American Stories: Living American History, Volume II: From 1865

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American Stories

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Volume II: From 1865

American Stories Living American History

Jason Ripper

M.E.Sharpe Armonk, New York London, England

Copyright © 2008 by M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 80 Business Park Drive, Armonk, New York 10504. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ripper, Jason, 1970– American stories : living American history / Jason Ripper. v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: v. 1. To 1877 — v. 2. From 1865. ISBN 978-0-7656-1918-1 (v. 1 : pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-7656-1920-4 (v. 2 : pbk. : alk. paper) 1. United States—History—Study and teaching. 2. United States—Biography. 3. Education—United States—Biographical methods. 4. United States—Biography—Study and teaching. I. Title. E175.8.R57 2008 973.07—dc22

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Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1984. ~ BM (p)

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Contents Preface and Acknowledgments

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Chapter 1

After the Civil War The Difficulties of Reconstruction Reconstruction: Black and White Mary Ames: A New England Woman in Dixie W.E.B. DuBois and the “Problem of the Color Line”

3 4 6 10 16

Chapter 2

Cowboys and Indians Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Horses: Flesh and Iron Buffalo Bill, Black Kettle, and the Wars for the West Buffalo Bill: Violence and Theater Annie Oakley Sherman Alexie’s Poem on Buffalo Bill

19 20 22 24 31 32 37

Chapter 3

A Mosaic of American Life: 1875–1914 Millions of Watts: Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla Millions of Immigrants Sadie Frowne: Sweatshop Seamstress Ida Tarbell: Muckraker

39 40 44 48 54

Chapter 4

The U.S. Government: At Home and Abroad The Scene at Home Theodore Roosevelt, Part 1: Of Silver Spoons and Police Badges An International Interlude: Cuba, Hawaii, and the Prelude to War Theodore Roosevelt, Part 2: Of Rough Riders, Talking Softly, and Carrying a Big Stick The Spanish-American War and the War Against Filipino Nationalism Theodore Roosevelt, Part 3: From Lieutenant Colonel to President

59 60 62 66 72 74 75

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

A Palette of Progressives The “Full Dinner Pail” and the “Square Deal”: Theodore Roosevelt as President Defining “Progressivism”: Roosevelt and Robert La Follette Different Paths to Progress: Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Frances Willard Birth Control and Conservation: Margaret Sanger and Gifford Pinchot Lines in the Water

79 80 84 86 91 94

World War I Did Civilization Civilize? The Causes of World War I in Europe War, Baseball, Ragtime: From August 1914 to January 1917 The Yanks Are Coming A Doughboy in the Trenches Woodrow Wilson and Some Kind of Peace

99 100 101

The 1920s Introduction to the Twenties: Cars, Commercials, and Crime Al Capone: The Powers of Money Zora Neale Hurston: The Harlem Renaissance, American Letters, and the Great Migration In Cars, on Roads, to Cities

117

Into the Great Depression From Plenty to Plenty of Nothing: Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover The Bonus Expeditionary Force and the Election of Franklin Roosevelt The Depression: Why? Plenty of Dust: Stories from Inside the Storm Eleanor Roosevelt: Before the Depression Popularity from the Pulpit: Aimee Semple McPherson Eleanor Roosevelt: Progressive Politics in the Depression

137

140 144 146 150 152 153

Out of the Depression and Into War What They Heard on the Radio Pearl Harbor Sacrifice The Internment of Monica Sone

157 158 162 166 169

103 108 110 114

118 120 127 134

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Sergeant E.B. Sledge and Shakespeare: “What a piece of work is a man”

174

Chapter 10 World War II James Doolittle Gives America Hope The War in Europe: 1941–1943 Dwight D. Eisenhower The Liberation of North Africa and Italy Daniel Inouye and the 442nd: D-day and the Fall of the Third Reich

177 178 181 183 185

Chapter 11 From World War to Cold War To the Surrender of Japan After the War: “Give ’em hell, Harry!” Alger Hiss and Joseph McCarthy: Spies, Superbombs, and Circus Politics

197 198 203

Chapter 12 American Culture and Society in the 1950s and 1960s White and Black, Apart and Together Rebels in Denim and Diamonds, and Rebels with a Pen Barbie in the Suburbs The Many Faces of Feminism

219 220 224 227 231

Chapter 13 In Love and War: 1961–1969 Big Dreams “Still crazy after all these years”: Castro, Kennedy, and Khrushchev The Vietnam Era: Civil Rights, the Great Society, and War Tim O’Brien: Citizen Soldier

239 240

Chapter 14 Contemporary America: The Life and Times of Al Gore You and History Al Gore and Global Climate Change Young Al Gore Vietnam and the Making of Al Gore Learning How to Be a Democrat in a Conservative America From Vice President to Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize The Early Twenty-first Century About the Author

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244 248 253 259 260 260 262 263 266 272 274 279

PREFACE

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments This book tells the history of the United States through the story of its inhabitants. As you turn the pages, an argumentative and yet cooperative mess of people will be found recovering from the Civil War; struggling to gain full civil rights; struggling to prevent others from achieving full civil rights; figuring out how to make a buck; tickling old slave spirituals through the piano keys to give the blues jazz; knocking baseballs past the diamond and past the last fence in the park; knocking the German military over not once but twice; tinkering into creation the gas-and-oil-hungry internal combustion automobile; creating a whole sector of the economy (i.e., advertising) designed to make us feel bad enough about our hair, our breath, and our good health that we would buy conditioner, mouthwash, and cigarettes—along with anything else an inventor with a patent could churn out from a factory floor. Each chapter features at least one (but usually two or three) prominent biographies, which travel the historical continuum from the philanthropic New England teacher Mary Ames to the eloquent pan-American activist W.E.B. DuBois to the progressive New York first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to the alarm-ringing citizen of the world Al Gore. The details of people’s lives are connected to their surroundings and to American history at large. This is, therefore, the interlocked history of worldwide political developments (often military), the ongoing fifty-state fight for social justice on the part of all racial and sexual minority groups, and an examination of federal, state, and private powers intersecting. Sad but dangerous racist ideologies perpetuated a skin-color hierarchy in the United States and spawned the preview to Armageddon known as World War II. While it took African-Americans 100 years after the close of the Civil War to wrest compelling civil rights legislation from the federal government in the 1960s, homosexuals in the United States still face pervasive and ugly daily discriminations. And where electoral political realities intersect with the oil industry, the auto culture, and the electrical grid, polar bears and global climate change are likely to suffer; as of January 2008, the federal government seemed prepared to lease oil exploration rights to private companies off the

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

north shores of Alaska—the domain of one-fifth of the planet’s polar bears. This book tells the history of the United States through the feelings, experiences, devastations, and triumphs of our ancestors and us. Years ago my father and I had a conversation about artists, about whether a writer, or painter, or musician can be part of a family and write, or paint, or make music fully and without reservation. I said that surely a person could be committed to both, could create great literature or compose an epic symphony and share the duties and responsibilities at the heart of family. He did not think so. He was more right than I knew. My wife, Diane, did not write a single word of this book, but she helped me write it all the same. While I sat hunched over my bone-white iBook day and night, she fed our children every meal they ate, cleaned up every spill, read them stories about talking worms and hungry bears, and tucked them into bed after each long day. Diane encouraged me to take on this project, and she unfailingly did everything she could to give me the space to research and write. Thank you, Diane. My mother has more college degrees than she knows what to do with, so I tricked her into reading the entire manuscript two or three times over. She corrected my spelling, gently nudged me back into line when my sarcasm got the better of me, and cradled the phone to her ear at least once a day while I rattled on about the Constitutional Convention or about Star Trek as a perfect metaphor for peace. Thank you, mother, for donating one more year of your life to me. At the base of my brain are the conversations I have had with my father since I was very young. He has always treated me like a son and a friend. We have talked about writing, about the way words fit together or do not, about the power of love—to borrow a line from one of his poems, “Love is the power to resist ruin.” I did not resist as many cups of coffee as I should have, and if I had really been thinking, I would have resisted a degree in history in favor of a cushy career in law or banking. But I have always enjoyed people’s stories, and that is with what I wanted to fill this book. If love is the power to resist ruin, I think that stories told lovingly may have the same effect. So I dedicate this book to my children, Phineas and June, in the hopes that you who read this book take the better parts of the past with you into the future—a future I hope you and my children will share together in harmony. This is starting to feel like the Academy Awards. Next I would like to thank my editor, Steve Drummond, who believed in the ideas I had and helped usher them through the many desks, hands, and meetings necessary for me, an abstract dreamer with a paperwork disability, to write a book. Nicole Cirino at M.E. Sharpe has been upbeat, full of answers, and enjoyable to work with. Thank you, Steve and Nicole. Henrietta Toth, project editor at Sharpe, ensured the “project” would become a book. Laurie Lieb, the copyeditor, checked my

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spelling, facts, syntax, style, and logic; finding all of it in distress, she thankfully came to the rescue. Three colleagues from Everett Community College donated summertime hours to the cause and reviewed a few chapters at the last minute. Thank you Dr. Tom Gaskin for your good-natured corrections of the chapter on Andrew Jackson; and thank you Sharon Stultz and Ross Angeledes for pointing out the simplicities, errors, and strengths you found in my writing. Second to last, a caffeinated thank you to the owners, Diana and Luke, and to the barristas at Caffe Adagio in Bellingham. The lattes, turkey sandwiches, and kind smiles were a welcome part of my days and kept my head above the proverbial water. Finally, my thanks to the people who wrote the diaries, letters, newspaper stories, and books that made up the best part of the research. I spent a whole afternoon in the library reading Sally Wister’s diary. She was a sixteen-yearold Quaker girl from Philadelphia whose family escaped to their country home when the British occupied the city during 1777. Most days during her temporary exile, Sally wrote to her friend Deborah, and I sat there, face inches away from the diary, sucked back in time 250 years. The room around me disappeared, and I could hear the clatter of horse hooves as Continental officers arrived at Sally’s house to request rooms and food. I saw her coyly flirting and teasing, and then running up to her room to laugh about the fun and mischief she was making. As she said to Deborah, “I have a thousand things to tell thee. I shall give thee so droll an account of my adventure that thee will smile.” Whatever Deborah’s response may have been I smiled all afternoon long—especially when I read about a prank some of the officers played. Sally had purchased a life-size painted wooden model of a British soldier that, she said, made “a martial appearance.” As the Wister family and the officers chatted merrily in the evening, some servants snuck outside and placed the British grenadier by the front door. Then a “Negro” servant apprised the group that someone outside wanted to have a word. The officers—all but one named Tilly in on the prank—got up from the table to see who was at the door. Tilly looked outside, saw the British soldier, and “darted like lightning out the front door, through the yard, bolted o’er the fence. Swamps, fences, thorn-hedges, and plough’d fields no way impeded his retreat. He was soon out of hearing.” Sally and company roared with laughter. Tilly ran over the snow and into the forest before realizing he had been set up. When he got back, everybody laughed at him for half an hour and then went to bed. That is history to me. I hope to have transferred to you the laughter and pain I read in the letters and journals. If this book works, you will care about the Sally Wisters, Zora Neale Hurstons, and Elvis Presleys as much as I did.

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American Stories

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After the Civil War

Mary Ames and Emily Bliss (Used with permission of Documenting the American South, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries.)

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AMERICAN STORIES The Difficulties of Reconstruction In the two decades after 1865, the recently reunited United States had to figure out how to be one nation again at the same time that the challenges of Southern society took center stage. What would freedom mean for African-Americans? Who would rule in the Southern states? Would it be the old coalitions of plantation owners, the same ones who had supported the Confederacy? Could traitors get pardons and become politicians and leaders of the nation they had recently abandoned? From the vantage of 1865, no one could foresee the South’s future. Few white Southerners wanted a social revolution, while all African-Americans did. Presidents and congressmen had to navigate against the racket of competing voices calling out for mutually exclusive demands. In January 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Field Order 15, giving land to the freed people on the South Carolinian sea islands—awakening hopes for forty acres and a mule. The land allocations were subdivided into forty-acre parcels and the army also distributed worn-out mules. Freed families streamed to the islands and planted vegetables and rice. The land had been owned by white people who had deserted it early in the war, but the freed people argued that 200 years of hard labor had certainly earned them a right to some acreage. Within the year, President Andrew Johnson returned the lands to the former owners, overruling Sherman’s efforts and appeasing Southern whites. Following Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson stumbled through three years as president, facing impeachment along the way for his opposition to Congress’s efforts to reform the South through constitutional amendments and civil rights laws. Johnson vetoed more than one law designed to secure civil rights for blacks. In the House of Representatives, a Radical Republican named Thaddeus Stevens, looking very dour and stern in his photographs, led the charge against Johnson’s interference with progressive racial policies in the conquered South. In the 1866 congressional elections, Republicans took enough seats to override presidential vetoes. Stevens’s brief popularity, however, could not overcome the blunders of fellow Republicans or the durability of white supremacy in the South. Ulysses S. Grant became president in 1868 and miraculously lasted through two terms that included one scandal after another and a nation-shaking depression in 1873. The depression partly resulted from the Crédit Mobilier scandal: various congressmen and other public officials had been siphoning off millions of dollars in public monies originally intended for a transcontinental railroad. But Grant had entered the White House with volcanic popularity. People liked his small-town simplicity. Besides, Grant had won the war. He was a hero who rarely let the attention go to his head. Grant enjoyed racing his carriage

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through the streets of the capital, and when he got stopped by a police officer for speeding, Grant insisted on being given the ticket and allowing his carriage to be impounded. But Reconstruction ate holes in his presidency. In 1868, Grant ran under the slogan “Let Us Have Peace.” The sentiment could not overcome the civil war still raging in the South between AfricanAmericans bent on gaining civil rights and ex-Confederates bent on maintaining supremacy. The most notorious group of domestic terrorists, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), used every bloody means possible to keep African-Americans from voting. They lynched; they shot; they burned crosses and threatened. The white-hooded Klansmen were terrorists, and only one force could stop them—federal troops. Congress passed a law, the Force Act, enabling Grant, in 1871, to rush troops into the South where they arrested and imprisoned hundreds of Klansmen. White Southerners simply took off the white sheets and kept resisting Reconstruction. Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens in the House and Charles Sumner in the Senate tried to do right by the freed African-Americans, but a reluctant, tired North and an intransigent white South prevented any long-lasting, structural changes to Southern society. South Carolina briefly enjoyed a state assembly with more black representatives than white. Mississippi elected a black U.S. senator, and AfricanAmericans filled ballot boxes with votes for Republican candidates throughout the late 1860s and 1870s. Ultimately, however, Southern whites reestablished political and economic control. Reinvigorated white racists “redeemed” the South by passing a host of unsavory laws called black codes, which permitted sheriffs, for example, to forcibly place the children of African-Americans into “apprenticeships” on neighboring plantations. Also, African-Americans left slavery with no money and no land. With freedmen too poor to buy their own property, sharecropping resulted, a system in which landlords made sure to keep their tenant farmers in a cycle of debt that prevented them from easily leaving. African-American sharecroppers continued to till land owned by their former slave masters. Slavery had ended but slave conditions continued. In 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes took over the presidency. Hayes was not popular in the South, but an election debacle in 1876 earned him the necessary Southern electoral votes. Three Southern states, including Florida, had had their ballots challenged. The responsibility of choosing the president fell to a congressional committee, which picked Hayes. Although Hayes was a Union veteran and a Republican, his ascension to the presidency signaled the end of federal Reconstruction in the South. Hayes had no political capital to continue Reconstruction. After sixteen years of strife, most people in the North wanted to get on with their lives and stop hearing about all the problems in the South: Ku Klux Klan violence, voting fraud, disgruntled whites anxious over the loss of their property and workers. The freedmen had lost their allies. Not

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AMERICAN STORIES surprisingly, Northern whites allowed their Southern counterparts to resume lording it over Southern society. Back in 1862, when the Civil War was still in an early phase, William Tecumseh Sherman had written to a Southern acquaintance, Thomas Hunton, with whom Sherman had attended West Point. Miffed at Hunton’s choice to fight for the Confederacy, Sherman conceded, “We are Enemies, still private friends.”1 If Sherman could be “still private friends” with a traitor and a rebel, was it any wonder that a nation ruled mainly by white supremacists would return the South to the hands of its old masters when the experiment in Reconstruction seemed too tiring, too dangerous, and too little possible? Reconstruction: Black and White Freedom is choice. Slavery is the lack of choice. When slavery was banned throughout the United States with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, freed men and women made the most of their new circumstances. Some traveled across the states, looking for children, spouses, parents, and other family members who had been sold away. Some bought land or took the land of their former owners and kept on planting the same crops, herding the same cattle, but on their own terms, on their own time. Most white Southerners could not abide all this change, all this black freedom. In 1865, a young former Confederate named Edwin McCaleb captured the exasperation and outrage that fellow whites felt. “We can never,” he exclaimed, “regard the Negro our equal either intellectually or socially.” McCaleb thought that if the South could have a “system of gradual emancipation and colonization our people would universally rejoice and be glad to get rid of slavery.” Instead, he predicted that “this sudden system of Emancipation, this spasmodic transformation of the ignorant Negro from a peaceful laborer who has been accustomed to have all needs [provided] to a self reliant citizen will paralyze the productive resources of the South.” While McCaleb railed against the loss of unpaid workers and the ensuing “famine” he expected, a deeper fear underlay his complaints: interracial mixing. McCaleb was certain that the federal government intended to encourage “miscegenation.” In that case, “if such a detestable dogma becomes a law we shall soon have a race of mulattoes as fickle and foolish as the Mongrel population of Mexico never content with their present condition.” 2 Racism and economic concerns mixed in McCaleb’s mind into a desire to keep African-Americans subordinate and submissive. The Civil War had ended slavery, but left the slaverholder’s mind intact. Southern whites like McCaleb saw few options, all involving intimidation, coercion, and a resistance to the Reconstruction policies being legislated by Congress. Abraham Lincoln had wanted to let the rebel states back into the

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Union without fuss or vengeance. Lincoln imagined forgiveness. His successor, Andrew Johnson, imagined one thing but did another. Johnson was from Tennessee, a Confederate stronghold. A member of the Democratic Party, he had been chosen as Lincoln’s running mate solely because the Republicans wanted to boost their support in the 1864 presidential race: Johnson could secure votes for Lincoln that Lincoln could not get by himself. Had anyone known Lincoln was going to be assassinated, greasy-haired Andrew Johnson would never have been chosen for vice president. As a Southerner and former slave owner, Johnson’s sympathies lay with the South, even though he detested the richest planters, whom he blamed for having caused the Civil War in the first place. By autumn 1865, half a year into his three-year presidency, he had shifted from promising to punish the South to essentially pardoning every former Confederate officer and legislator who begged or groveled enough. Under Johnson, it seemed, the South would not be reconstructed—it would be returned to the past. With Andrew Johnson in the president’s seat, Southern racists had only to sit back and wait. As always, if African-Americans wanted something, they largely had to go about getting it for themselves. Granted, the federal government helped somewhat. In 1865 the Freedmen’s Bureau was established, headed by General Oliver O. Howard, described by historian W.E.B. DuBois as “an honest man, with too much faith in human nature.” Howard tried his best to provide opportunities and fairness for freed people while simultaneously doing what President Johnson demanded. Congress and the freedmen tugged Howard one way; the president pulled Howard the other way. The Freedmen’s Bureau sent teachers (mostly women) into the South, built schools for AfricanAmericans, adjudicated labor disputes between white landowners and black workers, and tried to enforce the provisions of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which provided basic civil rights, including voting rights, to all citizens, regardless of skin color. Although the Freedmen’s Bureau came under some criticism for doing as much to force black people back onto plantations as it did to get them wage contracts, the agency was as true a friend to the freed people as it could be, given the state of affairs in the nation in 1865. Here was what Howard and the Freedmen’s Bureau workers faced, in DuBois’s words: “A curious mess he looked upon: little despotisms, communistic experiments, slavery, peonage, business speculations, organized charity, unorganized almsgiving,—all reeling on under the guise of helping the freedmen, and all enshrined in the smoke and blood of the war and the cursing and silence of angry men.”3 With only 900 officials assigned to deal with labor disputes, court cases, and reform throughout eleven Southern estates, the Freedmen’s Bureau was hamstrung from its start. What the Freedmen’s Bureau could not do for African-Americans, many did

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AMERICAN STORIES for themselves. In August 1865, a Cincinnati newspaper printed a letter from a freedman to his former master. It was time for a white man to listen to a black man. Jourdon Anderson was a father, a husband, a laborer, and a former slave from Big Spring, Tennessee. Apparently, his former owner—Colonel Anderson—had sent a letter to Jourdon Anderson requesting that he and his family return to work at the Big Spring plantation, only this time they would be paid. Jourdon Anderson had other ideas. However, assuming his former owner was willing to pay the equivalent of a lifetime’s worth of back wages, Anderson was willing to let bygones be bygones. In a conciliatory, friendly voice, Jourdon Anderson teased and toyed with Colonel Anderson. “I suppose,” Jourdon began, that any would-be readers “never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable”—not exactly the kind of revelation a Southern man would want broadcast in 1865. Jourdon Anderson showed himself forgiving in the face of Colonel Anderson’s obvious lack of grace: “although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living.” Readers must have guffawed at the scenario: a gunslinging, homicidal plantation owner inviting a former slave to return to the plantation, “promising to do better for [Jourdon] than anybody else” could. Jourdon informed the colonel, “I have often felt uneasy about you.” And no wonder. Getting down to business, Jourdon Anderson wanted to know exactly what wages the colonel proposed to pay. Life in Ohio was better, much better, than it had been in Tennessee. The children were going to school, Jourdon got paid twenty-five dollars a month, and overall the whole family felt “kindly treated.” If only Colonel Anderson could be more specific about the wages, Jourdon could “decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.” That was the crux of the issue: choice. Jourdon was free and doing well, but at least in the mock-serious world of the letter, he would consider a return to the plantation if the price were right. Therefore, Jourdon thought a display of the colonel’s sincerity, “justice and friendship” might establish the proper basis for a new relationship. A few simple calculations added up to the total amount due. “I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy [Jourdon’s wife] twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars.” One can imagine Colonel Anderson’s eyes bulging at the number. Pretending that the colonel would be disposed to see the justice of the request, Jourdon wrote, “Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio.” Finally, unwilling to continue the charade any longer, unwilling to let the colonel or readers of the newspaper think that forgiveness could be found in back wages or any other form of apology or restitution, Jourdon Anderson concluded the letter:

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Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire. In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits. Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me. From your old servant, Jourdon Anderson4

It is no great stretch to imagine that Colonel Anderson decided not to pay the eleven thousand dollars in back wages. It is no great stretch to imagine that Jourdon Anderson and his family remained in Ohio. The freedom to choose a way of life that Jourdon Anderson touted in his letter was not consistently enjoyed by African-Americans throughout the United States in the wake of the Civil War. Before the war, only four states had given black people the right to vote. Public facilities in the North had been segregated, and although free in theory, Northern black people were not free to go to most colleges or to manage businesses owned by whites. The war gave reformers an edge, however. After fighting for emancipation, how could Northern whites continue with such obvious bigotry? Within a decade, voting rights were extended to black people throughout the North, and restaurants, theaters, and hospitals were gradually integrated. As Jourdon Anderson’s letter makes plain, education was seen as the golden key to opportunity. The Civil War had accelerated two related trends: people moving to cities, and people working for wages. Factories expanded production during the war to feed and equip the soldiers. Commerce and trade increased, and the new jobs were mainly urban. In America’s cities, then, an education could make the difference between poverty and wealth. Farmers benefited from schooling but had never needed books or university professors to teach them how to plant and harvest. Doctors, lawyers, professors, teachers, engineers, bankers, and other wage workers either needed or at least benefited from a college degree. Many Southern blacks wanted to get off the plantation, away from the oversight and authority of their former owners. Education could elevate them while laws and federal agencies could do little more than ensure poverty pay and debt. Guns and armies set black people free. Now the ABCs could give them a new life.

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AMERICAN STORIES Mary Ames: A New England Woman in Dixie Mary Ames and her friend Emily Bliss arrived on Edisto Island, South Carolina, in May 1865 to open a school for some of the 10,000 African-Americans living there, former slaves who were hungry for education. The two New England women had been sent south by a Boston agency working in tandem with the newly created Freedmen’s Bureau. The Freedmen’s Bureau provided contacts and helped with housing and food, but the teachers who ended up going into rural districts, like Ames and Bliss, had to fend for themselves, which meant relying on the people they had come to teach. New England had not been ravaged by the war, other than having lost thousands of its sons in the fighting. For New Englanders who remained at home, crops grew, breezes blew, and houses stood unscathed. In the South it was different. Although some regions escaped any serious fighting, much of the land and its buildings were scarred from four years of war. The inhabitants had suffered, but they had also grown used to their circumstances. Northerners coming south to help were shocked on arrival. Traveling from the North was wearying and difficult. When the two women arrived in Charleston, Emily Bliss, “weary, discouraged, and homesick, threw herself sobbing into” the arms of Mr. James Redpath, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Charleston.5 It became apparent to Mary Ames that her traveling companion was barely suited to the task ahead. Mr. Redpath “wished us to remain in the city and teach in the public schools, and was quite disturbed and disappointed that we objected,” Mary Ames jotted into her diary. “We felt that we were not fitted for regular teaching. We were then offered a position on one of the islands where several thousand negroes were sent after Sherman’s march. That suited us, and we were ordered to leave in two days.” Edisto Island, their destination, had become a microcosm of the Reconstruction experiment. At the onset of the war, the U.S. Navy had seized the island. The plantation owners fled, leaving rich farmlands and houses for their slaves, who naturally set about farming and living as freely as any had ever hoped for. Fighting on the island had devastated many of the buildings, but society was still possible. By 1865, this environment had less of the racial strife and weariness that plagued Charleston, and it was assumed to be an easier posting for two fragile Yankee women. Mary Ames and Emily Bliss were at the vanguard of a revolutionary effort to plant primary schools and universities throughout the South, what the historian W.E.B. DuBois called “the crusade of the New England schoolma’am.”6 Within a few years, there were more than 3,000 teachers working with the freed people, and by 1869, more than half of those teachers were black, some from the North, many also from the South. The challenges were overwhelming: lack of supplies, books, and facilities; hostility from local whites; malnourished students; heat

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and sickness. Yet black people wanted to learn, were hungry for knowledge, famished by generations of illiteracy. This thirst for words, ideas, knowledge, and possibilities overcame the disadvantages of poverty. Freed people demanded literacy. And it was not just children who went to these new schools. Adults attended too, working all day in the fields as they had always done, but taking night classes sometimes twice a week. Some schools, like Tuskegee Institute, were designed to teach manual labor skills in agriculture and the building trades. Later, at the turn of the twentieth century, black American leaders debated and feuded over which type of education—liberal arts or trades—made better sense for black people in a wider United States society that was still not accepting of black equality. But in 1865, when Ames and Bliss arrived on Edisto Island, teachers and students alike were overwhelmed with getting down the basics: the alphabet, spelling, calm classroom behavior. Mary Ames’s time on Edisto Island—slightly more than one year—is the story of teaching under unusual circumstances, friendship between black and white, and the central importance of education. It is also the story of rattlesnakes in the bedroom, mosquitoes, sandy beaches, humid days that reduced the New England schoolma’ams to listless lumps, and nights spent without sleep reading cherished letters from home. What did the people of Edisto Island want after their chalky blackboard lessons? They wanted land, family, and salvation. Ames captured the rapture of her pupils’ yearning in one of their invocations: “When Gabriel blow his horn for Massa Jesus would he please blow a little louder?” African-Americans wanted what anyone wanted—the better things in life, the good things: plenty of food, some time off, the spirit of joy, a paying job, and freedom. When Ames disembarked at Edisto Island on May 10, 1865, it seemed to her “like fairy land—everything so fresh and green—the air so soft . . . the live-oaks in the background, with their hanging moss, had a very picturesque effect.” Fairyland got hot fast. The next day, the two newcomers reached what must have once been a pretty avenue, now rather forlorn. Driving in, we found negro cabins on either side, and a large house at the end. The inhabitants of the cabins came flocking out to welcome us with howdys, and offers of service to the missis. The former owner of the plantation was Dr. Whaley, the possessor of a hundred slaves, many of whom were now returned and living in the cabins. He deserted the place four years before, and the house had a desolate appearance—the windows gone, and shutters hanging by one hinge. Our trunks, box, and chairs were placed on the piazza and the army wagon was driven away. We looked at each other; our hearts were full, and if we could have seen any honorable way to escape and go home we certainly should have gone.

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AMERICAN STORIES Instead they chose two rooms in the mansion, which were littered with debris. “Uncle Jack and Aunt Phoebe,” who lived in adjoining cabins, cleaned the rooms with moss, there being no brooms on the premises. After a dinner of crackers, tea, and blackberries, Bliss and Ames headed upstairs to bed. On the stairs, they “were met by an angry old woman, who said we had taken possession of her quarters, and must pay her for them. We were frightened, and explained that we were sent by the United States Government, and must be respected accordingly. She went away, but soon began to throw stones and pieces of crockery into our open windows.” Alarmed, Ames “got out the hammer we had brought in our box and kept it in my hand all night, ready to beat out the brains of any one attacking us.” And that is how her teaching career began—under attack from an old woman wielding crockery shards, in a dirty room, surrounded by people desperate for what the new teachers had to offer. The next morning, Mary Ames unfurled a U.S. flag. The “negroes” gathered around it, appreciating what it heralded. A husband and wife, Jim and Sarah, along with their six children, offered to stay with Ames and Bliss in the house, making them feel safe. Sarah and Jim had followed Sherman’s army as he marched away from Charleston, Sarah carrying a two-year-old baby in her arms for more than 100 miles, the other children staying in front of her where she could keep her eyes on them. After another dinner of crackers and tea, the teachers went to visit their new neighbors. “Their faces shone when we told them why we had come. They all seemed decent and sensible creatures.” Although the Army commissary four miles away supplied food for the freed people, the general plan was for blacks to feed themselves as soon as possible. Ames explained that “Sherman’s plan is to have the negroes take care of themselves; they have planted corn, beans, and cotton, and are to repay the Government when their crops are gathered. This seems to be understood by all.” During 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau and the army distributed literally millions of meals throughout a South whose crops had been ravaged by Sherman’s army. Sherman’s troops had also destroyed railroads and bridges in their efforts to cripple the Southern will to fight. Now that the war was over, the infrastructure needed to transport food was gone: railroad ties bent and twisted, draft animals eaten or emaciated. And former slaves were not willing to work fourteen hours a day or seven days a week. Black women had long wanted to live the way wealthy white women did—at home, taking care of the children, which meant that fully one-half of the black workforce vanished from the fields. One-fifth of Southern white men had died during the war. Everywhere there was the absence of standing, healthy bodies. Even though the U.S. government now had to feed the defeated South, American culture

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did not encourage handouts. In particular, white people had long thought that black people were lazy and shiftless, a useful stereotype that allowed slaveholders to justify their practice of forcing slaves to work. But why would African-Americans have wanted to work hard for someone else when the only pay was fatty pork, maggot-ridden corn meal, and abuse? White people failed to see that their own prejudice and discrimination had pushed black slaves to resist slavery by doing what they could to labor slowly. W.E.B. DuBois called this the “problem of work,” the fundamental historical problem being that slavery was an economic system best suited to medieval feudalism, not to a cash-based, modern industrial economy.7 In DuBois’s opinion, black people needed to be trained to work as modern laborers, responding to the incentive of good pay for hard work. But most white Southerners preferred to get the former slaves back onto the plantations to labor for next to nothing or for nothing at all. So white people said that black people would not get handouts for long. Newspaper cartoons depicted black people lounging around, eating and lollygagging. From 1865 to 1867, during the period of “presidential Reconstruction” under Andrew Johnson, former Confederate politicians and officers took over Southern state legislatures and passed laws designed to keep African-Americans servile. All the while, government meals went to starving black and white people. In some military districts, white people took more meals than black people did, but this fact was generally ignored in favor of the racial stereotype of the shiftless “nigger” wanting something for nothing. Mary Ames quickly saw through the false notions and lies. She saw just how hard black people were willing to sweat for the lives they wanted. Less than a mile from their new plantation home, Mary Ames and Emily Bliss found a church. “The frame,” Ames wrote, “of the organ remains, the windows are gone, doors off their hinges, and pews mutilated, but we decided that it would serve our purpose well as a school-house.” The following Monday, May 15, the school opened with “fifteen scholars, nine boys, and six girls. Some were decently clad, others filthy and nearly naked. One or two knew their letters. None could read.” The next day twenty-eight students showed up. One of them, a boy named John, was “nearly naked, and so filthy” that Ames sent him off to bathe in a creek. The tide came in and pulled John out to sea, where he drowned. Ames felt grieved and guilty: “it was a terrible shock to us, and I felt partly responsible.” Nevertheless, she faced her main responsibility. Within days there were “sixty scholars” packed into the rickety church, many of them “rather unruly.” Ames recognized that “poor Emily is not adapted to deal with rough boys. I am obliged to go to her aid and, stamping my feet and shouting my commands, bring them to order.” Some things, apparently, never change.

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AMERICAN STORIES The two teachers also devised other tactics to control their classes. One day a man came into the school and sat down in a back pew; “the boys thought we had engaged him to whip them if they misbehaved. We have found out that the boys are afraid of their fathers, who are ‘Great on licking,’ so we shall threaten to report them if they are unruly.” Another tactic was less threatening: “Emily is a good singer, and when the school is too much for us, we start singing, and that calms them down.” Yet the shenanigans and difficulties continued; on one June day of “intolerable” heat, Ames had “one hundred and one scholars—too many—cannot keep order with so many. I am well worn out before noon with shouting and stamping, for I am obliged to help Emily when she gets into difficulty.” Their best tactic became simple adaptation to the new environment. Ames got to know and like her “scholars,” and they in turn came to like her: “We stayed after school closed with three unruly boys, . . . who confessed that they liked to tease us; but they were ashamed and promised to do better in the future.” Less than a week into the semester “a woman came with a prayer-book, asking to be taught to read it.” Ames told the woman “we would teach her willingly, but it would be some time before she could read that. She was satisfied, and as she was leaving, put her hand under her apron and brought out two eggs—one she put in Emily’s lap, the other in mine.” Trading eggs for education, the woman was probably offering everything she could spare. Bliss and Ames promised a twice-weekly evening class for the older people who had to work in the fields during the days. Ames wrote, “We had our first evening school for men and women on our piazza. It was well attended, all sitting on the floor and steps. One woman, who was much bent with rheumatism, and seemed very old, said she was ‘Mighty anxious to know something.’” Though conditions continued haphazard—“Jim has put up our stove; the pipe being too short for the chimney, he has put it out a window”—those were heady, ebullient times: “Nearly the whole school escorted us home to-day,” Ames noted. Afterward, teachers and students sat on the piazza sewing and mending clothes. When the weather grew too hot to walk to the church, they held class at the mansion. In fact, the students were becoming so eager to learn that they demanded lessons all the time—even on a Sunday. “No churchgoing—too warm,” Mary wrote. “We seated ourselves on the piazza to write letters. Soon a crowd of children were around us, all wanting books, and before we knew it we were teaching school.” One bright student was not content with getting an education for himself: “George is patient and promising. We are surprised at the ease with which he acquires the sound of words. He teaches his father after leaving us.” Although challenges and difficulties remained, progress was being made.

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One day “several children came and demanded clothing as a right. A girl brought back a dress, saying it was ‘scant.’ She wanted a fuller skirt and a hoop-skirt.” Fashionable nineteenth-century women’s clothes tended to be restricting and uncomfortable: corsets to bind the midriff and make the waist look slender; hooped skirts that billowed out around the ankles and made walking tricky. Nevertheless, these young girls wanted what was best, not just what was available. A sense of entitlement and a sense that clothing was a “right” were hopeful signs. The former slaves of Edisto Island were imagining a better future. And their teachers understood how much this possibility meant. One day, “a woman who brought some cucumbers said she would make any sacrifice to serve us, who were doing so much to teach her children, who knew nothing but how to handle a hoe.” In the evenings, the children sang songs, and Ames and Bliss told stories like “Red Riding Hood,” which the students had never heard. Mary Ames laughed into her diary that “they particularly delight in singing ‘Hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree.’” At the end of June, Ames and Bliss relocated to the island’s coast. The windward weather was cool and temperate. Another abandoned mansion sat waiting for them, and for the rest of the summer they held smaller classes on the coast, delighting in letters from home and visits from Jim, Sarah, and their children—the family who had roomed with them at the first house. But October became the month of shattered dreams, the month that General Howard of the Freedmen’s Bureau personally visited the island to tell everyone about President Johnson’s latest decree. The mansions, plantations, and farms were being returned to the white owners, who had fled four years earlier. As Ames described the scene, “At first the people could not understand, but as the meaning struck them, that they must give up their little homes and gardens, and work again for others, there was a general murmur of dissatisfaction.” Two of the largest plantation owners had accompanied General Howard, and Mary witnessed these men and their former slaves saying “How dy” to each other. One black man said that “he had lived all his life with a basket over his head, and now that it had been taken off and air and sunlight had come to him, he could not consent to have the basket over him again. It was a hard day for them.” The African-Americans of Edisto petitioned President Johnson to reconsider the severity of giving all the land back to the white people, leaving the black families with nothing. The petition had no effect. At other places in the South some lands were made available to AfricanAmericans, but often the land was not arable or the black farmers were given no seeds or tools to work it. The old property rights arguments were made to justify returning land and power to white people. By 1877, the Democratic Party regained a majority of seats in Southern legislatures. Democrats got elected to governors’ seats, and the Republican effort to reconstruct Southern

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AMERICAN STORIES society failed. In a couple of key Supreme Court cases, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution were rendered mute and ineffective. The Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment could be used to prosecute state governments that limited civil rights, but that the amendment did not justify prosecuting individuals who hindered civil rights. This ruling opened the proverbial door to vigilante injustice. When Congress and the courts were not rolling back victories and rights, local terrorist organizations were doing the evil work. The Ku Klux Klan, founded by former Confederate officers as a sort of fraternal organization, soon morphed into a secretive brigade of scared white people who feared losing their racial privileges and prerogatives. From their fear came hatred, and from their hatred came ugliness and violence. Hundreds of black people were killed by hooded Klansmen, and many more were threatened enough to either keep them from voting or get them to vote for Democratic candidates. The Grant administration passed laws to prevent Klan activities, but the laws did not work, could not work. After the war a U.S. Army of more than 1 million men in 1865 was almost instantly reduced to 38,000, most of whom were stationed in the West where new wars were being fought against Native Americans. Laws that could not be enforced were meaningless. In most places, education was all that was left. Mary Ames and Emily Bliss stayed on Edisto Island until the end of the summer of 1866. They lived in three different mansions and taught hundreds (probably thousands) of students, young and old. They shared wagon rides with skeletal horses, beef cooked to such exhaustion that it tasted like “queer bacon,” the shouts and ecstasy songs of prayer meetings, and the final sorrows of the African-American populace who were being sold short one more time in the United States. Ames knew that “the white people of Edisto [had] indeed suffered, but now their homes are to be given back to them. The island negroes and those brought here by our bewildered, blundering Government have had, and will have, harder days than their masters. Among those that we have known, however painful their experience, and whether accustomed formerly to easy routine as house-servants or to rougher field service, not one among them would choose ease with servitude rather than suffering with freedom.” As some of the black people left the island in the wake of General Howard’s visit and as other black people began signing sharecropping contracts, Mary Ames and Emily Bliss packed up their belongings and said good-bye to their “negro friends.” W.E.B. DuBois and the “Problem of the Color Line” Looking back over his shoulder forty years after emancipation, in 1903 W.E.B. DuBois wrote The Souls of Black Folk, a book about race, history,

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and soul. DuBois was the first African-American to earn a PhD at Harvard. In 1909, he helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP. Dr. DuBois fought eloquently and forcefully for African-Americans to be fully accepted into society. In those thirty-some years between emancipation and the turn of the century, he witnessed the calamity of a shattered experiment, the quick erosion of black civil liberties. In The Souls of Black Folk, he captured the disorientation and optimism that enveloped the first “New England schoolma’ams” as they entered the unreconstructed South: Behind the mists of ruin and rapine waved the calico dresses of women who dared, and after the hoarse mouthings of the field guns rang the rhythm of the alphabet. Rich and poor they were, serious and curious. Bereaved now of a father, now of a brother, now of more than these, they came seeking a life work in planting New England schoolhouses among the white and black of the South. They did their work well. In that first year they taught one hundred thousand souls, and more.8

Mary Ames did what she could for more than a year often admitting in her diary that going home would have been far preferable to the snakes and heat of South Carolina. Eventually she did go home, a choice available to her. But her scholars stayed behind, trapped into a cycle of poverty and debt established by history, tradition, and the unwillingness (or inability) of Southern whites to change. DuBois prophesied that the problem of the twentieth century would be the “problem of the color-line.”9 However, as industrial capitalism increasingly dominated the economy, the landscape, the politics, and the social relations of the United States, the problem of the twentieth century also came to involve the poverty line, the class line. White did continue to lord it over black in most cases, but as the twentieth century neared, a vast gulf grew between the few white families that owned most of the nation and the rest of the country who were struggling to make do. Notes 1. Amy Murrell Taylor, The Divided Family in Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 81. 2. Edwin H. McCaleb, “To T.P. Chandler, Esq.,” Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, www.gilderlehrman.org/search/display_results.php?id=GLC01594. 3. W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1903), 22–23. 4. Lydia Maria Child, The Freedmen’s Book (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865), 265–267.

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AMERICAN STORIES 5. All quotations from Ames’s diary can be found in Mary Ames, From a New England Woman’s Diary in Dixie in 1865 (Springfield, MA: 1906), Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina, http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/ ames/menu.html. 6. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk, 25. 7. W.E.B. DuBois, “The Problem of Work,” AME Church Review 19 (October 1903). 8. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk, 25. 9. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk, 40.

