automobile, all cars had the steering wheel on the right. This was because most roads were unpaved, and the driver wanted to make sure he didn’t drive off the path into the ditch. Then came along Henry Ford, who moved the steering wheel to the left. He foresaw the day of paved roads and fast cars, when the driver’s main concern would be the oncoming traffic. America is a forward-thinking nation.

It is also one with a limited appreciation of history. According to the American Bar Association, nearly half of all Americans cannot identify our three branches of government. Eighty-three percent of Americans never take a course in American history beyond high school (though that may not be such a bad thing, given what they seem to be taught nowadays). Many college students think that Martin Luther King Jr. was advocating an end to slavery in his “I Have a Dream” speech. The state of New Jersey recently issued new history standards that omitted any mention of George Washington, and students at one college in our celebrity-obsessed era rated Bill Clinton a better president than George Washington. Many American citizens don’t know what war Ulysses Grant fought in, or why the League of Nations failed, or why espionage was such a critical factor in World War II. Do you think any of them are aware that there was once a book read by a greater number of people than the entire American voting population?
(Common Sense
by Thomas Paine.) Politics was a passionate subject in those pre-TV days: newfound freedoms and liberties were not taken lightly. In the 1854 debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act expanding slavery into the territories, four years before he debated Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas said he could have “travelled from Boston to Chicago by the light of the fires kindled to burn him in effigy.”

None of us can ever be like the hyperkinetic Theodore Roosevelt—he read a book a day—but we can certainly do better in our understanding of how America came to be. Consider the story of Benjamin Franklin. When the Second Continental Congress declared rebellion against King George III, Benjamin Franklin was sent to Paris to enlist the support of King Louis XVI. It was a difficult assignment, trying to get a king to help a group of anti-royal reactionaries overthrow another king. The French monarch invited Franklin to play a game of chess. Franklin surveyed the various pieces—king, queen, knights—and made his move. It was a move that had never been done before, and has never been done since. But was it effective? Yes, absolutely.