American History Revised (41 page)

1990
Whenever you consider buying life insurance, your broker will urge you to also buy disability insurance. After all, what could be worse than death but to be a cripple and a lifetime burden on your family? The same applies to war: the forgotten ones—the soldiers thoroughly maimed and left living a mere fraction of their humanity. War statistics talk about the dead and the wounded, but not about the “living dead.” Thanks to advances in efficient helicopter rescue teams and the miracles of modern medical technology, American soldiers are fighting deadlier wars and surviving them—but just barely. They are the “living dead.”

According to Dalton Trumbo, author of
the 1939 classic antiwar novel
Johnny Got His Gun
, “Vietnam has given us eight times as many paralytics as World War II, three times as many totally disabled, 36 percent more amputees. Out of every hundred army veterans receiving compensation for wounds received in action in Vietnam, 12.4 percent are totally disabled. Totally.”

That was said in 1990. Move up to the Iraq War: the percentage of severely wounded—defined as “having suffered brain damage, loss of limbs, or [having] been crippled for life by their injuries”—was also around 12 percent. In the war’s first three years, from early 2003 to early 2006, there were 2,248 fatalities and 16,606 wounded, out of which more than two thousand were severely wounded or totally disabled. In World War II the ratio of killed to wounded was one out of four; in Iraq, one out of nine.

This improved survival ratio was no indication of less deadly warfare. In Afghanistan and Iraq, advances in protective gear, field medicine, and rapid evacuation procedures enabled soldiers to survive injuries that otherwise might have been fatal. American soldiers wore substantial body armor, leaving only their arms and legs exposed. Arrayed against this, however, was the increasingly lethal power of enemy weapons in the form of IEDs (improvised explosive devices). Almost half the soldiers wounded in Iraq were classified as “unfit to return to duty,” meaning that their wounds were extremely severe. According to Pentagon statistics, the amputation rate of the wounded in Iraq was double that of previous wars. Also much higher than before was the number of mental health cases. According to the commander of the Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, more than one out of three soldiers returning from Iraq faced post-combat mental-health issues. This was due not only to the physical injuries they may have suffered, but to the particular nature of the Iraq war. “Iraq war veterans,” he said, “are more likely to have witnessed someone getting wounded or killed” from roadside explosive or car bombs. “War,” he continues, “is sending a normal person into a very abnormal situation. Death and serious injury are very traumatic things to have to deal with.”

By military order, the coffins of soldiers shipped back to the United States from Iraq were shipped in complete privacy, with no photographs allowed to be taken. The wounded soldiers, especially the severely wounded ones, received the same treatment: the military planes bringing them home to the U.S. arrived after midnight, when there were few witnesses.

A
sked what single book he would put into the hands of a Russian Communist, President Franklin D. Roosevelt replied, “The Sears, Roebuck catalog.” So many products! So many choices and varieties! So cheap!

Today, America has a major image problem, especially in the Arab world: it is viewed as a land of gross materialism. What people forget is that the economic success that makes materialism and quality living possible is a strong economy. Democracy—and the patience it requires—does not appeal to people suffering from a hungry stomach and having no home to call their own. Back in 1789, when our Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they had no assurance that their project would survive. They needed help from the economy. “The debate over the constitution,” observed Chief Justice John Marshall, “was ended not by its ratification, but by the return of economic prosperity.”

“In democracies,” said Tocqueville, “nothing is greater or more brilliant than commerce. It attracts the attention of the public and fills the imagination of the multitude.” No man exemplified this better than
Benjamin Franklin. He held no elective office, he was no politician, he was no military hero. But he was a great common man, a citizen who was both a doer and a philosopher. And, lest we forget, he was a man who could accomplish what he did because he made himself rich in business by the time he was forty.

Of all our presidents, one man in particular recognized the importance of riches in pursuing the American dream. He said, “I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war on capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everyone else.” So spoke a man not normally associated with riches: Abraham Lincoln.