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Cowboys and Indians

Annie Oakley (Keystone/Getty Images)

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AMERICAN STORIES Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Many late–nineteenth-century Americans lived according to the rhythms of city streets or farm fields, presidential elections, newspaper headlines, railroad schedules, and children’s birthday parties. For entertainment, however, nothing beat a good gunfight or buffalo hunt, preferably when viewed from a distance. By 1883, lawmakers had outlawed gunfights and buffalo hunters had killed most of the buffalo. William F. Cody had just the cure: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a swirling menagerie of real Indians, real gunslingers, lots of dust, and lots of make-believe. Anybody with the entrance fee could settle in for four hours of stagecoach shoot-outs, buffalo hunts, and cavalry massacres, served up by the headliner himself—Buffalo Bill. William Cody was a handsome showman who had really been to the places he dramatized and who had done at least half of what he showed in the big ring. Rounding out the lineup were such wilderness luminaries as Geronimo, Sitting Bull, and Annie Oakley—defeated Indian chiefs and no-nonsense ladies. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows first went on tour in 1883, within seven years of the last massacre of Indians (at Wounded Knee in 1890), within the decade that the buffalo verged on extinction, and within the generation that the United States absorbed the Great Plains into its dominion. Cody and his performers gave Americans (and Europeans) what they wanted to see and in the process established America’s enduring western myth: gun-happy men on horses fearlessly taking the deserts, the prairies, and the buffalo away from featherdraped Indian warriors. William Cody’s audiences had other options for entertainment. A wideeyed consumer with no taste for the purely bawdy could see the Barnum and Bailey Circus; high-end or low-end productions of Shakespeare’s plays; baseball matches; and any traveling scientists, magicians, philosophers, socialist lecturers, astrologers, mystics, or charlatans who happened to be passing through town. Insulting by today’s standards was the popular vaudeville production known as a minstrel show. Some minstrel acts featured black performers, but others featured white performers in blackface: white men who darkened their skin with burned cork and accentuated their lips with red. White audiences smiled and clapped at the stereotyped, smiley-faced, “yes suh, massa” gimmicks. The blackface minstrelsy show, a mixture of imitation and insult, reinforced biased notions about black people’s incompetence, amusing imbecility, and lewd physicality. Consumers who liked more flesh in their fun could cheer on fighters like John L. Sullivan and “Gentleman” Jim Corbett at boxing matches or enjoy the lusty box-houses, which mixed dancing, drinking, and women in skimpy outfits—on stage or off, depending on the client’s desire. Prostitutes were a staple of American life; illegal

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in some places, tolerated in most, and even taxed in others. Author Curtis F. Smith regales readers with a pithy comment frequently heard on the muddy streets of Bellingham, Washington, in the waning years of the 1800s: “You could get a glass of gin,” the saying went, “a tattoo and a social disease, all within one block.”1 William Kittredge, the cowboy prose-poet of the West, calls brothels “civic sacrifice areas,” a way of explaining how the prostitutes were “sacrificed” to range riders’ lusts so that a town’s wives and daughters could be spared.2 Performers like the two “Little Egypts” became famous for their belly-shaking “hoochie-coochie” dances. But nobody was better known, better liked, or more watched than William F. Cody. He stole the show. In the three decades before Bill Cody could begin to make millions of dollars pretending to kill Indians and be killed by Indians, the final wars for the West had been fought. Ever since the 1840s, when white settlers began struggling across the Great Plains on their way to Oregon and California, there had been troubles between Indians and colonists. In 1851, at Fort Laramie, in present-day Wyoming, U.S. representatives and thousands of Plains Indians held a council. The Indians agreed to allow white people passage across the plains in return for yearly gifts from the federal government and firm guarantees of Native American sovereignty. The Fort Laramie Treaty specified vast expanses as the perpetual territory of the Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahos, and other tribes. There was, of course, a problem with this arrangement. People’s intentions were not necessarily the problem. Pressure for land and all that the land held was, as always, the problem. Immigration into the United States swelled an already-expanding population. Most white people fundamentally believed that Native Americans did not either need or deserve so much land. The U.S. economy relied on creating new markets and exploiting new resources, and there was gold throughout the northern plains, especially in the Black Hills of the Dakotas and in Montana. Few U.S. citizens or policy makers honored the Fort Laramie Treaty, so it became the task of the military to force Native American peoples to accept every treaty infringement that occurred. Some of the Indians’ staunchest advocates were the military men ordered to shove the Indians onto ever-shrinking reservations. Oliver O. Howard (former head of the Freedmen’s Bureau) was ordered, in 1877, to move Chief Joseph and the Oregonian Nez Percés to scrublands in Idaho. Howard protested, but carried out his orders, chasing Joseph, other chiefs like Looking Glass, and their few hundred followers from Oregon eastward, much of the way along the same route Lewis, Clark, and Sacagawea had followed seventy years before. Joseph and Looking Glass were trying to get to Canada, where the Hunkpapa Lakota Sitting Bull had taken hundreds of his people, also in flight from the U.S. military. But General Nelson A. Miles arrested their passage at Bear Paw

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AMERICAN STORIES Mountain, within sight of the border, staining too much snow with too much blood. The Nez Percés and Hunkpapa Sioux were not normally friends, but in this case, an enemy’s enemy would have done. Buffalo Bill’s extravaganzas embellished and glorified all things martial and wild, like the death of George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn. But in Oglala and Brule Sioux villages, in sodbuster hovels, and across the seas of native grass, families relied less on the gun and the sword than on the rain, the game, the wheat, and the corn. Cody turned conquest into a play just as the conquest was entering its final act. Horses: Flesh and Iron The horse became to the Sioux what the car became to later Americans: a new way of life; a way to get from here to there a whole lot faster, transforming families, motion, space, and food options in the process. Spanish conquistadors brought the horse to North America in 1519. Sometime around 1700, the peoples of the Great Plains began to ride, and the buffalo were no longer faster than their hunters. The most numerous people on the plains—the Sioux (really a confederacy of bands known as Brules, Oglalas, Hunkpapas, and Miniconjous, all of whom were affiliates of larger groups, the Lakotas and Dakotas)—wrapped their existence around the hunt, the horse, and the buffalo. Men and boys galloped from northern Texas past the Canadian border, from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi, learning how to kill with few arrows, how to skin the great beasts with sure and easy cuts, how to eat the still-warm organs when stomachs were empty and home lay hours away. Neither one horse nor one pony was enough. A single mount could tire too easily. Seasoned fighters and older leaders often had herds of their own, sometimes more than 100 horses, acquired through breeding and raiding. Sioux bands did fight other tribes, but warfare usually involved taking hostages and horses rather than slaughtering enemies. Prestige came from sneaking into an enemy’s camp and stealing a prized stallion or from galloping up to a foe and touching his arm with a stick (counting coup), both of which required greater finesse and style than piercing a man’s heart with an arrow. Elite warrior societies, however, attested to the importance of warfare. Other Plains Indians had gained the horse first and used it to thrash the Sioux, who, in turn, had become strong and warlike by necessity. When Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa band of Lakotas finally mastered the horse in the late 1700s, they reclaimed lost territory and took more besides. The horse was speed, power, wealth, and freedom, and the romance of the hunt blended into the sacredness of the buffalo and the sun. U.S. civilization had its own sacraments and idols, chief among them the

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headlong plunge into change and “progress” aboard the railroad. The idea for a transcontinental railroad stretched back at least to 1845, but sectional conflict had prevented its start. Northern and southern congressmen could not agree where the first rails should run. Then, in 1862, President Lincoln signed the transcontinental railroad into law, providing federal funding and land appropriations for two companies to do the work: the Central Pacific, working from the West, and the Union Pacific, working from the East. Federal support for the railroad was necessary to get it built, because the federal government claimed the whole of the West. The railroad was going to stitch the continent together with all the chugging, churning energy of the industrial age, accelerating the conquest of distance, accelerating the conquest of the Plains Indians, who also claimed the trans-Mississippi West. By 1860, some 300,000 Indians lived west of the Mississippi. By 1868, workers had placed enough railroad tracks to separate the immense buffalo herds into southern and northern halves. By 1883, the herds had shrunk from as many as 13 million buffalo to no more than 1,000. The thick hides of the shaggy lords of the plains were stripped, cut, and cured into belts, many of which got used to run the factory machines of the East. United States colonization of the plains did not stop during the Civil War. In 1864 alone, 150,000 people jostled west in prairie schooners, churning up the dust of Kansas and Nebraska. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 meant colonists no longer had to worry about biting freezes, six-month cholera-plagued treks, or lack of food when heading toward the West Coast. For that matter, Congress had awarded railroad companies checkerboard patterns of land on either side of their lines, which they happily gave away or sold for pennies to anyone willing to settle in the grassy plains between Sacramento and Omaha. Congress sweetened the pot in 1862 with the Homestead Act, which offered 160-acre plots of land free—except for an overall eighteen-dollar filing fee—to any head-of-household (male or female, white or black) who would stay and cultivate them for at least five years. The hellish iron and steel smelting factories of Ohio and Pennsylvania produced the hard metal tracks of conquest, which Irish immigrant laborers laid in the East and Chinese laborers laid across the West. Just like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, other depictions of the West were intentionally misleading. When the Central Pacific and Union Pacific teams met at Promontory Point, Utah, to drive a golden spike into the completed tracks, the official photographs showed a conspicuous absence of anyone Chinese. Precise numbers are not possible, but perhaps 15,000 Chinese immigrant laborers (many intentionally recruited) had blasted, dug, and heaved over and through the imposing mountain peaks of the Sierra Nevada of California. There they had dangled in baskets over the edges of murderous precipices, carefully hand-drilling small holes into the rock face where they would set

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AMERICAN STORIES blasting powder, light the fuse, tug on the rope, and hope to be hauled back up before the explosion killed them. Many men froze in instant graves of rock and ice when avalanches rumbled over work teams toiling in the midst of the worst winter blizzards. These nameless “Johns”—a pejorative term used to strip Chinese laborers of their own identity—built the tracks that took Americans over the Great Plains, but the Chinese faces remained invisible in media celebrations. The “iron horse” could now run over the continent. Railroad rider and horse rider were sure to collide. When they did, the results would be final and devastating. There was no question that the Great Plains would be taken from Native Americans. The only questions involved how the land would change hands: peacefully or violently, orderly or chaotically. Buffalo Bill, Black Kettle, and the Wars for the West After a civilization has destroyed or tamed its original wilderness, the civilization then goes about memorializing all that was lost. Indian shamans like Geronimo and Sitting Bull were the prairie and desert witches of white American nightmares, conjuring savage magic from a spirit world that threatened the push of progress. In Arizona, Geronimo and his Chiracahua Apaches evaded—and in their evasions tormented—the best U.S. military commanders in the field, Generals George Crook and Nelson Miles, until Geronimo finally surrendered in 1886, having been chased by 5,000 soldiers while he fled with thirty-four people, women and children included. Sitting Bull and his Hunkpapas (along with many other Sioux and Cheyenne bands) decimated the Seventh Cavalry under the reckless, egomaniacal George Armstrong Custer at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn. In their guises as roaming warriors, Geronimo and Sitting Bull were barbarians whom the U.S. Cavalry needed to catch. By the mid-1880s, the cavalry had accomplished this goal, and with their apprehension the last stirrings of Native American military resistance evaporated from the West. Farmers and ranchers descended unimpeded onto the Great Plains to go about the hard arts of farming and ranching with help from the federal government through railroad financing, passage of laws like the 1887 Desert Lands Act (which provided dirt-cheap lands to those who could irrigate arid expanses), and maintenance of the Indian reservations. All that remained was for a master storyteller to transform the once fearsome Indians warriors into salable showpieces. Sitting Bull and Geronimo both starred briefly in William Cody’s traveling Wild West. William Cody, born in 1846, had a hard-knock childhood in Kansas, crucible of America’s sectional strife. In 1854, his father, Isaac, was stabbed by a proslavery neighbor at a political rally. Isaac died three years later, leaving eleven-year-old William the not-uncommon task of earning money for the

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family. Overnight, boys became men, and girls became women, in an era when epidemics of disease and violence regularly snatched fathers and mothers from families with young children. An uncanny knack for path finding and horse riding landed young Bill Cody his first paying job in the saddle as a messenger for a local freight service run by the same men who soon opened the short-lived Pony Express. Though only fourteen when the Pony Express started its first runs in 1860, Cody had already impressed his bosses enough that they gave the lad his own route. The western novelist and historian Larry McMurtry points out that the Pony Express could not have lasted long, even with riders like Cody, who made at least one circuit of more than 300 miles in only a few days. “The owners [of the Express],” McMurtry writes, “knew they were racing the telegraph and the telegraph soon beat them: The two coasts were linked in November of 1860—the singing wires, as the Indians called them, had come to stay.”3 The metal technologies of telegraph and railroad closed old opportunities and opened new ones. If William Cody could not make a living delivering letters from the back of a horse, he still could make a living riding one. Cody joined a Union Kansas cavalry regiment during the Civil War and stayed on with the army as a scout after the Confederacy surrendered in April 1865. From then on, he delivered messages from fort to fort, guided the cavalry in its futile chases after mobile bands of Indians, killed buffalo to feed railroad crews (earning him his nickname), roped cattle, and acted in dreadfully written theater productions. Cody met the people with whom he would associate and travel for the rest of his days: Louisa Frederici, a New Orleans socialite whom he married and stayed with—in matrimony if not always in location or harmony—until he died; the Sioux leaders Spotted Tail and Sitting Bull; the skill-less playwright and dime novelist Ned Buntline (who helped popularize Buffalo Bill); the shotgun deadeye Annie Oakley; the lawman, gambler, and gunfighter Wild Bill Hickok; and Gordon Lillie, better known as Pawnee Bill, who bought out Cody’s Wild West company in the early 1900s. By 1900, Cody had also shaken hands with England’s Queen Victoria, more than one U.S. president, a Russian prince, countless fans, and a slew of desperadoes and dignitaries—American Indian, European, and Arabian. Muslims rode in the Wild West beginning in 1891 when he hired Syrian and Arabian riders. He also changed the name of the show to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, a globalized name to match his global cast. Cody’s variety in acquaintances and friends speaks not only to his charm and celebrity, but also to the swirling events that grooved the channels of American life through which he traveled. While the Civil War raged in November 1864, no less fierce after three years of bloodshed, snow coated the high plains of Colorado. A few hundred

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AMERICAN STORIES Cheyennes and Arapahos camped to the southeast of Denver along the banks of Sand Creek, some forty miles from the nearest army base, Fort Lyon. In the preceding months, small bands of Cheyennes known as Dog Soldiers had attacked U.S. citizens, who were encroaching on traditional hunting grounds. Silver, gold, and farmland had attracted colonists to Colorado, and the region’s latest colonists were up in arms, literally, over the Indian attacks. On November 29, 1864, a militia force calling itself the First Colorado Cavalry, led by Colonel John M. Chivington, a Methodist Episcopal minister from Denver, rode down upon the camping Cheyennes and Arapahos at Sand Creek. The people camping had wanted to avoid trouble, and, in fact, the families stretched out along the river were there at the invitation of Colorado’s governor, John Evans, who had offered them the protection of the garrison at Fort Lyon. On the way to Sand Creek, Chivington had actually stopped at the fort and recruited some last-minute volunteers from the regular army troops posted there. Just before ordering the attack on the village, Chivington was reputed to have said, “Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.”4 The leader in camp was Black Kettle, who had recently come with his wife to Fort Lyon at the army’s request to show his loyalty and peaceful intentions. A white flag and a U.S. flag flew over Black Kettle’s tent. Chivington and his 700 troops circled the village and unleashed rifle and cannon fire indiscriminately, killing scores in the initial volleys, mainly women and children. As one soldier on the scene later described it, “[Men], women and children, were scalped, fingers cut off to get the rings on them.” The same soldier also saw “a Lt. Col. cut off ears, of all he came across, a squaw ripped open and a child taken from her, little children shot, while begging for their lives . . . women shot while on their knees, with their arms around soldiers a begging for their lives.”5 In the months after the massacre, Lieutenant Captain Silas Soule recalled more atrocities. Soule, who had refused to participate in the killing and tried to intervene to no avail, recalled how “squaws snatches were cut out for trophies.” He said, “you would think it impossible for white men to butcher and mutilate human beings as they did there.”6 In all, militia and army regulars killed about 160 (nearly one-fourth) of the Cheyennes and Arapahos at Sand Creek. Soon after the massacre, Chivington displayed “trophies”—scalps and other body parts cut from his victims—in Denver theaters and saloons packed with enthusiastic crowds. Although a congressional committee and President Ulysses S. Grant held Chivington responsible, no official action was taken against him, and he lived until 1892, working some of those years as a sheriff. One of Chivington’s partisans assassinated Silas Soule on a Denver street, in part because Soule had testified before an investigative committee against Chivington. Somehow, Black Kettle survived the attack at Sand Creek. After the massacre

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he found his injured wife—shot nine times—and carried her to safety on his back. Then the survivors began an arduous fifty-mile trek to a nearby encampment at Smoky Hill River, some “shuffling along as best they could, the most severely wounded on horseback.”7 In 1868, another infamous character, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, killed Black Kettle and his wife on the banks of the Washita River. The killings at Sand Creek and the Washita were typical of the confusion and hurt that William Cody rode through in his years as a scout and hunter. Like a stage magician transmuting tragedy into pageant, Cody befriended men he had once fought against and recruited them for his show. Sitting Bull (Tatanka-Iyotanka) was born more than a decade before William Cody somewhere in the northern plains near the Black Hills in present-day South Dakota. By the early 1860s, when serious troubles were beginning to flare between the Sioux and the United States, Sitting Bull, then in his early thirties, had already distinguished himself as a daring fighter. Later he would become a man of powerful visions, able, so it seemed, to see the future. He fought for the first time at the age of fourteen against a group of Crows. From horseback, bare chest catching the wind, Sitting Bull bludgeoned a Crow warrior and earned his first feather. When gold was discovered in the Rocky Mountains in 1862, a steady traffic of miners and settlers crossed Sioux lands that had been set aside by treaty as their sole territory. From this time until 1881, Sitting Bull resisted all U.S. attempts to displace his people and corral him onto a reservation. Montana became a territory in 1864. An Oglala headman in the area, Red Cloud, agreed to let a new immigration route, the Bozeman Trail, pass through the territory. But the U.S. Army built forts and intervened on behalf of passers-through who harassed Red Cloud’s people and stole their land. From 1866 to 1868, Red Cloud organized such effective offensives that the army, for the only time in the history of the West, agreed to dismantle its three forts in the area and leave Red Cloud’s people alone. The new arrangements were made in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, in which the Black Hills was set aside forever as Sioux territory. Three years later, Red Cloud traveled by railroad to Washington, DC, to meet with President Grant and tour various East Coast cities. Grant’s intention was to awe Red Cloud with the industrial might and sheer population of the States. The plan worked, and although Red Cloud argued passionately against future attempts to reduce the size of his people’s reservations, he did not fight again, recognizing the futility of struggling against the United States. Sitting Bull, however, had not yet been convinced that his cause was hopeless. Soon after Red Cloud was feted with fireworks and steak in Washington in 1871, Sitting Bull added to his own legend by sitting down in an entirely

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AMERICAN STORIES different way. A column of 200 U.S. soldiers marched into eastern Montana in 1872, only to be greeted by the Hunkpapas. In the fight that followed, Sitting Bull walked into the grass separating the two firing armies, sat on the ground, lit a pipe, and smoked a good lungful while bullets creased the air around him. Then he walked back to the remaining Sioux, who summarily retreated. Sitting Bull was developing a reputation to match that of Buffalo Bill Cody, who, although he did not fight that day against Sitting Bull, served during that year as an army scout in the region. The following year, 1873, Lieutenant Colonel Custer rode through the northern plains protecting the men building the Northern Pacific railroad. Although Custer had distinguished himself in the Civil War—earning renown for near-suicidal charges at Gettysburg—his gift for war had more to do with guts than smarts, and he loved attention. In late November 1868, at the Washita River in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), Custer had gained both national adulation and condemnation for leading troops in a slaughter of about 200 Cheyennes, including Black Kettle and his wife. Some people in the United States had called the Washita incident a massacre. Others had seen it as just retribution against “hostile Indians.” General Philip Sheridan considered Custer “distinguished” and his men “gallant” for their killing at the Washita.8 Now in 1873, George Custer was once more in Indian country. As financial panic and economic depression gripped the nation, Custer found a way to lift the nation’s spirits and to catapult himself as high, some have speculated, as the presidency. Treaties had made the pine-tree-studded Black Hills one of the last sanctuaries of the Lakotas. In 1874, Custer led a detachment of the Seventh Cavalry into those hills, hoping to corroborate rumors of gold. He found what he was looking for, and more. By 1875, news of Custer’s finds swelled the telegraph wires, which swelled the hills with prospectors, perhaps 15,000 by midsummer. The U.S. Army was not about to fight its own population as thousands of men and women swept into Lakota territory and began mining and building ramshackle dives like Deadwood. At a grand council held in 1875 with U.S. officials, Red Cloud and other chiefs offered to sell much of the Black Hills, but other chiefs, including Sitting Bull, refused. The U.S. government was willing to give $6 million, but the Sioux in attendance demanded perpetual compensation, which seemed only fair. Six million dollars would be spent within years, but the land would never vanish. In any case, no one chief ever spoke for all the Sioux. Red Cloud and one of his rivals, Spotted Tail, had become affixed to agencies—reservations—acting as intermediaries between Bureau of Indian Affairs officers and their own people. Red Cloud and Spotted Tail urged their young men to adhere to reservation policies, to give up fighting, but they had

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little authority, and many young Sioux left the agencies to follow defiant leaders like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. In the spring of 1876, thousands of Sioux, Arapahos, and Cheyennes converged at the Little Bighorn River (known to them as the Greasy Grass) in eastern Montana, certainly to hunt but also to fight if fighting came to them. Custer came to them, with fewer than 1,000 men under his direct command. On June 17, eight days before Custer plunged into his own death, dragging his men along with him, a battle was fought nearby at Rosebud Creek. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull had heard about a force of soldiers moving northward led by General George Crook, a generally honorable man willing to meet Indians as equals in battle or peace. Army command had recently relocated Crook to the north after five years of kicking up Arizona dust in pursuit of the Apaches. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse met him in a daylong melee that ended in a twilit standstill. Crook and his 1,000 soldiers turned back. The Sioux were emboldened, and Sitting Bull’s best-known prophecy was about to come true. Just before the battle, Sitting Bull had tried to induce a vision by having another man slice 100 bits of flesh from his arms. Then he danced, gazed at the sun, and passed out. As he came back to consciousness, a spirit voice had informed Sitting Bull that soldiers would soon fall upside down into his camp. Three columns of U.S. troops were supposed to have been converging on the Greasy Grass, where a four-mile-wide camp of Sioux, Arapahos, and Cheyennes waited. But Crook’s troops had been turned back at the Rosebud, a fact that neither of the other two converging officers, General Alfred Terry and Colonel John Gibbon, knew. Cocksure and hotheaded, Custer—who was only supposed to scout ahead for General Terry—kept his Seventh Cavalry going straight through the night of June 24, 1876, fearing that the Indians would escape if he did not attack immediately. Had Custer waited for Gibbon and Terry, history would have been different. When the morning sun rose over the hills surrounding the Little Bighorn, thousands of Sioux, Arapahos, and Cheyennes awoke from a good night’s sleep. Custer’s soldiers crested the hills exhausted and shocked at the number of tents stretching out below them. The Seventh Cavalry was obviously outnumbered. Guided perhaps by the same unseen voice that had offered visions to Sitting Bull, Custer’s cavalry charged headlong into a prophecy. At first, as a surviving participant named Red Horse recounted, cavalry under Major Marcus Reno’s command attacked one side of the Sioux camp. Red Horse recalled: The women and children ran down the Little Bighorn River a short distance into a ravine. The soldiers set fire to the lodges. All the Sioux now charged the soldiers and drove them in confusion across the Little Bighorn River . . . A

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AMERICAN STORIES Sioux man came and said that a different party of soldiers had all the women and children prisoners. Like a whirlwind the word went around, and the Sioux all heard it and left the soldiers on the hill and went quickly to save the women and children.9

Led by Crazy Horse and another war chief, Gall, thousands of Sioux lanced into Reno and Custer’s ranks. The initial cavalry onslaught had just killed Gall’s young daughter and wife, and Gall struck back with blinding rage, his grief mingling with dying men’s shrieks and the rolling thunder of 10,000 horses’ hooves. The killing lasted for hours. More than 100 Sioux died, and all 265 men under Custer’s direct command lost their lives at the Greasy Grass. When army and cavalry reinforcements arrived, the Indians dispersed. It took a few days for the story to hit the major newspapers, and when it did, people’s sympathy for previous injustices to the Sioux vanished. On July 6, the New York Times ran its first piece on the incident, titled “Massacre of Our Troops,” with a subtitle indicating the way public opinion would sway: “Attack on an Overwhelmingly Large Camp of Savages.” The following day, the Times lamented, “how gallantly those poor fellows fought can only be surmised.” The Times urged “chastisement” of the “wild Indians” and labeled Custer “dashing” and a “hero,” if somewhat “imprudent.”10 The Times credited Sitting Bull with leadership of all the Sioux forces, though in reality he probably did not even fight at the Little Bighorn. Nonetheless, the army massed new forces in the area and gave chase. Most Indians easily hid in the hills or returned to one of the reservations in the region. Sitting Bull went to Canada with hundreds of followers, where he stayed until the Canadian government pressured him into returning in 1881. Crazy Horse, a one-time loner now turned into a symbol of resistance, stayed in the hills, feeding starving followers, until the spring of 1877, when he realized that a life on the run would not work with women and children in tow. He submitted himself to a reservation, but confusion and jealousies got the better of him. Red Cloud and Spotted Tail fretted over Crazy Horse’s popularity. He had stayed free and fought, while they had submitted to white ways and white authority. Crazy Horse made them look weak, and they feared the crazy ideas he might put in young men’s heads. In September 1877, Crazy Horse died at the hands of friends and an army soldier’s bayonet during an accidental altercation. During these years of plains warfare, the army needed seasoned scouts who could track Indians like Crazy Horse or Geronimo. On July 8, 1876, the New York Times suggested that the army enlist men from the “Western Territories” who “are used to the country and the climate, and who can live, like the Indians, two or three weeks at a time on jerked beef and water, with now and then a piece of hard tack.”11

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Buffalo Bill: Violence and Theater Just before the battle at the Little Bighorn, William Cody received notice that his services as a tracker were required. Cody could live on jerked beef, water, and hardtack, though lately he had been living on audiences’ applause and the proceeds from ticket sales. Buffalo Bill Cody had become an actor. Now the army called him west in anticipation of troubles, and although he arrived too late to play a role at either Rosebud or the Little Bighorn, he managed to add another knife fight to his long list of Wild West heroics. On July 16, Cody spotted a group of Cheyennes heading out to intercept two army messengers. He rallied some troops and galloped after the Cheyennes. What happened next has come down through history as a mixture of Cody’s flare for promotional storytelling and the accounts of a few witnesses. In Cody’s account, a Cheyenne chief named Yellow Hair turned to face Cody gladiator-style where all could watch. Cody shot Yellow Hair’s horse, raced down on the fallen warrior, and plunged a knife to the hilt in the man’s heart. Cody finished by saying, “I scientifically scalped him in about five seconds. . . . As the soldiers came up I swung the Indian chieftain’s top knot and [war] bonnet into the air and shouted: the first scalp for Custer!”12 A soldier on the scene saw things a little differently, believing that Cody killed Yellow Hair with a bullet, not a knife. But whether by knife or gun, Cody used the incident to adorn his reputation and advertise his show in the coming years. Reenactments of the scalping of Yellow Hair became a favored scene in Cody’s Wild West. There are no surviving accounts of Indians who traveled with Cody objecting to these kinds of displays. White men and Indians mutilated their victims’ corpses as a matter of course, just as they had been doing for centuries. That Cody would use this grisly practice to his advantage was only natural. To think that scalps were the trophies of men only would be to mistake the commonplace use of body parts in western culture. In the early 1900s, a woman named Emma Warfield Howard recalled a keepsake from her childhood during the pioneering days in Oregon: “My father volunteered in the Indian war of 1855 and 1856. . . . When my father came back from the war, he gave me the scalp that he had cut from the head of Peu-peu-moxmox [chief of the Walla Walla]. Mother used to make rag dolls for me and would sew the scalp of Peu-peu-mox-mox on the doll’s head for hair. This scalp served as hair for several of my dolls. As the dolls would wear out I would change the scalp to the new doll.”13 It was no wonder that Cody borrowed liberally and graphically from the frontier wars to entertain his audience. A mock scalping, let alone, apparently, a real one would have shocked few people.

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AMERICAN STORIES Annie Oakley Real women in the West had to do whatever was necessary to survive. That often meant toiling alongside their husbands in soils gone hard from drought, driving fence posts, planting crops, and shouldering a rifle, whether to keep an unsavory character at bay or to shoot the evening’s meal. The popular image of a woman, however, included neither rifles nor farming, but rather demure domesticity: gentle humor, plenty of baking flour, an apron, and an uncomplaining endurance. Phoebe Ann Moses was not born in the far West. However, as Annie Oakley, she became one of the most famous Americans of her day, part of a Western tableau cooked up by William Cody’s imagination and her ability to remain ladylike while enthralling audiences as one of the best rifle shots on the planet. She was born in rural Ohio in 1860. Like Cody’s father, Phoebe’s father died when she was young, leaving her mother with five children and nowhere near enough food or money to fend for them all. The local orphanage sent Phoebe to an abusive farm family whom she later called “the wolves.” When only twelve, Phoebe escaped, found her way back to the orphanage—which was under new and kinder management—and learned to sew, a skill she later used to make her own outfits. During the next five years, Phoebe found her way to a gun, which she promptly used to put single shots through the heads of tasty birds. A local grocer realized the money to be made from her hunting and gave her a better gun. By the age of fifteen, Phoebe was providing fowl and rabbits to local high-end restaurants in Cincinnati and had paid off the mortgage on her mother’s home. The year she turned fifteen, 1875, was the year miners flocked to the Black Hills and the second year of Bill Cody’s incipient acting career. The next year Phoebe Moses met an Irishman, Frank Butler, a traveling marksman who worked in vaudeville. Butler had a standing offer in each new town that after a performance anyone could challenge him to a pigeon shoot. Any challenger who beat him would walk off with 100 dollars. Imagine his surprise when five-foot Phoebe Moses easily won the money. Apparently possessed of steadier humor than hands, Frank fell in love with the diminutive champion, and within a few years they were touring together, though it was not until 1882 that they married and that Phoebe appeared on stage—the day Frank’s partner fell ill and could not perform. Phoebe, of course, out shot both Frank and the audience’s expectations of her. The crowd loved her, and Annie Oakley was born. The timing was perfect. During the first few years that Annie Oakley shaped her stage persona, Bill Cody broke free from stiff dramas written and produced by other people. In 1883, the Wild West made its debut in Omaha, Nebraska. Two years later, Annie Oakley joined the troupe, with Frank, no

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longer himself a headliner, acting as her manager. Audiences loved watching this pretty woman’s cute, endearing ways as she blasted away with a deadly smoothbore shotgun, letting a soft smile touch her face when she missed a shot (which rarely happened) and springing a jaunty backward heel kick after a particularly good shot. As business people, she and Cody needed each other, and except for a two-year break from 1887 to 1889, they were not parted on the road or on stage until 1903. Long white hair flowing from underneath his Stetson, Cody cut a dashing figure on his show horse, which the poet E.E. Cummings called “a watersmooth-silver stallion.”14 Oakley always wore a dress, never once appearing in bloomers or pants, both of which she decreed unfit for a woman. As cultural ambassadors of the United States, Cody, Oakley, ninety-seven Lakotas, other performers, stagehands, and droves of symbolic livestock (namely buffalo and elk) steamed to England in 1887 for a grand celebration of Queen Victoria’s fifty years under the crown. Victoria, the most powerful woman in the world, took a coach to the fairgrounds to watch Annie Oakley, the most famous American woman, shoot pennies in the air, split playing cards on the thin side, and clip a cigarette held trustingly in Kaiser Wilhelm’s lips. Although the tour of England was an unqualified success for all, with goodwill and good money flowing generously, Oakley and her husband decided to try showbiz on their own for a while, and they left for New York City before the tour was completed. Oakley tried Pawnee Bill’s competing Wild West production, tried going it alone, but ultimately accepted Cody’s offer to cross the Atlantic again for a madcap circuit of the European continent. Audiences loved her as much in Europe as they did in the United States, and the history of the West as told by Buffalo Bill became the story of the West that everyone learned. There was a tricky, emotionally treacherous side to these presentations of Western history and civilization: after all, real people, white and Indian, had really died. But the last major confrontation between them—at the Little Bighorn—had occurred years earlier, in 1876, and with Sitting Bull himself appearing for a season in Cody’s Wild West show during 1885, it seemed safe to Buffalo Bill to trivialize killings through the act of glorifying killings. Sitting Bull got paid fifty dollars a week, a handsome sum, though he returned to the Standing Rock reservation after one season because he could not abide the way white Americans treated their paupers on the street. Lakotas took better care of their own. Before leaving the show, Sitting Bull befriended Annie Oakley, being variously impressed by her shooting and her attitude. After 1890, as it turned out, the Wild West shows had to scale back some of their bloodier acts, making displays of Oakley’s shooting skill more palatable to a nation spent on western massacres.

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AMERICAN STORIES For generations the Sun Dances had been vital to plains people from the Kiowas to the Sioux. In The Way to Rainy Mountain, N. Scott Momaday recalls the “annual rites” of the Sun Dances, by which the Kiowa ritually restored themselves through dance and “buffalo medicine” in the presence of Tai-me, “the sacred Sun Dance doll” given to them by the Crow in the late 1600s.15 But the dance had not prevented white colonization or the eradication of the buffalo, and Momaday explains how his own grandmother attended the last attempted Sun Dance of the Kiowa in 1890 when soldiers from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, dispersed the Sun Dancers. Momaday says, “without bitterness, and for as long as she lived, she bore a vision of deicide.”16 During this same period of suppression of Native religion in the 1880s a new dance, the Ghost Dance, began to make its way across the plains. Preached by Jack Wilson, known better as Wovoka, an orphaned Paiute raised by a Nevada rancher, the Ghost Dance offered the promise of a return to a prewhite world. If dancers followed Wovoka’s advice and rituals—which included only peaceful and exhausting movements—Indians could regain the plains as the white people faded away, to be guided elsewhere by a messiah. The dance arrived in Sioux country in 1889, making both military and Indian Affairs officials nervous and twitchy, especially with a Sioux innovation that involved Ghost Dance shirts with the power to stop bullets. Besides, who wants to be shimmied into oblivion? With Ghost Dancers already swaying at the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations, only Standing Rock remained free of the movement, until October 1890 when Sitting Bull allowed its practice there as well, though he may have viewed the Ghost Dance with some skepticism. Sitting Bull never danced, according to biographer Robert Utley, but he “presided over the community of believers” and, possibly to renew his waning influence, “he led, reluctant but resolute, uncertain but committed.”17 Thousands of army troops were massed around the reservations, anxious at the prospect of a renewed Indian uprising, which the dance seemed to portend. On December 15, 1890, a group of Indian police officers tried to arrest Sitting Bull in an effort to remove his support for the dance. A group of the old prophet’s friends surrounded the police. In the ensuing scuffle, guns were discharged, one or two directly into Sitting Bull’s brain. The Indian agent, James McLaughlin, who had ordered the arrest had also, foolishly, prevented Bill Cody from trying to help. General Nelson Miles had telegraphed Cody a couple of weeks before, asking him to assist with Sitting Bull, to “deliver” Sitting Bull to the military.18 Agent McLaughlin, however, had not wanted the impresario of the West either mucking things up or getting any credit for arresting Sitting Bull, which McLaughlin had thought he could accomplish. So McLaughlin had telegraphed the president arguing that Cody would “cause a fight.” President Benjamin Harrison had,

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in turn, “rescinded Cody’s authority.”19 Whether or not Cody would have made a positive difference during Sitting Bull’s arrest cannot be known, but Sitting Bull’s death did precipitate a much larger tragedy than the sadness a few friends experienced at his passing. The most famous and enduring (and in this case unplanned) massacre of Indians took place at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on December 29, 1890, only two weeks after Sitting Bull died. Edgy in the aftermath of the killing, hundreds of Hunkpapa Sioux left the Standing Rock reservation and wandered off into the Black Hills and toward other encampments of Sioux, including Chief Big Foot’s camp at Cherry Creek.20 Then, in the last days of December, Big Foot—who was coming down with pneumonia—led his Miniconjou and the newly arrived Hunkpapa toward Red Cloud’s headquarters at Pine Ridge. The Ghost Dance still beat a strong tempo, and army troops moved in around the camp-in-motion of the pneumonia-plagued chief Big Foot, whom they had orders to arrest, under the false assumption that Big Foot posed a risk. Paranoia ran rampant throughout the ranks of soldiers and Sioux. For one night, U.S. cavalry and Sioux cavalcade traveled slowly together over the snow toward Pine Ridge. The next morning, the soldiers gathered the Sioux together and set about disarming them, taking all knives and guns. Women, children, and warriors were gathered there together on the snowy ground. In the process of trying to collect their firearms, a number of missteps coincided: jittery soldiers making a stressful encounter worse; a Sioux holy man throwing a handful of dirt into the air (a sign to fight, perhaps); a Sioux’s gun firing accidentally or intentionally; volleys of army bullets in return. Within a few minutes, a few soldiers lay dead, and at least 153 Sioux—out of an original 350—were sprawled on the ground, including Big Foot, where they stayed until New Year’s Day, when a detachment of soldiers showed up to collect the corpses for burial. At least one baby was found alive in the snow, wrapped tightly in blankets, snug against its lifeless mother. More than thirty years later, a Lakota elder named Black Elk memorialized Wounded Knee. “I did not know then how much was ended,” Black Elk said. “When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”21 With Native American traditions and culture remaining strong and resilient, in the late nineteenth century, Congress tried to make Indians more “American,” to “assimilate” them into the mainstream culture. Between 1894 and 1935, the federal government banned Native American religious ceremonies, making them illegal on reservations. Even before 1890, the U.S. government,

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AMERICAN STORIES the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and well-meaning (if presumptuous) “reformers” decided that Indian children should be educated in Christian, English, and industrial manners. Starting with the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania in 1879 (which received federal funds beginning in 1883), thousands of Native American children from all over the nation were forced into Indian schools where they had their hair cut, got stuffed into military-style clothes, and were punished for speaking their native languages. Sent back to their respective reservations, these adolescents straddled two cultures and often had a hard time fitting into either. Most of the reservations they were sent back to had been vastly diminished by another federal decision: the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, which intentionally broke up reservation lands, apportioning 160-acre plots to individual families (families as defined by the white onehusband-one-wife model). Much of the rest of the reservation got doled out to white families, either via lottery or sales. By the time Congress revoked the Dawes Act in the 1930s, more than half of all reservation lands had been taken away. Bill Cody’s Wild West shows demonstrated a commonplace in American life: the way to assimilate is through acceptance rather than coercion. Cody offered women and Indians the same thing he offered men: three meals a day and good pay. The federal government was reluctant to let Indians leave the reservations and work for Cody, but when offered the chance, they went with him by the dozens and hundreds. Their old West was gone anyway, and they could earn more honor and sustenance working for the Wild West show than they could on reservations where pushy teachers and missionaries told them how life ought to be. Bill Cody and Annie Oakley were apparently two of the very few white people that Sitting Bull liked. Though most Americans still lived on farms or in towns with fewer than 2,500 residents by the time that William Cody died in 1917, he had seen many transitions and helped to usher in a few. The Old West was gone: cattle had replaced buffalo, and even cattle ranching was changed. Cattle drives northward out of Texas along routes like the Goodnight Trail from Abilene to Colorado were no longer necessary since railroads could take cows and steers directly where once the cowboy was needed to keep the vast herds in line. Out of the lariat and saddleback skills of the cowboy, Bill Cody invented the rodeo, yet one more Western device in his make-believe re-creations of fact and fiction.22 Enthusiastic audiences, including crowds of children given free tickets, watched Buffalo Bill’s scruffy-faced actors yank stagecoaches around the central performance concourse as yelping Indians chased behind. There in the noonday sun of an East Coast summer, audience members had as much heat and humidity to contend with as the actors. But Thomas Edison, who patented literally

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hundreds of gizmos from the ticker tape to the phonograph recorder, also devised motion pictures. By the early 1900s, Edison’s movie cameras were creating entertainment faster than Cody could re-create the past. Cody invested time and money in some movie flops, which exhausted the little money he had ever been able to set aside in the compulsive fits of partying and philanthropy that overcame him regularly. Today there are a few minutes of surviving film footage of Buffalo Bill riding in dusty circles and Annie Oakley shooting teensy targets out of the air. Cody died in 1917, before movies could undo him. He was still the biggest act in America. Annie Oakley lived until 1926, when the stars of the vaudeville stage were being inched out by the stars of the screen. Sherman Alexie’s Poem on Buffalo Bill Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian. Alexie has published haunting and hilarious stories and poems about Indian life on and off the reservation. While still writing new stories, Alexie has also produced two movies, Smoke Signals and The Business of Fancydancing.23 Evolution Buffalo Bill opens a pawn shop on the reservation right across the border from the liquor store and he stays open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and the Indians come running in with jewelry television sets, a VCR, a full-length beaded buckskin outfit it took Inez Muse 12 years to finish. Buffalo Bill takes everything the Indians have to offer, keeps it all catalogued and filed in a storage room. The Indians pawn their hands, saving the thumbs for last, they pawn their skeletons, falling endlessly from the skin and when the last Indian has pawned everything but his heart, Buffalo Bill takes that for twenty bucks closes up the pawn shop, paints a new sign over the old calls his venture THE MUSEUM OF NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURES charges the Indians five bucks a head to enter.24

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AMERICAN STORIES Notes 1. Curtis F. Smith, The Brothels of Bellingham: A Short History of Prostitution in Bellingham, WA (Bellingham, WA: Whatcom Historical Society, 2004), 2. 2. William Kittredge, Owning It All (Saint Paul, MN: Gray Wolf, 2002). 3. Larry McMurtry, The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and the Beginnings of Superstardom in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 50. 4. Thom Hatch, The Custer Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to the Life of George Armstrong Custer and the Plains Indians Wars (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2002), 104. 5. David Fritdjof Halaas and Andrew E. Masich, Halfbreed: The Remarkable True Story of George Bent Caught Between the Worlds of the Indian and the White Man (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2004), 160. 6. Halaas and Masich, Halfbreed, 147. 7. Thom Hatch, Black Kettle: The Cheyenne Chief Who Sought Peace but Found War (Hoboken: John Wiley, 2004), 165. 8. Jerry L. Russell, 1876 Facts About Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (New York: Da Capo, 1999), 50. 9. Garrick Mallery, Picture-Writing of the American Indians (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2006), 2: 565. 10. New York Times, “An Indian Victory,” July 7, 1876, 4. 11. New York Times, “What Is Thought in Washington; How Shall the Indians Be Subjugated—A Call For Volunteers Probable,” July 8, 1876, 1. 12. William F. Cody, The Life of Honorable William F. Cody (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004), 213–214. 13. Fred Lockley, Mike Helm, ed., Conversations with Pioneer Women (Eugene, OR: Rainy Day, 1981). 14. Richard S. Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E.E. Cummings (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 130. 15. N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969), 8, 6, 88. 16. Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain, 10. 17. Robert Utley, The Lance and the Shield (New York: Ballantine, 1993), 285. 18. Utley, 294. 19. Utley, 295. 20. Dee Brown, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), 439. 21. Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 446. 22. McMurtry, The Colonel and Little Missie, 229. 23. A couple of other noted works by Mr. Alexie are The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2005); and One Stick Song (New York: Hanging Loose, 2000). 24. A special thanks to Sherman Alexie and Hanging Loose Press for permission to reprint “Evolution,” from Sherman Alexie, The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems (Hanging Loose, 1992).

