American History Revised (3 page)

His move? He took the two king pieces off the board. “In America we have no kings,” he told his startled host. The two men then played the only kingless game of chess ever played. Months later, the king agreed to support the man whose candor had so impressed him.

The people and events chosen for this book meet two criteria: they are largely unknown, and they make a point worth remembering. By relating them to the present, we experience “the thrill of learning singular things.”

Seymour Morris Jr.

A
n interviewer once asked that notable man of letters Gore Vidal, “What would have happened in 1963 had Khrushchev and not Kennedy been assassinated?” Vidal answered, “With history one can never be certain, but I think I can safely say that Aristotle Onassis would not have married Mrs. Khrushchev.”

Humor aside, the real point of the story is, don’t take history too seriously. There’s a lot of history that barely managed to happen. History, said Hugh Trevor-Roper, is what happened “in the context of what could have happened.” Like baseball—“a game of inches”—famous people and events can be more circumstantial than historic. Many books will aver that history is made by great men and women performing prodigious feats. Sometimes this is so, but often not. As we all know from our own lives, the prize we won in school, the career we chose, the person we married, the big sale we made—these are frequently a function of our being at a particular place at a certain time and making the right choice at a pivotal fork in the road. “Every true story,” says the novelist Siri Hustvedt, “has several possible endings.” Ecclesiastes says, “I returned and saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the
strong, neither bread to the wise nor riches to men of understanding, but time and chance happeneth to them all.” (9:11) That’s right: timing and chance.

One of the reasons history can be so distant and uninteresting to schoolchildren is that it is fixed in stone. What happened, happened—end of story. There are no possible alternative endings, unless we engage in counterfactual “what if?” exercises. Stimulating though they may be, they tend to be exercises in intellectual gamesmanship: “Interesting, but so what?” More useful is to focus on “the fork in the road”: What really happened at that pivotal moment, seconds ticking away? However it turned out, call it luck, coincidence, perseverance, or whatever—much of history was a close call, a razor’s edge.

Take our greatest foreign-aid program, the Marshall Plan. When President Harry Truman proposed it in 1948, he knew he had a problem: winning congressional support for a costly new program that would consume 16 percent of the federal budget. An additional problem was that the most powerful man in the Senate was also a strong isolationist: Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan. When Truman’s aides did their homework, however, they uncovered a fascinating nugget: for the previous seventeen years Senator Vandenberg had taken his annual vacations abroad, to a different country each time, and had stayed for as long as two months. Clearly this was not your typical provincial congressman. The president met with the senator and they eventually reached a meeting of the minds, and history was made—all because of a senator’s unusual vacations that enlightened him to the needs of other countries.

Consider a different subject etched in black-and-white finality: war. Even here the determining factors can be quite happenstance. The weather, for example. One does not read in history books how important the weather was. In 1776, General George Washington lost the Battle of Long Island and needed desperately to get his army out of the clutches of the superior British forces. The only path of retreat was to cross the East River and escape to Manhattan. But in the meantime the British fleet, parked off the southern end of Manhattan, was trying to sail upriver and block off any chance of escape. The weather intervened. For the better part of a week a fierce rainstorm prevented the British ships from moving. On the chosen day, Washington’s rowboats made numerous sorties throughout the night. As dawn approached and the rebels were fearful of being seen by the advancing British army, a pea-soup fog—a “manifestly providential” fog, “an American fog”—descended upon the riverbank, obliterating all vision and enabling the American rebels to conduct their escape. Alas, a woman living near the ferry woke up and sent her servant off to warn the British. The man made his way through the lines to a German officer heading the British patrol, but the German spoke no English and
arrested the servant! Had it not been for the incredible triple luck of first a storm and then a fog and finally a non-English-speaking German officer, Washington and half of the American army would have been captured and the American Revolution all but over.

