American History Revised (25 page)

1893
The advent of the telegraph and the telephone was greeted with considerable skepticism in America, where communications in such a vast country were normally restricted to personal encounters. In
Walden
, Thoreau had written, “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas … have nothing important to communicate.” Similarly, in a trial conversation between Washington DC and Philadelphia, President Rutherford B. Hayes queried, “An amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?” Nonetheless he bowed to progress and had a telephone installed. In 1893, Grover Cleveland returned to the White House after a four-year interregnum. How was the White House phone answered?

By the president himself: “Grover Cleveland speaking.” The telephone was viewed as a medium for emergencies—the equivalent of today’s “red button.” When you called the White House, you wanted the boss immediately, not some lackey.

America gets a new map

1900
The population was 76 million. The average life expectancy was forty-five years, which is not surprising given that 90 percent of doctors had no college education (they attended what were called “medical schools,” widely condemned by the government and the press as “substandard”). Only 4 percent of the population made it to age sixty-five. Almost all births took place at home, and people worked until they died. There was no need for Social Security. The leading cause of death was pneumonia/influenza, followed by tuberculosis and then diarrhea. (Today’s leading killers—heart disease and stroke—ranked fourth and fifth; cancer and Alzheimer’s had not been diagnosed then.) Local corner drugstores—unregulated, of course—did a thriving business in strange and exotic medicines. Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all readily available over the counter. Heroin, the most expensive medicine, was cited by pharmacists as “a perfect guardian of health” because it
“clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, and regulates the stomach and bowels.”

Hamburgers appeared on the market for the first time, in New Haven, Connecticut. Nobody other than Italian immigrants ate spaghetti.

Only 14 percent of homes had a bathtub. Kitchens were very rudimentary, and of course washing machines did not exist. All was not lost, however: 18 percent of households had at least one full-time servant or domestic help.

Twenty percent of adults couldn’t read or write. Only 6 percent of Americans had graduated from high school. Factory workers and coal miners, including children, worked a twelve-to-sixteen-hour day to make one to two dollars. Many workers couldn’t survive on such low pay; many immigrants gave up and returned home. The average wage was twenty-two cents an hour. An accountant made about $2,000 a year; a dentist, $2,500; a mechanical engineer, $5,000. Low income and lack of education, however, did not mean a high crime rate as so many sociologists today claim. There were only 230 murders that year in the entire country.

Because there were no income taxes, the federal government was small. Its sole source of income was tariff and excise taxes, primarily on tobacco and alcohol. William McKinley won reelection as president, proving that the key to being reelected is not to be a bold president, but to be a great politician. His running mate was a brash young politician named Theodore Roosevelt, who got the job only after two other candidates had turned it down. Then, as now, the vice presidency was regarded as a one-way trip to oblivion. Many Americans wondered why the United States, hitherto an isolated country, was sending troops to Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, not to mention getting involved in faraway conflicts in the Philippines and China. There was a lot to be done in the United States alone. There were only 150 miles of paved roads in the entire country, but progress was in the air: automobiles, phonographs, lightbulbs, typewriters, telegraphs, skyscrapers, automobiles, and the Brooklyn Bridge portended an exciting century to come.

Americans were filled with optimism and faith in technology. Rev. Edward Everett Hale envisioned a time when people would be shot by pneumatic tube from Texas to Georgia (not such a bad idea, given the hassles of airplane travel nowadays). Newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst predicted a rosy future:

A 1900 vision of America in the year 2000

The leading automotive technology was Thomas Edison’s battery-powered vehicle, leading one person to predict that “the whole of the United States will be sprinkled with electric changing stations.” One third of America’s eight thousand cars were electric-powered. The major competitive threat to the electric engine was not the gasoline engine, but an engine so successful in propelling trains and boats: the steam engine.

There were only a handful of foreign cars, thanks to a U.S. 45 percent import tax on European car manufacturers. To buy a Mercedez Benz, you went to a New York City department store.

1912
Although the
Titanic
was a British ship, it was largely American-owned (the majority shareholder in the White Star Line was a New York investment trust headed by J. P. Morgan). Most of the first-class passengers who drowned were American; the wireless operator who caught the SOS signal was American (David Sarnoff); the rescue ship
(Carpathia)
was American; one of the two government investigations was American; the discovery of the ship in 1985 was made by an American; and the blockbuster movie was American. Hence its inclusion here.

When the ship sank in 1912, everyone demanded to know why the huge ocean liner had carried only twenty lifeboats. Asked whether the
Titanic
had erred in carrying so few lifeboats, the captain of the rescue ship
Carpathia
responded, “No, the
Titanic
was supposed to be a lifeboat itself.” More important in creating the unsinkable ship were tennis courts, grand dining saloons, electric elevators, and Turkish baths.

People also wanted to know why the ship was running at twenty-two and a half knots, full speed, after it had received numerous warnings of serious ice conditions.

Incredible though it seems today, the standard practice of ships entering the icy North Atlantic was to maintain their speed and rely on lookouts to spot any icebergs ten miles ahead—plenty of time to take evasive action. After the
Titanic
disaster, the U.S. Senate and the British Board of Trade immediately launched investigations. But the people they called to testify were the survivors and “armchair experts,” not specialists in the arcane art of ice navigation. The U.S. Senate investigation lasted only four days, and included such silly moments as when the chairman asked a seaman what an iceberg was made of.

“Ice,” the seaman replied.

The British—who one would expect to know how to conduct a serious marine investigation, Britain being a seafaring nation—were more thorough. They took more than thirty days to conduct intensive questioning (including asking the surviving
senior officer no fewer than 1,600 questions). Still, they accepted the prevailing practice of the day and refused to condemn the British captain for recklessness. Said the inquiry chairman,

Today, of course, the captain would be found guilty and the lawyers would have a field day. The essential rule of good seamanship is “When in doubt never assume, always confirm.” Such were the actions of the captain of the
Carpathia
, the ship that subsequently rescued the
Titanic
survivors. Upon entering ice-filled waters, the
Carpathia
’s captain doubled his lookouts and exercised extra vigilance. When he got the distress call from the
Titanic
, he “added a man to the crow’s nest, two more on the bows, and a pair on each wing of the bridge, all chosen for their keen eyesight. This would prove a good precaution: five icebergs were dodged later that night.” Another nearby ship, the
Californian
, took the ultimate safety measure: it stopped.

Compare this with the attitude on the
Titanic
, where Second Officer Charles Lightoller told the British Board of Inquiry that slowing the ship down “was not necessarily the most obvious way” to avoid a collision. This statement so stunned the interrogator he then asked, “Well, is it one way?” Lightoller replied, “It is one way. Naturally, if you stop the ship you will not collide with anything.”