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3

A Mosaic of American Life 1875–1914

New Americans, circa 1905 (Lewis W. Hine/Getty Images)

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AMERICAN STORIES Millions of Watts: Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla Gas lamps puffed out. Kerosene flames dimmed and flickered. Out with the old, and in with the new: electricity had been tamed. In 1879 the incandescent light bulb shimmered into existence. After September 1882—when the first power plant started generating a trickle of joules in New York City—rivers got dammed and coal-fired generators installed. Substations appeared, collecting and then spilling volts into the crisscross maze of wires strung haphazardly from building to building. Geniuses like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla offered the telephone, the phonograph player, the motion picture, radio wave transmission, remote-controlled boats, and electricity to homes, businesses, streetcars, and light bulbs—only a sampling of the inventions and possibilities that sprawled across the nation, lining store shelves from Florida to California. Thomas Edison doubled as inventor and businessman. Where others might see only light beaming from an electric lamp, Edison saw wealth and opportunity. In 1879, right after the first public demonstration of his incandescent bulb, Edison remarked to a reporter, “We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.”1 Money flowed into those crisscrossed power wires and back out again, along with the megawatts of electricity. Capital investments afforded laboratory space and time to invent. The incentive for profits spurred researchers and investors to put money and minds together. Both poor farm children and desperate immigrants let loose in America’s bulging cities provided the labor to turn inventions into inventory. Edison, a once poor boy from Ohio, amassed a fortune working from his office complexes at Menlo Park and West Orange, New Jersey—a sleepless creator engineering the future. Edison was frequently quoted, “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” although later in life he did not remember ever having said that.2 The sentiment, however, was accurate enough: he tried at least 6,000 separate substances (including beard hair) for the filament in the incandescent light bulb. Nikola Tesla, however, did design-work in his head, able to picture complex mechanics and circuitry in three dimensions. Tesla literally imagined a remote-controlled submarine and then built a working miniature that he tested for the U.S. Navy. Tesla, an ethnic Serb, emigrated from Paris in 1884, with a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison from a mutual associate. The letter simply said, “I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man!” Within a few months, Tesla had improved on some of Edison’s machines and designs for direct current transmission of electricity. Immediately after, the two men had a falling-out. According to Tesla, Edison reneged on a promised bonus of $50,000, saying, “Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor.”3 Whatever the real cause of their split, Tesla quit, opened his own laboratory,

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and within a few years teamed up with George Westinghouse to sell alternating current to the nation—a business arrangement that made Westinghouse phenomenally wealthy only after Tesla had generously waived a profit-sharing offer in order to give Westinghouse the money on hand to advertise and develop their type of electrical current. The “Battle of the Currents” was on. Westinghouse and Tesla were battling Edison, who mistakenly hung onto direct current as the better method for providing electricity commercially. Over distances longer than two miles, however, direct current travels poorly and becomes more dangerous. Edison had already poured his public image and money into direct current, and the stubbornness that ignited his creativity also made him inflexible. He was unable, or unwilling, to see that Tesla was right. The 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago—the Columbian Exposition where Bill Cody performed daily outside the main fairgrounds, giving free tickets to orphans—was lit by alternating current, provided at half the price Edison had bid. Buildings painted white sparkled under incandescent light, Edison’s filaments powered by Tesla’s ingenuity and Westinghouse’s marketing. The modern age was taking shape. Chicago, an immigrants’ city sprung from the prairies, hosted a corporate carnival. Brand-name products like Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Juicy Fruit gum tickled the coins out of the pockets of 27 million fairgoers, the wealthiest of whom luxuriated their way to the “White City” in the fanciest transport of the day: Pullman railroad cars, made on the outskirts of Chicago by workers who lived in tightly regulated housing tracts built and maintained by George Pullman. His craftsmen built library cars, dining cars, and sleeper cars with burnished hardwood and brass fittings. Pullman’s factory-town employees were expected to maintain the highest standards of moral decency (according to his definitions), with an expected result of harmony between workers and managers. Relations had been good for years, seeming to justify Pullman’s near-obsession with appearances, like his prohibition of employees sitting on their front stoops at night to smoke a pipe and watch the children play in the yards. There were parks for that type of behavior, Pullman said. But a financial panic hit the United States during 1893, the year of the Chicago fair, and Pullman kept rents high at his houses while reducing his employees’ pay. In 1894, violent strikes engulfed Pullman’s factories. Neither the white paint and burning bulbs of the Columbian Exposition nor George Pullman’s model town could hide the lavish habits separating America’s superrich from its underpaid majority. Now that the gleaming buildings of Chicago’s fairgrounds sat as empty as Pullman’s factories, there was neither diversion nor employment to keep people’s spirits high. In 1894, in the languor of the new economic depression precipitated by too little money in circulation, thousands of men from around the entire nation

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AMERICAN STORIES hopped on freight cars and descended on Washington, DC, following the lead of Jacob Coxey, a former stonecutter turned politician from Ohio. This flood of the unemployed became known as Coxey’s Army, and its pleas for relief had no effect on the police who arrested its leaders on the grass lawn of the Capitol. Jacob Coxey wanted capitalism to work, but he wanted it to work better. He and his followers demanded that the federal government print more paper dollars, which would devalue the currency, making it easier, for example, for indebted farmers to pay off fixed-sum loans. Supporters of Coxey—the unemployed, underpaid, and indebted—also looked to the newly formed Populist Party for help. In 1896, the Populist Party endorsed the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, for president, and he almost got elected, a testament to the nation’s willingness to experiment. Bryan advocated unlimited coinage of silver (another way of getting more money into circulation) and government ownership of railroads and power companies. At the 1896 Democratic convention, Bryan received a thirty-minute standing ovation and the nomination for president after closing a speech with, “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”4 The gold standard, in Bryan’s opinion, symbolized privilege—the privilege of the few who had enough money to get by. Although he lost to William McKinley, Bryan received 47 percent of the vote. This son of a Baptist preacher who had moved to the promised land of Platte, Nebraska, witnessed the worries of common Americans too poor and too rural to be reached by electrical power lines. Other Americans became entirely disgusted with the economic system, believing that capitalism corrupted democracy. In 1912, six out of every 100 voting Americans voted for Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate for president. Debs was a former railroad firefighter who had come to the realization that corporations—like the Pullman Car Company and John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil—were more interested in profits than in the well being of their workers. In the twenty-seven years from 1890 to 1917, more than 2 million railroad employees got injured on the job, and about 72,000 died. In wood mills on the West Coast, it was said that an employee’s time on the job could be counted by the number of missing fingers and half-fingers on his splintered hands. 1n 1902, Eugene Debs explained how he had gone from being a railroad firefighter to a union leader to a socialist. At first, Debs wrote, “I was with the boys in their weary watches, at the broken engine’s side and often helped to bear their bruised and bleeding bodies back to wife and child again. How could I but feel the burden of their wrongs? How could the seed of agitation fail to take deep root in my heart?”5 So he had become a union organizer, trying to get all railroad workers into the American Railway Union, begun in 1894, the year of the Pullman strikes. George Pullman hired

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Pinkerton detectives, who battered the striking workers newly organized by Debs, and Debs found himself in jail, accused of fomenting anarchy and communism. In the following months, he began to read about socialism, and eight years later he wrote, “The American Railway Union was defeated but not conquered—overwhelmed but not destroyed. It lives and pulsates in the Socialist movement, and its defeat but blazed the way to economic freedom and hastened the dawn of human brotherhood.”6 Bald, well dressed, and still fit after decades of union work, Debs was a reformer, not a revolutionary. Like Jacob Coxey and William Jennings Bryan, Debs believed in America, but unlike the other two, he no longer believed that corporate America was trustworthy in the least. For Debs, socialism was an adaptation, an advancement that would curb the cruel edges of the corporate wage system. Newness was America’s tonic. Old problems and new, people believed, could be overcome through experimentation of every kind, whether in the laboratory, the voting booth, the picket line, or the suburbs. People wanted progress; it was synonymous with America. The feast of capitalism, with its smorgasbord of technologies and opportunities, promised to provide enough money, housing, and security for all. People clung to the chance of betterment through wages and hard work. But when the social and economic experiments of America’s capitalists, like George Pullman, went awry, other ways of achieving decency and plenty were explored. America’s corporations provided jobs along with oil, railroads, bubble gum, and light bulbs. But for many workers, from the 1870s on, the toll in human suffering was beginning to outweigh the benefits of convenience and the joys inherent in novelty. American-style progress would fail without bread on the table. For that matter, municipal governments short on funds were having difficulty feeding streetlights. The riverside town of Vancouver, Washington, turned off all its street lamps in 1896, no longer able to afford the cost. The mayor of Boise, Idaho, had already pulled the plug in his town in 1894, leaving just eight street lamps burning at night. The “Depression of 1893” lasted until 1897. Those years of hardship kept Americans wondering whether the costs of industrializing were worth the benefits, particularly when the benefits seemed to have evaporated. Could progress be maintained? Thomas Edison was considered the number one hero of progress. He was known as the “Wizard of Menlo Park” for his more than 1,000 patents, and although his direct current trailed Tesla’s alternating current, it was Edison who propped up the story that riches came to those with “luck and pluck.” Tesla was without the financial luck, but he was every bit the real wizard. He discovered that high-frequency, high-voltage electricity will not easily penetrate the skin, and he used to put on demonstrations for friends at his New York laboratory with his “Tesla coil.” Visitors such as Mark Twain would

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AMERICAN STORIES accompany Tesla back to his offices after a night of high talk and good food. Blue tongues of electricity would shroud Tesla’s body when he touched the strange generator, bathing him in the spare electrons of industry. In capitalist America, Tesla’s eerie genius accounted for less than Edison’s cutthroat business style. Tesla offered the first wireless energy display inside a vacuum tube (which later provided the first television images). His inventions tended to be ethereal and applicable only after others had harnessed them into some sort of practical, commercial doodad. Edison made machines that people could use right away. Wax cylinder “records” could be snatched off a store shelf and taken home, and Edison’s name went with them—what is known today as “branding.” Tesla’s generators and induction coils worked literally behind the scenes, and his one easily marketable technology—transmittable and receivable radio waves—was stolen by way of patent by Guglielmo Marconi. Although Tesla patented a number of the technologies that Marconi used to transmit the first long-distance radio message—sending the letter “s” across the Atlantic—the U.S. patent office nonetheless gave Marconi credit for the radio in 1904 (probably because he had the financial backing of Edison, while Tesla was too broke to effectively sue). Then in 1943, the Supreme Court gave the patent to Tesla—just after his death (Edison had died in 1931). Consumers tended to be less interested in who had patented their new purchase than they were in getting it at a good price and getting it home. No matter how tough times got, no matter how many people lost their jobs, had their wages cut, got attacked by Pinkerton detectives while walking a picket line on strike, or watched their children succumb to black lung disease working in an anthracite coal mine, capitalism won out over its competition. Slowly, measurable “standards of living” improved for all Americans, measured in access to indoor plumbing, indoor lighting, movie theaters, safer meats, safer pharmaceuticals, public schools, longer life expectancies, and shorter workdays. Getting to the better days was the struggle, and for every Edison who succeeded there was a Tesla who barely hung on. Millions of Immigrants In big cities entrepreneurs built big stores, like Neiman Marcus and Marshall Field’s. Elevators whisked women to the top floors while merchants often reserved the first floor for men’s items, assuming that men were not interested enough in shopping to go farther than absolutely necessary. For women with means, shopping was fast becoming a hobby all by itself. Even poor women were encouraged to “window-shop.” And for newly arrived immigrants in remote locations, like Swedish newcomers on the ice sheets of upper Minnesota, where there were no department stores or even mom-and-pop shops,

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salvation was at hand. Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck offered the mail-order catalogue with color photos (starting in 1897) of cookware, toy soldiers, bicycles, wedding gowns, jewelry, vials of cocaine, gasoline engines, and everything else being manufactured in or imported into the States. Orders could be placed by letter, and, within little more than a week, a trip to the nearest train depot rewarded the store-starved consumers with whatever their hearts desired (and could afford). Here to build and assemble the bicycles and light bulbs, to sew the gowns and shape the top hats, were immigrants from the world over. From 1900 to 1910, more than 8 million immigrants arrived in the United States. Some cities had more foreign-born residents than native-born. They crowded into the tenement districts of New York City, Chicago, and other high-rise cities of the North, where they built the consumer goods and bought them—when wages permitted. Chinatowns formed in San Francisco and New York City—partly in response to discrimination that Chinese-Americans faced, partly because a sense of culinary, linguistic, and cultural familiarity could be had in such districts. The Irish got their neighborhoods in Boston, and the Italians in Cleveland grouped together in Little Italy. The district’s name could not have been more appropriate: by 1911, about 95 percent of Cleveland’s Little Italy residents had been born in Italy. Eastern European Jews came to escape persecution and settled in New York City’s Lower East Side. During some decades, more than half of some ethnic immigrant populations returned home, having stayed in the United States just long enough to earn money to take back to the old country, where they could pay off family debts or open a business. These decades surrounding the turn of the century announced in marquee lights the arrival of the modern age. Women were gaining the vote. Mass transit linked suburbs to cities. Mass media helped create the stirrings of a nationalized, popular culture through pulp fiction, national news stories—and what passed for news stories. Skyscrapers towered over financial districts echoing with the latest stock reports incoming on the ticker-tape machines invented by Thomas Edison. Subway cars barreled through fresh tunnels underneath the chaotic streets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Sewage systems washed human excrement out of sight and out of smell (often dumping it untreated into area rivers, lakes, and bays). Congress and presidents were creating national parks as permanent preserves for humans and animals alike. The rich were generally getting richer, and by comparison the poor were certainly seeming poorer. The changes were staggering, dizzying, confusing, and often upsetting. Because Americans typically welcomed technological innovation, not enough people initially worried about the possible long- or short-term consequences of burning coal to generate electricity or stacking people on top of

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AMERICAN STORIES each other like kindling in windowless apartments. Such worries set in after coal soot coated window ledges like industrial snow and smudged spring skies with a gray haze. Pollution was a sibling of progress. In poor neighborhoods where draft-animal conveyances had not yet been replaced by electric trolleys, dead horses lay bloated in roadways. People debated how to balance civic and environmental health with the new reliance on power generation and tenement dwelling for wageworkers. The “City Beautiful movement” became one way to soften urban blight. Frederick Law Olmstead led a new generation of reformers—landscape architects—who argued that parks could enliven the spirit with sprigs of green while also bringing together the poor, the middle-class, and the rich. Central Park in New York City was Olmstead’s creation, from its playing fields to its lakes and cool patches of oak shade. He hoped a little theater in the park, a few strands of a Mozart quartet, and the self-restraint modeled by sober families sipping lemonade would initiate the unlettered, unassimilated masses into America’s middle-class values. Coal generators continued to roar and belch, but at least a thirteen-year-old Lithuanian shirt maker had somewhere relaxing to go on Sunday. Reformers and inventors also hoped that new inventions would arrest whatever miseries could not be cured by parks, literary societies, and temperance. The light bulb, it seemed, could banish both darkness and ignorance: electric light meant more time to read at night after the day’s labors were ended. And nighttime criminals would have fewer places to lurk with city lights glaring down at them from hooked poles strung together with power lines singing a high-voltage tune. Poverty, factory injuries, child labor, rodent infestations, bedbugs, and disease epidemics (like the bubonic plague, which showed up in San Francisco in 1900) competed with the hope and optimism that brought millions of immigrants to America and kept most of them here. Whether to accept or repel the Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, Polish, Syrian, Turkish, Mexican, German, Italian, or Irish immigrants perplexed philosophers, policy makers, and everyday street talkers across the United States. Jews wanted not to work on Saturdays rather than Sundays. The Chinese seemed to have no discernible religion. Catholics were still believed to be in the back pocket of the pope. The Germans and Irish appeared to consume their fair share of alcohol, along with everyone else’s share. Almost no immigrants came from a country with a democracy, and no one knew whether these immigrants would help the economy or hurt it. Were they creating jobs or stealing them? In 1885, 300 white people from Tacoma, Washington, answered the question violently by banding together and forcing its 700 Chinese residents to flee the city. Seattle’s white residents followed suit the next year, and although authorities intervened on behalf of the Chinese, most chose to leave Seattle anyway. In both cases, people from the mob, white urban laborers, complained that the

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Chinese were taking their jobs by accepting low wages no white worker was willing to accept. At any given time, a person opposed to a certain immigrant population might also advocate for a different group’s rights. Mary Kenworthy, for example, helped establish voting rights for women in Washington Territory in 1883 (soon disallowed by the territorial supreme court in 1888), but Mary Kenworthy also led the movement to drive the Chinese out of Seattle, even offering to pay their boat fare from her own pocket. Making matters worse, racial theorists borrowed from the new sciences of genetics and Darwinian evolution to argue that dark-skinned people, whether African, Eastern European, or Indian, were actually a lesser form of humanity. Scientific racism gave new justifications for bigotry and helped get laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 through Congress, which banned further Chinese immigration into the States for at least ten years. In 1892, Chinese immigrants were banned for another ten years, and then in 1902 the law was extended indefinitely. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” with the emperor of Japan, which essentially halted further Japanese migration to the United States. Such international racism was fostered by world’s fairs and expositions, for instance at Chicago in 1893, where grand concourses were set up with displays of native peoples from around the globe in “natural” habitats. An entire group of Dahomey villagers from West Africa came over to live in grass huts according to their more allegedly primitive home customs. Along the concourse, the dioramas followed a line from savage to civilized, and the closer one got to savage, the darker the skin tones. The four decades from 1875 to 1914 have been called by a variety of names: the Gilded Age, the Wageworkers’ Frontier,7 the Populist Era, and the Progressive Era. Taken together, the names suggest certain images. The yachts and crystal chandeliers of America’s megamillionaires—the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Carnegies—epitomized the Gilded Age (there were about 300 millionaires in 1860 and nearly 4,000 by 1890). The deep-forest loggers known as “bindle stiffs” carried their worldly belongings in bundles tied to the ends of sticks, dependent on their own sinew and the paltry wages dangled in front of them on the wageworkers’ frontier; the census of 1870 marked the first time in U.S. history that more people worked for wages than for themselves. The indebted southern and western farmers scrambled to pay unseemly railroad rates during decades when produce prices were already unstable—the same farmers who formed the backbone and underbelly of the 1892 Populist Party, which demanded a national currency and publicly owned transportation and communication networks. And, finally, middle-class, progressive reformers like Jane Addams started the settlement house movement in the United States, dedicated to assimilating immigrants. Addams believed

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AMERICAN STORIES that education and an activist government could lift poor immigrants out of despair, ill health, and foreign ways that were not conducive to success in the world’s greatest democracy. New inventions, new investments of money into large corporations, new immigrants, and a shared belief that all could rise through hard work and just pay set into motion the juggernaut of the U.S. economy. The frenzied growth of cities, of industries, of the whole nation caused unprecedented chaos, and from the chaos came experimentation—utopian thinking, unions, city parks—that tried to make sense and harmony out of the disorder and dislocation that accompanied rapid change. Sadie Frowne: Sweatshop Seamstress Imagine moving from rural Poland or Russia to New York City in 1890. People in the Old Country traveled either on their own two feet or in the back of a donkey-drawn wagon. They spoke Polish, Russian, German, and—if they were Jewish—Yiddish (a mixture of medieval German and Hebrew), but not English. Almost everyone farmed (except for the Russian Jews who were confined to small towns known as shtetls), and women were known to do an equal share of the farm’s work. Jewish communities tended to be conservative, women and men sitting segregated in the synagogue, with Sabbath attendance essentially mandatory. Change had tiptoed carefully into village life, custom, poverty, and history often chasing away innovation. That had been Sadie Frowne’s life until the age of ten, when her father died. After that, though Sadie’s mother was resourceful and strong, they had trouble getting even their daily black bread and onions, let alone finding the money to pay the six-dollar-a-month rent on their two rooms. One of Sadie’s aunts, Fanny, had already gone to America. When Sadie turned thirteen, Aunt Fanny took up a collection from relatives in America to book passage for Sadie and her mother to join them all in New York City. After twelve days in steerage—the dank, smelly belly of the ship, where Sadie “thought we should die”8—they arrived at the gateway to opportunity. Towering above them was the Statue of Liberty, which Sadie called “the big woman with the spikes on her head,” which had just been dedicated in 1886. The statue itself had also come by boat to America, a gift from the people of France, shipped in 214 crates and assembled in the States, much like the immigrant communities themselves. In the same way that Sadie’s American relatives had pooled the money for her transit, it was the impoverished people of New York who cobbled together $100,000 in pennies and nickels to pay for the statue’s pedestal—the poor welcoming the poor. Sadie did not mention Ellis Island, which opened in 1892, so she probably arrived before that

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date. Mother and daughter found work common to female migrants: sewing and domestic service, respectively. Sadie got room and board and was paid nine dollars a month. Although not much money, Sadie saw this salary as fair, considering she was merely a “greenhorn.” Her mother, however, began sewing undergarments for nine dollars a week: “high class work,” Sadie called it. Sadie had food, a roof, and spending money. She and her mother were doing well for the first time since the death of Sadie’s father three years before. As was particularly common for the millions of Jews who came to America after 1880, Sadie wanted to assimilate—to become American—as quickly as possible. She worked hard at it. All too soon, Sadie’s mother’s “consumption” (probably tuberculosis) worsened fatally after she caught a cold touring the city at night. Sadie was left with no mother and a funeral to pay for, which flattened her meager savings. “And now I had to begin all over again,” Sadie recalled, except this time she was “all alone.” Throughout the 1800s, women on their way to the United States rarely traveled without a man, except for the Jews and the Irish. Unattached Jewish girls often got sent on ahead before other members of the family could afford to leave the old country. During the first great surge of Irish emigrants, from 1845 to 1855, more Irish women than men migrated to the States, and many did so by themselves. At first, young Irish women in New York City took to domestic work, which had been done almost exclusively by black women for the previous 200 years. By 1850, more than 75 percent of household workers in New York City were Irish girls. Many of them seemed to feel a mixture of thankfulness for the work, annoyance at the condescension of their bosses, and jealousy that they cared for a family’s needs but did not have a family of their own. After her mother’s death, Sadie Frowne moved from domestic service to a sweatshop’s sewing machine right along with many of the working girls of the North and Southeast. And like so many of her peers, on the factory floor Sadie risked injury, sexual harassment, arbitrary wage cuts, death, and belittling comments as common as pinpricks from the sewing machine. As Sadie said, “I was often called a ‘stupid animal.’” At first Sadie sewed six days a week, earning five dollars. She shared a room with a girl named Ella, who worked at the same sweatshop. Unlike many tenements that had no windows, Sadie and Ella’s apartment had two, though an elevated train rumbled right in front of the building, stirring up “a great deal of dust and dirt” in the summer. That still left the back, where early morning sun streamed through the windows. With her portion of the rent costing only a dollar and a half, Sadie had plenty left over for tea, cocoa, canned vegetables, bread, potatoes, milk, fruit, butter, meat, fish, and laundry. She bought fresh meat, rather than the gray dregs left over at the end of the week, which sold for considerably less and tasted considerably worse. She had

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AMERICAN STORIES cocoa for breakfast, an oil stove for cooking codfish, the beaming morning sun, and an oil lamp for evening reading—especially useful once she enrolled in nighttime English classes. Nothing had come to Sadie Frowne easily, but she had “a dollar a week to spend on clothing and pleasure,” a good deal more than she had been left with in Poland. With each strike of adversity, Sadie had adjusted and her prospects had improved. This was fairly common for young Jewish immigrants whose parents instilled in them a drive to get educated, to work their way out of manual labor, and to fully embrace the best parts of American life. The old country held bitter memories. The new country smelled of sweets. Soon, Sadie moved into a rooming house in a different section of New York “where so many of my people”—other Polish Jews—lived. She got hired at a new factory and earned a wage increase of fifty cents a day, a substantial raise when weekly fresh cuts of beef were only costing her sixty cents and six eggs went for thirteen cents. This sweatshop was in a brick building where there were fourteen sewing machines staffed by two women and twelve men. While Sadie made five and a half dollars a week, the men made as much as sixteen dollars. Though she noted the discrepancy, she did not complain at first. She did, however, complain about what today would be called sexual harassment. During the first weeks at the new job, when the men “passed me they would touch my hair and talk about my eyes and my red cheeks, and make jokes.” Sadie cried and threatened to leave if this “rudeness” did not stop. The “boss” told the men not to “annoy” Sadie, and a young gallant named Henry, “tall and dark” with big, brown eyes, threatened to knock out anyone who mistreated her. With a stoic, forgiving nature, Sadie merely said, “It was just that some of them did not know better, not being educated.” With the help of Henry and the boss, Sadie set aside the harassment. Later she would attend to a more pressing problem: wages and solidarity. In the meantime, Sadie found her rhythm. Six days a week, eleven to twelve hours a day, Sadie and her fellows made “all sorts of cheap underskirts, like cotton and calico for the summer and woolen for the winter, but never the silk, satin or velvet underskirts.” Even had she produced silk blouses or satin ties, Sadie would have made little more money. Her workdays began at six in the morning, after a splash of coffee, some bread, and a bite of fruit. She worked till noon, took a brief lunch, and usually carried on till six at night. Exhaustion kept her company: “the machines are all run by foot power, and at the end of the day one feels so weak that there is a great temptation to lie right down and sleep.” Accidents were nearly as common as weariness, a moment’s inattention all that was necessary for the needle to plunge into a fatigued finger: “where the needle goes through the nail it makes a sore finger, or where it splinters a bone it

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does much harm. Sometimes a finger has to come off. Generally, tho, one can be cured by a salve.” Sweatshop workers had to be tough, but after work they wanted to have fun, too. The culture that birthed Buffalo Bill, bicycles, and the Ferris Wheel (introduced at the 1893 Chicago exposition) was not short on entertainment. Rather than letting the endless toil kill her joy, Sadie lifted her head at night and went off in search of fun. “But you must go out and get air, and have some pleasure,” she said. “So instead of lying down I go out, generally with Henry.” New York City was a wonderland for those with a coin or two to spare. She went to Coney Island, with its “good dancing places . . . Ulmer Park [for] picnics.” Sadie could date freely, dance wildly, and eat what she wanted. Her parents were dead, and she was her own guardian, earning an independent wage. If anything, this growing female independence defined America as different from other countries. Nowhere else in the world did a young woman have such a chance to earn a living and make her own decisions about sexuality, marriage, or even a night out on the town. Sadie’s degree of independence, however, was still unusual for young women at the turn of the American century. “Modesty” remained the password into polite society for eligible girls, particularly those with parents or brothers concerned about respectability. As for Sadie, she intended to drink in the humor and the tragedy, forgetting neither her past nor her present. “I am very fond of dancing,” she said, “and, in fact, all sorts of pleasure. I go to the theater quite often, and like those plays that make you cry a great deal. ‘The Two Orphans’ is good. Last time I saw it I cried all night because of the hard times that the children had in the play. I am going to see it again when it comes here.” There must have been a morning price to pay for her fun, but America had a mechanical answer for just about everything, including tired workday mornings. With innocent amazement, Sadie said, “I have heard that there is a sort of clock that calls you at the very time you want to get up, but I can’t believe that because I don’t see how the clock would know.” (Bedside alarm clocks started to gain popularity in the late 1870s in the United States.) When she said this to an interviewer in 1902, Sadie gave away how close she still was, in some ways, to the Polish village where she had been born. Although Sadie Frowne could be stoic about mangled fingers, she was willing to agitate for better pay. But as a contemporary of Sadie’s, Rose Schneiderman, said, “no one girl dare stand up for anything alone.” Sadie Frowne, a fun-loving seamstress from Poland, needed support to get better pay. She needed a union, and there were many to choose from by 1900. Workingmen’s associations, essentially an early form of union, stretched back into the 1700s in the Americas. The associations provided camaraderie and helped members

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AMERICAN STORIES of certain professions set standards, thus drawing a line between, say, a “professional” tailor and an amateur. But the first national union in the United States did not form until 1869, largely in response to the radical changes overcoming the workplace. Machines were replacing humans (if slowly at first), and skilled laborers were being replaced by expendable immigrant drones who could be taught to repeat one or two tasks over and over again. The flood of immigrants gave factory owners a replenishing supply of disposable workers, people who needed jobs so desperately they would work for impossibly low wages, for abysmally long hours, and in very dangerous conditions. The nation’s first national union had a mouthful of a name: The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor. The Knights of Labor—nobody in America had the time to use the full name—began as a secret organization of tailors in Philadelphia. Within a few years it blossomed into a fairly all-inclusive union. The Knights would take women, blacks, skilled craftsmen, and unskilled laborers. On the other hand, it excluded liquor dealers, lawyers, stockbrokers, and professional gamblers. By 1886, the Knights of Labor claimed to have 700,000 members. Although the number may have been inflated, the membership was certainly in the hundreds of thousands, a testament to workers’ hunger for representation and help. The Knights of Labor advocated for an end to child labor and equal pay for the sexes. Ending child labor was not necessarily a humanitarian cause. The use of children in factories and mines drove down the wages, it was argued, making it harder for adults to earn a living wage. By no means was everyone in America opposed to child labor. Parents and older siblings often inducted the younger members of the family into the ways of the loom, the coal-sorting box, or the bobbin. Circa 1900, when Sadie Frowne and her fellow workers went on strike, there was an average of 4,000 strikes annually across the nation. Sadie belonged to a garment workers’ union, the “United Brotherhood of Garment Workers,” which took in “the cloakmakers, coatmakers, and all the others.” Sadie and her garment-stitching unionists were in luck. Local factories conceded, and “we only have to work nine and a half hours a day and we get the same pay as before. So the union does good after all in spite of what some people say against it that it just takes our money and does nothing.” Other workers in other unions had not been so lucky. Starting with the general railroad strike of 1877 (when 100 workers died in clashes with ten different state militias), federal troops, state militias, city police, and hired gangs of enforcers typically bruised and jostled union strikers. In 1886 at Haymarket Square in Chicago, a strike against the McCormick factory (which made large farm equipment) ended in the deaths of six police officers and 100 civilians, many of whom had intended only to watch the demonstrations. During the 1894 Pullman strikes, 14,000 militia clashed with members of Eugene Debs’s

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American Railway Union: thirty-four strikers died. In response to these kinds of abuses, some workers turned to more radical organizations, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) serving as the best-known example. Begun in 1905 and led by the human bear William “Big Bill” Haywood, the IWW branded itself with a famous motto: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” With a nationwide appeal, the IWW thrived for a decade in the Pacific Northwest—home to droves of migratory laborers—where it pioneered the “free speech” movement. “Wobblies,” as IWW members were called, often pulled such antics as tying themselves to power poles so that police could not drag them off to jail as they lectured audiences in lumber towns about the evils of capitalism and the coming revolution of the common man. The IWW attracted socialists. Sadie Frowne, apparently, was interested not in high-minded economic rhetoric but in higher stacks of dollars at the end of the week. “The next strike,” she said, “is going to be for a raise of wages, which we all ought to have. But tho I belong to the union I am not a Socialist or an Anarchist”—admitting, incidentally, “I don’t know exactly what those things mean.” Sadie may not have read either Karl Marx’s Das Kapital or his Communist Manifesto (the founding books of communism), but she did value education. Having studied “reading, writing, and arithmetic” for two years at a public school, she had mastered English well enough to gobble novels. One of her favorites let her feel as if she “were the poor girl . . . going to get married to a rich duke.” Education, however, had more purposes than the enjoyment of literature in a new language. Education gave Sadie social power: “it is good to have an education; it makes you feel higher. Ignorant people are all low. People say now that I am clever and fine in conversation.” She was setting herself apart from the greenhorns, the people fresh off the boats who had not had “a chance to learn anything in the old country.” Sadie’s other method of distancing herself from greenhorns was through clothing: Some of the women blame me very much because I spend so much money on clothes. . . . But a girl must have clothes if she is to go into high society at Ulmer Park or Coney Island or the theatre. Those who blame me are the old country people who have old-fashioned notions, but the people who have been here a long time know better. A girl who does not dress well is stuck in a corner, even if she is pretty, and Aunt Fanny says that I do just right to put on plenty of style.

Cloaked in her “plenty of style,” Sadie intended to continue enjoying “jolly parties.” Young men, of course, liked to talk to her, but Sadie would not go

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AMERICAN STORIES out “with anyone except Henry,” the gallant who had saved her from the unwanted attention of the men at the factory. Sadie was in a position to have choices in the future: “Lately [Henry] has been urging me more and more to get married—but I think I’ll wait.” One can imagine Sadie’s dead mother either smiling or rolling over more than once in her grave. Ida Tarbell: Muckraker Nineteenth-century laws reflected America’s agrarian past. Large-scale industry with absentee owners, hierarchies of managers, and relatively unskilled workers was a new arrangement. Legislators were not certain if they should regulate factories and mines (“Absolutely not!” screamed most owners). Legislators were also not certain that they could regulate industry. The federal Constitution was vague. But loggers’ and miners’ advocates told many stories of broken bodies, orphans, and widows. Even if legislation could and should be passed, Republicans and Democrats disagreed about what degree of interference was warranted. Three things, however, forced lawmakers’ hands: labor disturbances in the form of strikes, often ending in terrific violence; mounting numbers of industrial fatalities, often gruesome; and journalists who exposed the worst problems of American industry, from the perspectives of both the worker and the consumer. Since the founding of the colonies, the women of America had been more or less prevented from participating in public decision making. Then along came the abolitionists, including capable Amazons like Sojourner Truth and unflappable belles like the Grimké sisters. They broke through the gender silence, and the echo of their voices only grew louder as succeeding generations of American women picked up all manner of banners: temperance, labor reform, female suffrage, and in general any cause or malady that could be written or lectured about. The same “cult of domesticity” that had required women to raise young Americans with moral fortitude and decency could be bent to a more social role. If women were responsible for maintaining the moral barometer of the nation, ought they not take these responsibilities into the streets, the alleys, and the factories? The first two professions into which women strode were teaching and writing. Women became educators for two reasons external to their own desire for independent fulfillment. The growth of schools during the early 1800s was so rapid that there simply were not enough qualified men available to teach by the late 1830s. Second, in an unabashed sign of the times, male school administrators realized that they could hire women at a fraction of men’s salaries. To protect these unattended young women from the supposed dangers of independence, ”many school boards prohibited their teachers from

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anything they regarded as a potential impropriety, ranging from riding in a carriage with a man to being out after 8 p.m.”9 In other places—particularly the Midwest—it was common for single female schoolteachers to live with a local family, who often demanded that the teacher pay rent by washing clothes, scrubbing dishes, and helping care for babies or toddlers: most likely not a schoolteacher’s idea of quality room and board. Writing for a living, however, did not necessarily bring the complication of upsetting social customs. A writer could do her work from home. The Civil War had been a watershed for women, an opportunity to show their faces publicly. North and South needed office workers, and women got recruited. When the numbers of dead and wounded bodies started to mount, revealing an acute shortage of nurses, women came to the rescue, though men and women alike were reluctant to have delirious men tended to by angelic ladies. One suggestion was to recruit only “plain”-looking women as nurses.10 War is a kind of frontier that breaks down tradition and custom. With thirty years of abolitionist lecturing, teaching, magazine writing, and nursing now behind them, it became less of a shock (for everyone) to have women out in the workaday world. Ida Minerva Tarbell was born in 1857, right in the midst of the erosion of gender barriers. Within thirty years, good jobs and even some good colleges were available to women willing to hazard the less-and-less frequent taunts of those men who could not abide the changes. In 1880 Ida Tarbell graduated from Allegheny College in Pennsylvania with a degree in science, the only woman in her graduating class. After a brief teaching stint, Tarbell found her true gift: writing biographies. She started with Madame Roland, a French revolutionary, and then skipped to two of history’s biggest players: Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon Bonaparte. Her series on Lincoln greatly expanded the circulation of the magazine she was writing for, McClure’s. Popularity and success gave Tarbell freedom and choice. She chose John D. Rockefeller as her next subject—or victim, as it felt to Rockefeller. From 1902 to 1904, Tarbell serially published The History of the Standard Oil Company, a damning portrayal of Rockefeller’s rise to power and fortune. Her research was meticulous, the result of two years of digging through archives and court records. But like all writing—no matter how much “evidence” gets used—Tarbell’s assertions about Rockefeller were arguments, not definitive, objective truth. Decades later, in her autobiography, Tarbell accused capitalists like Rockefeller of practicing an “open disregard of decent ethical business.”11 Although he did operate as a monopoly (at one point owning enough of the oil production facilities in the United States as to be responsible for 90 percent of the output), Rockefeller paid high prices for his corporate acquisitions, and he tried (at least by the relative standards of the late 1800s) to treat workers well. He retired from business in 1911 and devoted

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AMERICAN STORIES the rest of his life to philanthropy. But Tarbell’s coverage of Rockefeller’s life spoiled what might otherwise have been at least a mixed reputation. Ida Tarbell generated intense interest in the machinations of America’s top capitalists, but she did not by herself spur the federal government to pass new regulations or laws. Other members of her literary class, however, had exactly that effect. For example, Upton Sinclair—a socialist—published a novel titled The Jungle in 1906. He had meant to elicit sympathy for the misused workers in Chicago’s meatpacking industry. Instead he horrified President Theodore Roosevelt, the public, and Congress. Within only months, new federal legislation provided $40 million for better quality meat inspection. Journalists were raking the muck, and society was responding. Federal involvement in the economy resulted from the various phenomena examined in this chapter: the rush of immigrants into America’s cities and industries; the headlong rush of industry into a gilded age of vast wealth and vast poverty; the opportunities for good and for harm opened up by the invention of powerful machines reliant on the pulsating surge of electricity. This new world of screeching trains and disembarking immigrants eager for a fresh start highlights a human paradox. We cannot always adjust to our inventions as quickly as we can create them because we do not know what our inventions will do in the long run. But the logic of a for-profit, capital-investment economy urges inventors and investors to hurry new products into the marketplace. In 1859, Benjamin Drake figured out how to drill for petroleum in Pennsylvania, sparking the first oil boom. The internal combustion engine followed shortly, the mechanical heart of an automobile. One hundred fifty years later, people are facing the prospect of lasting global climate change—partly a result of the global car culture made viable by the commercial production of petroleum. Neither Benjamin Drake nor John D. Rockefeller could have foreseen this consequence. However, Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair saw the daily consequences of giant corporations. Tarbell watched her father’s minuscule oil production company lose out to Rockefeller’s. Sinclair exposed the human body parts, rats, poisoned rats, and rat feces commonly mixed into sausage. What to do about small farms and small firms failing in the heat of competition from big farms and big corporations is a question that typically divides people along political and ideological lines. In a summary judgment of Standard Oil Company’s business practices, Tarbell offered her own rhetorical stab at this question of humanity’s ability to exceed itself when experimenting (in this case, with a new business type: the large corporation): I never had an animus against [Standard Oil Company’s] size and wealth, never objected to their corporate form. I was willing that they should com-

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bine and grow as big and rich as they could, but only by legitimate means. But they had never played fair, and that ruined their greatness for me. I am convinced that their brilliant example has contributed not only to a weakening of the country’s moral standards but to its economic unsoundness.12

Notes 1. Quoted in Evan Mills, “The Specter of Fuel-Based Lighting.” Science, vol. 308, no. 5726 (Washington: May 27, 2005), 1263. 2. In the digital edition of the Thomas A. Edison Papers, the editors point out that although he has been quoted as saying “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” Edison mentioned in his notes in 1915, “[T]hey attribute this saying to me,” he wrote, “but I cannot remember that I ever said it.” The Edisonian, “New From the Thomas A. Edison Papers” volume 3, issue 1, State University of New Jersey Rutgers, http://edison.rutgers.edu/pdfs/The%20Edisonian%20-%20Volume%203.pdf. 3. Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of Time (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 53, 57. 4. William Jennings Bryan, Speeches of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1909), 1: 249. 5. Eugene Victor Debs, Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1908), 81. 6. Debs, Debs, 84. 7. Carlos Scwhantes offers a good explanation in The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 326–334. 8. All statements by Sadie Frowne are from Hamilton Holt, ed., “The Life Story of a Polish Sweatshop Girl,” The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans As Told by Themselves (New York: J. Pott, 1906), 34–46. 9. Gail Collins, America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines (New York: William Morrow, 2003), 110; see also Women’s Work?: American Schoolteachers, 1650–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 10. Collins, America’s Women, 198. 11. Ida M. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1939), 204. 12. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work, 230.

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The U.S. Government At Home and Abroad

Theodore Roosevelt (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

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AMERICAN STORIES The Scene at Home To what extent should the federal government regulate domestic affairs and actively, even aggressively, promote U.S. international interests? At the turn of the twentieth century, Americans faced this question with more urgency than they had since the Civil War. Violence continued between workers and their employers’ hired muscle. Effects lingered from the economic panic of 1893. Corporations’ influence and power continued to grow. Packaged foods remained arguably unsafe. Wholesale clear-cutting of forests, decreasing runs of fish, and polluted waterways hinted at disaster. Some cities, like San Francisco, had insufficient water supplies. And worrisome troubles stewed in Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines. Citizens and legislators had to decide what roles the federal government should take, if any. Past precedents suggested present solutions. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln had sliced into civil liberties because he believed the cause of union demanded drastic measures. Critics had grumbled when Lincoln and Congress instituted both an income tax and military draft and when Lincoln suspended habeas corpus throughout the nation—largely in response to protests against the draft. Soon after the war ended, however, habeas corpus was restored. Congress ended the income tax in 1872. And the army shrank from 1 million men to 26,000 within a decade. As the need for a mammoth federal government had receded, so too had the scope of the government’s intervention. Even so, the number of federal departments, bureaus, agencies, and employees had grown steadily since 1789. Each increase came accompanied by a sensible explanation. For example, the Secret Service got its start in 1865 to counteract counterfeit money. Secret Service agents began their first presidential protection detail with Grover Cleveland in 1883—eighteen years too late for Lincoln, and two years too late for President James Garfield, who was assassinated a few months after his inaugural by a disgruntled federal job seeker named Charles Guiteau. Presidential murder in pursuit of a federal job proved the final nudge in getting Congress to pass sweeping civil service reform: the Pendleton Act of 1883, which set up the Civil Service Commission, responsible for establishing hiring guidelines for federal jobs. In a February 1891 Atlantic Monthly article, Theodore Roosevelt, a member of the commission, wrote, “We desire to make a man’s honesty and capacity to do the work to which he is assigned the sole tests of his appointment and retention.” In the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson had defended the “spoils system,” the practice of handing out plum jobs to friends and supporters. Although Jackson’s opponents grumbled at the extra power the spoils system infused into the office of the president, his executive

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THE U.S. GOVERNMENT successors continued the practice of handing federal jobs to sycophants. But the scandals that dogged President Ulysses S. Grant’s time in office, from 1869 to 1877, provided solid evidence that good relations with the president were no guarantee of a job seeker’s intentions or abilities, no matter how reputable the president. Grant seems to have been an honest man surrounded by leeches. His confidant and private secretary, General Orville E. Babcock—though ultimately found not guilty—was implicated and indicted for what was likely his central role in defrauding the government of millions of tax dollars, part of the notorious “Whiskey Ring.” Was it to be men of talent or men of connections who ran the world’s first successful republic in 2,000 years? If the federal government was to be a major employer, then its procedures needed to be orderly and regulated, in much the same way that large corporations were instituting efficient management and personnel practices. The size of the federal government alone did not mean that it was exceeding its constitutional powers. In 1887, however, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act, followed three years later by the Sherman Antitrust Act: two laws that gave Congress the power to regulate the economy on a case-by-case basis. This was something radically new. Business was fast becoming the pulse of the nation, and the common philosophy of the day stressed free-market economics, the belief that competition between companies would ensure the “survival of the fittest.” In the early 1800s, when large corporations had not existed and almost everyone had farmed, federal involvement in the economy had mostly been limited to imposing tariffs—taxes on imported goods—with the intention of protecting domestic manufactures by making imported goods unnaturally pricey. Otherwise, Congress regularly gave away free land or sold it for a pittance, giving people the one thing they needed—soil to plow. In the 1820s, the efforts of Speaker of the House Henry Clay to implement his “American System” of government-sponsored road building had been met with lamentations about the insidious interference of the government in private (or at most state) matters. Even funding the Erie Canal by New York State tax dollars had seemed to many critics a dangerous move. Under the original model of republican philosophy, citizens had feared the federal government. The framers of the Constitution had wanted to keep the president from becoming a tyrant, to keep either house of Congress from growing too powerful, and to keep the federal government from abusing the prerogatives of the states. But now, with the passing of the Interstate Commerce and Sherman Antitrust laws, Congress perceived companies and corporations, essentially conglomerations of private citizens, as threats to the common good. The federal government—the old monster hiding under the bed—was slowly becoming the public defender. Corporations like John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company and Philip

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AMERICAN STORIES Armour’s meatpacking houses in Chicago challenged the autonomous agrarian order of farmers hoeing their own vegetable patches and scything their own fields of wheat. And James Pierpont Morgan’s financial holding system gave him control over railroad networks, steel factories, banks, and coalfields—to the tune of $22 billion, which was more capital than the federal government had at the time. Some of these “captains of industry,” or “robber barons,” as they were also known, welcomed federal oversight. With every federal inspection stamp applied to a package of Armour sausages, international buyers could feel confident that American meats were safe to eat. Sometimes business and government entered into willing partnership. There were, however, more industrialists and financiers opposed to the oversight and interference of the government. Bulbous-nosed, temperamental J.P. Morgan had bought Andrew Carnegie’s U.S. Steel because he wanted to integrate steel making into his shipping interests in order to stabilize the economy. Morgan thought too much competition bred wild fluctuations into the economy, but Presidents William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft—one after the other—disagreed. These three Republican presidents brought the Sherman Antitrust Act down upon more than 100 corporations and holding companies—“trusts”—in order to prevent one company or even one man (like Morgan) from monopolizing too much money and power. In his 1913 Autobiography, former president Theodore Roosevelt argued that 100 years of unregulated capitalism had given “perfect freedom for the strong to wrong the weak.” Saying there had been “in our country a riot of individualistic materialism,” Roosevelt justified his use of federal power to constrain the Morgans and Rockefellers from preying “on the poor and the helpless.”1 Although President Taft “busted” more trusts than Roosevelt, it is Theodore Roosevelt who has continued to be known as the preeminent trust-buster. In fact, five-foot-eight, barrel-chested Roosevelt was known for just about anything a man could hope to do, due in great part to his own knack for self-promotion. Theodore Roosevelt, Part 1: Of Silver Spoons and Police Badges Millions of inherited dollars and an ebullient family spirit—as well as ownership of an import-export business, a controlling stake in Chemical Bank, and connections to New York City’s other leading families—freed the Roosevelts to chase their own fancies. Descended from some of the earliest Dutch settlers to colonize Manhattan, the Roosevelts grew with the city, building mansions adjacent to the financial district and raising each generation to prosper and think. They were as much a family of the mind as they were a family of the dollar. In 1858, Theodore Roosevelt—the future president—was born to a

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THE U.S. GOVERNMENT stalwart father and a story-filled southern mother, Martha Bulloch.2 Theodore Roosevelt Sr., born in 1831, chose not to fight in the Civil War—paying $1,000 for a substitute instead—but he did more for the Union cause than any single soldier could have accomplished. Philanthropy is a pursuit of the wealthy, a sort of voluntary welfare that appealed to a nation of self-styled rugged individualists. In the emerging American capitalist arrangement, individuals could choose whether to spend, save, or give away their own money. Government neither doled out relief nor forced the wealthy to help the indigent. Rich colonists and their republican descendants had been expected to dispense alms to the needy, a workable arrangement in villages and small towns. But the immensity of poverty in nineteenth-century cities overwhelmed the ability of individuals to dispense food and coins. A few hundred leading families did not have personal networks in place to handle the needs of tens of thousands of urban poor. And besides, the precedent for large-scale, philanthropic poor-relief simply did not exist. How to alleviate widespread poverty was a new problem made worse by the devastation of the Civil War, which not only killed wage-earning fathers and sons, but at the very least left mothers and young children at home to fend for themselves until their battle-scarred fathers and husbands returned. Theodore Roosevelt Sr. decided to do something on a massive scale to help soldiers’ struggling families, and he thought the federal government ought to be at the center of his efforts. This wealthy man with a deserved reputation for philanthropic work wanted to enlist Lincoln’s Union government in the cause of the common good. Seeing government as an aid, not as a hindrance or lurking foe, Roosevelt went with two friends to visit President Lincoln in the capital. The president supported their idea for an allotment system, a way of sending home some of a soldier’s pay. With Lincoln’s blessing, Roosevelt convinced Congress to enact the plan and soon began convincing New York State soldiers, over whom he had been made allotment commissioner. For two years he toured Army camps, signing men up for the program and overseeing the distribution of funds, which totaled in the millions. Prior to the war and afterward, Theodore Sr. dedicated himself in other ways to alleviating the hazards of urban poverty. In part, he funded an orphanage, the Newsboys’ Lodging House, to which he went every Sunday afternoon, often bringing young Theodore along. The future president would watch his father dispense good advice and encouragement, pepping the youngsters to study and work hard. Over the years, thousands of the orphans were placed in midwestern farm families, away from the grime of New York’s underside. In 1913, Theodore Roosevelt published his autobiography and with great admiration remembered his father as “the best man I ever knew. . . . He was interested in every social reform movement, and he did an immense amount

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AMERICAN STORIES of practical charitable work himself.” The elder Roosevelt died in 1878 at the too-young age of forty-six, when his son was halfway through Harvard. The father had lived long enough, however, to provide a model for the rest of Theodore’s life. The future president recalled how his father’s “heart filled with gentleness for those who needed help or protection, and with the possibility of much wrath against a bully or an oppressor.”3 All was not philanthropy and tender care giving in young Roosevelt’s childhood. There was also fascination with nature. He remembered, “raising a family of very young gray squirrels [and] fruitlessly endeavoring to tame an excessively unamiable woodchuck.”4 The family hiked the Alps and took a float down the Nile, where he blasted away at ibises with a shotgun. Theodore and his three siblings studied with private tutors. Some nights, when bronchial asthma filled his frail lungs with swollen tissue and fluid, his father would wander the mansion, carrying the “gasping” boy from room to room. Occasionally they would load into a carriage and trot through the night streets of New York, letting the motion and cool air calm young Theodore’s nerves and soothe his breathing. He remembered his mother, Martha, with equal love. She was from the South and remained “entirely ‘unreconstructed’ to the day of her death,” an attitude that in a less loving family might have caused problems. In the Roosevelt household, having a Union-leaning father and Confederate-leaning mother led to nothing more than mischief and play. The ex-president recalled the dawning in his child’s mind of “a partial but alert understanding of the fact that the family were not one in their views about” the war. To pay his mother back for a dose of daytime “maternal discipline,” he tried “praying with loud fervor for the success of the Union arms” during the evening prayer. Luckily for the mischievous boy, his mother was “blessed with a strong sense of humor, and she was too much amused to punish me.”5 Unlike the orphaned boys he visited on Sunday afternoons with his father, bereft as they were of family, Theodore Roosevelt had loving parents and playful siblings to influence him and instill a belief that people could be good when circumstances permitted. After graduating from Harvard in 1880, Theodore Roosevelt scanned his prospects—which were many—and chose two marriages: one to Alice Lee; the second to the public. He would break with genteel tradition and become a politician. Educated sons of privilege scorned politics in the late 1800s, considering it the domain of ruffians, attention seekers, and men of ambition, a quality that was not necessary for those already at the top of the national pyramid. The world already stretched out beneath them. Roosevelt’s well-heeled friends scoffed at his political intentions, warning him away from the “saloon-keepers, horse-car conductors, and the like” whom he would have to deal with as equals. Roosevelt, however, had had

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THE U.S. GOVERNMENT quite enough of billiard rooms and talk that went nowhere. He had the example of his father before him, a first-rate education, and an internal drive to better himself and the nation at all turns. Politics was the place to accomplish his vision. As he told his blue-blood friends, “I intended to be one of the governing class.”6 One year out of college, Roosevelt got elected to the New York State legislature, where he remained for three terms, distinguishing himself as a cautious reformer who listened attentively and spoke forcefully. He devoted special zeal to civil service reform, helping enact the first statewide civil service laws in 1883, just before passage of the Pendleton Act nationally. This made him, in effect, the champion of competence and honesty, setting him at odds with the lords of tradition, represented by city political machines—notably New York’s own Tammany Hall, the heart and soul of Democratic politics for more than 100 years, well into the 1900s. Although Tammany’s most notorious leader—graft-swollen William Marcy Tweed, known as “Boss” Tweed—had been jailed in the 1870s for skimming upward of $200 million from city coffers, the Tammany political organization maintained tight control over city jobs and contracts, exchanging votes for employment. The political machine system benefited fresh immigrants who needed work, protection, and access to basic services, but the same system also stymied reform and made graft easy. Roosevelt’s time in state office endeared him to President Benjamin Harrison, who appointed Theodore as a federal Civil Service Commissioner in 1889. The step from state to federal government had been natural and easy for Roosevelt, though contemporary events in his own life proved more tumultuous. On February 14, 1884, Theodore Roosevelt’s mother and wife both died. The twin deaths left him hollow, and he turned to the same part of the country so many men before him had used as a crucible for recasting a shattered life: the West, in his case North Dakota. Landscapes of trees, mountains, and streams had always tugged at Roosevelt’s spirit. He found more to bind the mind in wilderness than in anything else other than politics. (Later in life he found a way to bring his love of nature and his gift for politics together.) The Roosevelts had spent summers on Long Island, when it still harbored tangled places and quiet dunes. The best parts of his two trips to Europe had been its natural vistas and ancient ruins, the parts of civilization at least partially returned to the earth. At the age of thirteen, Roosevelt had learned the skills of taxidermy, which blended well with his bird hunting and general interest in “natural history,” the catch-all phrase for human history and earth sciences tumbled together. What better place, then, than North Dakota, still a territory and still untamed enough for ranching, grizzly hunting, and bandit rassling, all of which Roosevelt fit into his two years on the range—along with solitary trips through the moonscape of the Badlands, haunted as it was with dinosaur bones and other relics of time.