Many foreigners misunderstand this fundamental aspect of America: they accuse America of commercialism, of pursuing Mammon instead of God (though America may be more religious than many other countries). Political stability requires that everyone work hard and do their part—and enjoy the rewards. In 1853 the most prominent senator in the United States was William Seward of New York. He gave a speech to the Senate in which he said, “Multiply your ships and send them forth. The nation that draws most from the earth, and fabricates the most, and sells the most to foreign nations, must be, and will be, the great power of the earth.”

Years later, in 1863, when he was Lincoln’s secretary of state, in an effort to forestall European powers from supporting the Confederacy, he brought to New York a number of ambassadors from England, France, Germany, and Russia. The point of the visit? To show them “hundreds of factories with whirling wheels, thousands of acres of golden harvest fields, miles of railway trains, laden with freight, busy fleets on rivers, lakes and canals.”

And what made all this activity possible? Not the government that encouraged such endeavor, but individuals pursuing personal wealth.

“Robber barons” make for great publicity, even for historians. But such sensationalism is misleading. John D. Rockefeller made hundreds of millions. But more important is how Rockefeller enabled fuel prices to drop 90 percent and workers’ real wages to double. Same for Henry Ford, celebrated for creating the first mass-produced car. Henry Ford’s great contribution was more than just the assembly line, it was his willingness to pay high wages so his workers could afford to buy a car.

In his masterful work of historiography,
The Historian’s Craft
, Marc Bloch had this to say about the short shrift given economics by historians focused on politics:

Governments prosper or die by the economy. George Washington knew this instinctively. When he took office in 1789, he installed five employees in the newly created State Department, and in the Treasury Department he installed forty. Presidents get reelected or thrown out of office depending on the performance of the economy during their tenure, as George H. W. Bush learned in 1992. He should not have been surprised. His mentor Richard Nixon was once asked why he lost the 1960 election to John F. Kennedy. Nixon could have blamed any number of things: his facial “five o’clock shadow” during the crucial first TV debate, his getting hospitalized during two of the last weeks of the campaign, or his not having in his camp Mafia bosses who controlled Chicago and could deliver the critical state of Illinois. Had any one of these been in Nixon’s favor, Nixon might have won. No, Nixon blamed the economy—more specifically, Eisenhower’s refusal to pump up the economy in 1959–60, at the risk of incurring a deficit.

Thomas Jefferson wrote many articles and speeches. One doesn’t think of his second annual message of December 15, 1802, as being in the league of Washington’s Farewell Address (“entangling alliances with none”), Monroe’s Doctrine, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Wilson’s Fourteen Points, Eisenhower’s farewell address (“military-industrial complex”), or FDR’s (“fear itself”) or JFK’s (“do for your country”) inaugural speeches. Indeed, go through any compendium of great American speeches, and Jefferson’s remarks are not to be found.

From the perspective of today, however, Jefferson’s remarks take on historical significance. In this particular speech, Thomas Jefferson chose to hammer away at fiscal responsibility and the national debt. After expressing satisfaction concerning the “large and effectual payments toward the discharge of our public debt and the emancipation of our posterity from that mortal cancer,” he explained that one generation had no right to bind the next: “The earth belongs to the living generation.” Jefferson thought that if it was absolutely necessary for the government to enter into debt for reasons of war or financial panic, those debts should be completely paid off in around twenty years.

“The business of America is business,” goes the common saying. Much has been written about the magnificent Statue of Liberty, surely the first sight of America many of our immigrants saw. No, not at all. Long before they caught sight of the Mother Lady, immigrants on the boat deck anxiously looking for their new homeland were greeted by Coney Island’s giant illuminated Ferris wheel blazing in the night.

President Washington’s handwritten journal of his crops for 1789. Even as president, he kept meticulous records.

1785
In business, one of the criteria that executive recruiters use in looking for a chief executive is “line management” experience, i.e., having many people under his authority responsible for producing the enterprise’s products.