American History Revised (26 page)

Out of such insights are great seamen made—assuming they make them.

The two lookouts in the crow’s nest had no binoculars (the White Star Line had stopped distributing them in 1895). Asked how fast the ship was going, the sole surviving lookout said he didn’t know; asked how large the iceberg was when he saw it, he responded, “I have no idea of distances or spaces.” Even worse, they had been on duty for an hour and a half in wind-chill temperature conditions of 5 degrees—brutal conditions affecting the capacity of anyone to reason clearly. When the lookouts saw low-lying pack ice four miles away, they mistook it for haze and did nothing; only when the ice was five hundred yards away did they finally yank the alarm rope.

Many landlubbers jumped on the White Star Line for having such incompetents in such a sensitive position. But were they to blame? No, says
Titanic
historian Daniel Allen Butler: “Based on firsthand experience with 1910-vintage binoculars, I can tell you that their relatively poor optics actually reduce visibility because they absorb so much light. In actual practice,
lookouts do not use binoculars to spot objects, but rather to identify them once they are spotted.”

Lookouts are not expected to estimate distances, says Butler. Their job is to spot objects and report their findings to the bridge; it is up to the officers on the bridge to make more accurate measurements and decide what action to take. To First Officer William Murdoch the captain had entrusted the ship, believing it to be in good hands. Captain Smith had every reason to be confident. Not only was Murdoch a highly seasoned officer, but the ship itself was a feat of remarkable engineering. This was an age of iron, electricity, engines, and the telegraph—Man finally conquering Nature. That the technology of the day was still quite primitive occurred to nobody.

Here was a captain who believed the
Olympic
and
Titanic
could be cut in half and still float. Furthermore, he bragged, “If the engines and boilers were to fall through their bottoms, the vessels would remain afloat.”

A boat with no bottom?

To this day, no nautical architect has designed such a ship. But who cares? Such was the euphoria of the Edwardian Age in 1912.

Titanic
survivors on the
Carpathia.
When the
Olympic’s
captain offered to come help the rescue, the
Carpathia’s captain
cautioned that “it was not advisable for the survivors to see
Titanic’s
nearly identical-looking sister ship.”

1955
How the mighty have fallen! The most powerful corporation in the world in the 1950s was General Motors. No company like it will ever exist again. “General Motors has no bad years, only good years and better years,” said president Harlow Curtice. GM made as many automobiles as all its competitors combined, its labor union contracts set the standard for the entire auto industry, and its chairman, on becoming secretary of defense, could say with impunity, “We at General Motors have always felt that what was good for the country was good for General Motors as well.”

GM was so powerful that its major concern was not competition but rather the Justice Department. When GM’s chairman, Alfred P. Sloan, learned that Ford Motor Company was at the point of collapse, he privately encouraged a team of his top managers to leave GM and go save Ford. Ernest Breech, passed over for the presidency of GM, became number two at Ford. Joining him were the new Ford vice president of finance, three of the four heads of the Ford operating divisions, and the new head of Ford engineering. Dozens of other key positions were also filled with GM recruits.

Wrote management guru Peter Drucker:

By point of contrast, consider this story: Many years ago, this start-up automobile company was tottering on bankruptcy when across the sea a multinational war started. One of the belligerent countries placed so many orders for vehicles and trucks that the company’s sales immediately shot up 40 percent. “These orders were our salvation,” said the company’s chairman. Today, sixty years after the Korean War and the orders placed by the U.S. military, Toyota is the largest automobile company in the world.

1955
Nowadays there is a great “anti-materialism” push among legislators and environmentalists to recycle our consumer product containers, especially bottles and cans. We look back upon the 1950s as a quaint, boring, terribly materialistic era when there was no sensitivity to eliminating waste or preserving the environment. Just look at the gas-guzzling cars Detroit manufactured then—what behemoths! Today, as we sort out our soda and
beer bottles for recycling, we congratulate ourselves for being such conscientious citizens.

A note of caution: Back in the 1950s the most popular consumer item was a bottle of Coke, which was recycled regularly—long before people knew what recycling meant. According to the Coca-Cola Company, each Coke was filled, emptied, returned, and refilled thirty-seven times. There is no product on the market today that approaches this remarkable Earth-conservation achievement.

“J
acques Barzun,” says
New York Times
columnist David Brooks, “once observed that of all the books it is impossible to write, the most impossible is a book trying to capture the spirit of America.”

Said Walt Whitman in his poem
Leaves of Grass
, “Very well, then I contradict myself / I am large, I contain multitudes.” The ethnic, social, and economic makeup of America is varied and constantly changing. Alexis de Tocqueville described America as a country of “ceaseless agitation.” Such agitation creates an “all-pervading and restless activity, a superabundant force, and an energy … which may, however unfavorable circumstances may be, produce wonders.”

America is famous for its log cabins; out of many log cabins have emerged many self-made men. Even better, as the saying goes, “He was born in a log cabin he built with his own hands!”

America accomplishes these wonders by being a country obsessed with moving forward. “America is a country of the future,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. “It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.” Several of our presidents were very firm about this. John Quincy Adams, when he was Monroe’s secretary of state,
advised a German baron about immigrants to America, “They must cast off the European skin, never to resume it. They must look forward to their posterity rather than backward to their ancestors.”

Equally unequivocal in his advice was President Woodrow Wilson: “You cannot become thorough Americans if you think of yourselves in groups. America does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American.” Said Theodore Roosevelt:

America’s original heritage may be European and partially African, but its character is oriented toward the frontier. George Washington had never been to Europe; when the Marquis de Lafayette proposed to Washington in 1783 that he come visit Europe, Washington declined; if he was going to take a trip, he would rather visit “the New Empire” stretching from the Carolinas via the Mississippi to Detroit. So, too, would Henry David Thoreau: “Eastward I go by force, but westward I go free….I must walk toward Oregon and not toward Europe.” But what happened when we reached the end of the frontier, as asked in the 1890s by Frederick Jackson Turner? Other than an eventual inclusion of Alaska and Hawaii, Americans had no choice but to confront and accept their limits. Said Herbert Agar after the end of the Second World War, “We are all descendants of people who fled from Europe….Our instinctive wish is to be left alone by Europe, to stop fretting about Europe, to turn our eyes toward the Pacific….We belong to the West, without which we must perish. We do not belong to Asia.”

Americans may belong more to the West than to Asia, but they are not Europeans, they are different. Nobody expressed this better than the great Prussian officer sent by the French to instill some discipline in Washington’s ragtag troops at Valley Forge in 1775. He was Baron von Steuben: “The genius of this nation is not in the least to be compared with that of the Prussians, Austrians or French. You say to your soldier, ‘Do this,’ and he doeth it, but I am obliged to say, ‘This is the reason why you ought to do that,’ and he does it.”