Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States (7 page)

These were just some of the storm clouds now gathering over the nation’s political landscape. For meanwhile, back east, the cold front of moral outrage was moving inexorably toward the low-pressure system of southern economic interests, creating another of those frontal systems of conflict that would inevitably result in a violent afternoon or evening thundershower of Carnage. Also, it was time for the Civil War.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. In the song “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain When She Comes,” why do

they announce so cheerfully that they intend to “kill the old red rooster

when she comes”? Is it some kind of ritual thing? Or is it that they

just hate the old red rooster, because maybe it pecked them or something

when they were children, and now they’re just using the fact that she’s

comin’ ‘round the mountain as an excuse to kill it? 2. An-cay oo-yay eak-spay ig-pay atin-lay? Explain. 3. Define the following: “Wooo-EEEE!

The seeds of the Civil War were sown in the late eighteenth century when Eli Whitney invented the “Cotton gin,” a machine capable of turning cotton into gin many times faster than it could be done by hand. This created a great demand for cotton-field workers, whom the South originally attempted to recruit by placing “help wanted” advertisements in the newspaper:

ATTENTION SELF-STARTERS!

Are you that special “Can-do” kind of guy or gal who’s

looking for a chance to work extremely hard under horrible

conditions for your entire life without getting paid and

being severely beaten whenever we feel like it, plus we

get to keep your children? To find out more about this

exciting career opportunity, contact: The South.

Oddly enough, this advertisement failed to produce any applicants, and so the South decided to go with slavery. Many people argued that slavery was inhuman and cruel and should be abolished but the slave owners argued that it wasn’t so bad, and that in fact the slaves actually were happy, the evidence for this being that they sometimes rattled their chains in a rhythmic fashion.

By the mid-nineteenth century, slavery was the topic of heated debate among just about everybody in the country except of course the actual slaves, most of whom were busy either working or fleeing through swamps. The crisis deepened in 1850, when President Zachary Taylor died of cholera, fueling fears that we forgot to mention his election in the previous chapter. Taylor’s death led to the presidency of a man whose name has since become synonymous, in American history, with the term “Millard Fillmore”: Millard Fillmore.

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE FILLMORE ADMINISTRATION

1. The Earth did not crash into the Sun.

After Fillmore came Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, who as far as we can tell were both president at the same time. This time-saving measure paved the way for the election of Abraham Lincoln, who was popular with the voters because he possessed an extremely rustic Set of origins.

THE ORIGINS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Lincoln’s family was poor. He was born in a log cabin. And when we say “a log cabin,” we are talking about a cabin that consisted entirely of one single log. That is how poor Lincoln’s family was. When it rained, everybody had to lie down under the log, the result being that Lincoln grew up to be very long and narrow, which turned out to be the ideal physique for splitting rails. Young Abe would get out there with his ax, and he’d split hundreds of rails at a time, and people would come from miles around. “Dammit, Lincoln,” they’d say, “those rails cost good money!” But in the end they forgave young Abe, because he had the ax.

He was also known for his honesty. In one famous historical anecdote, Lincoln was tending store, and a customer accidentally left his change on the counter, and young Abe picked it up and walked fourteen miles with it, only to glance down and realize that his face was on the penny. This anecdote gave Lincoln the nickname that was to serve him so well in politics—“Old Ironsides”—and it earned him an invitation to appear as a contestant on The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, the most popular show of the era. Lincoln was able to get to the bonus round, where he correctly answered the question “How much is four score plus seven?” thus winning the Samsonite luggage and the presidency of the United States.

This resulted in yet another famous historical anecdote. When Lincoln assumed the presidency, he was clean-shaven, but one day he got a letter from a little girl suggesting that he grow a beard. So he did, and he thought it looked pretty good, so he decided to keep it. A short while later, he got another letter from the little girl, this time suggesting that he wear mascara and rouge and maybe a simple string of pearls. Fortunately, just then the Civil War broke out.

THE CIVIL WAR

This was pretty depressing. Brother fought against brother unless he had no male siblings, in which case he fought against his sister. Sometimes he would even take a shot at his cousin. Sooner or later, this resulted in a horrendous amount of devastation, particularly in the South, where things got so bad that Clark Gable, in what is probably the most famous scene from the entire Civil War, turned to Vivien Leigh, and said: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” This epitomized the feeling of despair that was widespread in the Confederacy as the war ended, and it left a vast reservoir of bitterness toward the North. But as the old saying goes, “Time heals all wounds,” and in the more than 120 years that have passed since the Civil War ended, most of this bitterness gradually gave way to subdued loathing, which is where we stand today.

RECONSTRUCTION

After the Civil War came Reconstruction, a period during which the South was transformed, through a series of congressional acts, from a totally segregated region where blacks had no rights into a totally segregated region where blacks were supposed to have rights but did not. Much of this progress occurred during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, who in 1868 defeated a person named Horatio Seymour in a race where both candidates had the backing of the Let’s Elect Presidents with Comical First Names party, whose members practically wet their pants with joy in 1876 over the election of Rutherford B. Hayes, who went on to die—you can look this up—in a place called Fremont, Ohio. Clearly the troubled nation had nowhere to go except up.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. If he had a beard, where would he apply the rouge?

FUN CLASSROOM PROJECT

See if you can name the causes of the Civil War.