One of Jefferson’s crowning achievements as president was the Louisiana Purchase. What is not widely known, however, is that the French territory was offered first to England, who refused it. A further irony: the funding that enabled Jefferson to pull off his coup came from bonds provided by Hamilton’s U.S. Bank, which Jefferson had once viewed as unconstitutional. Finally, the money to buy the bonds came mostly from French and Dutch investors, not American, meaning that the U.S. got the land for practically nothing by using other people’s money. Jefferson, no financier himself, had pulled off one of the greatest financial deals of all time.

The United States was even luckier in its other mammoth land acquisition, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War. On January 25, 1848, after nine months of intense negotiations with the defeated Mexicans, Nicholas P. Trist, special envoy for President Polk, got the Mexicans to accept $15 million for California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. Trist consummated the deal just in time.

The day before—January 24, 1848—gold was discovered in California.

“Hindsight,” says the British broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, “is the bane of history.”

“Very nearly everything that happened in history very nearly did not happen,” said the renowned mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Here are some other histories that almost never made the history books.

1776
Might war have been avoided? Most likely not, but the way it started was the result of boneheaded miscalculations.

In an effort to appease the American colonists who were smuggling in Dutch tea rather than pay the stiff duty on British tea, the British came up with what they thought was a noble plan. Under the new Tea Act of 1773, they would cut the twenty-shillings-per-pound duty in half.

The plan backfired: instead of appreciating the ten-shilling savings, the colonists reacted to the ten-shilling duty and instigated the Boston Tea Party. It was a classic case of glass half full or half empty: one side seeing it one way, one side seeing it the other way.

How could the British get it so wrong? By being out of touch with their subjects. Ever since 1760 the British Parliament had been conducting much debate about how to handle the colonies, with arguments and ideas being tossed to and fro. But never once during this period did a British minister or member of Parliament bother to go to America and investigate what was going on. Had the British exercised some basic hands-on management, this breakdown in diplomacy might not have occurred.

As late as 1776, England was still “the mother country.” On January 1, during the siege of Boston, George Washington raised a new flag visible to many of the British soldiers on the other side. It was the first flag in America. It had thirteen red and white stripes, signifying the union of the thirteen colonies, and in the upper left corner was the Union Jack, representing the British Empire. “The flag,” says the historian Thomas Fleming, “affirmed America’s determination to resist Britain’s authoritarian pretenses—and at the same time somehow to maintain an allegiance to the ideal of a united British empire.” Called the Grand Union flag, it was more a statement of allegiance than of rebellion. A British intelligence agent in Philadelphia described the flag as “English colors but more striped.” The commanding general of the British army, William Howe, agreed: the flag was a signal of the colonies’ respect for British authority.

America’s first flag, January 1, 1776: English colors, but more striped

Unfortunately, the king didn’t see it that way. Proving the axiom that people invariably see only what they want to see, King
George III saw the flag as exactly the opposite: an act of rebellion. How dare the colonies put the Union Jack in a small corner! When the Continental Congress sent an emissary with an “Olive Branch Petition” expressing loyalty to the Crown and requesting a possible reconciliation, the king refused to consider it.

Had he interpreted Washington’s gesture correctly, he might have had a New World partner for decades longer. Washington continued to be conciliatory: when he crossed the Delaware in his famous Christmas victory a year later, the flag he took was the Grand Union flag (not the Stars and Stripes we see in every painting). Rebels though they were, the colonists still thought of themselves as subjects of the king.

Six months later, in mid-1777, the colonists finally changed their flag to the Stars and Stripes. After further fighting and neither side getting anywhere, the British in early 1778 changed tack and offered the colonists a sweeping program of concessions so radical that it left Parliament “stunned and unbelieving.” Under the Conciliatory Propositions, the tea duty and other punitive acts would be repealed entirely, all taxation by Parliament would cease, Congress would be granted full recognition as a constitutional body, and membership in the House of Commons would be offered.

No question, this was quite an offer. Problem was, it was too little, too late. The colonists had upped their demands, and now wanted complete independence and removal of all troops and warships. Continued negotiations might have been fruitful except for one basic fact: having taken on France as an ally, America could not have cut a deal with Britain even if it had wanted to.