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AMERICAN STORIES In 1886, Roosevelt returned to the East—though the West was never far from his mind. He fully resumed a settled life by marrying a childhood friend, Edith Carow, with whom he had five children to accompany the one from his previous marriage (named after her mother, Alice, who had died from childbirth complications). He also tried his luck at a mayoral election, which he lost. Along with his six years as a civil service commissioner (preceded by working on Benjamin Harrison’s successful presidential bid), Roosevelt spent most of the next decade in personal ways, writing an epic history of the West in four volumes and raising his wild brood. But 1895 found Roosevelt back in a reformer’s chair, serving as police commissioner for New York, where he had to fight against nearly as many problems inside the department as its officers faced daily on the streets. Training standards were either lax or nonexistent. For example, patrolmen received few to no lessons in pistol use, though they were given revolvers. Protection rackets took up as much time as protection of innocent citizens. It was common police practice to extort weekly fees from brothels in exchange for letting prostitutes continue their business. And night patrol was seen as a good time to take a nap. For two years, Roosevelt cleaned up shop, informing the officers that he would judge them according to the quality of their patrolmen’s police work. In typical Roosevelt fashion, he did the judging personally by wandering the streets at night, keeping tabs on his own increasingly alert force. This was all a matter of “merit” and responsibility as far as Roosevelt was concerned, another facet of his intention to fill civil service jobs with men who performed well. After his two years of instituting effective reforms and training procedures, the nation again called out to Theodore Roosevelt, and he excused himself from police oversight to take a larger cop’s job, assistant secretary of the navy, in 1897. The timing, for a man of Roosevelt’s tastes, temperament, and toughness, could not have been better. An International Interlude: Cuba, Hawaii, and the Prelude to War After Theodore Roosevelt retired from the presidency in 1909, he grabbed a big-game rifle and some buddies, notified enough reporters to keep the name “Roosevelt” in the newspapers, and steamed for Africa. His son Kermit was the expedition’s photographer, mirroring Roosevelt’s own family shooting trip down the Nile some thirty years earlier (when a minimum of 100 birds had been shot, destined for stuffing and storage in young Roosevelt’s growing home taxidermy collection). In 1909, besides wanting to have a “bully” time in Africa, ex-President Roosevelt was off to prove his manliness by

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THE U.S. GOVERNMENT blasting anything that moved—other than people. Roosevelt and company killed more than 250 animals, including eight elephants, seven giraffes, seven hippopotamuses, five pelicans, and nine lions. The American public, in turn, lionized Roosevelt, cheering at news of his ongoing “strenuous life.” In a 1910 dispatch from Khartoum in the Sudan, the ex-president informed readers that he had gone “where the wanderer sees the awful glory of sunrise and sunset in the wide waste spaces of the earth, unworn of man, and changed only by the slow change of the ages through time everlasting.”7 Roosevelt’s yearlong tour of Africa did more than impress his nation of admirers. The tour reinforced a handful of notions: animals and nature were present for humans to “use” as they saw fit; Africa had produced no real civilizations of its own, leaving the continent “unworn of man”; and the United States should continue to share its bold democracy with the world. During the 1800s, Europeans colonized most of Africa, and in the century’s closing decade, the United States established Hawaii as a territory and the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico as colonial protectorates. These forays into Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific islands were generally understood to be part of the “white man’s burden,” a responsibility to do two things: to bring the modern wonders of white civilization to dark peoples and to make money in the process. Where once it had been the responsibility of missionary societies to spread American culture on a global scale, now the federal government—through its navy and army—was asserting American global aspirations. Theodore Roosevelt was delighted to display the United States flexing its muscles, and he was not shy to say so. In 1895, he spelled out his image of the American colossus. “We should,” he said, “build a first-class fighting navy. . . . We should annex Hawaii immediately. It was a crime against the United States, it was a crime against white civilization, not to annex it two years and a half ago [when Queen Liliuokalani was deposed by white landowners]. . . . We should build the Isthmian Canal, and it should be built either by the United States Government or under its protection.” In his own gymnastic prose, Roosevelt proclaimed both peace and war as just policies: “Honorable peace is always desirable, but under no circumstances should we permit ourselves to be defrauded of our just rights by any fear of war.” This was an early version of Roosevelt’s dictum, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”8 In 1887, Theodore Roosevelt had met Alfred Thayer Mahan at the United States Naval War College. Three years later, Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, a book that Roosevelt took seriously. Mahan theorized that during the colonial period (stretching back to Rome), navies had determined which empire would prevail: whoever controlled the seas could control commerce; and whoever’s commerce could be sustained could

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AMERICAN STORIES in turn endure a robust war. Now at the helm of the U.S. Navy as its assistant secretary, Roosevelt implemented Mahan’s lesson by pushing for the navy to be enlarged and, even more important, modernized. In 1898, Roosevelt had the chance to test his and Mahan’s ideas. Resting less than 100 miles to the south of Florida was one of the last remnants of the decrepit Spanish empire: Cuba. Rich in sugar and tobacco, Cuba provided the tottering Spanish monarchy with some of its only reliable revenue and with its last claim to greatness, a lonely vestige of a once-vast domain. But for more than three decades, the Cuban people had been restless subjects, disaffected by their lack of independence while all around them their Spanish-speaking neighbors in South and Central America tore off the yoke of Spanish overlordship and proclaimed freedom. From 1868 to 1878, Cuban mambises, revolutionary fighters, struggled against Spanish troops, and the warfare ended in never-fulfilled Spanish promises to give the Cubans greater autonomy. The cry of Cubans to exert self-determination, to govern themselves, yielded outpourings of sympathy in the United States, where incantations of freedom always sounded good. During the 1880s and early 1890s, a Cuban intellectual named José Martí lived in New York, writing articles for Spanish-language newspapers generally favorable to the United States. Martí’s relationship with the United States inaugurated what has become more than a century-long affair between Cuban dissidents and Americans wanting to change Cuba’s government. Beyond the ideological and moral pull of the Cuban cause, there was also approximately $50 million invested in Cuba by American businessmen, 50 million reasons to make sure the island’s economy did not deteriorate. In 1894, new tariffs in the United States made it difficult for Cuban sugar to compete in the U.S. market, which in turn threw Cuba’s economy topsy-turvy. Hard times stirred up simmering political problems, and a truce between Cuban rebels and Spanish officials ended in fighting. Martí sailed to Cuba in 1895, where he died within two weeks, the victim of a small and meaningless skirmish. At first, outgoing president Grover Cleveland merely issued a statement of American neutrality, followed near the end of his term by a warning to Spain that if the war continued, the United States might intervene on behalf of the Cubans. Later Cleveland became part of the anti-imperialist group, opposed to any territorial acquisitions in the Atlantic or Pacific. Under President William McKinley, who took office in March 1897, the United States watched the war in Cuba with increasingly vigilant interest. McKinley had a variety of considerations on his mind. He was a Civil War veteran, wary of entering into any conflict that could lead to the bloodshed he had participated in thirty years earlier. There was also a domestic, amorphous opposition to any imperialist expansion, voiced by enough popular Americans (from Mark

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THE U.S. GOVERNMENT Twain to Jane Addams) to make McKinley worry that a battle with Spain could cost him the 1900 election. But Spain made it easy for Americans to sympathize with the Cuban people. Spain’s military, though outdated by the standards of Britain and Germany, had more resources and firepower than the Cuban revolutionaries could muster, so the Cubans turned to hit-and-run tactics, first called “guerrilla warfare” in the early 1800s. Spain responded by forcing villagers into enclosed encampments in order to separate the civilian populace from the rebel fighters, the two groups being difficult to distinguish from each other. This reconcentrado policy of concentrating civilians in what turned out to be cramped and filthy conditions caused more than 200,000 deaths, almost entirely by starvation and disease. A few journalists writing for William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer—two wealthy New York newspapermen—sensationalized the mayhem, further aggravating the antiSpanish mood of the American public. In fact, Pulitzer’s New York World and Hearst’s New York Journal provided enough damning stories of Spanish misbehavior to be partly responsible for the declaration of war against Spain in April 1898. Magazines and journals had been selling well for three quarters of a century. The majority of them—like Godey’s Lady’s Book, begun in 1830—had been addressed to and purchased by women, the first indication that women could set a national agenda, if not on voting day then through the power of the purse. Newspaper sales had been brisk since colonial days, but the advent of the corporate business structure, improved printing technologies, and the telegraph permitted men like Hearst and Pulitzer to deliver timely coverage at an affordable price. Hearst was a California boy who learned the trade working in New York for Pulitzer’s World. In 1895, Hearst borrowed money from his millionaire father, bought the limping New York Journal, and started to publish the same mixture of civic-minded exposés and entertainment pieces offered by Pulitzer, but for the low price of one penny a paper. Hearst had to lower the price in order to compete with Pulitzer’s reach and style. One of Joseph Pulitzer’s first successes appeared in the form of a sleuthing adventuress named Nellie Bly. Born Elizabeth Cochrane, she adopted the pen name Nellie Bly (taken from a Stephen Foster song) in order to shield her real identity from Pittsburgh readers, a common gender subterfuge in an era when women’s opinions were considered fit for polite conversation, not necessarily for serious journalistic discourse. Bly’s undercover investigations into child labor and hazardous conditions in local steel mills got her reassigned to the theater beat at the Pittsburgh Dispatch once the owners of those mills threatened to remove their advertising dollars. To avoid the doldrums of writing about stage lighting, Bly set off for Mexico in search of more exciting material. Within

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AMERICAN STORIES months, Mexican authorities chased Bly out of Mexico for her pieces on political corruption and exploitation of labor. All this moral gallivanting by a trim, button-nosed woman in her twenties attracted the admiration of Joseph Pulitzer’s chief editor, who hired her to write for the New York World without restrictions—but only after she had proven her skills by going undercover to the women’s mental asylum on Blackwell’s Island. She delivered herself to the asylum under hysterical pretenses, experienced the unconscionable treatment of the patients, and wrote an exposé for Pulitzer’s paper. In 1889, inspired by the fantasy writer Jules Verne, Bly took an express trip around the world, trying to make it in less than eighty days, a tip of the lady’s hat to the title of Verne’s novel, Around the World in Eighty Days. Bly crossed the globe in seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes, and fourteen seconds, and her enthusiastic employer, Pulitzer, publicized the whole affair through his newspaper by getting people to bet on the time it would take Bly to get home. More than 1 million fans signed up for the guessing contest, which did wonders for his paper’s circulation. And adoring crowds greeted Nellie upon her triumphal return. Pulitzer and Hearst demonstrated the new reach of newspapers in their ability to inspire mental asylum reforms (passed by New York after Bly’s articles on Blackwell’s Island), political house cleaning, and sporting devotion to Bly’s obvious publicity stunt. The reading public was easily manipulated, and with more than two-thirds of New York City’s nearly 3 million people buying at least one newspaper every week, an astute publisher with an agenda could lead the public down a variety of paths, even one leading to war with Spain. As the Cuban insurrection against Spanish rule intensified, Pulitzer and Hearst sent journalists to live with the mambises and to send back whatever outrageous stories they could uncover or concoct. One story about a mishandled damsel rotting in a Cuban prison galvanized readers’ feelings, as did the rousing story of her rescue by a Hearst reporter who rented an apartment next to the prison, stretched a ladder from his open window to her barred window, hacked away the bars, and carried her to safety. While the heavy-handedness of Spain in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines offered the American public enough examples of wrongdoing to generate war fever, Hawaii was another matter. In 1893, a small contingent of white sugar planters with close ties to the United States deposed Queen Liliuokalani, the last Hawaiian ruler in a dynasty stretching back to 1810, when the islands had unified under one king rather than continuing as autonomous regions led by chiefs. In 1820, missionary families—mainly from New England—had crossed the Pacific to Hawaii and begun their preaching and teaching work. As the children and grandchildren of these first missionaries grew to maturity, the islands’ native inhabitants died in the thousands from the same diseases that had been decimating indigenous populations throughout

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THE U.S. GOVERNMENT the Americas for 300 years. At the same time, sugar became Hawaii’s gold. By the 1850s, too few native Hawaiians were left alive to farm all the rattling fields of sugarcane, so major landowners—mainly the descendants of the original missionaries—imported low-paid workers, first from China and then Japan. In 1876, the Hawaiian sugar industry received a boost by the removal of trade barriers with the United States, which spread sugar culture that much farther into the islands. The white landowning families gained more influence and power with every cane stalk that sprouted. King David Kalakaua, Liliuokalani’s brother, built a lavish palace festooned with electric lights, which cost just about the same amount as the rest of the palace. Decked out in a British military coat complete with epaulets, his face wreathed with bushy, American-style muttonchop whiskers, King Kalakaua intended to show that Hawaiians could be both traditional and modern. But his insistence on native rule and native rights appealed very little to sugar magnates like Sanford Dole, a direct descendant of the 1820 missionaries. Meanwhile, Kalakaua’s sister was living in the United States and Europe, receiving the best education available and attending such highbrow affairs as the fiftieth celebration of Queen Victoria’s reign, the Golden Jubilee—the same bash at which Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley performed. While Liliuokalani was shaking hands with the grande dame of England, her brother, King Kalakaua, was coerced into signing a new constitution, dubbed the “Bayonet Constitution,” which stripped about 75 percent of the remaining native Hawaiians of their voting rights, among other indignities. Kalakaua died in 1891, and Liliuokalani succeeded to the throne, from which she attempted to promulgate yet another constitution, one that would return power to her hands and to the hands of her people. Two years later, in a revolt led by Sanford Dole and tacitly supported by the U.S. Marines (who came ashore but did not engage in any fighting), Queen Liliuokalani was overthrown. Decrying the involvement of the marines, who had been ordered into action by the U.S. minister on the scene, President Grover Cleveland insisted that Liliuokalani be returned to power. Instead, the members of the so-called Committee of Safety who had deposed the Queen made Sanford Dole president of the Republic of Hawaii. (Sanford was cousin to James Dole, who made a fortune in the early 1900s turning pineapples into gold.) While the United States and Spain inched closer to war, men like Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt continued to call for annexation of Hawaii, which Roosevelt thought was an essential jewel to pluck. By late 1897, he worried that if the United States did not annex Hawaii, some other world power would do so, and the United States would lose its chance to establish coaling stations and fresh supplies of water for its ships on the way to the increasingly important Far East. Explosive events in Havana harbor on

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AMERICAN STORIES February 15, 1898, sparked a war with Spain and the start of more than 100 years of direct U.S. military involvement all around the world, including the quick annexation of Hawaii. Theodore Roosevelt, Part 2: Of Rough Riders, Talking Softly, and Carrying a Big Stick Cecil Spring-Rice, a British diplomat and close friend of Theodore Roosevelt’s, once privately commented to a friend, “You must remember that the president is about six.”9 The gibe was meant lovingly, but it conveyed a great insight into Roosevelt’s character: he would act in politics and war with the same ungovernable glee any wound-up boy might bring to a good game of tag or cowboys and Indians. Roosevelt’s gang of six children took their cues from their father. When Roosevelt gave his son Theodore Jr., age nine, a first rifle and Theodore Jr. wanted to know if it shot real bullets, Roosevelt loaded one and shot it into the ceiling of their Long Island home, Sagamore Hill. The children in their turn peppered the side of an outbuilding with bullets and pocked their father’s prized swimsuit with holes. They also sneaked a pony into the White House and once snuffed out city gas streetlamps right after they had been lit. Roosevelt expected his children to walk the line between seeking attention for its own sake and bucking meaningless social conventions, regardless of what attention might ensue. His eldest daughter, Alice, smoked cigarettes publicly, and when President Roosevelt was notified that she sometimes smoked on the roof of the White House, he responded, “I can run the country or I can control Alice, I cannot do both.”10 This adoring father who lavished his children with presents and love was also an ardent believer in the unique destiny of the United States, absolutely certain that the white race, and the United States in particular, needed to remain strong in order to remain civilized. He expected people to have fun and saw much worthwhile adventure in both a bear hunt and a timely war, but he also expected his children, himself, and the nation to behave responsibly, a charge not easily maintained in drawn-out combat. A few months into his job with the navy, Roosevelt wrote a letter to Cecil Spring-Rice that was typical of his ideas about race, liberal politics, and the need for martial manliness as applied to domestic and foreign policy. “The one ugly fact all over the world,” Roosevelt intoned with naked chauvinism, “is the diminution of the birth rate among the highest races,” namely the English-speaking white people of the United States and Britain. Roosevelt did not want the United States or any other place on earth to be overrun by the “savage” races. Even so, the United States had its problems: “As for my own country . . . We are barbarians of a certain kind, and what is most unpleasant

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THE U.S. GOVERNMENT we are barbarians with a certain middle-class, Philistine quality of ugliness and pettiness, raw conceit, and raw sensitiveness.” The trick to remaining morally upright and potent was to stay away from too much raw barbarity and too much effete liberalism. “Where we get highly civilized,” he wrote, “as in the northeast, we seem to become civilized in an unoriginal and ineffective way, and tend to die out.”11 What could save the United States from an excess of civilization, from becoming weak and degenerate? Roosevelt had just the cure. Writing to William Kimball, a naval officer, Roosevelt said that going to war against Spain would be humanitarian: more of the Western Hemisphere could be wrested away from European control. Better yet, since he was always worrying about the softening of American toughness, Roosevelt saw war as a way to strengthen people, to distract them from thinking about wealth, and to give the military some “practice.” War was practice for war and a needed supplement to the ease afforded by modern conveniences. Roosevelt got his wish. On February 15, 1898, the battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor, killing 260 crewmembers, nearly the whole complement. The United States had positioned the Maine off the edge of Cuba as a warning to Spain: the United States was seriously willing to use military force to stop the Spanish from killing more Cubans in what was obviously a tired battle for a vanished empire right in the backyard of the United States. The captain of the Maine, Charles Sigsbee, urged caution in assessing the cause of the explosion (most likely accidental), yet newspapers like Hearst’s New York Journal and Sacramento Examiner provocatively announced on the 17th, “Maine Blown to Bits By Torpedo.” This Hearst-approved war whoop had been preceded ten days earlier in his papers by the translated publication of a rude letter penned by Spain’s U.S. ambassador, Enrique de Lome, who had called President McKinley “weak and catering to the rabble, and besides a low politician who desires to . . . stand well with the jingoes of his party.”12 On April 4, Hearst ordered 1 million copies of the Journal to be printed, calling for an immediate declaration of war on Spain. That the United States declared war on Spain on April 25, 1898, is not surprising. It is, however, surprising that it took so long given the affront to national honor, the assumption that Spain had torpedoed the Maine, and the bugle blaring for action in Hearst’s papers on the east and west coasts. Roosevelt was delighted. Now he could have his war. He resigned as assistant secretary of the navy and raised a volunteer regiment dubbed “The Rough Riders,” in honor of Bill Cody’s troupe, “The Congress of Rough Riders.” Before setting off to fight, Roosevelt exceeded his authority by issuing a directive to the commander of the Pacific fleet, Commodore George

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AMERICAN STORIES Dewey: “Order the squadron . . . to Hong Kong. Keep full of coal. In the event of declaration of war [with] Spain, your duty will be to see that the Spanish squadron does not leave the Asiatic coast.”13 Dewey complied, taking along an exiled Filipino, Emilio Aguinaldo, the Filipino mirror of the Cuban José Martí—two men driven to free their people. Aguinaldo trusted the United States to help. The Spanish-American War and the War Against Filipino Nationalism Spain did not stand a chance, and her generals knew it. But they fought anyway, briefly. The Spanish-American War lasted all of eight months, only half that time with any large-scale combat. By December 10, 1898, Spain had signed a peace agreement ceding the Philippines, Cuba, Guam, and Puerto Rico to the United States, in return for $20 million. Guam and Puerto Rico, according to U.S. designs, were intended to remain dependent territories, arguably part of the United States without any direct representation—shadow states. As for Cuba, in April 1898, Congress issued a resolution, dubbed the Teller Amendment, stipulating that the United States had no territorial ambitions in Cuba. Congress determined “to leave the government and control of the island to its people.”14 However, the fate of the Philippines was from the outset much less established, due in part to three factors: first, the speed of events leading up to war, which precluded consensus within society or government; second, roiling debates within the United States concerning the desirability of acquiring either an empire or, perhaps instead, new states in distant places; and third, the attitudes of Filipinos. On May 1, Commodore Dewey’s fleet blasted, sank, and disabled the entire Spanish Philippine squadron—in one four-hour battle. On July 25, U.S. troops landed in the Philippines to fight alongside the revolutionary forces under control of Emilio Aguinaldo’s self-declared independent republic. On August 13, the U.S. military betrayed the Filipinos. Arrayed outside of Manila, the largest city in the archipelago, Filipino fighters planned to stage joint operations with the U.S. military, but instead the American and Spanish generals worked out a secret plan. A mock fight was staged, with some mortar and rifle fire coming from U.S. lines. Spanish forces in Manila immediately hoisted a white flag, and the “conquering” American forces entered the city peacefully. They kept the Filipino fighters out. Soon, Dewey labeled Aguinaldo’s fighters “undisciplined insurgents.”15 The Spanish-American War was effectively over, but the Philippine-American War was just about to begin. With the Spanish military presence removed from the Philippines, local congressional representatives, calling themselves the Malolos Congress,

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THE U.S. GOVERNMENT began meeting in September, and they finished writing the constitution for the First Philippine Republic in late November. President McKinley refused to recognize their government or their legitimacy. On December 10, Spain sold the Philippines to the United States for $20 million, and by the end of the month, McKinley ordered that force be used to subdue any indigenous opposition to the new American regime. Full Filipino independence turned out to be no more substantial than a broken promise. As a measure of American territorial fever, Commodore Dewey got promoted to rear admiral in 1898, and he enjoyed celebrity throughout the nation. In fact, Dewey’s popularity lagged behind that of only one other man at the time: Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, who by the end of 1898 had established himself as the hero of the fight in Cuba. Theodore Roosevelt, Part 3: From Lieutenant Colonel to President The U.S. military was not really prepared for war in April 1898. Most uniforms were heavy wool, having been made for winter campaigns. These were the uniforms worn by soldiers preparing to ship out from Florida, heading to Cuba at the start of the summer. A Frenchman had invented smokeless gunpowder in 1886, but it was not usable in American rifles. Theodore Roosevelt and his friend, Colonel Leonard Wood, assembled their Rough Riders in Texas and then relocated to Tampa, Florida, along with some media specialists equipped with new, mobile motion-picture cameras. Roosevelt knew fame waited ninety miles, the length of a gun barrel, and some motion pictures away. Yet he did not want to openly admit to others his longing for glory. In mid-April, he wrote to his sister Corinne’s husband, Douglas Robinson, a good friend, “If I went [to Cuba], I shouldn’t expect to win any military glory.” Instead, he intended “to act up” to the warlike “preaching” he had been doing for two years. “I have a horror,” Roosevelt wrote, “of the people who bark but don’t bite.”16 Whether his float-along cameramen or his letter to Douglas Robinson ought to be used as evidence of Roosevelt’s aspiration to catch the nation’s eye, catch that eye he did. On July 1, 1898, Roosevelt led the Rough Riders up Kettle Hill, part of the larger Battle of San Juan Hill. The previous day, a hot air balloon had hovered over the hills long enough for its signal corps occupants to spy a good path. According to Richard Harding Davis, a reporter on the scene who technically worked for Joseph Pulitzer but who acted like Roosevelt’s personal publicist, “over their heads the balloon was ascending for the first time and its great glistening bulk hung just above the tree tops, and the men in different regiments, picking their way along the trail, gazed up at it open-

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AMERICAN STORIES mouthed.” That night, Davis described how “the tropical moon hung white and clear in the dark purple sky, pierced with millions of white stars,” and the troops stayed awake late, realizing that saying “good night” would only be a “gentle farce.”17 On the morning of July 1, American soldiers marched into position at the bases of various hills, each with Spanish soldiers dug in at the top, armed with smokeless rifles, harder to pinpoint and more accurate than the U.S. weapons. The balloon went up again, but only managed to draw heavy Spanish fire. Shrapnel rained down on the troops, and the balloon, riddled with bullets, sank. All was confusion, and finally the regimental officers on the line were given total command of their troops. Roosevelt’s men charged alongside the Ninth Cavalry, a segregated black regiment often called “Buffalo Soldiers”—many had fought against Plains Indians and Apaches in the preceding decades. Together the Buffalo Soldiers and Roosevelt’s oddball mixture of Ivy Leaguers, ranch hands, and sportsmen left the trenches next to the eponymous kettle they had found at the base of their hill. Men dropped from gunfire and heat exhaustion; one out of six lay dead or wounded by day’s end. Fearing that the heat of running up the hill might take him otherwise, Roosevelt chose to stay on his horse—making him an easy target. The soldiers made it to the top of the hill, cut through barbed wire, and sent the remaining Spanish into a retreat. Theodore Roosevelt swept home in the national spotlight, his exploits having been trumpeted by Hearst’s and Pulitzer’s reporters. As Richard Harding Davis, in typically adulatory fashion, recalled the charge up Kettle Hill, “Roosevelt, mounted high on horseback, and charging the rifle-pits at a gallop and quite alone, made you feel that you would like to cheer.”18 Roosevelt’s family visited him and the Rough Riders at their final camp on Long Island, and the boys even got to sleep with their father in his tent (leaving him to snooze on the table). Fame led to election in 1900 as governor of New York, where he ruffled so many state politicians’ feathers by shooing away incompetence and graft that he was prompted to accept the vice presidential nomination as William McKinley’s running mate. They won, and Roosevelt unexpectedly became president half a year later when a self-styled anarchist named Leon Czolgosz shot McKinley. On September 14, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office. His years as president of the United States heralded the next stage in the expansion of the federal government. Theodore Roosevelt championed the American system of republican capitalism at home and abroad. He would see to it that neither left-leaning labor leaders nor power-mad moneymen would be allowed free rein in the United States. Second-rate nations in the Western Hemisphere would be similarly watched over by the United States, their affairs adjusted by military interventions when deemed necessary. The legacy

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THE U.S. GOVERNMENT of Roosevelt’s upbringing became the legacy he left to the United States: benevolent-minded leaders were to become the guardians of American virtue, through the force of mind preferably, but through force of arms when other methods failed. Government, in Roosevelt’s opinion, was an indispensable component of American and world society. Notes 1. Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 462. 2. For a beautiful and fuller treatment of Theodore Roosevelt’s childhood and young-adult years, read David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001). 3. Roosevelt, Autobiography, 12. 4. Maurice Garland Fulton, ed., Roosevelt’s Writings: Selections from the Writings of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 248. 5. Roosevelt, Autobiography, 14. 6. Roosevelt, Autobiography, 63. 7. Theodore Roosevelt, The Works of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Scribner, 1910), x. 8. Theodore Roosevelt, Campaigns and Controversies (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2005), 247–248. 9. Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 81. 10. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Mrs. L.: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth (New York: Doubleday, 1981). 11. Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: Letters and Speeches (New York: Library of America, 2004). 12. Thomas E. Morrissey, Donegan and the Splendid Little War (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2002), 150. 13. W.H. Brands, The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 324. 14. Brands, The Reckless Decade, 315. 15. Walter Millis, The Martial Spirit: A Study of Our War with Spain (Cambridge: Riverside, 1931), 354. 16. Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, My Brother Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921), 162. 17. Richard Harding Davis, Notes of a War Correspondent (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912), 81, 83. 18. Davis, Notes, 96.

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A Palette of Progressives

W.E.B. DuBois (C.M. Battey/Getty Images)

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AMERICAN STORIES The “Full Dinner Pail” and the “Square Deal”: Theodore Roosevelt as President During his successful presidential campaign in 1900, William McKinley and his vice presidential running mate, Theodore Roosevelt, assured the electorate a “full dinner pail,” plenty of food to eat along with all the other trimmings of prosperity. In 1904, voters elected Theodore Roosevelt president after he offered them a “square deal,” a slogan less well defined than a table spread with food, but seeming nevertheless to promise the sort of fairness and goodgovernance upon which Roosevelt staked his reputation. How well did he deliver? In 1900 there were 8,000 automobiles registered in the United States. By 1910, there were 458,000 registered automobiles. The dragging farm prices of the 1890s had rebounded, and the average wage earner saw about a 20 percent increase in wages over that same time, up to about $600 annually. Electricity continued to fan out from cities to suburbs, though most rural areas would have to wait until the 1930s and 1940s for electric power. Starting in 1907, well-funded government specialists trained to weed out diseased meats and dangerous drugs began inspecting food and pharmaceuticals. During a 1902 strike for higher wages, the federal government supported Pennsylvania coal miners. First in Wisconsin, and then elsewhere in the Midwest and West, legislatures wrote new forms of direct political action into law—referendums, initiatives, primaries, and recalls—giving voters the chance to vote on laws, propose new laws, choose candidates for elective office, and yank politicians out of office. And there was more fun to be had in America, too. Bicycles by the millions whirred over brick roads and country lanes. Innovative diamond-shaped frames and improved tires provided the convenience and comfort needed to get women riding, even in a skirt. Susan B. Anthony, the famous suffragist also famous for her stick-in-the-mud seriousness, said bicycles had “done a great deal to emancipate women. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.”1 The leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Frances Willard—noted for her sparkling advocacy of a dry country—got such a boost from bicycle riding that she promoted its delights in an 1895 book, A Wheel Within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle. Willard was sure that if women catapulted themselves onto the backs of bikes, they could also spin a proper campaign to attain full citizenship, namely the right to vote. She remembered being imprisoned by apparel on her sixteenth birthday, “the hampering long skirts . . . with their accompanying corset and high heels; my hair was clubbed up with pins.” Dutiful to tradition, Willard stayed “obedient to the limitations thus imposed” by stifling clothes and inhibiting expectations, but almost four decades later, overwhelmed by

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overwork and grief for her mother’s death and needing “new worlds to conquer, I determined that I would learn the bicycle.” What started out as an energizing diversion soon became a means to convey her messages: “I also wanted to help women to a wider world, for I hold that the more interests women and men can have in common, in thought, word, and deed, the happier will it be for the home. Besides, there was a special value to women in the conquest of the bicycle by a woman in her fifty-third year.”2 Besides inspiring women, biking was a bonanza for industrialists, tinkerers, and retailers: Americans purchased more than 10 million bicycles by 1900. And what better way to get exercise than to pedal over to the nearest movie house? Tally’s Electric Theater opened in 1902 in Los Angeles, the first building consecrated to movies and movies alone, though the sixty-seven stately vaudeville buildings operating in the nation by 1907 also showed movies—that ultimate freedom from care and worry, if only for an hour or two. Americans were devising ways to make themselves happy and rich at the same time. It would seem that Theodore Roosevelt at least presided over a “square deal,” however much of it he may have been responsible for. Not everyone in America had the chance to pedal the latest-model bicycle or sink into the plush upholstery of a palatial vaudeville house. In particular, European-Americans continued to shove African-Americans away from the good jobs, the seven-gabled, oak-shaded neighborhoods, and the good fun of this glittery, consumer-oriented, plentiful land of illusions. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments guaranteed full civil rights to black people, and the 1875 Civil Rights Act prevented any one individual from denying “the full and equal enjoyment of any of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters and other places of public amusement” to any other citizen because of “race” or “color.”3 In 1883, however, the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 law, saying that the regulation of individual behavior was a state matter. This ruling left southern blacks at the mercy of white-controlled legislatures. Then, in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, the Supreme Court allowed for a legally segregated America. An 1890 law in Louisiana stipulated that railroad companies provide separate seating for whites and blacks—the only exception allowing for black nurses tending to white babies. Homer Adolph Plessy, a light-skinned mulatto with one-eighth African ancestry, donated his body to test the law. In 1892, police summarily arrested Plessy for sitting in the white seating, and his case made its way through the appeals system. Eight Supreme Court justices ruled in favor of the Louisiana law, disagreeing with the “assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority.” The only dissenting justice was John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky. Although a former slave owner, Harlan had no

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AMERICAN STORIES trouble understanding the Constitution. He called the Louisiana segregation law “hostile to both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution of the United States” and deliberately intended to create the “legal inferiority [of] a large body of American citizens”—which is precisely what happened.4 The lie of “separate but equal” became many white Americans’ favored illusion. In 1890, when Louisiana passed the law segregating railroad cars, there were sixteen black legislators in that state. By 1910 there were none. What had been discrimination in practice became discrimination by law as southern schools, water fountains, hotels, hospitals, public bathrooms, restaurants, parks, and every other conceivable public place became racially divided, usually with the black facilities inferior in construction and amenities. Separation itself was often a worse sting, though the leaking tarpaper roofs and the biting chill of winter in the windblown hovels that served as African-American primary schools inflicted their own pain. State and local officials prevented African-Americans from registering to vote by using poll taxes, monetary fees that most poor people—white or black—simply could not afford. Officials also used literacy tests, which allowed the white examiners to interpret a written passage in such a way as to pass or fail anyone they chose. And they implemented “grandfather clauses” that permitted an illiterate man to vote only if his father or grandfather had been registered prior to 1867 (when not a single black person could vote). In these ways—and through violent intimidation—white southerners prevented most black southerners from voting. The dinner pail was at best half full in black America. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, many white women, casting their lot with the suffering slaves, had struggled for the immediate end to slavery. When slavery ended with the Thirteenth Amendment, these fighting abolitionists (like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had organized the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848) expected to receive their own full citizenship rights, especially the vote. Instead, the proposed Fifteenth Amendment specifically omitted women, giving the vote only to men. Feelings of fury and betrayal seeped into Elizabeth Stanton and her ally Susan B. Anthony, and they campaigned against passage of the amendment. In 1865, sensing a national mood favorable to black suffrage but opposed to woman suffrage, Stanton wrote, “The representative women of the nation have done their uttermost for the last thirty years to secure freedom for the negro . . . it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see ‘Sambo’ walk into the kingdom first.”5 Her old friend and ally, Frederick Douglass, naturally took offense at the “Sambo” reference, and they split ways. In 1895, five years after leading suffragists created the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), they excluded AfricanAmerican women from the annual convention held in Atlanta. The difficulty

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of convincing people that women were suited to full citizenship turned many white suffragists into pragmatists—if black women had to be excluded in order to gain southern support, so be it. The remaining obstacles to female enfranchisement were many. Nearly everyone felt that politics were corrupt and would corrupt women in turn. The liquor industry’s brewers, distillers, saloon owners, and distributors rightly feared that voting women would march to the ballot boxes and check “prohibition.” Conservative women did not want to upset the traditional social order. Many southerners assumed that any increase in the franchise would somehow lead to a reversal of Jim Crow. Stanton, Anthony, and many of their white suffragist sisters gave in to segregation in order to advocate for their primary cause: getting the vote for themselves. In 1908, when only four states—all in the West—had given women the vote, President Roosevelt gave his opinion of enfranchising women. “Personally,” he said to an Ohio member of NAWSA, “I believe in woman’s suffrage, but I am not an enthusiastic advocate of it, because I do not regard it as a very important matter.” He did not, however, think suffrage would “produce any of the evils feared”—like siphoning women away from motherhood and into the pigpen of politics. Roosevelt envisioned equality of spirit but not of action. “I believe,” he wrote, “that man and woman should stand on an equality of right, but I do not believe that equality of right means identity of functions.” There were, in Roosevelt’s opinion, proper realms for women and men, and women should be active at home because “the usefulness of woman is as the mother of the family.”6 Reality, however, had already antiquated his beliefs. Argonia, Kansas, elected the nation’s first woman mayor, Susanna Salter, in 1887. Seven years later, in 1894, voters elected three women to Colorado’s state legislature. In 1902, women were more than 50 percent of the undergraduate students at the University of Chicago. All sorts of career fields opened up to women: journalism, law, medicine, research, teaching, retail, clerical, labor agitation, business ownership. Most middle-class working women quit their jobs upon marriage, but poor women—white and black—generally had to continue working, the average salary of the average husband being insufficient to support a family. Jane Addams, the pioneering social worker in Chicago who ran Hull House, was America’s most respected reformer, and her star did not crash until she spoke out as a pacifist during World War I. Unlike Addams, who never married, Madam C.J. Walker—born Sarah Breedlove—knew family and fame. Born to African-American sharecroppers, orphaned, early widowed, and remarried, Madam Walker concocted a scalp tonic that regenerated hair (or at least cleaned the follicles well enough to let frustrated locks through to the light of day). The lotion generated a fortune for her, and she toured the country setting

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AMERICAN STORIES up beauty schools and salons. During World War I, she raised bonds for the war effort, keeping clear of Jane Addams’s descent into disrepute. Although Madam Walker was an exception to the rule of impoverished black oppression, she demonstrated the strength and will power of the socially damned. As she put it, “I have built my own factory on my own ground.”7 Neither African-Americans nor women—and Madam Walker was both—passively accepted the half-lives that white men offered as broken tokens of an elusive American dream. Defining “Progressivism”: Roosevelt and Robert La Follette Historians usually dub the first fifteen years of the twentieth century “the Progressive Era.” What does this phrase mean? In part it is historians’ acceptance of a word, “progressive,” that certain politicians of the time applied to themselves. Robert La Follette—congressman, then governor, and finally senator from Wisconsin—called himself a “progressive” while, as governor, he battled against others in Wisconsin who wanted to stymie his efforts to make democracy direct. Ten years later, in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt, in a bid to regain his old job, formed a new political party, the Progressive, or “Bull Moose,” Party. He had suffered through the presidency of his old friend William Howard Taft—whom Roosevelt did not think had the mettle that a chief executive needed. Now Roosevelt draped himself in a “progressive” aura. If Teddy Roosevelt and Battling Bob La Follette were both “progressives,” did they share more than the name? How did their behavior define the term? Since the 1890s, farmers, including the Wisconsin dairy farmers who were La Follette’s constituency, and small communities regularly complained about the seemingly arbitrary prices set by railroad companies. Governor La Follette took up their cause with the theatrical flourish expected from a former Shakespearean actor (who as a young man decided he was too short for the stage). La Follette enlisted the data-rich testimony of professors from the University of Wisconsin. Academics had founded the new fields of sociology, economics, and anthropology on a shared premise: human society could be understood and improved. La Follette realized the credibility that trained scholars could bring to his case, and his ploy worked: in 1905 the Wisconsin Railroad Commission got the authority to oversee railroads and to modify their rates. (Then again, the professors from the university demonstrated in their reports that the railroads were not as capricious as La Follette and his constituents had argued. Academics were already hard at work upsetting everybody.) As president, Roosevelt more than once relied on similar tactics: coercing recalcitrant lawmakers into going along with his ideas in the threatened (and sometimes revealed) face of evidence compiled by experts. When Sinclair

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Lewis’s book The Jungle was published in 1906, the public grabbed the first 25,000 hot copies and read them with dismay. The Chicago meatpacking industry apparently had no standards other than to sell “everything but the squeal.” And “everything” seemed to include rat poison, rat bodies, rat dung, and any other fleshy matter that happened to end up in a meat grinder. Neither the public nor Congress had been wholly unaware of the meatpackers’ lax standards, but Sinclair’s imagery turned enough stomachs to throw the issue directly into Congress’s lap. When certain legislators resisted passing laws to better regulate conditions in the stockyards, slaughterhouses, and canning factories, Roosevelt ordered a commission to immediately investigate and produce a report. The report came in two parts, the first of which had fewer disgusting details. Roosevelt released this to the newspapers and threatened to release the second half, which could have scandalized anyone opposed to new regulations. On January 1, 1907, the Meat Inspection Act passed, giving $3 million more to fund the previously cash-poor meat inspectors. The Pure Food and Drug Act, which established the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), also became law. While Roosevelt had used La Follette’s tactics to improve the safety of food and drugs, he resorted to backroom deal making to convince oppositional congressman to strengthen the government’s oversight of railroads. Roosevelt was as comfortable wielding the scientific lingo of progressive reformers as he was chewing cigars with congressmen he may not have liked but whose votes he needed. Believing that corporate growth was inevitable and often beneficial, Roosevelt was not opposed to big corporations as a rule, although he did think trusts and mammoth companies ought to be regulated, particularly the railroads. He shared this peeve with La Follette. Besides, Roosevelt wanted to court southern voters into the Republican Party, and southern farmers yowled about the railroads. So there was political capital to be won by lassoing companies like the Southern Pacific. As it turned out, Roosevelt’s lasso could not really restrain a railroad. In order to strengthen the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) through the Hepburn Act of 1906, Roosevelt and his congressional allies had to agree to a disappointing proviso: federal courts could veto any rate adjustments that the ICC made. That was politics at its most stereotyped—in order to get anything done, so much water got added to laws that they leaked. But still Roosevelt could present himself as having made progress with regard to unfair shipping rates. From the politicians’ point of view, then, being a progressive meant adjusting the laws or creating new ones in such a way that government oversaw business, economy, and labor with an eye toward fairness for all. Except for the 4 to 6 percent of voters who voted for the Socialist Party ticket, most Americans—including typical progressives—thought capitalism was a work-