The end of the Civil War paved the way for what Mark Twain, with his remarkable knack for coining the perfect descriptive phrase, called “the POst-Civil War era.” This was a period unlike any that had preceded it. For one thing, it occurred later on. Also it was an Age of Invention. Perhaps the most important invention was the brain-child of Thomas “Alva” Edison, a brilliant New Jerseyan who, in 1879, astounded the world when he ran an electrical Current through a carbonized cotton filament inside a glass globe, thus creating the first compact-disc player. Unfortunately it broke almost immediately and did not come back from the repair shop for nearly a century (And it still didn’t work right.). But this did not stop the prolific Edison from numerous other electronic breakthroughs that we now take for granted, including: the Rate Increase; the Limited Warranty; the Eight “C” Batteries That Are Not Included; the Instructions That Are Badly Translated from Japanese; and the Newspaper Ad Featuring Four Thousand Tiny Blurred Pictures of What Appears to Be the Same VCR. For these achievements, Edison was awarded, after his death, one of the highest honors that can be bestowed upon a dead American citizen: A service plaza off the New Jersey Turnpike was named after him (The first is named for Marvin Kitman, the second for Al Capone.). Parts of it still stand today.

Another famous genius of the era was Alexander Graham Bell System, who in some specific year beginning with “18” invented “the area code,” thus paving the way for long distance, without which modern telephone-company commercials would not be possible. Originally there was only one area code, called “1” but over the years new ones were added steadily, and telephone-company researchers now foresee the day when, thanks to modern computers, every telephone in the nation will be a long-distance call from every other telephone, even if it’s in the same house.

Meanwhile, the nation’s rural areas were being greatly affected by the MeCormick reaper, which was invented by Cyrus McCormick and paved the way for the Midwest, a group of flat Protestant states containing an enormous amount of agriculture in the form of wheat. Formerly, to reap a single acre of wheat, a farmer would have to work for four days, with the help of two farmhands driving six mules. But now he could sit back and relax as the reaper roared through as many as ten acres per hour, reaping the living hell out of everything that stood in its path, occasionally spitting out bits of mule fur or farmhand clothing, which could easily be reassembled thanks to the sewing machine, invented by Elias Howe. “Don’t ask me Howe it works!” he used to say, over and over, until finally somebody, we think his wife, shot him in the head with a revolver, invented by Samuel Colt.

McCormick’s invention was so successful that by the early 1870s the Midwest was disappearing under an enormous mound of reaped wheat, and it became clear that some kind of efficient method was needed to get it to the big cities, where it could be converted into sandwiches, which had been invented earlier in England by Samuel Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato. This caused Congress to authorize work on the first transcontinental railroad corporation, Amtrak. Two work crews began laying rails, one starting on the East Coast and the other on the West Coast. It was hard going. The crews endured broiling heat and bitter cold, often simultaneously. But they persevered, and finally, on October 8, the two crews met at Promontory Point, Utah, where, in a moving and historic ceremony, top railroad executives gathered to explain to them that they were supposed to be nailing the rails down, for God’s sake. But even this setback did not prevent women and minority groups from achieving many notable achievements.

THE RISE OF HEAVY INDUSTRY

Around this time heavy industry started to rise, thanks to the work of heavy industrialists such as Andrew “Dale” Carnegie, who made a fortune going around the country holding seminars in which he taught people how to Win friends by making steel. Another one was John D. Rockefeller, who invented oil and eventually created a monopoly, culminating in 1884 when he was able to put hotels on both Park Place and Boardwalk. This made him so rich that everybody started hating him, and he was ultimately forced to change his name to “Exxon.”

As heavy industrialism became more popular, large horrible factories were built in eastern cities. The workers—often minority women and children—toiled under grueling, dangerous conditions for twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for an average weekly salary of only $1.80, out of which they had to “voluntarily” give 85 cents to the United Fund. On top of this, the factory workers were subjected to one of the most cruel and inhumane labor concepts ever conceived of by the mind of industrial man: vending-machine food. The suffering this caused can only be imagined by us fortunate modern corporation employees, but we can get some idea of what it was like by reading this chilling excerpt from a nineteenth-century New York factory worker’s diary:

Nobody knows where the food comes from, or even if it

really is food. There is a machine that dispenses liquids

that are allegedly “coffee,” “tea,” “hot chocolate,” and

even “soup,” which all come from the same orifice and all

taste exactly the same. Another machine dispenses bags

containing a grand total of maybe three potato chips each,

and packages of crackers smeared with a bizarre substance

called “cheez,” which is the same bright-orange color as

marine rescue equipment. The machine for some reason is

constructed in such a way that it drops these items from a

great height, causing the contents, already brittle with

age, to shatter into thousands of pieces. Also half the

time it just eats your money, and forget about getting a

refund …

Conditions such as these resulted in the Labor Movement, the most important leader of which was Samuel Gompers. And even if he wasn’t the most important, he definitely had the best name. We could just say it over and over: Gompers Gompers Gompers. This would be an excellent name for a large dog (Such as a Labrador retriever.). “Gompers!” we can just hear ourselves yelling. “You put that Federal Express man down right now!” Nevertheless it was to be a long, hard struggle before the Labor Movement was to win even minimal concessions from the big industrialists—years of strikes and violence and singing traditional Labor Movement protest songs such as “Take This Job and Shove It.” But it was the courage of these early labor pioneers that ultimately made possible the woring conditions and wages and benefits that American factory workers would probably be enjoying today if the industrialists hadn’t moved their manufacturing operations to Asia.

THE SETTLEMENT OF THE WEST

When the Civil War ended, the West was still a region of great wildness, a fact that had earned it the nickname “The Great Plains.” In this rough, untamed environment had emerged the cowboy, a hard-ridin’ straight-shootin’ rip-snortin’ cow-punchin’ breed of hombre who was to become the stuff of several major cigarette promotions. To this day you can walk up to any schoolboy and mention one of those legendary Old West names—Wyatt Earp, “Wild Bill” Hickok, Gary Cooper, “Quick Draw” McGraw, Luke Skywalker—and chances are the schoolboy, as he has been taught to do, will scream for help, and you will be arrested on suspicion of being a pervert. So maybe you better just take our word for it.