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AMERICAN STORIES able arrangement, one that rewarded thrift, hard work, ingenuity, skill, and a sprig of luck: all parts of the American character. Progressives might differ in the extent of government involvement they sought (La Follette thought the Hepburn Act was weak and not worth much), but they generally agreed on establishing safeguards and basic rules of conduct in order to stabilize what was obviously becoming the greatest economy ever known. A person could be a progressive but not an elected official. Though the Constitution had created a representative republic rather than a direct democracy, that did not mean that Americans were prevented from participating as they saw fit. With the emergence of national magazines and newspapers, a citizen could stoke the hot embers of public opinion just as surely from an editor’s desk as from a governor’s. Ida Tarbell demonstrated the power of the citizen’s pen in her running history of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil (which led in 1911 to a “trust-busting” that separated Standard Oil into thirteen smaller companies, one of which is known today as Exxon-Mobil). Other citizens also used the press, along with their business and political contacts, to adjust society. Jane Addams, Madam C.J. Walker, Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B. DuBois were all progressives, each in her or his own way, though not one of them ever held elective office. Different Paths to Progress: Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Frances Willard In 1895 at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, a handsome ex-slave named Booker T. Washington took the podium and spoke a two-part harmony that led to his ascendancy as a premier spokesman for African-American rights. (However, not all African-descended citizens of America recognized Washington’s leadership.) Under a southern sun, Washington did his best to reassure a largely white audience in order to gain their cooperation. Jim Crow was setting in, sometimes in the ugliest ways imaginable. Many whites used lynching as a public tool and spectacle, a kind of macabre sport. Audiences of white families numbering in the tens, hundreds, and thousands (including children) would arrive at a prearranged destination (often advertised by railroads) and participate in the hanging, burning, mutilation, and butchering of black men. It was common for white people to rush a tied-up black man, cut off his ears, cut off his nose, pour oil onto the kindling underneath him, and cheer as he burned. Then they would dig through the ashes for body-part souvenirs. Photos were taken. The photos got turned into postcards. Between 1882 and 1901, at least 2,000 people were lynched in the United States, 90 percent of them black and nearly all in the South. Booker T. Washington knew his people’s plight, and he knew

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that white people were speeding up segregation, so he reached for an accommodation, a compromise. At the heart of Washington’s speech lay this thought: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Blacks will accept social segregation in return for jobs—that is what his speech boiled down to. It was folly to recruit foreign immigrants to work in the South’s growing factories, Washington told the whites in the audience, because there was already an eager, trustworthy pool of available laborers—African-Americans. And it was folly, Washington said to the black people in the audience, to expect to be elected mayor or made president of a bank. “We shall prosper,” he said, “in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life.” Work in the fields, he told his black listeners. Work in the factories, and for now, forget the loftier dreams: “No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.”8 This was a message that white supremacists could accept. This was not a message that all black people thought proper or fitting. W.E.B. DuBois labeled Washington’s speech “the Atlanta Compromise,” a phrase that could be interpreted as compliment or criticism—or both.9 W.E.B. DuBois emerged as Washington’s leading African-American critic. While Booker T. Washington was establishing the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the center of the cotton South, DuBois earned a PhD at Harvard (the first African-American to do so) and set to work writing one essay or book after another. At Tuskegee, Washington taught what were considered practical, applicable skills like agricultural science and machining. Washington’s educational efforts certainly had their successes: from 1900 to 1910, AfricanAmerican literacy improved by half, up to 70 percent. At nearby Atlanta University, DuBois framed a theory of race advancement in which he proposed that a “talented tenth” of African-Americans receive top-notch educations and then lead the rest of the race to success and equality, even if they had to do so without the cooperation of white people.10 Both men wanted the same thing for African-Americans, but at least in public they advocated separate paths, and they used radically different language. In DuBois’s 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, he called Booker T. Washington’s methods a “programme of industrial education, conciliation of the South, and submission and silence as to civil and political rights.” Protesting that “narrow” vision, DuBois favored instead the example of Frederick Douglass, who had “bravely stood for the ideals of his early manhood,— ultimate assimilation through self-assertion, and no other terms.” Douglass,

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AMERICAN STORIES in other words, had not compromised, had not submitted, had not been silent. But Douglass had been dead eight years by the time DuBois published The Souls of Black Folk, years during which Washington advocated “a gospel of Work and Money” that “almost completely . . . overshadow[ed] the higher aims of life”; Washington, DuBois thundered, had practically accepted “the alleged inferiority of the Negro races.” What was DuBois’s solution? “By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive,” he wrote, “for the rights which the world accords to men, clinging unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”11 These rights were not forthcoming, however, so in 1909 DuBois, along with white and black allies, formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a progressive organization if ever there was one. The NAACP funded legal cases; provided education, guidance, and resources to black people in need; and advocated for government intervention on behalf of those same needy people. In the late 1930s, writing columns for The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP, DuBois was still petitioning Congress to pass antilynching laws, but more than twenty years of petitions lay strangled on the floor of the Senate by southern lawmakers. DuBois was not the only one shaking his fist in the air at the spectacle of dangling black men. Ida B. Wells-Barnett did not have a Harvard PhD like DuBois, nor did she get invited to dinner at the White House like Booker T. Washington, nor did she receive millions of dollars in donations from the likes of banker Andrew J. Carnegie and Madam C.J. Walker, as Washington’s Tuskegee Institute did. As it turned out, Ida Wells did not need other people’s money to make a stand: she had teeth and a typewriter. Born a slave in 1862 in Mississippi, Ida Wells took a teaching job at the age of sixteen after losing her parents to yellow fever. By 1884, she was living in Memphis, Tennessee, with her aunt and younger siblings, providing what she could for them. One day, as she was traveling in a railroad car set aside for women, the conductor came through and told her to move on to a “smoker” car set aside for blacks, right behind the locomotive. Protesting this further segregation, Wells refused to budge. The conductor grabbed her, so she resorted to nature’s natural defense and sank her teeth into his hand. He went to get a baggage handler to help. They dragged her off the train, and men and women on board clapped in approval. Ida Wells pursued a lawsuit against the railroad under the 1875 Civil Rights Act, which forbade segregation in public conveyances like railroads. She could remember, years later, a newspaper headline that snidely greeted official word of her initial success against the railroad: “DARKY DAMSEL GETS DAM-

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AGES.”12 Later the state supreme court overturned the local court’s ruling. So Ida Wells turned to journalism. First she wrote about her own experiences, and then she began investigating other people’s stories. Tragedy gave her work a focus: in 1892, three friends were lynched, three black grocers whose store was attacked by neighboring white grocers enraged by the competition from black men. Her friends—Henry, Thomas, and Calvin—fought back, injuring a few of the attackers. Custom in the South, however, made the injuring of a white man by a black man a crime, no matter that it happened in self-defense. The three black grocers were in jail, awaiting trial, when a lynch mob broke in and killed them. Ida Wells wrote the story. As the months passed, she investigated further and concluded that racialized sexuality led to lynching: white men viewed black men as sexual predators prowling after the magnolia scent of virtuous white women, but the truth was that white women were inviting black men to have sex. In Wells’s words, “White men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women.”13 White men from Memphis, maddened by Wells’s accusations, destroyed her offices and equipment, so she moved to a region somewhat more accepting of her revelations: the North, and ultimately Chicago. How was a single, essentially broke, young black woman supposed to make her way in the world, particularly after the taboo-breaking thesis of her story about lynching in Memphis and elsewhere? Networks existed to give her shelter: networks of church, race, women, and career. The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church had become a nationwide force for black cultural and spiritual life. In fact, the pastor of the Memphis AME church had been an early supporter of Wells’s writing. Now AME sisters in New York City took Ida Wells into their homes. At the same time, she was a member of the Negro Press Association, another organization that could provide contacts for shelter and, at least as important, work. She toured the Northeast, sharing her insights by writing and lecturing; and she made two trips to England and Scotland, where she helped found an antilynching committee. This was the flowering of Wells as progressive reformer. Lynching; sharecropping as the only option available to feed one’s family; prison chain gangs made up almost entirely of black men convicted on minor charges and forced to labor for years grading roads, building levees, picking their former masters’ cotton; theft of the vote from most southern blacks; and lack of the vote for most women in America: these were variations on an oppressive theme. One oppression looked like another to Ida B. Wells, so she joined efforts with fellow agitators and reformers. During 1893 she worked with Frederick Douglass to publicize the exclusion of African-Americans from free and open participation in the Chicago World’s Fair. (No wonder

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AMERICAN STORIES it was known as the “White City.”) By 1895, she had formed relationships with Susan B. Anthony and Jane Addams, and she was present in 1909 at the formation of the NAACP, where her association with DuBois set her at odds with the softer-toned Booker T. Washington. Like DuBois, Wells demanded justice and did not tolerate waiting if something could be done to hasten a better world. The NAACP came out in favor of woman suffrage, another testament to the shared interests and visions of the people who joined hands as often as possible to make American equality more than a hollow phrase. Yet this rosy portrait of white and black, rich and poor, northern and southern reformers singing “hallelujah” together is only one scene from a larger progressive collage. Jane Addams was the founder of Hull House in Chicago, a sprawling complex of buildings dedicated to educating immigrant families, especially women, and offering needed child-care and health-care services. Addams inherited her father’s small fortune and received generous donations from American industrialists, much as Washington did at Tuskegee. Their labors were acceptable to powerful white men. Ida Wells-Barnett (who hyphenated her name when she got married to a Chicago newspaperman in 1895) never had Addams’s success at soliciting donations, largely because men and women rarely deemed her acceptable. After all, Wells-Barnett exposed the guarded lie at the heart of Victorian morals: white women had sexual urges as real as anyone else’s, and as varied. In her books and pamphlets, Wells-Barnett provided incontrovertible evidence (often from interviews) that white women in the North and South happily slept with black men. Frances Willard—merrily writing about the unbounded joys of bicycle riding—presided over the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), composed mainly of middle-class and upper-class white women. In the mid1890s, the WCTU had a membership ten times the size of Susan B. Anthony’s suffrage association. In other words, banning alcohol was more important to more women at the turn of the century than was getting the vote for themselves. Hatchet-wielding crazies like Carry Nation (who chopped up snazzy bars and dive saloons throughout Kansas, and published a magazine titled The Smasher’s Mail) might not receive the WCTU’s active endorsement, but saloon-smashing and public embarrassment of bottle tippers met with more encouragement than Wells-Barnett’s positively racy subject matter. In 1894, the WCTU half-heartedly denounced lynching by resolving to oppose lynching without actually passing the resolution. The white women of the WCTU fundamentally could not see black men as both legally and sexually innocent. Willard was aghast at Wells-Barnett’s imputation that white women were lusting after black men: “It is my firm belief that in the statements made by MISS WELLS concerning white women having taken the initiative in name-

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less acts between the races, she has put an imputation upon half the white race in this country that is unjust, and save in the rarest exceptional instances, wholly without foundation.” In other words, white women did not sleep with black men as far as Willard and the “most disinterested and observant leaders of opinion” (whoever they were) were concerned.14 Although both women proudly waved the suffrage banner, race and social class kept them from agreeing on the matter most central to Wells-Barnett. In 1895, Wells rebuked “that great Christian body,” the WCTU, for opposing the “social amusement of card playing, athletic sports and promiscuous dancing” and “the licensing of saloons” while failing to adopt the antilynching resolution.15 Actually, Frances Willard did mean for the resolution to pass, but the southern delegates had opposed it. Southern race sentiments prevented the WCTU from officially condemning lynching just as they later did in Congress. Congress and enough states constitutionally prohibited alcohol production and distribution via the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919. And through the Nineteenth Amendment women got the vote nationally in 1920. Though the House of Representatives twice passed antilynching bills, Congress never passed a federal law. Frances Willard’s white finger was closer to the pulse of the nation than was Ida Wells-Barnett’s black finger, if only because there were more white people than black. Birth Control and Conservation: Margaret Sanger and Gifford Pinchot As far back as the 1860s, some Americans had decided that sexual literature, pictures, and chitchat had become far too free. Anthony Comstock, a United States Post Office inspector from 1873–1915, was a New York evangelical who believed that pictures of nude people were the devil’s tools that could turn a person’s “thoughts away from God and undermine all aspirations for holy things.” In 1873 Comstock inspired the passage of the Comstock Act, federal legislation aimed at prohibiting the dissemination of any “obscene [or] lewd” information through the mail system or across state lines—including pamphlets pertaining to what would later be called “birth control” education. Comstock and his congressional supporters wanted to legislate one moral vision dependent on their sense of the word “obscene,” a concept notoriously difficult to define. They condemned not just pornography but contraceptives: the only acceptable means of birth control was to abstain from intercourse. Comstock classified contraceptives as illicit and any discussion of them as “pornographic.” He thought advertisements for douches, sponges, and condoms might “arouse in young and inexperienced minds, lewd or libidinous thoughts.” The purpose of sex was to make babies, not to have fun. Residents

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AMERICAN STORIES of New England states were more in line with Comstock’s thinking than residents of any other region. In Connecticut, all contraceptives were banned, and their use was made a felony. Altogether, twenty-four states passed regulations similar to the Comstock Act. Laws were one thing, however, and behavior another. Most Americans were neither as patient nor as restrained as Comstock, who told a reporter from Harper’s Magazine in 1915 that people who did not use “self-control” were choosing to “sink to the level of the beasts.”16 At the same time the progressive but decorous reformer Jane Addams was busy in Chicago following annoyed trash collectors to make sure they actually collected the trash; compiling statistics about the city’s crime and poverty; and trying to oust the corrupt (if sometimes helpful) ward boss and city alderman, Johnny Powers, who gave out thousands of turkeys to ward residents with money he had pocketed from city transit fares that were twice as high in his ward as the average fare anywhere else in Chicago, the progressive Margaret Sanger was busy in New York City handing out information on birth control. Sanger was Anthony Comstock’s nightmare. By no means did people in the United States agree about the proper way to better society. Anthony Comstock believed he was safeguarding all people, and young people in particular, from falling into debauched lives. His Society for the Suppression of Vice had the ear of government, and much like Jane Addams in Chicago, who sought to enlist legislators in her causes, Comstock worked with lawmakers to enact his programs for “moral” control, which he could then police through his job with the Postal Service. Margaret Sanger fundamentally disagreed with Comstock. Born in 1879 in Corning, New York, she became a nurse, moved to Manhattan, and married a free-spirited but failed artist. Sanger immersed herself in the liberal experimentation of New York’s Greenwich Village, not a tame place even 100 years ago. She sipped absinthe with avant-garde writers, but she also worked daily as a nurse with mothers burdened by too many children and too little access to the knowledge that could improve their lives. The wealthy could afford to have many children. Theodore Roosevelt had six, and they were sent to Groton and Harvard, schools whose annual tuition exceeded what most working people made in a year. The poor women that Sanger visited in their dank apartments often resorted to self-induced abortions or abortions typically performed in unsanitary conditions by operators lacking proper training. The results were frequently deadly, and Sanger argued that these women needed access to useful information about “birth control,” a phrase that she coined. Sanger’s own mother had died at fifty after having eleven children and seven miscarriages, and Sanger was certain that too many children and too many pregnancies had ruined her mother’s health and shortened her life.

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Sanger’s patients invigorated her commitment to social justice. In 1913, as a regular columnist for a socialist-inclined newspaper, she wrote an article on venereal disease, and post office inspector Anthony Comstock banned her column with a wave of his imperious pen. She responded by publishing an article titled “What Every Girl Should Know. Nothing; by Order of the U.S. Post Office.”17 His was the power of the law enraged by a caustic strain of the self-righteous; hers was the power of the martyr. Margaret Sanger continued to write about birth control options, and in 1915 she was indicted on charges (later dropped) of having violated the Comstock laws by sending contraceptive diaphragms through the mail. She escaped briefly to Europe, and while she was gone, her husband, William Sanger, was arrested for passing out copies of one of her birth control pamphlets. Upon her return, Bill was sentenced to thirty days in jail by a judge who said, “Your crime is not only a violation of the laws of man, but of the law of God as well, in your scheme to prevent motherhood,” a ruling obviously not free of bias, nor reassuring in its concrete mixture of church and state.18 During the trial, Anthony Comstock caught a cold that turned into pneumonia and killed him shortly afterward. Margaret Sanger went on to open the country’s first birth control clinic, in 1916, for which she was arrested. In 1921 she founded the American Birth Control Clinic, the origin of Planned Parenthood. She advocated for a birth control pill and for population control because she worried that the earth would not be able to support the unchecked growth of humanity. Incidentally, the legislators of North Carolina were also worried about population expansion, so in 1937, they passed the nation’s first state-funded program for dispensing contraceptives. “Ironically,” as historian Sarah Jane Deutsch puts it, “North Carolina’s reasoning was not that birth control was a human right but that birth control would reduce the black population.”19 The examples of Jane Addams, Margaret Sanger, and many thousands of other women show that feminism was a progressive cause. Another progressive cause was conservation. President Theodore Roosevelt loved the wild and realized that nature must be conserved if the planet and its inhabitants were to survive. Two advisers, John Muir and Gifford Pinchot, urged Roosevelt to set aside millions of acres in federal lands as national forests and reserves. But Muir and Pinchot differed as to goals and souls. Muir was a gifted writer who thought land should be set aside and “preserved” for its own value, its own inherent and sublime beauty. He spent years living in the California forests now part of Yosemite National Park. Roosevelt spent a few splendid days hiking and camping with Muir; the two shared a kindred spirit when it came to the draw of forests and mountains. But Roosevelt was a president of forests and of people, and his was a vision of active citizens and active business. Where

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AMERICAN STORIES Muir urged making federal lands wholly unavailable to loggers, miners, and recreationists, Gifford Pinchot suggested “conservation” as an alternative—which has become the basis of U.S. Forest Service doctrine and policy. Pinchot had the same Harvard background as Roosevelt, and though Pinchot was a zealot for his cause, his was a zealotry that Roosevelt could support politically. The logging and mining industries wanted open access to trees and minerals, and their representatives complained that restrictions on access would hurt their business. Although the number one cause of loss of jobs in the logging, lumber, and mining industries was (and remains) new technologies, these extractive industries convinced themselves and their constituencies that environmental regulations were a problem. Roosevelt’s answer was to place Gifford Pinchot as the head of the newly created Forest Service and to give him vast control over an additional 16 million acres that Roosevelt set aside as federal reserves during a ten-day spurt of environmental activism. In late February 1907, Congress passed a law, set to go into effect within days, that would prevent a president from unilaterally creating new federal land reserves in six northwestern states. In what many considered a dubious move, right before signing the new law into effect on March 4, Roosevelt put those chunks of land—together bigger than many eastern states—out of reach of loggers and miners. Then Pinchot sent his forest rangers, a job he created, out to police the trees. The lofty goals of progressives—saving trees, saving women from unending labors, saving women from forced prostitution, keeping corporations from forming monopolies, ensuring the safety of food and drugs—enjoyed a heyday not to be savored again until the 1960s. Progressivism as a union of reformers with government might have failed eventually, but international events came crashing into the reformers’ party in the first two decades of the new century. Worldwide war wrecked just about everything good. Lines in the Water From February 1899 until 1902, the United States fought a brutal war against the forces of Emilio Aguinaldo’s Philippine government, which had adopted the hit-and-run guerrilla tactics previously used by the Cubans against the Spanish. In response, the United States rounded up civilians and placed them in concentration camps, much as the Spanish had done in Cuba—ironically, one of the original reasons the United States had gone to war against Spain. Roosevelt approved of the U.S. militarism in the Philippines, having said in 1899 that the United States should “keep the islands and . . . establish therein a stable and orderly government, so that one more fair spot of the world’s surface shall have been snatched from the forces of darkness.” Never mind

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the Filipinos’ government or their constitution. Roosevelt believed “it is only the warlike power of a civilized people that can give peace to the world.”20 One method used by U.S. troops to gain information about Filipino troops was to force captives to drink gallons of water, which they would then vomit up—euphemistically referred to as the “water cure.” When the war in the Philippines ended in July 1902, nearly one year after Roosevelt’s time as president had begun, 4,200 U.S. soldiers were dead, along with at least 20,000 Filipino soldiers. About 200,000 Filipino civilians had died, some gunned down by U.S. troops, many others the casualties of the concentration camps and resultant epidemics of cholera that camp living encouraged. From that point on, the U.S. Army and Navy were never to be at their small, prewar levels. In order to maintain American “strategic” interests around the globe, the U.S. military gained added numbers and added roles, including repeated interventions in the Caribbean and Central America, sometimes to depose governments not amenable to U.S. economic wishes, sometimes to establish the kind of governance deemed acceptable by U.S. administrators. For example, when the Cubans were freed of Spanish rule in 1898, they set about writing a constitution. In 1901, U.S. negotiators coerced the Cubans into implanting the Platt Amendment within their constitution. The Platt Amendment gave the United States the right to militarily intervene in Cuba “for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty, and for discharging the obligations with respect to Cuba imposed by the treaty of Paris on the United States.”21 In 1906, the Liberal Party of Cuba went into open revolt due to certain problems, including election fraud. When Roosevelt threatened military action and sent U.S. troops, both Cuban parties submitted to American arbitration, led by William Howard Taft, former head of the U.S. provisional government in the Philippines and later Roosevelt’s successor in the White House. The Platt Amendment remained in effect until 1934. Other military interventions occurred in the Dominican Republic, in Nicaragua, and in Haiti. Roosevelt’s biggest coup, however, took place in a narrow northern strip of Colombia. The land strip was known as Panama, through which the French had tried for ten years to dig a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific (at the loss of more than 20,000 lives). Panama was a potential gold mine to any group capable of funding and finishing the canal. In late 1903, the United States sent a naval ship to support a coup led by a scheming Frenchman named Philippe-Jean Bunau-Varilla. Local Panamanians declared their independence, which the United States conveniently recognized within days. In exchange, Panama granted the United States the rights to dig and indefinitely operate a canal. Roosevelt considered this one of his greatest achievements, and he denied

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AMERICAN STORIES that the United States had done anything wrong with regard to Colombia. The canal would permit rapid deployment of the U.S. Navy from ocean to ocean, allowing the United States to keep the meddlesome Europeans out of American matters—a policy dubbed the Roosevelt Corollary, an extension of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. The United States reaffirmed its pledge to keep Europe out of the American continents, but events overseas would eventually suck the United States into the European continent in a war that American citizens strenuously wanted to avoid. Notes 1. Susan B. Anthony, Lynn Sherr, ed., Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony In Her Own Words (New York: Times Books, 1995), 277. 2. Frances E. Willard, A Wheel Within A Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle With Some Reflections by the Way (New York: F.H. Revell, 1895), 10–11, 73. 3. Statutes at Large, “An act to protect all citizens in their civil and legal rights,” Mach 1, 1875, 43rd Congress, 2nd Session, Volume 18, Part 3, p. 336, http://memory. loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=022/llsl022.db&recNum=365. 4. Ronald H. Bayor, ed., The Columbia Documentary History of Race and Ethnicity in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 347, 351. 5. Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle, eds., The Concise History of Woman Suffrage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 219. 6. Joseph Bucklin Bishop, ed., Theodore Roosevelt and His Time Shown in His Own Letters, (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004), 2: 148. 7. A’Lelia Bundles, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker (New York: Scribner, 2001), 136. 8. Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1902), 220–222. 9. W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: A.C. McClurg, 1903), 31. 10. W.E.B. DuBois, “The Talented Tenth,” from Booker T. Washington, ed., The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative Negroes of To-day (New York: James Pott, 1903), 29–34. 11. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 31, 35, 36, 42. 12. Jinx Coleman Broussard, Giving a Voice to the Voiceless: Four Pioneering Black Women Journalists (New York: Routledge, 2003), 33. 13. Bert James Loewenberg and Ruth Bogin, eds., Black Women in NineteenthCentury American Life: Their Words, Their Thoughts, Their Feelings (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 255. 14. Trudier Harris, ed., Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 227. 15. Harris, ed., Selected Works, 235. 16. Mary Alden Hopkins, “Birth Control and Public Morals: An Interview with Anthony Comstock,” Harper’s Weekly, May 22, 1915, 489–490. 17. Gail Collins, America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 341.

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18. Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 127. 19. Sarah Jane Deutsch, “From Ballots to Breadlines, 1920–1940,” in Nancy F. Cott, ed., No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 452. 20. Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (New York: Century, 1902), 35–37. 21. Platt Amendment, www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=55&page =transcript

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World War I

Trench aid. (Sergeant Leon H. Caverly/Getty Images)

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AMERICAN STORIES Did Civilization Civilize? What has been known since the 1940s as World War I, but which was roundly known at the time as the Great War, made the days of the early 1900s seem like a drowned dream peopled with fairy children waving from an innocent place lost in time. Theodore Roosevelt’s own children, giddily known as the White House Gang, once planned an “attack” on the White House. President Roosevelt caught wind of their invasion scheme and sent them a note through the War Department telling them to abort the attack. Within ten years of Roosevelt’s leaving the White House, the War Department was sending messages about a genuine call to arms after hostilities broke out in Europe in 1914. While war had always been what William Tecumseh Sherman plainly called “hell,” the Great War leeched away age-old romantic fantasies about “good” wars. The romance was poisoned on battlefields where chemical gas attacks caused men’s lungs to bleed and their skin to pucker, boil, and sometimes burn down to the bare bleached bone. Young soldiers frightened by wafting green clouds of chlorine gas choked down their fear and struggled to fit gas masks over their horse’s heads. The old world and the new crashed into each other on the bomb-pitted Western Front of France and Belgium as wooden reconnaissance airplanes whirred over baggage trains of rickety wagons pulled by mules and horses. From 1914 through 1918, at least 10 million men died on the battlefields of Europe, including 115,000 U.S. soldiers—“doughboys”—who began arriving in mid-1917. France and Germany buried roughly 16 percent of their male populations, almost one out of every five men. What led to this waste and ruin of civilization? Why would the wealthiest nations on the planet—Great Britain, France, and Germany—choose annihilation rather than continue to promote science, medicine, art, and above all peace? (Then again, war often prompts fits of invention in science, technology, medicine, and art.) In the nineteenth century, the prospect for a healthier planet had risen from laboratories like a spring bloom in the midst of a winter freeze as the dread terror of infections and epidemics slowly receded, chased away by the application of education, reason, and cooperation. Louis Pasteur developed the vaccination for rabies in 1880, and European scientists were busy publishing papers on germ theories of disease. It was becoming common practice in clinical settings for doctors to wash their hands, one of the biggest developments ever in medicine, and antiseptics were introduced to hospitals during the 1870s following the research of Joseph Lister, who trusted Pasteur’s work and successfully tried carbolic acid as a means of killing bacteria during surgeries. (If, by the way, you rinse with “Listerine,” you have a swish of Joseph Lister’s name in your mouth.) After the Spanish-American War in Cuba, an American doctor named Walter Reed (the namesake for the military

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WORLD WAR I hospital in Washington, DC) drained swamps to remove mosquito habitat, finally offering relief from yellow fever, a terrifying virus. This knowledge allowed U.S. doctors and engineers in Panama in 1904 to complete the canal where the French had failed twenty years before. Under microscopes, the invisible workings of the natural world could be reduced to their smallest components and then interpreted as elaborate theories, like genetic evolution. France discarded its Catholic-run primary schools in favor of a secular education system. Understanding would derive from logic and literature, not from church doctrine. While continentals absorbed Sigmund Freud’s dream interpretations, Karl Marx’s explanations of the role of economics in history, and Albert Einstein’s mind-bending dissertations on light particles and relative reality, art galleries and symphonies flourished. Pointillist painters re-imagined the pastel romanticism of impressionist gardens and parasol strolls by the Seine in a dot-by-dot rendering of the world. Civilization was in full bloom. With disease on the run, space and time unfolding their secrets, and a profound movement toward citizen participation in government (throughout western Europe at least)—with progress an act rather than a mere word—with what seemed a dawning age of permanent summer and perpetual sunshine, why did Europeans try to destroy each other? The Causes of World War I in Europe By 1914, Europe was a madhouse. In England, 2,250 “noble” families owned almost 50 percent of all the farmland, while 1,700 people owned 90 percent in Scotland. Ten years earlier, Russia had shipped hundreds of thousands of soldiers across Siberia to fight a colonial war in China, not against the Chinese but against the Japanese, who also wanted a piece of China. The Russians lost, and while retreating soldiers starved, one batch of officers chugged home in lavish railroad cars filled with vodka and prostitutes. (Incidentally, Theodore Roosevelt orchestrated the peace for the Russo-Japanese War, earning him in 1906 the first Nobel Peace Prize for an American.). Back in Russia, a popular revolution threatened to overthrow the czar, who responded to democratic demands by stomping on freedom. The czar’s police and army spied on, deported, and shot anyone who seemed the least bit uppity—including a few hundred peasants led by a priest carrying a letter begging the czar for help. A jog to the west, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, which had been unified as a nation only in 1871, preferred military rule to the messiness of democracy, which became a major problem after 1910 as the Reichstag (parliament) was taken over one vote at a time by socialists. The kaiser and his spike-helmeted advisers did not know what to do. In the words of historian D.F. Fleming,

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AMERICAN STORIES offering a glimpse into the prewar anxiety of German society, “The nation created by blood and iron was becoming weary of the weight of iron on its back and of the load of parasitic militarism on its soul.”1 A war, as it turned out, could be just the distraction needed to keep the socialists from promoting their annoying anti-imperialist notions about fairness and sharing of resources. War and chaos were regularly one neighboring region away. The Austro-Hungarian Empire sat to the south of Germany like a cracked bowl full of mismatched fruit. The unstable arms of the empire’s ruling Hapsburg monarchs stretched out from central Europe to the edge of Turkey. The Hapsburg family reigned over an ethnic assemblage of Muslims, Catholics, Jews, Hungarians, Germans, Turks, Croats, and Serbs. These people did not get along too well, and any number of them wanted their independence, especially the Serbs of Bosnia-Herzegovina, who had been forcibly dragged into the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1909. One Serbian revolutionary group calling itself the Black Hand trained young rebels to shoot and bomb––tactics today called terrorist––tactics often used then and now for political reasons. The Black Hand and its small cells of three to five members wanted to find a way to get out of the Austrian empire and into the Serbian nation right across the Drina River. Gavril Princip was a disciple of the Black Hand still in his teens, and on June 28, 1914, he killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a member of the ruling Hapsburg monarchy—in fact, the heir apparent, next in line to rule. On a goodwill tour occasioned by his wedding anniversary, Ferdinand was in Sarajevo to inspect military drills. A team of assassins waited, poised to bomb and shoot him, the weapons having been provided by the Serbian army. A hand bomb was tossed at his motorcade, but the archduke managed to deflect it with a raised arm after hearing the strike of metal on metal used to spark the fuse, and the bomb exploded behind his car, injuring some civilians. Rather than canceling the rest of his day’s tour, the archduke composed himself and followed the planned route, landing him directly in front of Princip, who had just exited a sandwich shop. Princip pulled a pistol from his coat, walked up to Franz Ferdinand’s car, and fatally shot him. In a continent with fewer funhouse mirrors, these events might have been followed by a series of inquiries, trials, and perhaps even limited battles between Austria and Serbia. But this was the Europe of 1914, blighted by the high ego of its own power and by the mistaken belief that alliances and treaties could be a guarantee against war, rather than a cause. The madhouse afflictions of inequality and strife that left European nations internally divided were amplified internationally by the entangling alliances that nearly every country had made. Russia supported the Serbs, and Russia and France had a mutual defense treaty. So when Austria declared war on Serbia in late July, Russia responded by mobilizing its forces in preparation

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WORLD WAR I for war with Austria-Hungary. (Unfortunately for the Russian peasants, whose sons made up the bulk of the military and who soon died by the millions, Russia’s military resources were inadequate and antiquated—not enough rifles, not enough bullets, not enough winter coats, gaps in the supply lines, which meant gaps between meals. Plus the generals tended to know as little about warfare as their dream-headed czar, whose wife had fallen under the spell of a shaggy charlatan-monk, Rasputin. The Russian bear was enormous, but its claws needed sharpening.) Germany and Austria-Hungary had mutual defense treaties also, so Germany declared war on Russia on August 1 and on France two days later. Great Britain was tied to Belgium, and Japan was tied to Great Britain. And so on. By early August 1914, Europe was at war, and the United States was 3,000 miles away, 3,000 happy miles. In Into the Breach, authors Dorothy and Carl Schneider offer a straightforward appraisal of the war’s causes: “greed, stupidity, and carelessness among both the Allies [Britain and France] and the Central Powers [Germany and Austria].” The Schneiders characterize the careless leaders of these nations as “obstinate, callous, and unimaginative old men” who sadly directed “soldiers . . . inspired by enthusiasm and a passionate idealism, marching off to war with flowers in their rifles, decorating their transports with garlands.”2 The belligerent old naifs of Europe, borrowing the deadly optimism of Confederate and Union Americans in 1861, expected the hostilities to last no longer than weeks or months. Few people could foresee just how horribly well trenches would work. In the summer of 1914, America’s leaders seemed neither so careless nor stupid as their European peers, and its young men were inspired by a different enthusiasm and passionate idealism—to stay safely out of the way. War, Baseball, Ragtime: From August 1914 to January 1917 War is fought for victory, but victory means different things to different participants. It can reasonably be said that few of the warring nations in 1914 had very clear-cut goals other than the formless desire to maintain honor and find glory. Germany was not fighting to own all of Europe. Whatever territorial acquisitions some Germans had in mind (including the borderlands between Germany and France) were relatively small compared to the grandiose schemes of a Caesar, Gengis Khan, or, later, Adolf Hitler. Germany was a latecomer to colonialism, having recently taken its few overseas territories, mainly in the South Pacific and Africa. Because of this lateness, Germans felt outdone by the British and French, neither of whom could match Germany’s industrial output but both of whom ruled vastly more colonies. Germany felt unfairly contained. This was nationalist jealousy amplified by fear. But the French and

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AMERICAN STORIES British had also been thinking about war as they watched Germany grow in strength. The German nation had been formed after the French decisively lost during the Franco-Prussian war, 1870–1871. For the French, memories of the defeat still smarted. The delicate balance of power on the continent was tilting toward Germany, and that made for frayed nerves elsewhere. By the start of the war, the second-largest and newest navy on the planet was Germany’s, second only to Britain’s. Naval supremacy was the aquatic highway of Britain’s empire, and its ministers worried about German rivalry on the seas. Germany, however, did not want to tangle with either Great Britain or the United States, which made the August 1914 invasion of neutral Belgium a horrible idea. By the beginning of August 1914, most of central and eastern Europe was at war, at least on paper, the declarations having been made, the armies mobilized. To the west, Germany wanted to invade France quickly and easily, so Germany asked tiny Belgium’s permission to march through its territory on the way to an end-round invasion of France. The border between Germany and France was heavily defended, but the French had built no barriers between themselves and Belgium. The Belgians, being neutral, naturally told the Germans no, and the Germans, being led by medieval Prussian military minds (haughty, imperious, and self-confident), naturally enough invaded Belgium. Is it accurate to say that Americans have always rooted for the underdog (as long as the underdog was not in America)? Upset and favorable to Belgium is certainly how most people in the United States acted when Germany declared war on Belgium on August 4. As the New York Times succinctly put it on August 5, “Germany is the aggressor.” Coincidentally, Germany’s Belgian invasion was also the move that brought Britain into the conflict. Germany’s first major blunder out of two was the invasion of Belgium, not least because 200,000 Belgian troops fought bravely enough and effectively enough to buy two weeks for the French and British to prepare a new line of defense. And now Americans had a reason to dislike Germany, in fact to blame Germany for the war. Blaming Germany and wanting to fight against Germany were—for the most part—separate emotions. Almost 5 million Americans were first-generation German or Austrian immigrants, and there were millions more who were second- and third-generation. In 1914, these Austrian- and German-Americans tended to have strong, positive feelings about their mother country. There were also nearly 1.5 million first-generation Irish-Americans, and they had historical reasons to feel bitter toward the British, who had invaded Ireland 500 years earlier and maintained an unappreciated occupation ever since. So whether in the streets or in the Senate—where Robert La Follette of Wisconsin expressed his constituents’ German roots in toots for neutrality the whole way through the war—many hyphenated Americans favored the Central Powers or

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WORLD WAR I at least favored neutrality. While most Americans spoke English and recognized English culture as the dominant strain in the United States, there were millions of citizens and residents who did not want to shoot, stab, or bomb a German. Besides feelings of national allegiance, many Americans abhorred war. Pacifism was popular. Philosophers, bakers, newspaper writers, mechanics, educators, and fathers and mothers waved flags of peace and neutrality as vigorously as they could, sending a message to the bullet-brained leaders of Europe and to the elected officials in the States: American boys should not cross the sea to die in someone else’s war. Within months of the start of the war, it became obvious to everyone the world over that death’s twentieth-century angels carried bigger swords. During August, German armies cut with planned efficiency through the Belgian lines and into northern France. On August 22, at the Battle of the Frontiers, 27,000 French soldiers died in a single day. The Germans were within thirty miles of the cafés and bistros of Paris before grinding to a halt. From September 6 to 14, some 2.5 million soldiers fought the first Battle of the Marne. Many of the troops were inexperienced, fresh from farms or schools; one exception was the British Expeditionary Force, which though small was composed of experienced fighters who had honed their skills in colonial wars. In eight days of fighting, more than 500,000 soldiers died or were wounded (almost as many as had been killed in the four years of the American Civil War). While the battle offered clever stories—especially the arrival of 6,000 French troops delivered to the front in 600 Parisian taxis—the Marne also witnessed greater cause for shock and sorrow than anyone could have anticipated. The carnage was dispiriting and frightful. As troops dug trenches and settled uncomfortably into what would become four years of unmoving trench warfare, the American peace movement sang its song of sanity, led by women like Jane Addams and supported often by mothers who feared for their sons’ lives. Jane Addams—that unswerving hero of the poor, particularly the poor recently arrived from Germany and other central European countries—had already stepped out against war in 1898. Her advocacy for peace during the quick war against Spain had not damaged her reputation. In late 1914, as the war in Europe fell into a deadly stalemate of mortars and “aeroplane” pilots firing machine guns, organizations formed to find better means than bullets for ending the conflict. In February 1915, an international group of women met at The Hague in the Netherlands and created the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Jane Addams was there, and she got elected to go on a tour of Europe to negotiate peace settlements with the warring parties. Only three months later, during Addams’s European tour, Germany made its second tremendous blunder of the war: on May 7, 1915, a U-boat’s torpedoes sank a British luxury ship, the Lusitania, drowning almost 2,000 people,

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AMERICAN STORIES including 128 Americans, in the waves off the coast of Ireland. Babies in baskets were sucked under the bubbling swirl created by the massive ship’s descent. Public opinion in the United States veered into angry denunciations of Germany’s submarine warfare, which had now taken American lives where the British blockade of Germany’s coast had previously taken only dollars. President Woodrow Wilson demanded that Germany stop sinking merchant vessels headed for Britain’s coast. In essence, he called for freedom of the seas for neutrals, a right insisted on by the United States just over 100 years earlier, a leading cause of the War of 1812. In Germany, feelings were mixed: the superior British navy had blockaded the northern coast, making it increasingly difficult to get needed food and war materials; unrestricted U-boat attacks were seen as a hope for survival. But the prospect of the American goliath joining the war was scarier than the prospect of tightening the collective belt. By early 1916 (after almost a year and two more ship sinkings involving American casualties), Germany relented and agreed to stop its unrestricted U-boat warfare. While waiting for Germany to comply, Wilson called for increased military preparedness, especially for an increase in the size of the navy and army. Congress agreed reluctantly, providing only token numbers compared to the millions of uniformed men in Europe at the time. Jane Addams protested Wilson’s new approach. On October 29, 1915, she sent Wilson a letter requesting a different policy than “preparedness.” Speaking officially for the domestic Women’s Peace Party, she explained, “We believe in real defense against real dangers, but not in a preposterous ‘preparedness’ against hypothetic dangers.” Germany, in other words, was not a “real danger” to the United States. Addams and her cohorts feared the United States would lose the world’s trust by arming itself unnecessarily. Besides, she said, if Wilson wanted to be known for the “establishment of permanent peace,” he would need to find ways other than increasing “that vast burden of armament which has crushed to poverty the peoples of the old world.”3 Addams’s pacifism and willingness to address Wilson directly earned her the esteem and support of Europeans and Americans alike; however, once America entered the war feelings about Adams would sour. She received a letter from a Mrs. M. Denkert, a German-American who had emigrated to the States in the 1880s, who wrote that she was the mother of “two big, healthy boys” and that her heart was “wrung at the thought of all those mothers not alone in Germany, but in all the warring countries, who have to send forth these treasured tokens of God, either never to see them again or else to get them back crippled or blind or demented.” Denkert pleaded with Addams to “keep up your brave fight and emperors and kings and ministers and mankind will bless you for it for all times!”4 President Wilson agreed with the peace sentiment, but he continued to

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WORLD WAR I push for preparedness. Yet during the presidential election campaign in 1916, Wilson used the slogan “He kept us out of war”—ironic, as it would turn out. The year of his election propped up the promise of his slogan, as there were no serious breaches of the peace between Germany and the United States. Besides, Americans had military worries much closer to home. Ever since 1910, Mexico had been in a state of revolution, its long-time dictator Porfirio Díaz soon exiled to France. Díaz was followed by a succession of contenders, one of whom—Victoriano Huerta—ordered the arrest of U.S. sailors who had gone on shore leave in Tampico in 1914. With the sting of imprisoned U.S. sailors and news of a German shipment of Americanmade rifles headed for Huerta’s forces, President Wilson ordered a party of marines ashore at Veracruz, ostensibly to prevent the rifles from being unloaded. In the ensuing street fighting, eighteen marines died, and Huerta’s reputation improved, briefly: he had stood up to the northern giant. Huerta, however, had competition for the presidency of Mexico, and with the help of the United States, he was replaced by Venustiano Carranza. Carranza’s revolutionary credentials, however, were insufficient for other reformers in the impoverished country who wanted the peasants to have more rights to own the land they worked. Pancho Villa, a former bandit turned revolutionary general, had been clashing with Carranza’s forces—including a brief, unpopular occupation of Mexico City. For a time, Villa had received weapons from the United States and even had a movie contract, which meant some of his real battles got filmed. However, in an effort to promote stability south of the border, President Wilson decided to cut off military aid to Villa’s forces. In response, Villa’s men shot American tourists and, in March 1916, crossed the border into Columbus, New Mexico, where they set fire to the town and killed eighteen Americans. This was done under the faulty assumption that Villa’s reputation would soar—like Huerta’s had—if he clashed with the Anglos. Instead, Villa became a villain in the States, hunted now by Carranza’s forces and by 6,000 men under John J. Pershing. In 1916, the public in the United States was more eager to punish Villa’s killings of railroad tourists and his “invasion” of the nation than they were to engage the “Huns,” as the British propaganda spinners had labeled German troops. While Pershing and his troops chased the elusive Pancho Villa (whom they never caught) through northern Mexico, Americans distracted themselves with various irresistible pastimes. Baseball had a new star, a phenomenon named George Herman “Babe” Ruth—a stocky man-boy with memories of a hard childhood and a taste for antics of a peculiarly American stripe.5 Babe Ruth joined the (then) minor-league Baltimore Orioles squad in 1914, recruited directly from a Catholic reform school (as it turned out, a ball-player incubator, bat and ball being a safe outlet for rambunctious, discarded boys). At

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AMERICAN STORIES the Orioles’ training camp in North Carolina, eighteen-year-old Ruth rode his horse into a soda fountain shop and asked for two drinks, one for him and one for his horse. With war stories flooding the news, the irrepressible Babe, with his voluminous appetite for food, drink, and women, gave anxious readers someone safe to cheer. Babe Ruth did not kill people—he just killed other players’ records. In 1916, he set a baseball record during the fourth game of the World Series when, as the pitcher, he led the Boston Red Sox to a fourteen-inning win, allowing only one run to cross the plate. A strong-arm pitcher with a blazing fastball, Ruth’s real razzle-dazzle came with the bat, which he used to launch more balls over the outfield fence than any player of his era. He was a home run catapult. While Babe Ruth tapped out his bat-on-ball, over-the-fence rhythm, tricky-fingered piano players got dance floors bouncing with the syncopated melodies of ragtime. Scott Joplin, a black man from Texas taught piano by a German immigrant, first popularized the infectious quick-step of ragtime with songs like “The Entertainer,” synonymous today with stilted motion pictures of boxy Ford Model T’s puffing past coat-and-tie bicyclists or with the antics of silent-film comedians getting bopped on the head. Dancing to ragtime music was the delight of young women with bobbed hair—that radical, chin-length coif that seemed somehow molded by nature onto flappers’ heads in the 1920s, though it was first worn before World War I. The flappers’ bobs were a signal that the New Woman’s look might have as much pluck and spring as a ragtime jig. Ragtime was gaiety, a good mood transcribed into four-four time, the musical equivalent of children laughing, and it fit the spirit of a nation enamored of its own possibilities. The 1910s were as intentionally silly and wonderfully frivolous as they were weighed down by international catastrophe. Ragtime could accompany troops on the first transports out of the United States headed for Europe in 1917, but the sad wail of a jazz trombone seemed more suitable for soldiers praying before battle, soldiers who had already heard battlefront reports. The Yanks Are Coming Part of the trick for the rulers of each fighting nation was to figure out how to encourage the whole populace to want to fight. Government-sponsored propaganda became one method, first in Europe, then in the United States. A nation has boundaries, but nationalism is a phantom of the emotions, and it is upon emotions that advertisements and propaganda play. First the British and French, then the Americans, convinced themselves that Germans were baby-stabbing, woman-ravaging monsters maniacally driven to ruin liberal civilization and replace it with despotism. When war jingoes and recruitment

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WORLD WAR I posters stopped convincing French soldiers that the fight was worth it, the French government and officer corps resorted to a subversion of their own ideals to keep the fight going. During 1916, two of history’s bloodiest battles were waged, at the Somme and at Verdun. In each case, over the span of mere months, more than 1 million soldiers died. To the flea-speckled, hacking men in the ditches waiting for the signal to leap forward into a spray of German machine-gun bullets, there seemed no reason left to fight. The tactics did not work. The battle lines did not change. Slogans and jingoes sounded thin and tinny, no longer imbued with heroism or some call to a higher purpose. Where propaganda failed the French military and civilian leaders, force would have to suffice. In 1917, French troops mutinied en masse and were threatened with execution if they did not get back in line, or at least into the trenches—an example of the kind of despotism the French told themselves they were fighting against. These were the conditions facing American doughboys who began to arrive in the summer of 1917, one half-year after Germany’s final mistakes, the ones that drew the United States directly into the conflict. Not only would a modern military of unprecedented size have to be created in the States—trained, equipped, and shipped to Europe—but also the people of America would need a reason to believe in if they were going to willingly commit their sons to death. By January 1917, Germany was starving: infants malnourished, mothers without meat or milk. The German high command believed that within six months Britain could be driven to surrender if Uboat warfare were resumed. With Britain out of the way, French resistance would crumble. So Germany announced that unrestricted attacks on any ships approaching Britain or France would start on February 1. American seamen were going to die. As well, the volume of trade between Britain and the United States had grown so substantial that the U.S. economy would be dealt a severe blow by the threatened interruption. As if this were not inflammatory enough, the British intercepted a German communiqué originating from foreign minister Arthur Zimmerman. From Washington, DC, he had cabled the Mexican government to suggest an alliance. Would the Mexicans be interested, Zimmerman asked, in regaining the lands it had lost seventy years ago in the Mexican-American War? If so, perhaps Mexico should join Germany when the time came and take up arms against the people of the United States. The British held onto the Zimmerman telegram until the middle of February. Then they passed it along to President Wilson and released it to the press, where it was first published on March 1. The timing was genius. After a series of American merchant vessels had sunk, punctured by screaming German torpedoes, Wilson addressed Congress on April 2 and asked for a declaration of war against Germany. President Wilson knew that Germany’s government needed to be slandered,

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AMERICAN STORIES not just as an aggressor, but as a body without principle, just cause, or decency of any sort. Wilson’s message to Congress began one and a half years of carefully crafted language designed both to inflame American outrage at Germany and to make a hyphenated, heterogeneous population unanimous in its support for total war. Mr. La Follette might be French-American while Mr. Wilson was Scottish-American, but both were “civilized” members of humankind, and it was under the banner of humanity that Wilson sought to unite his nation. Wilson detailed Germany’s despicable acts: the sinking of hospital ships on their way to relieve the sick in occupied Belgium; the use of “spies” in the United States; the Zimmerman telegram. In this German “warfare against mankind” the United States now had a responsibility: “The world must be made safe for democracy. . . . We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind.”6 These were ideals of a noble order, and four days later, on April 6, Congress declared war against Germany, though six senators and fifty representatives (including Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to the House) voted no to war—the greatest number of votes opposed to a war declaration in the nation’s history. And so began America’s involvement in a titanic struggle, which would bleed dead fully one-half of all Frenchmen between the ages of twenty and thirty-two. A whole generation was dying, and the doughboys were on their way to stop the carnage. A Doughboy in the Trenches The smell of death could not be bottled, nor could the sounds of exploding shells be synchronized with the sight: “talking” movies had not yet been invented. Newsreel footage of combat did make its grainy way onto the canvas screens of movie houses where cigarette smoke further clouded the images. Moving pictures were the only sensory way to grasp the apocalypse of war other than writing, which remained the most prevalent news medium during the world war. Radio signals could be sent across the Atlantic Ocean, but commercial radio did not make its debut until 1921. Americans eager to learn about the war read about the war. On September 28, 1914, a young American named Alan Seeger wrote a letter to his mother from Toulouse, France.7 Seeger had joined the French Foreign Legion and wanted to let his mother know why he was going to fight and maybe die in the land of pastries and champagne. After graduating from Harvard, Seeger had gone to Europe, a normal rite of passage for welleducated, well-to-do Americans. There he could visit cathedrals and statues,

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WORLD WAR I soak in the sordid perfection of an older civilization, become cultured as well as educated. When war was announced, Seeger found himself feeling French, like an adopted son of a culture and people whose existence and continuance he valued enough to sacrifice his own. He informed his mother, “In this universe strife and sternness play as big a part as love and tenderness.” Philosophy explained war, and for one who understood that life has two faces, the only good choice was to experience both the strife and the love. So Alan Seeger would fight, and he hoped his mother would “see the thing as I do and think that I have done well.” Alan Seeger lasted—in war and life—two more years. During these extraordinary times, he lived in trenches, fought from trenches, recuperated in chateaus and under trees. He lounged with rats and dined from vats of meal and mush. He continued to write to his mother, kept a diary of poems and thoughts, and wrote dispatches to the New York Sun. Along with a handful of other Americans in Europe, Seeger saw the cause of civilization as synonymous with the cause of the Allies. This was also true for Herbert Hoover, for example, a wealthy mining magnate from the Midwest who had lived abroad most of his life and took over the task of coordinating relief for Belgium. Edith Wharton, an established personality and the author of The Age of Innocence (along with forty other books), resembled Seeger in her journey from New York City to Paris, a city she found majestic in its architecture and romantic in its wintry light. Also like Seeger, Wharton wrote for American newspapers and publicized the suffering of the Allies, calling on America to join the war; like Hoover, she worked to provide comfort to the displaced refugees of northern France and Belgium. Each of these Americans, if only in small ways, brought the United States closer to war by making the Allied cause seem noble, necessary, and distinctly anti-German. The watery rainbow hues of autumn on a stretch of the battlefront appealed to Alan Seeger, who captured them for his readers in a description of guard duty at dawn: “The light splash in the foreground becomes a ruined château, the gray streak a demolished village.” Hymn-like praise from a brave man guarding a French sunrise could last only so long in an environment made to kill. By Christmas of 1914, Seeger’s portrait of war dropped from earlier images of airplane fights and “the magnificent orchestra of battle” into the subterranean slop where he lived with his comrades. In the trenches, “down the length of one curving wall the soldiers sit huddled, pressed close, elbow to elbow. They are smoking, eating morsels of dry bread or staring blankly at the wall in front of them. Their legs are wrapped in blankets, their heads in mufflers.” Covered by their gear, little else protected them. He depicted how “a villainous draught sweeps by. Tobacco smoke and steaming breath show how swiftly it drives through. The floors are covered with straw, in which

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AMERICAN STORIES vermin breed. The straw is always caked with mud left by boots which come in loaded down and go out clean.” December nostalgia crept into Seeger in his trench. He said, “the smell of the wicker screens and the branches in the dirt on top of the trench reminds me of Christmas odors in American houses decorated with green things for the holidays. Then the smell of powder from the shrapnel kills the holiday reminder.” One year later, in October 1915, Seeger was a veteran of the Foreign Legion, having shared food and shelter with men from all over the globe. Then he and his comrades fought in their first sustained battle, Champagne. For four days he lay on a field, with artillery shells whooshing overhead, bombs thundering the earth, and friends dying all around him. The French effort to break through the German lines proved futile. Though carnage enveloped him, Seeger wrote to his mother to say, “There should really be no neutrals in a conflict like this.” He had chosen his course and would not waver, having adopted a stoic resolve as the war dragged on. “The conflagration spreads and there is not the smallest glimpse of hope of seeing it finish inside of years and years,” he wrote. “This is a little disheartening. But as in times of peace there is nothing better than love and art, so in times of war there is nothing better than fighting and one must make the best of it.” During the late winter of 1916, Seeger came down with bronchitis, recuperated first in a hospital, and then was taken in by a wealthy woman who provided a comfortable bed in a pink and white room. American papers had reported him dead, but he wrote to his mother to assure her that his heart continued to tick. Convalescence ended, and after a month enjoying the pleasures of Paris, Seeger returned to the front, where he waited for a battle that seemed long in coming, especially after Verdun’s draining of munitions and “eating of the world,” as he put it. He amused himself with a bored soldier’s small tricks, once sneaking up to a tangle of German barbed wire and leaving a card there with his name on it. During these final months of waiting, Seeger told a friend, “It was natural that I should have staked my life on learning what [war] alone could teach me.” Harvard had given him Ovid and Cicero. The battlefront would give him “an emotion that I remained ignorant of.” He realized that killing and death—quite likely his own—were essential ingredients in this grand experiment, but only because they were part of some greater whole: “Love is the sun of life,” he mused to the same friend. A few months later, in July 1916, Alan Seeger died, trailing off into the dust after dashing off a fitting last few words on June 28: “I am glad to be going in the first wave. If you are in this thing at all it is best to be in to the limit. And this is the supreme experience.” An Egyptian friend of Seeger’s, also in the Foreign Legion, eulogized his sprint into the abyss: “How pale he was! His tall silhouette stood out on the green of the cornfield. He was the tallest man in his section. His head erect,

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WORLD WAR I and pride in his eye, I saw him running forward, with bayonet fixed. Soon he disappeared and that was the last time I saw my friend.” Within a year, by the summer of 1917, American soldiers were arriving in France by the thousands under the command of General John J. Pershing, recent leader of the foray into Mexico in search of Pancho Villa. Some of these doughboys would have read Alan Seeger’s poems, which had been published in major New York newspapers, and some might have read his obituary in the Times or a collection of his poems, released in late 1916. A total of 2 million Americans troops crossed the sea, many in merchant vessels commandeered for the war effort. On the way, they played cards, frequented the bars aboard, and prayed that a U-boat would not find them before the convoy of destroyers found the U-boat. More than 300,000 African-Americans enlisted or were drafted, but almost none saw combat under an American flag, though nearly 200,000 made it to France. The Ninety-second Division—all AfricanAmerican—was placed directly under French command, and its members fought bravely and with distinction, but most black doughboys were consigned to menial jobs, segregated and mistrusted by their white American officers just as much in France as in the States. For the first time in U.S. history, the army and navy allowed women to enlist, mainly in clerical positions or as nurses. Between 25,000 and 30,000 proud women went to Europe, some civilians going early in the war, as Alan Seeger had done, but most as part of the major push, catching a ride with Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force and dressed in the uniforms of the U.S. military, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), or the Red Cross. However, the YMCA disliked the idea of black women tending white men, and the Red Cross did not want black women to wear its uniform at all. Addie Hunton, a member of the YMCA national board, eventually convinced the organization to send her to assist the black troops. After a few days in France, it became apparent to Hunton that white American soldiers maintained their racial prejudices even while fighting overseas under the banner of freedom. At American military camps, signs reading “No Negroes Allowed” were a common sight, and, Hunton remarked, “sometimes, even, when there were no such signs, services to colored soldiers would be refused.” Such petty prejudices did not impede women like Hunton from offering the soldiers comfort and the sight of welcomed faces. During the screening of a newsreel, the troops saw a group of “colored women . . . marching” as part of a war parade. “The men went wild,” Hunton remembered. “They did not want that particular scene to pass and many approached and fondled the screen with the remark ‘Just look at them!’”8 Pershing’s forces did not engage in major combat operations until the last six months of fighting in 1918, and while they made a concerted dif-

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AMERICAN STORIES ference during a few offensives, it was mainly the stunning presence of so many fresh troops with the promise of more to follow that shattered the last resolve of the Germans to continue fighting. November 11, 1918, was the day Germany and the Allies signed an armistice ending combat. A war without end finally ended. Woodrow Wilson and Some Kind of Peace Back in January 1917, before the United States entered the war, President Woodrow Wilson made a surprise visit to the Senate to deliver a speech calling on America to help bring a brokered end to hostilities. He said the nations of Europe must agree to “a peace without victory.” If instead the war ended with winners and losers, the imposed peace terms “would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory” for the vanquished. Wilson believed “only a peace between equals can last” (later events of the 1930s proved him right).9 However, within four months, the United States gave up the role of mediator and declared war on Germany, joining Britain and France. Two years later, negotiators met in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles outside Paris—a seventeenth-century, glittering glass and gold parlor whose hanging crystal chandeliers and polished floors fittingly stretched along a corridor of seventeen mirrors from the Salon of Peace at one end to the Salon of War at the other. There, on June 28, 1919, diplomats of a failed continent signed an imperfect peace, the Treaty of Versailles, officially ending the war five years after it had begun. When Wilson returned from Versailles in the summer of 1919, he brought with him the exact kind of peace treaty he had warned and fought against. Germany was made to accept a “war guilt” clause in which it took all blame for starting the war; consequently, Germany also agreed to make “reparations,” cash payments of $33 billion, for the damage inflicted on Belgium, France, and even Britain (where German bombs had been dropped, although there had been no actual ground combat). In another visit to the Senate, Wilson made a plea for the United States to join the newly created League of Nations, an offshoot of the Treaty of Versailles and the prototype of today’s United Nations. Wilson’s chances to get the treaty ratified were not good. Wilson was a Democrat, but Republicans had taken control of the Senate in 1918. Some senators—namely an elder Republican statesman named Henry Cabot Lodge, who loathed President Wilson’s politics—argued that the provisions of the League of Nations charter could drag the United States into another war. Senator Lodge and a majority of his colleagues did not place faith in a brand-new international body composed of the same deranged princes, prime ministers, and presidents who had just orchestrated five years of unnecessary war. Mak-

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WORLD WAR I ing matters worse, Wilson refused to consider compromising with Lodge by reducing U.S. obligations under the League charter. The Senate now seemed likely to reject the treaty and thereby refuse to join the League—regardless of Wilson’s plea, “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?”10 Like the son and grandson of preachers that he was, Wilson embarked on a train tour of the country to take his enthusiasm for the League of Nations directly to the people. Pushing himself harder than he ought to have done, Wilson suffered a massive stroke in Pueblo, Colorado, in September. He was physically incapacitated for the rest of his presidency, though few people outside his inner circle of confidants knew the extent of his impairment. The Senate rejected the treaty, and American foreign policy became, in certain ways, isolationist—a retreat from other nations’ problems and nasty habits. After finally enlisting, training, and sending 2 million doughboys to the killing fields of Europe’s collective insanity, Americans were more convinced than ever that overseas military entanglements needed to be avoided entirely. Peace and prosperity topped the American agenda in 1919, as most Americans—worn out by the nagging of progressives to improve, improve, improve—ditched the reformist crusades of the previous twenty years. The nation had been made rich through war contracts: misery, as it turned out, was good for business. Before the war, the United States had been a debtor nation, borrowing from the grand banking houses of Europe to finance the luxuries of cars, skyscrapers, and subways. Starting in 1914, however, the flow of credit reversed. Great Britain, Russia, and France had had to borrow billions of dollars in cash and supplies to prevent rail-thin civilians and gluttonous machine guns from starving. American banks offered the gold and credit; American farmers supplied the wheat, the pork, and the beans; merchant ships not sunk by prowling German U-boats filled their holds with dry goods heading to Europe and with promissory notes heading home. The coming American decade was supposed to be financed, in part, by the interest payments of a Europe shattered by war—where inflation became so bad that in the early 1920s, Germans would have to fill a shopping cart with Papiermarks just to buy a loaf of bread. Germany never repaid its debts to the Allies, who in turn never fully reimbursed U.S. banks. But Americans found ways other than collecting debts to cram their pockets with dollar bills during the 1920s. The commercial airline industry, for example, rose like a steel phoenix from the dogfights and reconnaissance flights of the war. Airplanes were at first a novelty, then a deadly tool, and finally, under business leaders like William Boeing, a highly profitable way to travel. There were demons to reckon with along the way, especially certain cruel tricks of democracy summoned by wartime fears: antiwar speakers had been jailed; left-leaning unions like the Wobblies were driven almost to extinction;

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AMERICAN STORIES the president had set up a propaganda bureau—the Committee for Public Information—to generate war fever; local school boards bowed to external pressure and altered curriculum guidelines to make them more nationalistic; people had renamed sauerkraut “liberty cabbage,” as though a single spoken word of German might infect the war spirit with a taint of sympathy for the enemy; returning African-American veterans were beaten while still in uniform; and after Russia succumbed to rabid Bolsheviks in the autumn of 1917, many Americans worried that communism might spread like cancer. Fear and heightened bigotry were also the legacies of World War I, legacies that competed for dominance of the American mind in the coming decade. Notes 1. D.F. Fleming, The Origins and Legacies of World War I (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), 34. 2. Dorothy Schneider and Carl Schneider, Into the Breach: American Women Overseas in World War I (New York: Viking, 1991). 3. Andrew Carroll, ed., War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars (New York: Scribner, 2001), 126. 4. Carroll, War Letters, 127–128. 5. For a thoroughly enjoyable account of Babe Ruth’s life, read Leigh Montville, The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (New York: Broadway, 2007). 6. Albert E. McKinley, Collected Materials for the Study of the War (Philadelphia: McKinley, 1918), 13–16. 7. All excerpts from Alan Seeger’s writing are taken from Letters and Diary of Alan Seeger (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917). 8. Addie W. Hunton and Kathryn M. Johnson, Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Eagle, 1920), 26, 156. 9. McKinley, Collected Materials, 9–11. 10. John Milton Cooper Jr., Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 119.

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THE 1920S

7

The 1920s

Al Capone’s free soup kitchen, 1930. (MPI/Getty Images)

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AMERICAN STORIES Cars, Commercials, and Crime The 1920s started in 1919 and have not really stopped. They are movies with sound—“talkies”; women in pants or short dresses smoking cigarettes in bars with men, laughing and teasing, not giving an inch; state work crews spreading asphalt over mountain passes and along Main Street, followed not ten feet behind by herds of honking, puttering motorists—and women are driving, cigarettes in hand. The 1920s are commercial radio; black jazz men jazzing up white-only dance halls; Ku Klux Klan rallies in the heart of Washington, DC; race riots in big cities; debates about the benefits and dangers of immigration, leading to immigration restriction; fear of communism and interest in communism; fear of difference and exaggeration of difference; fundamentalist Christians challenging the teaching of evolution in public schools; national surveys and sociological studies of every habit, curiosity, peccadillo, belief, and disbelief of the American people; mass marketing campaigns designed to create brand image, brand recognition, and brand affiliation for cigarettes (“Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet”), for cars (“Buy a Ford and Spend the Difference”), for mouthwash (“Often a Bridesmaid but Never a Bride”), and for every other product on the market whose backers had enough money to pay for ads. Advertising agencies themselves developed aggressive techniques, seeking to scare, shame, or scam shoppers. Here was the new motto of selling: “Advertising helps to keep the masses dissatisfied with their mode of life, discontented with ugly things around them. Satisfied customers are not as profitable as discontented ones.”1 What better symbol for the discontented masses than a customer having a nicotine fit every ten minutes? The 1920s were standardized: racks of clothes in uniform sizes, with uniform stitches, made in uniform factories with more machines and fewer workers than before; planned suburban matrixes of look-alike houses, sheathed in exact-cut squares of plywood, spreading out like a cartographic virus from the fast-growing industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest; cigarettes spilling in the billions from the metal mouths of the third-largest industry in the United States—giant tobacco; Ford Motor Company’s Model T’s sputtering from the gates of the River Rouge factory-city in Michigan—every Model T in one easy-to-spray, fast-to-dry color: black. Ford’s assembly-line production system was so well standardized that by 1927 a new car came rolling out every twenty-seven seconds. Henry Ford, a former farm boy with a flair for mechanics and business, knew exactly how to tame the cost of automobiles while increasing his profits: “The way to make automobiles is to make one automobile just like another automobile; to make them all alike, to make them come through the factory just alike, just as one pin is like another pin when it comes from a pin factory.”2

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THE 1920S In the 1920s, gangs and gangsters smuggled bootlegged booze in hollowedout cavities underneath rear-facing rumble seats. Al Capone captured the dual American fascination with well-dressed lawless millionaires being chased by law enforcement officials eminently less interesting but necessary all the same. But did the very process of making a law—Prohibition and its Volstead Act—also create a new criminal class and hence the need for a new kind of cop? Could a law create crime? In the 1920s, prominent scientists advocated eugenics, the “improvement” of the species by sterilizing supposedly inferior people. Twenty-seven state governments established programs to forcibly sterilize epileptics, the retarded, and the mentally ill. In 1927, for example, the state of Indiana passed a law empowering hospital superintendents, with the approval of a review board, to “sexually sterilize” anyone “feeble-minded” or epileptic. This surgery was supposedly done in the “best interests” of the individual and of society.3 (Later, in the 1970s, doctors sterilized more than 3,000 Native American women in the hospital after childbirth, but without the benefit of a review board and not because of any feeble-mindedness. The surgeries were paid for with federal dollars. “The women widely reported being threatened with the loss of welfare benefits or custody of their children unless they submitted to sterilization.”4) In 1927, the Supreme Court upheld forced sterilization in order to protect future generations from what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called “the transmission of insanity, imbecility, &c.” Holmes added that the welfare of society would be promoted through selective sterilization because “feeble minded” people “sap[ped] the strength of the State.”5 And there was Henry Ford behind much of it, if only accidentally: bored by the boondocks, Ford helped to perpetuate and exaggerate the modern industrial city, whose noise, congestion, racy dancing, and racy women he feared. Though an advocate of Prohibition, he sold cars that got turned into rolling liquor stores. A believer in sexual modesty, he sponsored square dances, but customers necked at lookout points in his rolling motels. A hater of Jews, he published anti-Semitic diatribes that became popular reading for KKK members and even for a distant madman, Adolf Hitler, who was equally impressed by Ford’s attitude toward Jews and by the U.S. eugenics programs. Hitler kept a copy of some of Ford’s anti-Semitic writing on his desk. In the 1920s, it was as if a second Pandora’s box had been discovered, and from inside its hidden dark leaped fads, styles, entertainers, and entertainments: each bearing two faces, one horrifying and one enchanting. Americans kicked up farm dirt with gas-powered harvesters and reapers, kicked up their heels in speakeasy nightclubs, and kicked up a fuss about what the people on the other side of the cultural dividing line were (or were not) doing. The 1920s have not ended because we have not answered the questions that got asked

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AMERICAN STORIES and we have not stopped enjoying the fast cars, the soothing voices of gorgeous actors, or the tempting wink of corporate money and its never-ending array of the new-and-improved. Al Capone: The Powers of Money In 1919, Prohibition became the law of the land, established by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, backed up by the Volstead Act. This was the last dry gasp of the Protestant reformers whose Victorian predecessors had merely urged moderation; banning alcohol would not have been practical in previous centuries when many municipal water supplies were full of harmful bacteria and a “tumbler of whiskey” was a common breakfast beverage.6 Now, however, it was illegal to make, transport, or sell liquor, beer, hooch, moonshine, rotgut, demon rum, spirits, booze—or whatever an indulger preferred to call the stuff—in concentrations greater than 0.5 percent alcohol. But with more than half the nation enjoying the fantasy at the bottom of a bottle, it would take more than an amendment, a law, and a few thousand enforcement officers to stop the masses from drinking, particularly when there was so much money to be made. Brewers, vintners, bartenders, bar owners, investors, and the teamsters who hauled the booze: these people represented more than a sliver of the economy, and when enforcement officers opened a keg of whiskey with a hatchet, a lot of people stood to lose out. And it was not just sooty coal miners and singed steel workers—drudges without much political clout—who wanted to relax with a drink at the end of a day. Mayors, governors, police chiefs, bankers . . . men and women from every class, career, and neighborhood wanted what the law said they could not have. Fewer people were drinking beer or sipping martinis now that Magistrate Prohibition sat at the bench, but the numbers of drinkers had not fallen much. In New York City, the legal bars and saloons closed their doors in January 1920, but twice the number of speakeasies (about 5,000) opened in basements and back rooms. Illegality provided a new thrill that doubled the pleasure of a drink. Risking the danger of arrest, being allowed into a club only with the secret password, associating with the criminal element: all of it electrified the alcohol molecules, made the Manhattan a little sweeter, got the feet shimmying to the crazy swing of the Charleston. Skinny flappers with beads and skirts racing to the knees slid and stepped to the hottest tune in town, in any town: You may not be able to buck or wing Fox-trot, two-step, or even sing,

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THE 1920S If you ain’t got religion in your feet You can do this prance and do it neat Charleston! Charleston!7 It was fun to be bad—always had been—but now the law had given fun an extra twist of lemon. Besides, few of those charged under the Volstead Act spent more than a night in jail—in New York City alone, 7,000 arrests took place between 1921 and 1923, leading to only twenty-seven convictions. Odds were that you could buy a drink or deliver one and suffer nothing for your crime. Knowing—or owning—the right people made prison an even less likely scenario. Al Capone owned all the right people in Chicago. Gangsters and organized crime were nothing new. In every major city where jobs were hard to come by and immigrant groups clustered together in their own neighborhoods, young men formed gangs for mutual protection: Italians, Sicilians, Jews, Irish, African-Americans, and more. The Irish “micks” and the Italian “wops” tended to be Catholic, a religion still mistrusted throughout the United States, almost as detested as the ever-misunderstood and falsely maligned Jewish “kikes” and African-American “niggers,” as their antagonists called them. In fact, by 1925—when the Ku Klux Klan underwent such a resurgence that about 5 million white Protestant males were members (especially active in Indiana and Oregon)8—Catholics and Jews had to withstand abuse and ridicule right alongside African-Americans. Fear, hatred, and bigotry were rampant in the resurrected Klan—America’s biggest gang—that tried to defend the nation from the sin of not being the right kind of white. Some gangs started out as social clubs, but metastasized into knots of brawlers and petty thieves; new members got inducted into a preexisting association of violence and crime. It can be no coincidence that “vicious” and “vice” come from the same root word. Alphonse Capone was born in 1899 in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood of New York City and earned his own reputation for nasty valor. His mother and father were working poor, his father a barber, and Capone found that a strong jaw, meaty fists, and a flexible conscience opened certain business opportunities. Expelled from school for hitting his teacher, he ran the neighborhood pool tables, worked as strong-arm bartender, and joined the infamous Five Pointsers gang. Capone showed loyalty and no compunction about violence, whether taken or given. While still in his teens, he reputedly killed more than one man and took a knife cut to the face—leaving him with a permanent scar and a nickname to match, “Scarface.” Capone appreciated the man who cut him, Frank Galluccio, more than he appreciated the nickname. He later hired Galluccio as a bodyguard, but hid the scar with makeup and always tried to have photographs taken from his left side.

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AMERICAN STORIES John Torrio watched the young tough grow up. Born in 1882 in Naples, Italy, Torrio—short and slender—had a brilliant mind for planning and organization and was the nephew of “Big Jim” Colosimo, the rising crime boss of Chicago, who fed meatballs and wine to every bigwig felon and politician in the city (two groups whose only difference was in name). By 1919, Torrio had permanently relocated to Chicago, and when he invited Capone to come too, there was no hesitation. Capone had a new wife and baby and an impending murder charge hanging over his head. Untold murder, mayhem, and money waited. Prior to national Prohibition, more than half the states had passed their own laws banning alcohol, which meant organized criminals got a new market to add to their ongoing operations in gambling, theft, graft, prostitution, and killing and hurting for hire. Some enforcers printed lists of their charges for different types of punishment: five dollars for a punch in the face, 100 dollars for a “whacking.” Of all these crimes, prostitution drew the most citizen outrage during the progressive years around the turn of the century, and in 1910 the Mann Act made it illegal to transport a woman across state lines for any “immoral” purpose. Nevertheless, a pimp or a madam could have money and clout. When John Torrio’s uncle, Big Jim Colosimo, was gunned down in his own restaurant in 1920, he received a king’s funeral, described here by historian Laurence Bergreen: “Colosimo was universally recognized as Chicago’s premier pimp, yet his honorary pallbearers included three judges, a congressman, an assistant state attorney, and no less than nine Chicago aldermen.”9 The attendance of lawmakers and law enforcers is even more startling given Colosimo’s business methods. He and pimps like him regularly lured girls and young women into applying for other kinds of jobs, like maid services, and then had the girls locked away and gang-raped as a way of “breaking them in” for prostitution. After Colosimo was murdered, Torrio ran his brothels. Although Torrio himself did not personally do anything violent—his wife considered him a doting, faithful, and gentle husband—he had others to do his dirty work for him. There was serious money to be made, more than $100,000 per month from prostitution alone just in Torrio’s brothels, with some prostitutes costing two dollars for every five minutes. As in any business structure, that money got handed out to necessary associates: prosecuting attorneys, mayors, judges, and police. Local officials’ susceptibility to tainted money and threats meant that the diamond-studded gangsters of Chicago could get away with murder and face little chance of prosecution. In fact, during the 1920s, “Chicago was the scene of nearly five hundred gangrelated killings. Not one murderer was brought to trial.”10 In the mid-1920s, Calvin Coolidge was president, and he spoke for a lot of Americans when he said, “The chief business of the American people is busi-

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THE 1920S ness.”11 Corporate profits were soaring. Warehouses, stores, and showrooms were overstocked with merchandise: radios, dishwashers, refrigerators, dozens of brands of blue jeans (Levi’s, Lee’s, Carharrt, and Osh Kosh B’Gosh, to name a few), and a range of automobiles in a range of colors, thanks to General Motors, which outflanked one-model-fits-all Ford by offering choices. Much—including investments in the form of company stocks—could now be had on credit, which made the decade’s prosperity seem more certain than it was. President Coolidge probably did not have Al Capone’s new brothels or breweries in mind when he said, “The man who builds a factory builds a temple.”12 But Al Capone could still try to improve his public image by making his name synonymous with the respectable high life: jazz at the Cotton Club, appearances at the opera, donations to the sick and needy. Capone opened a three-meal-a-day soup kitchen in 1930 to feed the hordes of men made unemployed by the settling Depression. Americans generally understood that wealthy businessmen made money by paying others to do their work, but illusions of fairness, equity, and decency were necessary to keep capitalism as the dominating force in national life. Few newspaper readers wanted to pick through stories about the falling wages of coal miners (down by one-fourth over the decade), the sinking fortunes of farmers (who earned on average 70 percent less than a city worker by the end of the decade), or the desperate plight of most Native Americans living on reservations (almost three-fourths of whom lived on about $200 per year, far below the poverty line, which was $2,500 per year for a family of four). Al Capone’s operations took in $165 million in 1927 alone.13 But rather than irking people outside his ring of cronies and satisfied customers, newspaper stories about Capone’s opulent downtown business suite in a grand hotel fueled the capitalist fantasy: life was swingin’ and it was fun to watch the fat cats swing. A more popular big man known for his literal swing, for his swat, for his bashes, for his out-of-control-but-adored-all-the-same style, for his charity to children and children’s causes, and especially for his 714 home runs that sent balls halfway to the moon (and sometimes through the windows of houses that neighbored the ball park) was Babe Ruth. Where Capone broke bones with a bat (three people’s in a single evening), the Babe broke records—passing the previous total of 138 career home runs early in his career. Where Capone made $1 million selling beer and women’s bodies, the Babe brought more than 1 million visitors to the Yankees’ stadium in 1921, yet another record. Babe Ruth, the “Sultan of Swat,” “the Behemoth of Bust,” could eat three raw steaks in one night. He could flip his convertible without injury and go to jail for speeding in his twelve-cylinder auto-rocket at 11 in the morning and still make the second half of a game by 4:45. The Babe could steal third base, get an infected elbow from the slide, and then play two more games in the series

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AMERICAN STORIES with a tube on his elbow draining away the pus from his swollen, blue arm. He could hit a home run with only one hand on the bat and strike out Ty Cobb when the Yankees pitching lineup tired out. Babe Ruth did what he wanted, when he wanted, and how he wanted no matter how much his coaches, handlers, and managers tried to say otherwise. A fellow Yankee whom Ruth was supposedly rooming with on the road said, in answer to whether the Babe was in fact his roommate, “I don’t room with him. I room with his suitcase.”14 The Los Angeles Times proclaimed Ruth America’s national hero in 1921, the year sports writers dubbed the Yankees’ hitting lineup “Murderer’s Row.” When a 62,000-seat coliseum, Yankee Stadium, opened in 1923, some 74,000 people attended on opening day and watched Ruth clock a homer, a present to the nation. As the sportswriter Heywood Broun said of Ruth in 1923 in the New York World, “The Ruth is mighty and shall prevail.”15 This was one year before newspapers first spotlighted Al Capone in a less-than-flattering way. Unfortunately for Capone, gangsters and dead bodies went together like bullets in a tommy gun (the murder machine of choice for 1920s gangsters, able to fire 1,000 .45-caliber slugs per minute). Capone’s reputation as a “millionaire gorilla”16 stemmed largely from a series of brutal and public killings. In 1924, Capone and Torrio had to find new ground for their operations because Chicagoans elected a moral-minded mayor whose idea of reform included shutting down brothels and breweries. Like other entrepreneurs looking to urban sprawl for new customers and revenue, Chicago’s gangsters searched for a promising nearby town they could “develop.” These gun-slinging small businessmen without licenses or tax records chose Cicero, Illinois, a sleepy town with few people and lots of room to expand. To ensure that Cicero’s Capone-friendly mayor got reelected, Capone and more than 100 goons stormed Cicero on Election Day, literally filling out citizen’s ballots for them—at gunpoint—and watching the ballots drop into the boxes. Anybody with an attitude got a readjustment, courtesy of Capone and free of charge, unlike most of his services. Police from outlying towns, including Chicago, got called in to stop the violence. One of Capone’s brothers died in a shoot-out, and Capone himself was seen blazing away at the cops. Capone threw a gangster’s funeral for his brother—replete with $10,000 flower bouquets—and his own face, now synonymous with death and corruption, showed up in newspapers. After Johnny Torrio’s near-assassination in 1925, Capone took over control of the operations. From that point until 1928, when he bought a mansion in Miami, Florida, and went into semiretirement, Capone continued to consolidate his control, which involved the usual palette of blood and money. Election rigging, bootlegging, pimping, and general hooliganism kept Capone in serge and satin suits. But try as they might, local prosecutors could not keep Capone in jail, regardless of how many concealed weapons

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THE 1920S arrests they made. The man was untouchable. Back in 1913, however, the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution had been ratified, permitting the federal government to tax people’s income. A final slipup on Capone’s part prodded President Herbert Hoover to tackle the thick-necked gangster with a squad of pencil pushers. In 1929, Capone ordered the murder of his last remaining Chicago competition, a gangster named George “Bugs” Moran. On Saint Valentine’s Day, four hired gunmen—two dressed as police—shot and killed seven of Moran’s henchmen, though Moran himself avoided the ambush. The grisly murder scene, replete with rivulets of thick-pooled blood, was captured in photographs and national news stories. President Hoover set federal bloodhounds loose on Capone’s trail. If they could not get him on murder charges, they would look into his tax records, or lack of records. Capone had made millions, but had never given Uncle Sam his cut. Eliot Ness and Elmer Irey, a Prohibition enforcer and a taxman, a cop and an accountant, drove a truck, literally, right through the heart of Al Capone’s alcohol empire. Ness—with his short, dark hair parted down the middle and slicked to a sheen—looked mild-mannered but acted every bit as tough as Capone. Ness raided breweries, documenting Capone’s misdeeds as he went along. Once, in the mood to sting Capone, Ness arranged to have all Capone’s impounded distribution trucks driven slowly past his downtown headquarters. Ness called Capone ahead of time and told him to look out his windows at eleven o’clock sharp, when, sure enough, the confiscated fleet passed by as planned. The sting stung, and Capone thrashed his office in a rage. As Time magazine put it in 1948, Elmer Irey “wasn’t a lawyer, he wasn’t a detective, and he wasn’t physically tough,”17 but he was smart enough to do the math in ledgers seized from Capone’s premises—numbers that added up (at an obvious bare minimum) to $200,000 in unpaid taxes. Luckily, the Supreme Court ruled in 1927 that the federal government could take tax dollars from businesses, like brothels and bars, which were not even supposed to legally exist. With statutes of limitations for tax evasion running out, Irey brought Capone to trial in 1931, and although Capone bribed the jury ahead of time, the judge switched juries on the first day of the trial, leading to easy convictions and a sentence of eleven years. Capone served out his term first in an Atlanta penitentiary and then on Alcatraz Island from 1934 until he was released in 1939. If Capone had been convicted 200 years earlier, he would have been hanged in front of a crowd or whipped 500 times. But this was 1931, and the United States had developed a system of penitentiaries—walled, guarded, dreary places where lawbreakers were sent to be punished and, it was hoped, rehabilitated if they were not to be locked away for life. No more eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth: retribution had now become a year for a lie, a cell for a kill.

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AMERICAN STORIES In fact, according to author Cyndi Banks, after 150 years of experimenting with types of prisons and rationales for incarceration, in 1929 “the Federal Bureau of Prisons declared rehabilitation to be the fundamental aim and purpose.”18 Sociologists and psychologists had been arguing for thirty years that crime had identifiable causes and that people who had broken the law could still be brought back inside the ranks of the lawful. Through rigid discipline, exposure to religious teachings, an imposed work ethic, some book learning, and the general atmosphere of industrial habits, the criminal and the troubled were to be taught how to behave better, how to follow rules at least. Capone was the first notorious inmate doing time in America’s first war on drugs, though it was not called that at the time. Al Capone would have broken the law even without Prohibition, even without the Volstead Act, and in fact he served out his term on Alcatraz after Prohibition got repealed in 1933 because the federal government had convicted him for taxes, not bottles. At the end of his trial, as Capone was being escorted out of the courtroom, he and Eliot Ness confronted each other. “Well, I’m on my way to do eleven years,” Capone said. “I’ve got to do it, that’s all. I’m not sore at anybody. Some people are lucky. I wasn’t. There was too much overhead in my business anyhow, paying off all the time and replacing trucks and breweries. They ought to make it legitimate.” Ness replied to the suddenly philosophical Capone, “If it was legitimate, you certainly wouldn’t want anything to do with it.”19 After being released from prison a year early for good behavior, Capone lived out eight more years in a semidelusional state of mind caused by endstage syphilis, which he had contracted before getting married back in his Brooklyn days. As New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin reminds us, more came from Capone’s life than flashy stories and corpses. As part of the effort to nail him, a doctor named Calvin Goddard figured out how to use a comparison microscope to compare bullets: In 1929, [Goddard] analyzed bullets collected at the site of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre . . . Goddard test-fired all eight machine guns owned by the Chicago police and found no match with the bullets used in the crime. Two years later, he examined two submachine guns retrieved from the home of Fred Burke, a sometime hit man for Al Capone, Moran’s great rival. Goddard pronounced Burke’s guns the murder weapons, and the feat so impressed local leaders that they established a crime lab, the nation’s first, and installed Goddard as its director.20

From the capture of one of America’s greatest criminals came the techniques used to catch future generations of gunmen and outlaws. Interestingly, when

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THE 1920S Al Capone was still a boy, his oldest brother ran away from home. His name was James, and after years in the circus and working with Native Americans in the West, he became a Prohibition agent, just like Eliot Ness. Although James Capone did not work on his infamous brother’s case, James did visit Al the year before his death. Zora Neale Hurston: The Harlem Renaissance, American Letters, and the Great Migration Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography was titled Dust Tracks on a Road,21 but it could just as easily have been called Laughing at Me, Laughing at You, or maybe just Laughing. As for dust tracks on a road, that was the anthem of colored people in the late 1800s and well into the 1900s: by some estimates, as many as 2 million African-Americans migrated from the South to the North between 1890 and 1930. Hurston was one of them. Born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, but raised in Eatonville, Florida, an “exclusively colored town,” Zora soaked in every oleander blossom, each family squabble, all the drops of her Mama’s love, and turned the whole tangled lot into stories. Her father, John, was a gypsy-minded carpenter and preacher who doted on his first daughter, Sarah, yet resented Zora because two daughters were one too many. “Of course,” she wrote, “by the time I got born, it was too late to make any suggestions, so the old man had to put up with me. He was nice about it in a way. He didn’t tie me in a sack and drop me in the lake, as he probably felt like doing.” But John Hurston generally did well by the family, providing an eight-room house, a barn, five acres, and plenty of food for all seven children. Hurston’s mother, Lucy, was an understanding ally: “Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at de sun.’ We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.” The launch pad for Hurston’s flights of fancy was Joe Clarke’s store, which beat out the two churches—one Baptist, one Methodist—as the social club for men in tiny Eatonville. On a hot Florida afternoon, men would gather in the shade of an awning, and Zora loved nothing better than “to hear . . . menfolks holding a ‘lying’ session. That is, straining against each other in telling folk tales. God, Devil, Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Sis Cat, Brer Bear, Lion, Tiger, Buzzard, and all the wood folk walked and talked like natural men.” Sent to get sugar or coffee from the store, Zora would linger as long as possible to listen to the adventures of Brer Rabbit until the sound of her mother’s voice piped up over the mens’: “‘You Zora-a-a! If you don’t come here, you better!’ That had a promise of peach hickories in it, and I would have to leave.” Often at home also was an ex-slave maternal grandmother who had a punishing mind about her, especially regarding what she perceived as lying. For Zora,

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AMERICAN STORIES storytelling was real; it was what she thought about all the time, imagining the whole world—sticks, trees, birds, and rivers—all talking all at once: I came in from play one day and told my mother how a bird had talked to me with a tail so long that while he sat up in the top of the pine tree his tail was dragging the ground. . . . Another time, I dashed into the kitchen and told Mama how the lake had talked with me, and invited me to walk all over it. . . . Wasn’t that nice? My mother said that it was. My grandmother glared at me like openfaced hell and snorted. “Luthee!” (She lisped.) “You hear dat young’un stand up here and lie like dat? And you ain’t doing nothing to break her of it? Grab her! Wring her coat tails over her head and wear out a handful of peach hickories on her back-side!” “Oh, she’s just playing,” Mama said indulgently. “Playing! Why dat lil’ heifer is lying just as fast as a horse can trot.”

Zora knew she “did not have to pay too much attention to the old lady and so I didn’t. Furthermore, how was she going to tell what I was doing inside? I could keep my inventions to myself, which was what I did most of the time.” In all of America, there were few places like Eatonville, where black people were their own mayors and police chiefs, where black and white folk, who lived nearby in Maitland, got along extraordinarily well. This was the kind of home where a black girl could dream uninhibited by color, although in her father’s opinion, “It did not do for Negroes to have too much spirit.” Jim Crow was the big boss of the South, and segregation was his rule. With physical violence a steady threat for any southern blacks who did not mind their place, and with few good job opportunities in the South but lots of new factory jobs in the North, the natural solution was to pick up and move. By 1920, every northern city that had good jobs had good music. Detroit with its cars, Chicago with its meat, Cleveland and Pittsburgh with their steel, and New York City with everything attracted more than 1 million “New Negroes,” who were bound to change the sound, the look, and the feel of the places where they landed. The trumpet-blowing Louis Armstrong went from New Orleans to Chicago and started touring during the 1920s. The blues-singing Bessie Smith went from Tennessee to the North and back again as she toured and recorded for more than twenty years. Armstrong and Smith recorded music together in New York City. The poetry-wielding Langston Hughes went from Kansas to New York, which became a homebase for his own itinerant life that included trips to Moscow, Paris, Africa, and Los Angeles. He sampled the world, brought it back home, and set it to words. A favored destination for those who could afford it, or at least thought they could afford it, was Harlem in New York City, described by historian Robert Hemenway as “a city within

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THE 1920S a city . . . the cultural capital of black America.”22 By the end of World War I, Harlem had more than 100,000 black residents. Harlem was hope; Harlem was jazz and jazzy poetry; Harlem had swing; the Harlem Renaissance was a period of black freedom and creative expression without oversight or permission. Zora Neale Hurston arrived in 1925, twenty-one years after her mother’s death and twenty years after she had first set out on her own, unwanted by her father and tolerated by an older brother only as a house cleaner. A double dose of spirit and talent and what her mother had called “travel dust” had put Hurston on the roads from Eatonville to Jacksonville and back home again, only long enough to find the “walls were gummy with gloom” caused by a dislikable stepmother. The antagonism between Zora and her father’s new wife finally erupted into an all-out brawl, with hitting, scratching, spitting, screaming, and hair pulling: “I made up my mind to stomp her, but at last, Papa . . . pulled me away.” Although her father had done little to coddle Zora, he would not totally abandon her either. Her stepmother said, “Papa had to have me arrested, but Papa said he didn’t have to do but two things—die and stay black.” At the age of fourteen, Zora Hurston left Eatonville for good, seeking as much fortune as could be scraped from a nation that had not yet read her name, had not yet read her talent. For ten years fortune played peek-a-boo. Hurston learned how to work and how to scrounge, and she later remembered, “there is something about poverty that smells like death. . . . People can be slave-ships in shoes.” Hurston cleaned houses, nannied, stiff-armed amorous employers, attended schools when and where she could, and toured with a troupe of traveling actors as the personal attendant to the star of the show. These were people who lived words, who made their bodies talk, though her southern bumpkin tongue was just as impressive: In the first place, I was a Southerner, and had the map of dixie on my tongue. They were all northerners except the orchestra leader, who came from Pensacola. It was not that my grammar was bad, it was the idioms. They did not know of the way an average southern child, white and black, is raised on simile and invective. They know how to call names. It is an every day affair to hear somebody called a mullet-headed, mule-eared, walleyed, hog-nosed, gator-faced, shad-mouthed, screw-necked, goat-bellied, puzzle-gutted, camel-backed, butt-sprung, battle-hammed, knock-kneed, razor-legged, box-ankled, shovel-footed, unmated so and so! . . . Since that stratum of the southern population is not given to book-reading, they take their comparisons right out of the barn yard and the woods.

The theater tour ended for Hurston in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1916. If a giant motion picture camera had been hung from the sky over the east

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AMERICAN STORIES coast of the United States in the 1920s, it would have shown two dust tracks on the road: one made by white people heading to southern Florida, the other by black people heading north. Zora Neale Hurston and Al Capone could have waved at each other in passing, he on the way to Miami, she on the way to Harlem. For generations, Florida had attracted the wealthy, the elderly, and the sick. But in 1896, an oil tycoon named Henry Flagler—a partner of John D. Rockefeller and part of the Standard Oil Trust—financed the building of the Florida East Coast Railroad all the way to sultry, breezy Miami. And the boom was on. Over the next twenty years, workers drained the surrounding Everglades and built the Tamiami Trail, a 238-mile highway that ploughed right through the swampy heart of the peninsula from Miami west to Naples, connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf Coast. The workers slept in elevated cabins that kept their feet from becoming alligator or snake feed. Now middleclass Americans could ride a train or put-put-put in their Model Ts and GMCs for a little Florida sun. Out in the bays, rum runners delivered Jamaican rum for the speakeasies, clubs, and resorts that blossomed in the speculative frenzy that had northerners buying empty lots, bungalows, and houses in subdivisions. Credit flowed like wine, just as it gushed and geysered on Wall Street. Although some people prophesied collapse, the boosters, the developers, the real estate jobbers, and the bankers kept on selling. In 1926, a hurricane blasted southern Florida with 125-mile-per-hour winds and threw a hungry tidal wave over more than 13,000 new houses. At least 115 people died in Miami, and another 300 drowned in the crashing waves, mostly poor Latino migrant laborers who were too poor to have the means for escape. Their bodies got stacked in heaps and burned. Two years later, the land boom went bust, a bitter taste of the hard years to come. Florida, however, had etched itself in the nation’s mind as the destination for vacation and migration. A slow urban, suburban, and exurban sprawl was swallowing the quaint towns of Zora Hurston’s childhood. But before Walt Disney built castles in the sand for Mickey and Minnie Mouse in the 1950s, before Eatonville got absorbed by Orlando’s asphalt, before the folktales told at Joe’s Country Store went silent, Zora would get a college education at Barnard College in New York, study under the master anthropologist Franz Boas, and return to the South under his tutelage to collect the old-time tales and to tease out the mysteries of hoodoo. After parting company with the actors in 1916, Hurston stayed on a while in Baltimore and then skipped to Washington, DC. In between stints as a waitress, a manicurist, and once again a maid, she found the wherewithal to attend night classes and then Morgan College, for she was determined to get an education. “This was my world,” she said to herself, “and I shall be in it, and surrounded by it, if it is the last thing I do on God’s green dirt-ball.”

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THE 1920S Though she did not fit in at Morgan, which catered to a decidedly middle-class group of students, her work gained her the opportunity to enroll at Howard University, which “is to the Negro what Harvard is to the whites,” where she earned a two-year degree in English in 1920. Introductions to the witty and well connected at upwardly mobile Howard University helped Hurston with her next step up the socio-economic ladder. By 1920, black Americans were divided over the best means to gain equality. Should they persist with established channels, cooperation with whites, petitions, demonstrations of worth, and patience? Or should black Americans give up the goal of integration and simply go their own way, create their own black society, a nation within a nation—or perhaps a new nation somewhere else, a grand resettlement? W.E.B. DuBois, the leading voice of the NAACP, advocated the first method, still committed in the 1920s to cooperation, though no less vehement or forceful in his demands for justice. Rising like a black Moses from the colonial streets of Kingston, Jamaica, Marcus Garvey spoke in a different voice. Arriving in Harlem in 1916, Garvey learned to move and speak like a preacher from the master of posture and pose, America’s first pop-culture evangelist, Billy Sunday (a fevered foe of alcohol and one-time golf chum of Babe Ruth). Schooled in pomp, Garvey dressed in colorful uniforms and carried a ceremonial sword. He opened the Harlem doors of his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1917 in the aftermath of a disgusting race riot in East St. Louis where white people rampaged through the African-American district, killing at will, tossing children back into burning buildings. Just as American doughboys were suiting up to “make the world safe for democracy,” black people in America were being brutalized. Rage, indignation, and injustice gave momentum to Marcus Garvey’s cry: “One God, One Aim, One Destiny.” Garvey wanted black people to unify and to take care of their own, in particular by starting their own businesses, their own banks and investment funds, their own newspaper—the Negro World—and a shipping line, Black Cunard. By 1919, Garvey had 750,000 followers, ships in the water, and his movement was heading for disaster. His calls for an entirely black nation in Africa—free from any white colonial control—scared the authorities, and J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was busy spying on Garvey, literally sabotaging Black Cunard ships by mixing junk into the gasoline. Worse, with millions of dollars coming into UNIA and the shipping company, Garvey began to embezzle from his own empire. Sensing conspiracy all around him (with good reason), he made an imaginative leap and met with the leader of the Ku Klux Klan—the man in whom Garvey assumed real and true power was vested in white America. The news that the self-styled leader of the first black power movement in the United States was negotiating with the grand

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AMERICAN STORIES wizard of the KKK lost Garvey thousands of supporters. Before long, Garvey was charged and convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to five years in prison. In 1927, before the end of his term, President Coolidge pardoned him and deported him back to Jamaica. Some of Zora Neale Hurston’s first published writing appeared in Garvey’s Negro World in 1920, which at the time had more subscribers than the NAACP’s Crisis. Hurston’s gratitude to Garvey for the chance to publish lasted no longer than Garvey’s reputation could sustain: in 1928, Hurston laughed at Garvey for having found greatness only in his great ability to steal from his own people. By that time Hurston was becoming something of a phenomenon in her own right. She had moved to Harlem in 1925, enrolled at Barnard College (the female wing of Columbia University) as the only black student in a sea of rich, white faces, and enchanted professors, fellow artists, and even a wealthy patron—Charlotte Mason, who demanded to be called “Godmother” by anyone accepting her money. At Barnard, Hurston made the professional choice to study anthropology rather than English, largely because of the charisma of Franz Boas, an intense German-born professor who headed a variety of famous studies and students: sending researchers into the Pacific Northwest to record Native American languages and myths and promoting the adventurous career of Margaret Meade, who sailed to American Samoa and examined adolescence as a cultural, rather than biological, phenomenon. Boas was a staunch critic of eugenicists, the scientists who wanted to create perfect people by selectively weeding out “undesirables” through sterilization, and through Boas’s training of a new generation of anthropologists he combated the racism and biases inherent in eugenics. His social vision appealed to Hurston, and with his intellectual guidance and Godmother’s money, she went back to Florida in 1927 to collect folk tales and to study hoodoo. There she heard of the most famous hoodoo priestess in New Orleans—Marie Leveau, “the queen of conjure” who once charmed a squadron of police into assaulting each other instead of arresting her. When not in Boas’s classroom or wading through the magic tales of the South, Zora was collaborating with Langston Hughes on a number of projects, going to parties and speakeasies, and generally drinking in the effervescence of Harlem at the zenith of its renaissance. Zora Neale Hurston brought the country to the city. Her Eatonville background was central to just about everything she wrote, including most of her essays, plays, novels, and ethnographic studies. In 1928, looking back at her childhood, she recalled that other blacks in Eatonville had “deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the country.” When she left monochrome Eatonville and ventured into multicolored Jacksonville, Hurston discovered that she “was now a little colored girl . . . a fast brown—warranted not to rub nor run.”23 From that

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THE 1920S point forward, she would experience what DuBois in 1903 called “this doubleconsciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”24 Hurston made sure to emphasize that she was “not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a low-down dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it.” In 1928, when she wrote these words in an essay titled “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” she was not giving in to anyone else’s petty race tyrannies or degrading demands. Instead, she saw a “world to be won and nothing to be lost.”25 For a time, Zora Neale Hurston won that world. She took first prizes for her plays and earned money for her essays. In the 1930s, she began publishing books, most notably (to the English teachers who now assign it) Their Eyes Were Watching God, a story about one woman’s shot at self-fulfillment told in the dialect of Hurston’s old South. Big-name newspapers and magazines gave her books good reviews, but ultimately her color caught up with her. As author Mary Helen Washington explained in the foreword to a 1990 rerelease of Their Eyes Were Watching God, “one white reviewer in 1937 [said he] had difficulty believing that such a town as Eatonville, ‘inhabited and governed entirely by Negroes,’ could be real.”26 When the novels of white authors like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sinclair Lewis sold in the hundreds of thousands, not one of Hurston’s books sold more than 5,000 copies before her death. She never earned even as much as $1,000 in royalties for a single volume, at a time when Babe Ruth was making more than $30,000 a year for swinging a bat. By 1960, she was living in Georgia, penniless and on state assistance. After she died that year, some of her unpublished writings were saved by a firefighter who put out the smolder in a heap of her papers that the apartment manager was torching. This woman who once sarcastically styled herself “Queen of the Niggerati,” this woman whom fellow writer Langston Hughes said was “full of side splitting anecdotes, humorous tales and tragi-comic stories”27 to the enjoyment of all in her glow, this black woman from Eatonville, Florida, died in relative obscurity and was buried in an unmarked grave. Though her own generation had largely abandoned her, she never meant to be tragic nor tragically taken, so it may be best to remember her own version of a tombstone epitaph. “In the main,” Zora Hurston wrote, “I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped up against a wall. . . . Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. . . . On the ground before you is the jumble it held—so much like the jumble in the

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AMERICAN STORIES bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place—who knows?”28 In Cars, on Roads, to Cities The newspaper writer Heywood Broun captured the ebullient mood of the era when he said, “The jazz age was wicked and monstrous and silly. Unfortunately, I had a good time.”29 While Babe Ruth, Al Capone, and Zora Neale Hurston were having a good time batting, boozing, capering, and writing, the rest of the nation paid the Babe and Capone a lot of attention and Hurston at least a little. Other Jazz Age Americans had to content themselves, typically, with less: less money, less crime, and maybe less fun. After all, a lot of people still lived on farms, many wishing they could sample the sparkling neon lights and spicy clubs of the big cities a bit more often, or at least once. One farm wife got interviewed in 1919 and was asked why she owned a car but no bathtub. She responded, “Why, you can’t go to town in a bathtub.”30 Roads and cities were not new to America. As far back as the 1820s, Henry Clay of Kentucky had been arguing that the federal government ought to be in the business of building roads so that goods from out west could get to the markets back east a whole lot quicker and cheaper. But it was not until 1916 that the federal government passed a law offering the states one dollar for each state dollar spent to pave roads in the interest of rural mail delivery. The objective was limited, but the effects were limitless. Along those roads that the states built, like the Tamiami Trail in Florida, people toured and migrated. Some went from city to city. Some went from farm to farm. But of those who actually packed up and moved, the major step was from farm to city. In fact, 1920 marked a turning point: in the census that year, more people were recorded living in cities (of at least 2,500 or more) than in rural districts and small towns. In search of jobs, fun, or simply something new, Americans chose the mixed joys of urban jungles. Notes 1. Communication and Consequences: Laws of Interaction (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996), 152. 2. Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Fords: An American Epic (San Francisco: Encounter, 2002), 34. 3. For the full text of the 1927 Indiana law, see “An Act to provide for the sexual sterilization of inmates of state institutions in certain cases,” S. 188, Approved March 11, 1927, www.in.gov/judiciary/citc/special/eugenics/docs/acts.pdf.

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THE 1920S 4. Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2003), 400. 5. Maureen Harrison and Steve Gilbert, eds., Landmark Decisions of the United States Supreme Court, Buck v. Bell, May 2, 1927 (Beverly Hills: Excellent, 1992), 48–52. 6. Gerald Leinwald, 1927: High Tide of the 1920s (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001), 78. 7. Quoted in Nicholas E. Tawa, Supremely American: Popular Song in the 20th Century (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2005), 58–59. 8. Leinwald, 1927, 165. 9. Laurence Bergreen, Capone: The Man and the Era (New York: Touchstone, 1994), 83. 10. Leinwald, 1927, 134. 11. Robert Sobel, Coolidge: An American Enigma (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1998), 313. 12. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 33. 13. Leinwald, 1927, 3. 14. Robert Creamer, Babe: The Legend Comes to Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 222. 15. Quoted in Roger Kahn, Memories of Summer: When Baseball Was an Art, and Writing About It a Game (Lincoln, NE: Bison, 2004), 51. 16. Bergreen, Capone, 262. 17. “What Elmer Did,” Time, December 6, 1948, www.time.com/time/magazine/ article/0,9171,853607,00.html. 18. Cyndi Banks, Punishment in America (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 76. 19. Bergreen, Capone, 524. 20. Jeffrey Toobin, “The CSI Effect: The Truth About Forensic Science,” New Yorker, May 7, 2007, 32. 21. All excerpts from Zora Hurston’s autobiography are taken from Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippencott, 1942). 22. Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 29. 23. Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” World Tomorrow, May 1928, 215–216. 24. W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: A.C. McClurg, 1903), 3. 25. Hurston, “How It Feels,” 216. 26. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), vii. 27. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Knopf, 1940), 239. 28. Hurston, “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” 216. 29. Alistair Cooke, Talk About America (New York: Knopf, 1968), 74. 30. Franklin M. Reck, A Car Traveling People: How the Automobile Has Changed the Life of Americans—A Study of Social Effects (Detroit: Automobile Manufacturers Association, 1945), 8.

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8

Into the Great Depression

Eleanor Roosevelt shakes a wounded soldier’s hand, 1943. (George Silk/Getty Images)

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AMERICAN STORIES From Plenty to Plenty of Nothing: Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover Warren G. Harding got elected president in 1920, relying on a single word for his campaign—“normalcy”: a comforting word that promised no more wars, no more struggle, no more reforms, no more change. Harding was a conservative, chain-smoking Republican who—like his successor Calvin Coolidge—let businessmen do their thing without much interference. By the time Harding took the oath of office in 1921, the first Red Scare, a national paranoia about the spread of communism, had ended after the often-warrantless arrests of more than 4,000 foreign resident aliens in thirtythree cities under suspicion of Communist Party ties. New York City police officers beat detainees with “makeshift clubs ripped from the stair rails,”1 and federal officers abused other detainees before deporting them from the country. J. Edgar Hoover, later the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), had zealously arranged the raids. With the Red Scare over, President Harding got down to the business of doing very little. Yet a series of scandals marred his presidency. Nan Britton, a woman from Harding’s hometown, claimed that she and the president had been having an affair, sometimes in a White House coat closet. And in what became known as the Teapot Dome scandal, investigators revealed that Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall had illegally leased federal oil reserves in Teapot Dome, Wyoming, to oilmen friends for the whopping sum of $400,000 in personal “loans.” Harding’s time in office thus included a fair amount of “normal” political behavior. He died in 1923 while still in office. Upon Harding’s death, Vice President Calvin Coolidge, “Silent Cal,” was sworn into office by his father—a notary public—while on vacation in Maine, an understated ceremony for an understated president. Coolidge continued Harding’s policies of noninterference with business, summing up his philosophy by saying, “The chief business of the American people is business.” In 1924, in an effort to placate citizens worried about the supposedly anarchic influence of certain foreigners, Coolidge signed the most racially restrictive immigration bill in American history, essentially stopping immigration from everywhere other than northern and western Europe. Like Harding and, later, Herbert Hoover, Coolidge endorsed tariff hikes (taxes on incoming goods) in an effort to protect domestic manufacturing and farm produce. In a world that was already globalized, however, this kind of international tax mostly served as a hurdle to slow the exchange of goods, ideas, and technologies and ended up making bad times more likely rather than less. Coolidge also vetoed a law to give cash bonuses to World War I veterans in 1945, but Congress passed the law over his veto. Otherwise, Coolidge contented himself with minor

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pranks, like pushing all the buttons on his desk just to see his secretaries come scrambling into the office all at once in a flustered flurry of notebooks and pens. Calvin Coolidge was a popular president who avoided any taint of scandal and presided over what seemed like a golden age of prosperity. In 1923, Kodak Corporation unveiled equipment for viewing home movies, while in the United States neon signs first flickered into sight “as . . . accent[s] for fantasies: movie houses, cocktail lounges, casinos.”2 In 1924, with 1,400 radio stations nationwide, nearly 3 million radio set owners could turn in to the local selection, and theaters showed Walt Disney’s first cartoon featuring a real woman interacting with cartoon characters, Alice’s Day at Sea. In 1925, the first $4 million movie, Ben Hur, was released while Warner Brothers engineers worked on “talkies.” In 1926, so many commercial radio stations were broadcasting that they clamored for governmental regulation because their signals were mixing. And in 1927, Ford Motor Company sold its 15 millionth car (while overall car ownership skyrocketed from 8 million jalopies in 1920 to 22 million by 1930). Cal could stay silent. Business was talking for him. The third president during the 1920s was Herbert Hoover, a hero in his own right, well liked for his almost-rags to glittering-riches origins and for his humanitarian relief work during the Great War, when he had organized food deliveries for the beleaguered masses in Belgium. Born a Quaker into humble, rural origins in Iowa and raised in Oregon, Hoover studied at Stanford University and made money in international mining, living overseas more than in the United States while still young. Steeped in the belief that a man became a man through grit, sweat, determination, and his own merits, Hoover was mentally unprepared for the spiraling financial disasters that started in 1929, his first year in office. When he accepted the nomination for president in 1928, Hoover had been certain that bright skies and fat paychecks were waiting for every American: “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us.”3 By 1930, people could tell that poverty had not been licked, and they needed help. Hoover wanted them to help themselves. The Great Depression was not Herbert Hoover’s fault. He had been in office for less than a year when the stock market crashes began in October 1929. However, by the time Hoover left office in early 1933, much of the economy had been gutted, and he had done little to alleviate the suffering or to improve the outlook for either capitalists or laborers. When about 150,000 farm families faced starvation in drought-afflicted Arkansas at the end of 1930, Hoover refused to authorize direct food relief. He was not cruel or heartless, but he had never experienced hunger himself, had never gone without a meal, and this rich man—who sipped grapefruit juice every morn-

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AMERICAN STORIES ing after a brisk exercise—did not believe, could not believe, that citizens of his country actually had no food to eat. Resistant to reality or too shielded from it, Hoover informed journalists, “No one is actually starving,” when in fact some Americans actually were.4 In England, Arkansas, about 300 farmers marched into town on January 3, 1931, and informed the authorities they would either take food or allow the Red Cross to save face and authorize the disbursement. The Red Cross said it would pay for up to $2.50 in food per person. Red Cross officials might have been nearly broke themselves, but they were not stupid. The immediate crisis passed, but national papers picked up the incident and labeled it a “riot.” Hunger and sorrow were being thrust into Hoover’s face. (Later, as if to solidify his image as removed and uncaring, Hoover sarcastically recalled in his Memoirs, “Many persons left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.”5) In a sardonic tribute to the president, urban shantytowns of the unemployed were called “Hoovervilles.” In every city of size, ragged rows of squalid nests made from packing crates, cardboard, and corrugated metal scrounged from scrap yards equaled home for thousands of Americans. But not everyone was reduced to a nickel and a song; while some people had to roost in a Hooverville, others either kept their car or earned enough to buy a new one. Car sales climbed during the 1930s—nearly 3 million autos were purchased. Never a nation to entirely lose its sense of humor, Americans managed to laugh at comedian Will Rogers’s quip, “We’re the first nation in the history of the world to go to the poorhouse in an automobile.”6 Former farmers fleeing the dust bowl of Oklahoma and Kansas loaded chickens and couches into the backs of their autos and drove west, looking for any kind of work on the Pacific Coast. The laughter stopped where starvation started, and something would have to be done. Hoover, however, only repeated his calls for private acts of charity and other nongovernmental forms of aid, particularly through the Red Cross, which simply did not have the resources to feed the masses. The Bonus Expeditionary Force and the Election of Franklin D. Roosevelt Out of work and out of patience, a thirty-four-year-old former World War I medic named Walter Waters took matters into his own hands after losing his last job at a cannery in 1930. In the spring of 1932, Waters seized some railroad cars in Portland, Oregon, and led cross-country the first small group of what would soon become an orderly but haggard legion of World War I veterans calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF). As the train sped across the continent, bisecting mountain passes and chasing the Midwest horizon, veterans by the hundreds hopped on board. By June more

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than 20,000 thick arrived in Washington, DC, to beg for early payment of their promised service bonuses, $1.25 apiece for each day spent overseas, $1 for each day spent in the States, which would have equaled about $1,000 apiece as of 1945 when the bonuses were slated to be paid under the original plan. The “Bonus Army” had been inspired by a Texas congressman, Wright Patman, who had tried in 1929 to get his colleagues to initiate immediate payment of the bonuses. The bill went nowhere other than into the newspapers, where it caught Walter Waters’s attention. He had been having a miserable time making a living before the Wall Street woes of 1929, and prospects had only deteriorated for him and his wife. From battlefield medic to the elected “general” of the BEF, Waters stood outside the Capitol Building with thousands of his men on a hot June day to hear how the House of Representatives would deal with demands for early payment of the bonus. On June 15, the House approved immediate payment, a vote paved by the dying speech of a Tennessee congressman, Edward Eslick, who had keeled over the day before on the floor of the House, midway and mid-sentence through an impassioned plea for approval. Only miles away at the main BEF camp, the New York Times noted that “veterans . . . lowered many of the tattered banners flying from their crazy shacks” and took up a collection of nickels to buy a wreath in honor of Eslick, who had spent his last breath on their behalf.7 But two days later, the Senate, unwilling to raise taxes to fund the $2.5 billion bonus, voted not to pay the veterans before the scheduled date of 1945. The Bonus Army had come from all over the country, hitching free rides on empty railroad cars or walking or even whirring in by plane. Once in the capital, they had encamped peacefully, up to 15,000 men at the Anacostia flats across the Anacostia River from downtown, where some built tiny houses with picket fences. No one had been allowed inside the main camp without first proving he had no weapons, and the camp had been racially integrated. Others stayed in Hoovervilles on Pennsylvania Avenue and in abandoned buildings without exterior walls. After news of the Senate’s rejection of proposed bonus bill, the veterans staged silent “Death Marches” for a month until Congress adjourned on July 17. War veterans without shoes on their feet, fed sparingly by sympathetic donors (once getting fifteen tons of watermelons from growers in Brawley, California), paraded up and down the streets outside the White House and the Capitol Building, playing to the swarms of clicking cameramen and never for a moment allowing legislators to overlook their plight. Two weeks later, on July 28, the attorney general ordered the veterans— including about 1,000 wives and children—to be dispersed, but twitchy police officers fired into a crowd that was pelting them with bricks. Two veterans were killed. More skirmishing ensued, and President Hoover unleashed army troops

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AMERICAN STORIES under General Douglas MacArthur. Rumors of anarchism and communism had swirled through the White House and the halls of Congress for weeks, and MacArthur assumed that communist hearts thumped radically underneath the dungaree overalls and old military uniforms covering the peaceable, stickbodied veterans. MacArthur felt no mercy and showed none, either, for men he considered enemies of the state. On July 28, the veterans’ request for early payment was fulfilled with tear gas, miniature tanks, bullets, and bayonets. MacArthur’s young troops rode down the older veterans, beating, scattering, and arresting them. Even though President Hoover had ordered MacArthur only to “surround the affected area and clear it without delay,” MacArthur led his troops across a bridge into the Anacostia camp and burned it.8 One baby died after being subjected to tear gas. The veterans filed out of the capital with less than they had brought, their hope stolen. Hoover’s public image suffered a new blemish with every blow the troops struck. That year, 1932, was an election year. The Republicans had been in power and popular for more than a decade. Now bank doors were slamming shut, sealing empty vaults from the gaze of accountants, mechanics, farmers, and retirees who had thought their money would be safe. By 1932, about 9 million Americans, almost 15 percent of the population, had seen their savings vanish. Hoover’s efforts to relieve nationwide hardship and overcome economic ruin seemed uncaring and weak. He asked leaders of industry not to fire too many people and to keep wages high. He told local governments it was their responsibility, not that of the federal government, to feed and house the hungry and homeless. Missing only the motto “too little, too late,” Hoover started the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) in 1932 with a capitalization of $2 billion: a lot by the standards of the day, but not enough to reinvigorate an economy grinding along with more than 20 percent unemployment (up from 4.4 percent in 1928). The RFC was supposed to provide assistance, particularly to railroads and banks, to jump-start the economy. RFC money started at the top with big industry and was intended to trickle down to the everyday worker. During the next year, however, the Depression worsened. Big businesses like U.S. Steel and GM laid off more workers. Ford Motor Company stopped making the new Model A—stopped entirely and shut down the miles of rolling metal at its River Rouge plant in Michigan. With little work and less luck, millions of Americans read about the veterans’ efforts to get some help. When Hoover turned his back on the Bonus Army marchers, the voters turned their backs on Hoover. Herbert Hoover missed an essential ingredient in recovery: getting people to feel hopeful. Also, starting with the 1928 election, Hoover had maintained a commitment to Prohibition when most of the rest of the country had come to realize that they wanted a legal drink at a legal bar. Hoover’s opponent for

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the presidency in 1932 was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a handsome, two-term governor from New York with a soothing, actor’s voice suited for radio, and he thought Prohibition ought to be old news. The nation agreed and, nervous with hope, ushered Roosevelt into office in 1933. On March 3, 1933, a black convertible with Franklin Roosevelt in the back seat pulled up in front of the White House, and Herbert Hoover reluctantly took the seat next to his victorious rival. They were headed together to Roosevelt’s swearing-in and inaugural address. Doffing his top hat to the crowds, Roosevelt tried to talk pleasantly with Hoover, but the outgoing president sat stony-faced, saying not a word. Herbert Hoover disliked Roosevelt as a politician and a man. In the coming years, that dislike would intensify with every piece of New Deal legislation that Roosevelt proposed to a compliant Congress. Roosevelt was getting ready to involve the federal government in an experiment unlike anything the country had ever known. From the wings of civilian seating, Herbert Hoover would watch his successor take the federal government from economic regulator to major player. Within two years, the Democratic-controlled Congress would create the Federal Emergency Relief Agency (1933) to offer direct relief payments, the Civilian Conservation Corps (1933) and the Works Progress Administration (1935) to oversee work relief, and a safety net for the old, sick, and unemployed—Social Security (1935). These programs would not end the Depression, but for more than half the country Franklin Roosevelt would become, in his radio broadcast “fireside chats,” the reassuring voice in the living room, the voice of a federal government that seemed to care. As one man put it, Roosevelt was “the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a sonofabitch.”9 When the convertible arrived at the Capitol, Roosevelt made his careful way to the podium. Speaking in the tones of a strong father, Roosevelt told the throngs of assembled citizens: This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.10

Though few knew it, other than close advisers, family, friends, and journalists taken into his confidence, Franklin Roosevelt understood paralysis: he had been stricken by the polio virus in 1921 and had lost the use of his legs. After a long convalescence, Roosevelt pushed himself through a grueling physical

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AMERICAN STORIES therapy regimen. He had gradually built back his muscles to the degree that he could stand—and stand for hours—though he could not walk without leg braces and crutches and spent most of his time in a wheelchair. (Journalists of the 1920s and 1930s, however, had an unwritten ethical code—general respect for presidential privacy. Only three photos of Roosevelt in a wheelchair are known to exist, and the public never saw them. A journalist who had caught President Harding peeing in the White House fireplace did not publish that incident either.) Roosevelt had known fear and paralysis, and somewhere in his resonant voice there was a sweet note of hope that Americans, gathered around radios to listen to his inaugural address, could hear and trust. The Depression: Why? The Great Depression was caused by a variety of factors, but that does not mean historians can really explain with complete certainty why the Depression happened or why it lasted until the United States entered World War II in 1941. Certain causes seem likely. Europeans were still in a slump trying to recover from World War I, and their economies may not have been helped by U.S. tariffs, especially not the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, which placed taxes on thousands of incoming items. High tariffs on major goods like Canadian lumber resulted in retaliatory tariffs that most likely damaged economies on both sides of the border. Britain and France could not repay the $11 billion they had received in loans during the war, particularly not after Germany defaulted on its reparation payments to them, leaving American lenders in the lurch. Throughout the world, inflation became a problem: prices for everyday goods and services rose relative to the value of a dollar. In the United States during the 1920s, major companies produced more goods than consumers were buying (largely because the dollar had dropped in value), so warehouses and shelves were overstocked by 1929, spurring layoffs and general worry. Banks throughout the decade had been closing, in part because farmers could not pay back their loans as farm prices fell from 1921 to 1929 and in part because banks were poorly regulated. And more Americans privately invested in stocks during the 1920s than ever before. By the end of the decade, shares in a company could be purchased from brokers who would lend up to 90 percent of a stock’s value. Brokers loaned more money than the federal government spent: in 1929, for example, the federal government’s budget was $3.1 billion while stockbrokers loaned $8.5 billion to investors. The economy was sitting on a giant bubble filled with speculative wishes. The bubble burst in October 1929 in a series of spectacular runs. Beginning with a deluge of sell orders on October 24, the crash reached its deafening crescendo on Tuesday, October 29—“Black Tuesday”—when 16.4 million

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shares were sold for a total daily loss of $15 billion. This was like having burglars break into Ford’s River Rouge factory and steal four out of every ten cars in one day. Overall, during October 1929, companies traded on the New York Stock Exchange lost $50 billion in value, nearly 40 percent of their preSeptember worth. The plummet in companies’ values meant that millions of mostly amateur investors lost—and lost big. Overproduction, falling wages, layoffs, firings, gloomy financial forecasts, and devastating stock news worked like a chain reaction: fear feeding on bad news led to more bad news and more fear. Once begun, the Depression would only get worse. The stock market crashes did not so much cause the Depression as signal its beginning, like a fever breaking out days after a virus has entered the body. The Great Depression was grim. In New York City, two weeks before Christmas in 1930, crowds filled the pavement outside the Bronx branch of the Bank of the United States, intending to withdraw all their savings, having heard a rumor that the bank was running out of money. With insufficient cash on the premises, the bank went out of business the next day, December 11, initially taking 400,000 people’s deposits with it. Businesses relying on the bank to meet their payrolls had nothing to offer employees. Reporting that New Yorkers generally took the closure “philosophically, realizing that there was nothing they could do about it,” the New York Times said, however, that “in the less favored parts of the city . . . the foreign-born, many of whom did not understand English, stood determinedly in the rain, hoping that something would show up to enable them to get their money.”11 Later, 80 percent of the bank’s deposits were paid out, but national confidence in banks was badly shaken. By 1932, the companies listed on the Big Board at the Stock Exchange on Wall Street had watched 89 percent of their total value evaporate. On average, one dollar of stock in 1929 was worth eleven cents by 1932. Investors who had borrowed heavily from brokers to buy their stocks owed ten dollars for a one-dollar sandwich. General Motors, the leading car company in sales, lost 92 percent of its value in three years. By 1933, there was not a single full-time employee at U.S. Steel, though in 1929 there had been 250,000. In 1932 alone, almost one-quarter of a million people were evicted from their homes (one out of every 480 people), and one out of every four capable, working adults was unemployed. Capitalism seemed to many Americans like a failed system. When local, state, and federal governments did not help, people turned to simple solutions. At the cloudy edge of the continent in Seattle, Washington, 50,000 residents formed the Unemployed Citizens League and promptly began their own barter economy, trading eggs for carpentry, fish for dentistry. They simply gave up on money because there was not any. Children, adolescents, and adults wandered the nation, hopping rides on railroads, begging for food

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AMERICAN STORIES at back doors, stooping into basement soup kitchens. People who had always been poor seemed to do better, however, than those suddenly out of a job. The previously poor had already figured out where to go for help, how to ask for help, and how to distinguish between pride and survival. Something else beyond the scope of accountants, bureaucrats, and economists was going wrong as well. As though the very air itself had been infected by the mood of the nation, the weather began to change. In 1930, the spring rains did not fall, and by the summer, temperatures in the Midwest lingered around 100 degrees, day after day. Plenty of Dust: Stories from Inside the Storm Six years after the stock market went bust, a rolling mountain of airborne dirt swept across the Great Plains on April 14, 1935—“Black Sunday”—coating creation in more grainy soil than engineers, diggers, and mechanical shovels had removed from the Isthmus of Panama while cutting out the canal over more than seven years.12 What may have been the worst environmental disaster on the planet in the entire twentieth century crashed into northern Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, and parts of Colorado and Nebraska in peak fury, smothering sod huts, dugout tar-paper shacks, wheat and corn fields, jackrabbits, cattle ranches, people’s lungs, and endless miles of flat prairie. In the furnace heat of a lasting drought, “black blizzards” like this had been descending on the plains ever since 1931, only two years after Wall Street’s stocks had started to dry up. With bank doors closing and stocks dropping, now it seemed nature would help itself to what was left of the farms and ranches on plains that had been better suited all along to buffalo and buzzards. During the 1930s, about 250,000 parched and starved sodbusters hiked, rode, and drove back out of the scorched, dirt-encrusted remains of prairies that had been home to short grass and millions of buffalo for thousands of years. These were the Exodusters and Okies immortalized in John Steinbeck’s decade-defining novel, The Grapes of Wrath. In days gone by, Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches had roamed the southern plains, first by foot and then on horse. To disinherit the Indians of their range, the buffalo had been slaughtered, their shaggy hides made into leather goods, their flesh fed to work crews pounding spikes on railroads, their bones ground fine to fertilize northern fields. Cattlemen like Charles Goodnight replaced the vanished bison with cows, which lacked the insulating coats of shag that let buffalo withstand a temperature range from minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit up to a blistering 110 degrees. In 1885 and 1886—two of the coldest years on record—the cattle herds froze, studding the prairies with bovine statues in mute commemoration of a bad idea. Cattlemen and cowboys carried on, soon joined by the

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homesteaders who showed up in the first two decades after 1900, would-be farmers drawn in by the lure of free government land. The Homestead Act of 1909 offered 320 acres to anyone uninformed, desperate, or crazy enough to plant wheat in a tumbleweed garden. For a few planetary heartbeats, the misled farmers got by, even experienced boom times: hunks of sod got uprooted to expose arable soil watered by spray sucked out of cool underground lakes, aquifers with reservoirs that might last an eternity, the thinking went; oil jets plumed, and the black slime fell back to the earth in the shape of gold bars; prices for wheat were high, and Prohibition meant that corn farmers could get high prices, too, just by boiling corn mash with sugar and yeast and selling the whiskey to the likes of Al Capone. In previous centuries, the plains and prairies could withstand a drought. Sod grass kept the underlying soil in place. But now the sod was being torn up or trampled under hoof by cows. Millions of square acres of newly exposed soil were endlessly churned by new John Deere tractors, and if their treads did not do the job, gusts of northern winds whipped down day and night to rip up the fertile but limited dirt held in place now by crops that were seasonally removed. This system of environmental plunder was what historian Donald Worster called “agribusiness”:13 ever bigger and more ecologically out-of-tune farming operations creeping over the southern plains with unregulated hunger; farmers mortgaging their futures to insolvent banks to buy more machinery to plow and harvest more acres of wheat and corn. The hurricane of dirt that beat down on the plains on Black Sunday had been caused, in large part, by people, though the final catalyst was drought. Assigning fault, however, felt irrelevant in the face of death. Louis Sanchez was eleven years old in April 1935, a Mexican-American boy born in Dodge City, Kansas, to a father who had been recruited around 1900 from Ciudad de Guanajuato to work on the Santa Fe Railroad.14 Louis’s father settled in Dodge City, bringing his children and wife to the Mexican section of town, where Louis grew up speaking Spanish at home, learning English at the Catholic school, and doing his best to avoid tuberculosis, which robbed many of his playmates of lung and life. Louis had worked fourteen-hour days in the beet fields, a giant sun blasting every field hand, cricket, and wilted leaf with its radiance; he had gone for two weeks without milk, and when his boss finally brought some by, it had to be drunk on the spot because they had no refrigeration. He had known hard work, tough times, and five years of dust storms, but Black Sunday was something new again. More than sixty years later, Mr. Sanchez recorded his memory of the April 14, 1935, storm for his granddaughter, recounting a trip to the local library where he went to read a newspaper, which he could not afford to buy. After reading in the library, he stepped out into the street, just as the dust storm was arriving.

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AMERICAN STORIES Sanchez recalled that “it was so dark and dusty [he] couldn’t find the entrance” to the radio station where he had been heading next. After groping around in blasts of wind that felt like somebody was “sandblasting” his face, he made it into the radio station, KGNO, and crawled up the pitch-black stairwell to the second floor where he waited for more than three hours. A group of begrimed people stumbled into his temporary sanctuary, detoured from their trip to a movie. Caught in the gale of dirt, they had “abandoned their car, held hands, and feeling the curb, found their way to KGNO.” Not wanting his mother to worry about him, Sanchez headed home as soon as possible. He remembered others dying in subsequent years of dust-induced pneumonia, and though he survived to tell the tale, his family’s circumstances were bleak: “Our homes were made of old lumber that the railroad had thrown away. No one had storm windows or doors so the dust just sifted in. My mother had to put wet rags over the windows and doors to keep some of the dust out of the air so that we could breathe.” The gritty swirls of dust marched across the middle of the continent, stripping paint from new cars and houses, crackling with enough static electricity to make metal poles shimmer and snap. Although the center of the dust bowl was in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, dirt from storms like this reached as far as Washington, DC, and New York City. There were even instances of dust bowl sand drifting out on the jet stream to land on ships’ decks at sea. The six-year drought ended in 1937. Two years later, The Wizard of Oz, starring Judy Garland as Dorothy, was released. Although L. Frank Baum’s Oz stories were three decades old, the opening dust bowl scene must have seemed more documentary than fantasy to the sand-blasted sodbusters, railroad hoppers, store clerks, Okies, and general nesters who toughed out six years of drought and dust. During the 1930s, President Roosevelt’s New Deal administration implemented all sorts of programs designed to improve life on the farm. Minimum prices were guaranteed for a variety of meats, vegetables, and grains. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) paid southern farmers to put hundreds of thousands of acres of cotton under the plow, literally lowering production to raise prices—then the AAA paid plantation owners in cash for the ruined cotton (during the decade, farm prices rose by 40 percent). The Rural Electrification Agency brought electricity to outlying farmhouses no private utility company would have dreamed of supplying at so much expense for so little financial return. The Tennessee Valley Authority, the largest river-damming irrigation project in the history of the nation, provided jobs, corrected soil erosion, diminished malaria breeding grounds, and provided steadier electric power throughout the South. But not everyone in the southern Midwest would benefit from New Deal programs.

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Sharecroppers both black and white provided the bent-backed, cottonpicking labor that slaves had done for 200 years. Sharecroppers owned nothing but a few clothes—and sometimes a pot, a fork, and a Bible—and they owed one-half of their cotton crop to the plantation owner in payment for the dubious pleasure of working the land, which left a starving share for the cropper’s family. When the AAA started to send checks to farmers in 1934 to slow cotton production, the plantation owners kept the cash for themselves, rarely passing any down to tenants or sharecroppers. An insurgent union called the Southern Farmers’ Tenant Union (SFTU) formed slowly and painfully to fight for some crumb of the greenback pie being delivered to the landowners. Segregated tradition gave way to integrated need, and the SFTU became a biracial movement: hunger and oppression looked black and white. In ugly response, owners of large farms took two actions: first, they worked with local sheriff’s departments to beat and shoot SFTU organizers throughout the South, once breaking into a church and blasting worshippers in the back as they tried to run; and second, they told their congressmen in the Democratic Party to pressure President Roosevelt not to help the SFTU. Roosevelt agreed, believing he could not push through other elements of his New Deal without the support of his party’s southern wing. In 1935, Congress passed the Wagner Act, giving workers the right to collective bargaining, the right to form unions with federal protection. But the Wagner Act did not cover southern tenant farmers and sharecroppers, and the Farmers’ Tenant Union crumbled and sank back into the cotton fields by the end of the decade. Northern steel and autoworkers, however, flooded into the newly created Congress of Industrial Organizations, a union for unskilled laborers. Under the leadership of its president, John L. Lewis, spark-scarred machine hands gained higher wages and shorter hours. In the North, workers might be poor but they could vote, so they had power over their congressmen. In the South, workers were poor and could not vote, excluded by dirty tricks like the poll tax, usually a one-dollar registration fee that sharecroppers simply could not pay. Without money and without the vote, poor southerners bent back under the lash of tradition. Also during the 1930s, under prompting from labor unions like the American Federation of Labor and from local welfare agencies, approximately 400,000 Mexicans and Mexican-Americans—many of them U.S. citizens born in this country—were forcibly deported as repatriados, “the repatriated,” a word used insincerely and inaccurately. One-third of all Spanish-speaking residents of Los Angeles were deported, along with hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children from Arizona and Texas. Only ten years later, when more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans were forced into concentration camps during World War II, the U.S. government would entirely reverse course under the bracero program, which imported Mexican laborers to work

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AMERICAN STORIES the fields of the West from which the Japanese had been plucked. When they were needed as cheap labor, Mexicans were invited—officially and unofficially—to enter the United States; when the economy slumped, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were chased away. The dust bowl was no one’s friend, certainly not gentle to the hangers-on at the fringes of the American economy. However, people of all colors and creeds found a powerful friend and ally in the White House, though it was not always the president. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt—niece to former president Theodore Roosevelt, former volunteer dance teacher at a settlement house in New York City’s Lower East Side, journalist writing a daily column titled “My Day”—coolly ignored the angry comments of racists and conservatives as she urged her husband to make the New Deal an equal deal for all. Eleanor Roosevelt: Before the Depression Eleanor Roosevelt was anything but common, but she championed the common causes of common people. Not since Dolley Madison had smoothed political feelings, thrown festive soirees, and saved an original oil painting of George Washington from the flames of British temper in 1814 had there been as independent and powerful a woman in the White House as Eleanor Roosevelt. She was born in 1884, the daughter of Elliot Roosevelt, the dashing youngest brother of Theodore, and his wife, Anna. Eleanor’s childhood had equal parts tragedy and chance. For tragedy, her father Elliot’s alcoholism competed with her mother Anna’s distaste for Eleanor’s physical features, namely a set of buckteeth. Her father abandoned her all too often for hunting getaways and bars, literally leaving young Eleanor on the street outside “his club” one afternoon until the establishment’s doorman saw her and ordered a taxi to take her home.15 Her mother abandoned little Eleanor from the outset, unsure of how to raise a bucktoothed girl in an upper-crust society that demanded conventional beauty of its women. But the Roosevelt family’s iron will braced Eleanor’s spirit to withstand the dwindled love of a besotted father and disappointed mother. Eleanor could and would care for herself, and she was not without allies or friends. Raised for a time by her maternal grandmother in New York City after Anna Roosevelt died in 1892, Eleanor first found sympathetic friends at the age of fifteen in England at an exclusive school, Allenswood, presided over by the gifted Madame Souvestre. There, Eleanor met other young women of means and minds, and under Madame Souvestre’s careful tutelage, she realized that there was room in the world for women of soaring spirit. Soon after returning from England, Eleanor went to a party she did not want

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to attend: her own. For members of old money, landed families, a comingof-age ball was held to announce adulthood. In Eleanor’s case, this meant an evening of unwanted small talk and the recognition that her new-found freedom was not long to last because the party also heralded her availability for marriage. Having enjoyed classic literature and tours of Europe with Madame Souvestre, Eleanor knew that marriage would entail the confines of home, weighted down by the children she would be expected to have. One starry-eyed suitor turned out to be much better than her fears. This was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a fifth cousin and Harvard student who knew what he wanted: to marry Eleanor and to be president of the United States. She elected him husband in 1905, twenty-eight years before the rest of the country elected him president. For ten years, Eleanor and Franklin shared an intimate love, though he was soon distracted by his ambition. In 1910, Franklin was elected to the New York State Senate and in 1913 landed the same federal-level job his older cousin, Theodore, had held: assistant secretary of the navy. To get these jobs and keep them, Franklin had to flash his delightful smile at innumerable hand-shaking, martini-sipping functions. Meanwhile, Eleanor was in the midst of birthing and raising five children under the domineering eye of mother-in-law Sara, who had never wanted any competition for her son’s love. Sara Roosevelt hovered. She went so far as to buy adjoining apartments for herself and for Franklin and Eleanor; then she had doors installed to join the apartments on every floor. Eleanor Roosevelt handled the children, the meddling mother-in-law, and the attention-seeking husband with grace and charm. But in 1915, Franklin complicated their domestic tranquility by having an affair with his wife’s social secretary. Eleanor discovered the truth when, after he returned from a tour of war-torn Europe, she unpacked his suitcase and found a bundle of love letters that she could not resist reading. After confronting him about the affair, which Franklin promised to end, Eleanor said she would remain in the marriage—a necessity for a man with major political ambitions. In return (though nearly a decade later), Franklin built her her own house, Val Kill, right down the road from the family mansion, Hyde Park, in New York. By the late 1910s, the Roosevelts maintained a marriage as true friends, and though they often lived apart, their public lives were intertwined. In 1920 Franklin made an unsuccessful bid for the vice presidency, losing to the Harding ticket and its promise of normalcy. Eleanor was there at his side, waving, smiling, and trying to control her runaway voice, which was high to start with and regularly took off by a shrill octave or two without her permission. The polio virus hit Franklin in the summer of 1921 while the family was vacationing in Maine, and once more Eleanor stood firmly by

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AMERICAN STORIES him, pulled back to his side by the quite literal necessity of propping him up as he tried to regain the use of his legs. Most people who caught polio did not suffer any paralysis, but a small minority did, and for most of them the loss of mobility was permanent. As the years progressed, Franklin and Eleanor resumed their separate private lives. Popularity from the Pulpit: Aimee Semple McPherson Few Americans would have known who Eleanor Roosevelt was before 1928 when her husband became, much to her chagrin, governor of New York State. Zora Neale Hurston’s name would have been slightly better known in literary circles, but both women were invisible compared to the holy glow of Aimee Semple McPherson. A two-time widow from Ontario, Canada, McPherson turned people on to God by getting people to tune in to her. Discovering a talent for revival-style preaching of a Pentecostal bent (including speaking in tongues and faith healing), McPherson draped herself in bright white, stylish outfits, giving congregants the unique opportunity to hear God’s word while seeing her shapely legs. What could not be seen from the pews of her 5,300seat Angelus Temple in Los Angeles could be imagined by listening to her broadcasts over KFSG radio—McPherson’s own station. Her Foursquare Gospel movement blossomed into hundreds of churches and a groundswell of interest in fundamentalist Christianity outside its rural crib in the South and Midwest. More than an evangelist for the Word alone, McPherson clinked glasses with seemingly unlikely types, like the sharp-tongued secularist H.L. Mencken; she championed the Good Book while he guffawed at its most fundamentalist followers. In 1925, Mencken traveled to Dayton, Tennessee, to cover the trial of John T. Scopes, whom prosecutors charged with teaching evolutionary theory in violation of a new state law. While Scopes’s conviction was later overturned on technical grounds, Mencken had a riotous time lampooning the creationist residents of rural Tennessee for hatching “conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters.”16 More important to the average American than the tabloid stories about Aimee McPherson’s side life (including allegations of love affairs with a married man) were the food and clothes she distributed to the needy during the Depression. The occasional scandal chased after her, as stories true and untrue haunt all celebrities, but Aimee Semple McPherson remained well loved and admired. She trained women to be ministers and invited African- and Latino-Americans to sing at her church on equal footing with white performers. The same tendency toward charity and kindheartedness that earned the flashy McPherson an adoring public was also at work for Eleanor Roosevelt. But where Aimee McPherson chased after the spotlight, Eleanor Roosevelt tried to avoid its glare, at least

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until her husband became president. It took a severe national crisis to make a president and first lady better known than a radio celebrity and personality of the magnitude of Aimee Semple McPherson. Eleanor Roosevelt: Progressive Politics in the Depression During the Great Depression, Eleanor Roosevelt was probably the most popular woman in the nation, better loved, perhaps, than Shirley Temple (child star of the movies), Amelia Earhart (“Lady Lindy,” the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic; her airplane vanished in the South Pacific in 1937), or Claudette Colbert (another movie starlet of mischievous beauty). Eleanor went where Franklin could not, literally and figuratively. Literally she traveled more than 40,000 miles to view New Deal projects like hospitals being built through Works Progress Administration funding, and she even took a train two miles down a coal shaft to see the conditions endured by miners—one of the class of workers offered the opportunity to join a union under the 1935 Wagner Act. Figuratively, Eleanor Roosevelt tested the limits of the Democratic Party’s liberalism with regard to African-Americans and other groups on the margins of society. In 1939, for example, an upper-crust association, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), refused to let a world-class opera singer, Marian Anderson, sing at its jubilee because she was black. After touring internationally because no major U.S. symphony wanted a black soloist, Anderson returned to the same conditions she had left. So Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR and found just the right place for Marian Anderson to let loose the vocal angels: the public grounds sprawling out at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, where 75,000 people showed up to listen. Every night Eleanor filled up a basket with memos meant to pester Franklin’s presidential conscience about this or that, and she filled the basket so full and so often that he finally told her not to put in more than three requests a night. Eleanor promoted the cause of poor farmers, abandoned wives with children to feed and no food in the cupboards, and just about every other group of disadvantaged Americans. Consequently, African-Americans in particular flocked to the Democratic Party, almost fully abandoning the Republican ranks, the party of Abraham Lincoln. The New Deal was the New Reconstruction, or at least Eleanor Roosevelt tried to infuse her husband’s administration with progressive politics. Even the most popular politicians are unpopular with somebody. A Gallup poll in 1958 indicated that if respondents had the chance to dine with three people in history, Eleanor would come in sixth, Franklin second, Jesus eleventh, and Abraham Lincoln first.17 On the other hand, anti-Semites in the country called the Roosevelt administration the “Jew Deal” because of

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AMERICAN STORIES the notable Jewish people appointed to high-level positions. Conservative Democrats and Republicans started to wonder together whether Roosevelt was turning the nation into a socialist experiment because he promoted close bonds between government and society, between the feds and the economy. While the New Deal undoubtedly bonded the federal government more finely and more firmly to nearly every facet of American life, the argument can be made that President Roosevelt wanted to save capitalism, not smother it with bolshevism or socialism. A national health care plan was not enacted, private property was not confiscated by the government, and unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW) did not damage the viability of companies like General Motors or Ford. In fact, by 2007, when Ford Motor Company was losing more than $2,000 per every car it sold, a leading expense keeping Ford from being profitable was the pension plan created in the 1940s. However, that pension plan—which guaranteed health care and monthly checks for life after retirement—was exactly the plan Walter Reuther, UAW president, did not want. Reuther wanted companies to buy health care collectively and to collectively pool their retirement funds, but major steel and auto companies resisted, saying that such a plan was “communist” and that their freedom of choice would disappear into any kind of collective scheme. Today, almost all U.S. steel and auto companies are struggling, largely under the burden of their pension plans, which would be less draining had they enacted Reuther’s plan. Unions wanted capitalism to work. Agreeing, President Roosevelt promoted certain safeguards—like the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees Wall Street—in order for people to have faith in the system. While government involvement in the economy has been debated ever since, no one disagrees that it was World War II, rather than the New Deal, that lifted the United States out of the Great Depression. Notes 1. Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Free Press, 1987), 78. 2. J.D. Reed, “The Canvas Is the Night, Once a Visual Vagrant, Neon Has a Stylish New Glow,” Time, June 10, 1985, www.time.com/time/magazine/ article/0,9171,958470-2,00.html. 3. Quoted in Martin L. Fausold and George T. Mazuzan, eds., The Hoover Presidency: A Reappraisal (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974), 52. 4. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (New York: Mariner, 1999), 378. 5. Quoted in Schlesinger, The Cycyles of American History, 378. 6. Earl Proulx, Yankee Magazine’s Make It Last: Over 1,000 Ingenious Ways to Extend the Life of Everything You Own (Dublin, NH: Yankee, 1996), 346.

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7. Special to the New York Times. “ESLICK DIES IN HOUSE PLEADING FOR BONUS: Tennessee Democrat Stricken by Heart Disease in Midst of Impassioned Speech. TRAGEDY MOVES VETERANS Shack Flags Put at Half-Staff––House Adjourns and Will Vote on Patman Bill Today. ESLICK FALLS DEAD PLEADING FOR BONUS.” New York Times (1857–Current file), June 15, 1932, www.proquest.com/. 8. Quoted in Tom H. Watkins, The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), 138. 9. Quoted in M.J. Heale, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The New Deal and War (New York: Routledge, 1999), 1. 10. Lewis Copeland, Lawrence W. Lamm, Stephen J. McKenna, eds., The World’s Greatest Speeches (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), 508. 11. “THRONGS ARE CALM AS BRANCHES CLOSE: Thousands Gather About Doors, but Most Accept Situation Philosophically. 8,000 AT ONE BRONX OFFICE Men, Women in Crowd––Line Begins Forming at 6 in Morning––Policemen on Guard.” New York Times (1857–Current file), December 12, 1930, www. proquest.com/. 12. Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 8. 13. Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 54. 14. For a full account of Louis Sanchez’s life, go to Dust Bowl Oral History Project, Ford County Historical Society: A Kansas Humanities Council Funded Project, August 18, 1998, www.skyways.org/orgs/fordco/dustbowl/louissanchez.html. 15. Jan Pottker, Sara and Eleanor: The Story of Sara Delano Roosevelt and Her Daughter-In-Law, Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: St. Martin’s, 2004), 71. 16. Vincent Fitzpatrick, H.L. Mencken (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004), 77. 17. “Famous People,” The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971 (New York: Random, 1972), 2: 1560.

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Out of the Depression and Into War

First Japanese-American arrivals at the Manzanar War Relocation Center, 1942. (Eliot Elisofon/Getty Images)

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AMERICAN STORIES What They Heard on the Radio Until 1937 the New Deal seemed to be working. Millions of men and women were put to work through New Deal agencies. Sleeping in military-style camps at night and swinging axes by day, Civilian Conservation Corps crews in jeans and white T-shirts landscaped parks and blazed trails through national forests. At the tops of mountains in the Cascade Range of the Northwest, fire lookouts were built where the likes of Jack Kerouac would spend summers in later decades scanning tinder-dry Douglas firs for sparks, watching grizzlies lumber through the brush, going nutty with boredom, and thinking up new books to define new generations. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) put artists to work creating tour books for the states and writing and producing plays. WPA photographers toured the nation taking black-andwhite stills of Okie families crawling westward or camping in lean-tos—like Dorothea Lange’s haunting picture of a weary mother and her brood under a canvas awning in the middle of nowhere. WPA researchers recorded interviews with elderly former slaves who recounted plantation memories, and painters brushed lead-paint murals of industry and folklife on the outsides and insides of buildings. Billions of dollars were paid out in work relief, and though the financial hardships did not end, they did soften. People young and old who would have been otherwise idled by unemployment got the satisfaction of participating in civic-use projects, with the added bonus of a weekly check—most of which got sent home, if there was a home at all. Then in 1937, unemployment began to rise again: where 7.7 million Americans had been without a job in early 1937, there were 10 million without work by late 1939—almost 18 percent unemployment. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal seemed not to be the pure cure for what ailed the nation. The incidence of fathers slipping out the door and disappearing into the brotherhood of hoboes continued, as did new and depressing rounds of layoffs and stock dips. Americans with a quarter for admission or an outlet for electricity continued to turn to the distractions of film and radio. Some radio programs were meant to be pure entertainment. Amos ’n’ Andy featured a comic duo of white actors mock-imitating black men in the vein of blackface minstrelsy—it was one of the most popular programs of the 1930s. By the late 1930s, fully 50 percent of the daytime shows on the airwaves were soap operas, named after the commercial soap companies that sponsored them, in particular Procter and Gamble, manufacturers of the Ivory brand. Housewives scrounging for food with skimpy paychecks could tune in to the stories of struggling radio heroines who were able to manage in spite of their jobless husbands. This was commercial commiseration. At the opposite end of the emotional spectrum from commiseration was

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“The War of the Worlds,” radio history’s most notorious moment. On October 30, 1938, the night before Halloween, Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater troupe dramatized British novelist H.G. Wells’s novel in the form of an emergency news piece so convincingly that, much to the delight of journalists, listeners were sure that Martians had invaded. As the New York Times had fun explaining in its morning edition the next day, “A wave of mass hysteria seized thousands of radio listeners throughout the nation.” People got treated for “shock and hysteria” after the broadcast “disrupted households, interrupted church services, created traffic jams, and clogged communications systems.” Afflicted listeners evidently missed the usual introduction announcing the on-air play as a Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and Mercury Theater extravaganza: twenty families on one city block rushed into the streets covering their faces with wet handkerchiefs, trying to protect themselves from what they thought was a Martian “gas raid.” Similar scenes occurred from east to west as bugeyed middle Americans scanned the skies for green bug-men to descend and zap away with “death rays.”1 In the ensuing days, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the general public forgave Welles and CBS for scaring them silly, and people got back to enjoying Welles’s better-known series, The Shadow, about an invisible, mysterious crime fighter with the ability to “cloud men’s minds” so they could not see him. As the show promised, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Only the Shadow knows!”2 Other radio programs had a decidedly social-political message. The premier example was the broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin, a Detroit-based priest who seized the example set by evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. But where McPherson demonstrated acceptance of difference, Coughlin preached an anti-Jewish, anti-communist, anti–New Deal message that attracted more listeners than some of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats. Echoing the prejudiced sentiment of many Americans at the time, Coughlin mistakenly blamed the worldwide depression on an international Jewish conspiracy, a cabal of Zionists bent on dominating the world—the same claim that Nazi chancellor Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, were making. Father Coughlin was popular, but in the end, his moral outrage could not unseat Roosevelt when he ran for an unprecedented third term in 1940 and won. The Depression was unbeatable and so was Roosevelt. Ultimately, events overseas put Americans back to work—and back into uniform. In 1931, a Japanese army occupied Manchuria, a northern province of China, and set up a puppet government, partly to keep the Soviets out and partly to maintain control over a key railroad. In 1935, Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, one of the last African nations free from colonial control. One year later, Spain convulsed with a civil war wherein the fascist insurgent Francisco Franco (the ultimate victor in 1939) got support

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AMERICAN STORIES from Hitler while communist partisans nominally behind the democratically elected government received aid from Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union—this was multiparty human chess played by distant dictators eager to try out their latest weapons. In 1937, Japan’s military directly invaded mainland China and brutalized the citizens of Nanking, killing more than 200,000 prisoners of war and civilians and raping at least 80,000 women and girls. That was the start of the Japanese policy of forcing Asian women into prostitution, victims casually referred to as “comfort women.” Meanwhile, since 1933, Adolf Hitler had been hypnotizing Germans with a poisonous mixture of hatred for Jews, military pageantry, pathological nationalism, and demands for the “return” to the Third Reich of all adjacent territories containing large concentrations of ethnic Germans. At the Munich Conference in 1938, prime ministers Neville Chamberlain of Britain and Édouard Daladier of France applied the flimsy doctrine of “appeasement” to Adolf Hitler’s demands for the incorporation into Germany of the resource-rich Sudetenland portion of Czechoslovakia. After plucking the Czech’s military resources, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and on the first day of September 1939, the European chapter of World War II was on. Great Britain and France upheld their commitments to Polish independence by declaring war on Germany. With the rest of the world going mad, from 1935 to 1939 the U.S. Congress passed four Neutrality Acts, which were legal attempts to prevent the United States from being dragged yet again into someone else’s war. The laws were supposed to stop the United States and its citizens from lending money to, sailing on the ships of, or trading with belligerent nations. By the middle of the Depression, a majority of Americans believed that U.S. participation in World War I had been a mistake, largely caused by extensive trade with Great Britain and the billions of dollars that the United States had lent to its allies. As battlefield smoke choked newspaper headlines, Gallup polls revealed that most Americans feverishly supported staying out of the war, even though their sympathies were heavily tilted against Japan and Germany. A vast majority in the United States supported Great Britain and China; however, fear of antagonizing Japan, the complexity of China’s politics, its distance, and a vast cultural gap meant that by July 1940, Americans knew less about the Asian war than they did about the dire circumstances faced by the British. And circumstances were dire. By July 1940, with few exceptions, the Nazis owned Europe from the edge of the Atlantic Ocean to the border of the Soviet Union. In June, France had fallen like a pastry puff, and a joint Belgian-French-British army had barely escaped from the beaches of Dunkirk under cover of squadrons of nimble Spitfires, the only real aeronautical match at that point for the German Messerschmidt 109s, the terror of the air. From July through the end of October

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1940, the German air force, the Luftwaffe, bombarded the airfields and cities of England, especially London, in the Battle of Britain. Hitler intended either to force a British surrender or to prepare the islands for a full invasion. For months, resolute Brits huddled in bomb shelters and slept in subway tunnels, air raid sirens moaning above, churches and office buildings crumbling to rubble under the incessant pounding of up to 1,000 German planes a day. Britain’s smaller Royal Air Force (RAF), with the aid of a new invention called radar, sawed into the waves of German planes in aerial dogfights that finally lifted the full-scale siege on October 31. Pilots from twenty-seven nations flew British fighter planes, including ten from the United States, three of whom died. Nighttime bombing raids on London continued, however, through May 1941—direct attacks on a civilian population, which infuriated the British, who retaliated by bombing German cities. This targeting of civilian centers became a horrifying hallmark of World War II, culminating with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. In 1941, a British painter and poet, Mervyn Peake, described the ruins of London as though the city itself were a woman battered by the recent ordeal: Half masonry, half pain; her head From which the plaster breaks away Like flesh from the rough bone, is turned Upon a neck of stones; her eyes Are lid-less windows of smashed glass.3 By the time the Battle of Britain ended, Hitler’s scheme to invade Britain—first by terrorizing its civilians into near-submission, then by boating his troops the short distance across the English Channel—was no longer possible, British defenses having been much improved despite the attacks. His plans for immediate domination thwarted by undaunted flyboys, Hitler turned to the seas, where wolf packs of Nazi U-boats stalked British supply ships. If he could not invade the British, he would starve them. Foolishly and contrary to the advice he received, Hitler also ordered a wasteful invasion of the Soviet Union beginning in June 1941. Deluded by hallucinations of a perfect future for his Aryan “master race,” Hitler rushed his armies eastward to secure lebensraum—living space—for the thousand-year Reich in spite of a nonaggression pact he had signed with the Soviets in 1939. The invasion necessitated reallocation of forces, including most of the Luftwaffe and 3 million German troops. To survive, both Stalin and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Britain knew they would need the full support of the United States. And the United States showed its support through the manufacture and distribution of guns, ammunition, naval destroyers, airplanes, and other equip-

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AMERICAN STORIES ment essential for stopping Germany. President Roosevelt and like-minded legislators found clever ways of altering, circumventing, or simply voiding the Neutrality Acts, ways of getting needed materiel to international friends. In 1937, Congress allowed Britain and France to buy supplies on a cashand-carry basis: the United States would sell war materials for payments in cash as long as the purchasing nation used its own vessels for transport. But Great Britain ran out of gold by 1941, so there was no cash to precede the carry. On December 29, 1940, knowing that the British were almost broke, Roosevelt spoke into a microphone perched on his desk to tell the citizens of America that he would not take them into war as warriors but that “we must be the great arsenal of democracy.” If the Nazi scourge had its way in the world, Roosevelt cautioned, there would be “no liberty, no religion, no hope.”4 He therefore issued orders for a new program called Lend-Lease, in which Britain, China, and the Soviet Union received military necessities “on loan.” Obviously, the United States would not want back used uniforms or dented guns. The idea of loaning bombs and bullets was a sly lie that officials and civilians could pretend to believe in together. Factories in the United States stepped up production to meet the needs of soon-to-be allies struggling for existence. A bullet fired by a British soldier against a Nazi was a job for an American. By 1942, there was no measurable unemployment in the United States. By 1942, the United States was also at war. Pearl Harbor On December 7, 1941, any remaining pretense of American neutrality in the war was shattered and sunk. For nine years, U.S. officials had watched from a distant perch as the imperial armies of Japan invaded first Manchuria, then China proper, and finally the southeastern coast of Asia, including Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The United States wanted to believe that Japan’s military would stop short of attacking direct U.S. interests or possessions (for instance, the Philippines or Hawaii). Even when Japan sank the USS Panay, a gunboat operating on the Yangtze River, and gunned down its fleeing crewmen on December 12, 1937, the United States accepted the unbelievable explanation that the Japanese pilots thought the Panay was a Chinese vessel, unlikely given the U.S. flag painted on the topside. In July 1940, U.S. leaders shifted from soft criticism to an embargo on items essential to the Japanese war effort—namely oil, gasoline, and metal, all precious to an island empire lacking in most natural resources. Two months later, Japan entered into the Tripartite agreement with Italy and Germany, forming the Axis powers. With the embargo stiffened in July 1941, Japanese leaders decided that an assault on the U.S. Pacific fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, would be worth

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the risk. If it was successful, Japan hoped to buy itself two years to finish its mainland and island conquests, including the erection of enough fortifications to dissuade the United States from retaliating. Japan miscalculated. Almost 3,000 miles from the west coast of the United States sat Hawaii, still officially a territory. These islands were central to U.S. security and regional interests. Tucked into a sheltered inlet on the southern edge of the island of Oahu, Pearl Harbor offered safe berths for the Pacific fleet, an assemblage of new and old destroyers, battleships, and aircraft carriers. Thin clouds floated over Oahu early on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. As it happened, the fleet’s two operational aircraft carriers were out on errands—delivering airplanes and marines to Wake and Midway islands. All the destroyers and battleships were docked, some crewman aboard, others in town sleeping off the previous evening’s fun. In many ways, the island’s army and navy bases were at a level of readiness typical for peacetime, not war. At airfields surrounding the naval base, U.S. Army Air Corps planes sat lined up in neat rows, wingtip to wingtip: easy to guard, easy to bomb. A skimpy total of three planes, out of more than 100, were in the air on patrol duty. Most of the other pilots were still asleep, though two of them, Lieutenants George Welch and Ken Taylor, “survivors of an allnight poker game,” were “awake and arguing about going for a swim” at six that Sunday morning.5 Senior civilian administrators—including President Roosevelt—and military leaders knew a Japanese attack would be coming somewhere soon: the Japanese consulate in London had been ordered to destroy its paperwork and close up shop; on November 22, an intercepted message to the Japanese consul in Washington had stated that if Roosevelt would not accept Japanese plans in Asia by November 29, “things are automatically going to happen.”6 But poor coordination of gathered intelligence, mistaken assumptions about where Japan would strike, and dangerous overconfidence in American readiness made Pearl Harbor a giant, sleeping target. In rough waters 220 miles out at sea, an undetected Japanese flotilla— including six aircraft carriers—stopped. At 6:10 am, with sailors holding onto railings as water sloshed over the decks, a first wave of 183 planes lifted into the sky, a mixture of high-altitude bombers, fighters, and dive-bombers equipped with modified torpedoes appropriate to the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor. Without advanced navigation systems or radar of their own, the Japanese pilots honed in on their destination by following an unlikely beacon: music from a Honolulu radio station. For two weeks U.S. Naval Intelligence had not heard a peep from this particular squadron of the Imperial Japanese Navy, which was worrisome since chatter was normal and the Japanese diplomatic and certain military codes had been broken so that their relays were decipherable. Secretary of State Cordell Hull

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AMERICAN STORIES had been negotiating with special Japanese envoys on and off for weeks, trying to reach an acceptable settlement (concerning Japan’s role in the Pacific) with Emperor Hirohito and Prime Minister Hideki Tojo. On Saturday, December 6, Roosevelt, certain that Japan was preparing an attack somewhere in the Pacific, sent an urgent peace note to Hirohito, concluding, “I am confident that both of us . . . have a sacred duty to restore traditional amity and prevent further death and destruction in the world.”7 But it was too late. On November 26, Roosevelt had issued a plan spelling out the ten things necessary for the U.S. oil and gasoline embargo to end. The demands, like ceasing military operations on the Asian mainland, were unacceptable to Japan’s leaders. So on November 29, with no slackening of the embargo in sight, Japan had initiated military plans for twin attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines. The only remaining security for American forces in Hawaii was the month-old early warning radar sites, one of which, the Opana station, perched at Oahu’s northern edge. Twelve B-17 Flying Fortress bombers en route from California to the Philippines were due to land at Pearl Harbor at any time. That was the most that American military personnel expected to see dropping out of the sky. At 7:06 am, a radar operator at Opana station called the Fighter Information Center to report what looked like at least fifty blips on his screen. Private Joseph McDonald, already on shift for thirteen hours, took the call and informed Lieutenant Kermit Tyler about a “large number of planes” incoming. Unimpressed, the lieutenant suggested that these must be the expected Flying Fortresses. McDonald thought otherwise, especially after talking again to the Opana operator, who indicated that the blips on the screen were closing in fast on Oahu. McDonald relayed this message to Tyler, who, remaining nonchalant, picked up the phone and told the radar man, “Well, don’t worry about it.”8 Half an hour later a single-file line of planes droned overhead. The U.S. Navy and Army installations were clear targets now that the morning’s clouds had parted—pushed out of the way, perhaps, by a kamikaze, a “divine wind.” Private McDonald watched fellow servicemen throw rocks at the Japanese planes as they zoomed south toward their final destination.9 What happened next wrenched Americans out of their collective illusion that peace would last. The Pacific Ocean was no longer a barrier to hide behind; technology had turned it into a puddle that veteran Japanese pilots—trained to despise Americans as impatient and weak—had easily crossed. Attack commander Mitsuo Fuchida’s planes screamed over Opana radar station. Minutes later, at 7:49 am, Fuchida saw that his primary objective, the American aircraft carriers, were nowhere in sight, and he told his telegraph operator to type out “To, To, To”—“charge, charge, charge.” His telegrapher did as ordered, and four minutes later, Fuchida radioed a more inspiring message, “To-ra, To-ra, To-ra”—surprise attack had been achieved.10

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At 7:55 am, December 7, 1941, the first wave of Japanese planes slammed their payloads into the fleet moored at Battleship Row. George Hunter, a gunnery officer aboard the USS West Virginia, remembered, “those yellow bastards were bombing with hairline accuracy.”11 In teams of five, the Japanese divebombers zeroed in on one ship after another, their movements precise, their choreography smooth from practice. Within minutes, the USS Nevada had sustained one torpedo hole and two bomb blasts, but her gunners held steady and shot three Zero planes from the sky. Great clouds of oily smoke billowed from the flaming hulls and decks. Fifteen minutes into the attack, the USS Arizona exploded when a high-altitude bomb sliced down to her lower decks and ignited 1 million pounds of gunpowder. Japanese flyers 10,000 feet high felt the shock wave. Nine minutes later, the Arizona was resting at the bottom of the sea with 1,177 sailors lying dead in its maze of rooms and passageways. (Neither the Arizona nor its sailors have ever been raised; the ship became their grave.) At 8:20 am, the first wave of Japanese attackers regrouped and began their return flight to the waiting carriers. At 8:54, the second wave of 213 planes arrived, strafing and bombing. During the lull, the shocked and wounded on the ground did what they could to recover and prepare for another onslaught. One seventeen-year-old Japanese-American youth named Daniel Inouye (a future U.S. senator), along with other Red Cross volunteers, rushed to the harbor to tend the wounded. After watching dive-bombers blast Wheeler Field, the two sleepless, pokerplaying lieutenants, Taylor and Welch, leaped into a car and sped to their airplanes at nearby Haleiwa airfield. Agile Zero planes, metallic gray with a telltale red dot painted on their wings and fuselage, strafed the two lieutenants along their way to the airstrip. As the second wave of attackers arrived, Taylor and Welch were already airborne and met a pack of dive-bombers midair, gunning down seven planes. Despite heavy antiaircraft fire, the 213 Japanese planes still managed to inflict great damage, sinking one more destroyer and forcing the Nevada to intentionally run ashore rather than going to the bottom. At 10 am, two hours into the mayhem, the second wave of Japanese planes headed back, and the fight was over, for the time being. The Japanese victory at Pearl Harbor was a great mistake because it filled Americans with a resolution to exact vengeance. In those two hours, 2,403 Americans died at Pearl Harbor, sixty-eight of them civilians. Another 1,178 were wounded. But the oil farms on Oahu and the aircraft carriers escaped unscathed, so the turnaround American response could be relatively swift. All but three of the sunken and damaged vessels would ultimately be raised and repaired. The West Virginia was part of the victory fleet at Japan in September 1945 when the treaty was signed ending the last phase of World War II. The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt addressed a

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AMERICAN STORIES united Congress, pointing out that the attacks were planned and premeditated, even though the United States and Japan had been at peace. Simultaneous with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had struck the Philippines. Saying that December 7 was a “date which will live in infamy,” Roosevelt asked that “the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly act by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.”12 Congress answered with a storm of applause, and all but one member voted for war: 388 to 1. The one peace vote belonged to Jeanette Rankin, who had also voted against U.S. entry into the First World War some twenty-four years earlier—Rankin was an unwavering pacifist. On December 11, Adolf Hitler, contrary to the advice of his advisers, and Benito Mussolini issued declarations of war on the United States, unnecessary extensions of the treaty they had with Japan, which only required mutual assistance. World War II had begun. Sacrifice The American mind remembers World War II as a just and necessary war. Given the Nazi genocide of homosexuals, gypsies, and Jews (at least 6 million gassed, starved, and shot) and Japan’s record of atrocities, including its policy of enforced prostitution and the beheading of numerous U.S. GIs taken hostage, Americans’ sacrifices seemed well justified. But the United States did not go to war to end genocide or to free Vietnamese girls from brothels. For example, the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938, when Nazi goons destroyed Jewish-owned businesses and 460 synagogues, killed about 100 Jews, and sent another 30,000 to death camps, were widely reported in U.S. newspapers. Only months later, 907 German-Jewish refugees crowded onto the ship St. Louis and steamed for Cuba, seeking asylum. But both Cuba and the United States refused the passengers entry, and eventually the U.S. Coast Guard “escorted” the St. Louis and its desperate human cargo back into international waters. Having seen the safe lights of Miami, these Jews were sent back to Europe’s darkness, where they “would again face the threat of Nazi extermination.”13 News about Hitler’s storm troopers massacring Jews reached major U.S. newspapers in 1941 when Germany invaded Russia: “Following the advancing German army, Nazi execution squads, known as the Einsatzgruppen, had begun murdering Jews by the hundreds of thousands.”14 However, news of these events induced little more official response in the United States than verbal denunciations. Instead, the United States went to war to preserve a modified world order: a balance of power, security from invasion, and free trade on the seas. Highminded rhetoric was employed to bolster America’s commitment to combating

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fascism, and the rhetoric soon became part of the cause. On January 6, 1941, Roosevelt addressed Congress to outline his vision of “future days.” Roosevelt imagined “four essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Finally, the United States went to war to avenge itself for the terror of Pearl Harbor. Americans of every color, creed, and sex made great sacrifices and noble contributions during the war years. Nearly 500,000 Mexican-Americans enlisted to fight, about one-sixth of the total Mexican population in the United States, even though, in historian Stephen Ambrose’s words, “Mexican-Americans were treated like scum.”15 About 550,000 American Jews served in the military. And 1.5 million African-Americans wore a uniform—the most famous being the Tuskegee Airmen, who flew with valor and skill in campaigns in Italy and Germany, although they and all other black troops in the U.S. Armed Forces were segregated. Uniformed black soldiers were forced to sit in the backs of buses in the South even while German prisoners of war were riding in the front; in Georgia under the governor’s orders, bus drivers were armed with pistols to maintain segregated seating. Some 50,000 Native Americans served in the military, including 4,400 from the Navajo Nation. In the Pacific theater, 420 Navajos served as Marine Corps code talkers, instrumental in the awful battles at Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. The Japanese never discovered that the unbreakable American code was simply Navajo. Jay-sho or “buzzard” became “bomber”; the bombs that fell from the buzzards were called a-ye-shi, “eggs.” The most decorated unit of its size in U.S. history was the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed entirely of Japanese-American men. Though many were drawn from Hawaii’s large Japanese population of 158,000, hundreds of the 442nd enlisted at tables set up in barbed-wired, machine-gun–turreted internment camps where they and their families had been placed by General John DeWitt and President Roosevelt. In February 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the secretary of war to designate restricted domestic “military areas” from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” As it turned out, the people excluded from western Washington, Oregon, Arizona, and California were more than 77,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry and more than 30,000 of their immigrant parents and grandparents who had legally been denied U.S. citizenship by the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted citizenship to “free white” people. Thanks to a “deteriorating military situation” that “created the opportunity for American racists to get their views accepted by the national leadership,”16 more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans passed through relocation centers from 1942 through 1946, and most then went into what Roosevelt himself called “concentration camps.” During the 1910s and 1920s, Oregon, Washington, and California had

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AMERICAN STORIES passed “alien land laws,” which stated that resident aliens could not own property. Because of the government’s ongoing adherence to the Naturalization Act of 1790, first-generation Japanese (issei) residents stayed permanent “aliens” ineligible for citizenship. Recognizing the antagonism of many other Americans to their presence, the issei and nisei (American-born, secondgeneration) Japanese were careful and conspicuous to demonstrate their genuine loyalty. Organizations like the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) upheld patriotism and American values as the guiding virtues of all Japanese-Americans. Most of the Japanese on the West Coast were successful farmers, applying techniques of intensive agriculture learned in land-scarce Japan; Japanese farmers typically produced crop yields of twice the volume that their Anglo counterparts managed. Resentment followed the beanstalks and snap peas of their prosperity, adding to the dislike and mistrust they already inspired. When the war came, resident-alien issei and their nisei children wanted to help, to participate, to sacrifice for their home just as many other Americans were preparing to do. After Pearl Harbor, about 9,500 Japanese men on Hawaii immediately volunteered for armed service, and more than 1,100 lined up for service from inside the concentration camps in early 1943. Eight percent of married women in the United States had a husband serving in the military. Another 350,000 women joined the armed services, of whom 1,000 served in the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), flying every plane in production, delivering bombers from Boeing to deployment, and even pulling targets behind their tails while novice artillery recruits took target practice from the ground. Sixteen percent of working women toiled in war factories, symbolized by their larger-than-life poster sister, Rosie the Riveter, glamorous in her grime. At Boeing, in the Seattle-Everett corridor of Washington State, nearly half the workforce of more than 50,000 was women, who helped to roll out “sixteen B-17s every twenty-four hours.”17 These reallife Rosies waved the flag of democracy every day they rose at 5 am, prepared breakfast for their brood, rode to Boeing on a bus to spend eight to ten hours riveting B-17 Flying Fortresses, and went home to prepare dinner and do all the housework. In 1943, when a new long-range bomber, the B-29 Superfortress, lumbered out of the hangar in Kansas, it quickly developed a reputation for difficult handling and crashing (once, right into a meatpacking plant where everyone aboard died). Two WASPs came to the rescue and flew a B-29 nicknamed “Ladybird” on a “see, it does fly” tour of the country, shaming their airborne brothers into trusting the Boeing behemoths (one of which became the Enola Gay, the plane used to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima). Some 600,000 African-American women worked in defense industries, and another 4,000 were in the military. Black women typically received “the most dangerous jobs in the factories. In airplane assembly plants, black women worked

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in the ‘dope rooms’ filled with poisonous fumes of glue, while white women were in the well-ventilated sewing rooms.”18 In 1944, women planted about 20 million victory gardens whose every onion, carrot, and cabbage provided tabletop calories for the cause. In all these cases, patriotism and opportunity went hand in hand. While women had been asked not to take a job during the 1930s so that their husbands could have one, now they faced government posters and short films admonishing them not only to get a job fast, but to avoid selfish smoke breaks because while they were outside huffing smoke, a “cartridge [could] go through the assembly line uninspected” and lead to an American GI’s death.19 All the beehive activity of war production created more dislocation in American society than had perhaps ever happened. Teenagers in New York City had so little supervision while their fathers trained to fight and their mothers went to work that rates of venereal disease rose by 200 percent in four years. Idaho actually lost population during the early 1940s as its young men and women flooded the coastal states for good jobs. A half million AfricanAmericans left the South and headed to Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, and other cities where segregation was less strict and jobs were more plentiful. Black people in the West often viewed southern African-American arrivals as uncouth and uneducated, responding with disdain to their southern drawl. Kaiser shipyards in seven West Coast locations—the steel-slamming, rapid-assembly creation of construction mogul Henry Kaiser—advertised for new employees nationally, offering to pay transportation costs. At the yards in Portland, which went from nonexistent to employing 100,000 workers nearly overnight, Kaiser promised to have a new home ready on the employee’s arrival. Little did the newcomers know they would be living in Vanport, a cookie-cutter company town whose houses had bedbugs, rodents, thin walls, and no foundations. Still, the workers had coins jingling in the pockets of clean trousers and opportunity in every direction they looked. However, no wartime dislocation was more intense or, as it turns out, unconstitutional than the internment of Japanese-Americans like Kazuko Itoi, who had to prove their loyalty to the nation of their birth—the United States—by submitting to the loss of their homes, their businesses, their friends, and their plans by living for months and sometimes years in remote, desolate, foreboding camps. The Internment of Monica Sone Seattle and Japan are about equidistant from Pearl Harbor. While 158,00 Japanese-descended people lived in Hawaii in 1941 (about one-third of Hawaii’s population), Seattle was home to about 8,000 Japanese and

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AMERICAN STORIES Japanese-Americans, a noticeable fraction of the nearly 120,000 on the West Coast. Monica Sone was born Kazuko Itoi in 1919 in Seattle, where the issei and nisei population centered in the downtown core of steep streets leading directly to Puget Sound, with the snow-capped Olympic Mountains in the distance. As Monica Sone recalled in her 1953 memoir, Nisei Daughter, “The first five years of my life I lived in amoebic bliss . . . at the old Carrollton Hotel on the waterfront of Seattle.”20 After briefly studying law in Japan, her father had come to the States in 1904 to complete his legal education, but he found the costs too high, so he cooked food on coastal ships, “toiled stubbornly in the heat of the potato fields of Yakima,” and eventually ran a dry-cleaning shop. Almost fifteen years after his arrival and now part of the lively Japanese community of Seattle, the man Sone simply referred to as “Father” was overjoyed to hear of an incoming boat full of eligible young Japanese women. Seventeen-year-old Benko disembarked with her two sisters, all looking “like exotic tropical butterflies” in silk kimonos of royal purple, plum, and blue. Before long, Mother and Father were married and had saved enough to buy the Carrollton, which they ran together “a stone’s throw from the bustling waterfront and the noisy railroad tracks.” Tattooed teamsters, marching Salvation Army formations bugling “Hallelujah” to the poor, and burlesque women with “carefully powdered wrinkles” added to the hubbub of the neighborhood. With a first name meaning “peace” and a second name borrowed from Saint Augustine’s mother, Kazuko Monica Itoi had nearly free run of the grand old hotel, which catered first to army doughboys when the Itois bought it in 1918 and then to every downtown’s collection of the odd and unnoticed. Until 1942, when the Itois and all their Japanese friends were ordered to prepare for evacuation to a relocation center, Kazuko’s days were a jumble of Anglo and Asiatic, her parents having blended American and Japanese traditions into a melting pot of hot dogs, hamburgers, and lacquered tea sets. Sacks of rice and jugs of soy sauce were lined up in the cupboards next to canisters of flour, sugar, and coffee; an “Oriental abacus board” used for keeping the books resting underneath a “somber picture of Christ’s face.” For playmates, Kazuko and her siblings romped with other nisei children and also with “men like Sam, Joe, Peter and Montana, who worked for Father,” a rough collection of good men who helped police the hotel. The bliss of earliest childhood was shattered the day Kazuko’s mother announced that Kazuko would “attend Japanese school after grammar school every day.” Monica Sone thought back to that moment in the kitchen: “Terrible, terrible, terrible! So that’s what it meant to be a Japanese—to lose my afternoon play for hours! I fiercely resented this sudden intrusion of my blood into my affairs.” Like many other children of color in America’s past, Sone grew up thinking of herself as “Yankee,” not as somehow different, not as Japanese-

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American. Her parents’ “almond eyes” had been no different than “one person’s being red-haired and another black.” She did not understand how she could be a “Yankee and Japanese at the same time. It was like being born with two heads.” To her “it sounded freakish and a lot of trouble.” And trouble it would be. From then on, what black historian W.E.B. DuBois called the “double-consciousness of race” followed Monica Sone wherever she went. In the late 1920s, when she was about ten years old, a family steamship trip to far-off Japan taught her that she was not considered fully Japanese by the people of Japan (due to her alien, comparatively boyish habits like fist fighting), any more than she was considered fully American by many Americans. Despite her mostly idyllic childhood, Monica Sone felt the occasional sting of anti-Japanese bigotry, as when her family tried to rent a house on Alki beach in Seattle and were told to their faces, “I’m sorry, but we don’t want Japs around here.” To Monica, that was like “a sharp, stinging slap.” However, in every case of this sort, her parents stiffened their shoulders, marshaled their pride, and told their children, “there are people like that in this world. We have to bear it . . . when you are older, it won’t hurt quite as much. You’ll be stronger.” After the bombing of Pearl Harbor and after Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, some German- and Italian-Americans came under suspicion of disloyalty, particularly leading members of groups like the German American Bund, a right-wing group that held rallies in Madison Square Garden with portraits of their idols swaying overhead: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Adolf Hitler. During the war, more than 250 Italian and 1,300 German “enemy aliens” were incarcerated, as were more than 1,000 Japanese from Hawaii. In these cases, however, it was not the detainees’ ancestry or nationality alone that caused their jailing, and each detainee’s case had received an individual review. But the West Coast Japanese were interned en masse with no individual screening. Their civil liberties were stripped away. Japanese-Americans “looked like the enemy” and could be “wiped off the map”—as General DeWitt put it—without fear of ruining an economy they were only a small, though noticeable, part of; in Hawaii, massive relocation would have devastated the economy and wrecked the civil defense network, of which the Japanese population was a sturdy and trustworthy part, but on the Coast, Japanese farmers could plausibly be replaced with MexicanAmerican braceros. The pervasive attitude that “a Jap is a Jap”—also uttered by DeWitt—underwrote the feelings of California’s Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association, which frankly admitted in the May 1942 Saturday Evening Post, “We’ve been charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do. It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown man. . . . If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we’d never miss them in two weeks.”21

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AMERICAN STORIES For Monica Sone, now twenty two years old, December 7, 1941, started an intensified ordeal of racial awareness, first at a fairgrounds in Washington and then amid the winter freeze and summer melt of Camp Minidoka in Idaho, one of ten internment camps that the U.S. government established from rural Idaho to rural Arkansas. The Itois were in church practicing Handel’s Messiah when the radio brought news of Pearl Harbor. Kazuko could feel herself “shrinking inwardly” from her “Japanese blood, the blood of an enemy.” With oracular presentiment, she knew that being “American by birthright” would not help her “escape the consequences of this unhappy war.” During the next six months, she was cast out of her home, stuck into the “gray, glutinous mud” of Puyallup, Washington’s county fairgrounds (renamed “Camp Harmony”), watched intently from high towers by guards armed with tommy guns, and confused with thoughts of her predicament: “What was I doing behind a fence like a criminal? If there were accusations to be made, why hadn’t I been given a fair trial? Maybe I wasn’t considered an American anymore. My citizenship wasn’t real. . . . Of one thing I was sure. The wire fence was real.” The next few months were a jostled settling in: nailing together two-by-four furniture; squeezing into cramped quarters in the wet slop of the fairgrounds, barbed wire fences ringing her steps; learning to overcome modesty in public bathrooms not built for anonymity; working for the camp itself, keeping track of the internees’ pay stubs (almost every adult got a job that paid a pittance); and receiving an unexpected visit from one of her father’s hotel employees, Joe Subovitch, who dropped by with nuts and candy bars. From May through August the Itois lived in Camp Harmony’s barracks with 10,000 other internees. JapaneseAmerican children were even taken out of orphanages and placed into relocation centers like Harmony. These people had been given bare weeks to wrap up their affairs at home, including selling their worldy possessions—often entire houses, businesses, and furnishings—on the cheap: according to author Robert Asahina, “The losses would be equivalent to about $6.4 billion in current dollars.”22 May’s “quiet hysteria” turned into “one steamy morning” in August when aged railroad cars bore the Itois and their camp fellows to Camp Minidoka in the middle of semiarid Idaho. They were greeted by jackrabbits and a dust storm, the kind that had driven tens of thousands of Okies out of the country’s barren middle ten years before. Compared to the temperate shores of western Washington, Idaho’s 110-degree sun made Sone feel like “a walking Southern fried chicken.” Extra-constitutional as these camps were, they were not totally lacking in amenities. Schools were started; mess halls had enough food (more food in the Rowher, Arkansas, camp than the local residents claimed to have); victory gardens were planted; but old ways of living were largely overthrown. Friends became family, and family never felt the same. Previous traditions of eating dinners together gave way to teens at their tables, adults at theirs. Fathers’

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traditional authority was eroded because they made no money, felt little pride, and were often worn out at advanced ages by the struggle against unusual and trying circumstances. And though all Japanese-Americans in the camps had originally been labeled 4-C by the military, “enemy aliens,” that decision was reversed in early 1943 when President Roosevelt decided that enlisting JapaneseAmerican men could combat German and Japanese propaganda that depicted the United States as a land inhabited by hypocritical racists. Twenty-two percent of the 21,000 age-eligible men in the camps refused to consider enlisting, the notion seeming preposterous in light of their current circumstances. Hundreds of others signed up after debating which choice would be most just, which choice would better serve the country and the individual. Monica Sone heard the arguments, but they affected her less than the War Relocation Authority’s decision, in early 1943, to begin releasing FBI-cleared internees back into the United States, either to work or to go to school. By 1945, there were fewer than 80,000 residents still in the camps, and Monica was one of those who had been freed. She was first sent to work for a dentist in Chicago. But the dentist had a problem with the way “inferior people” worked, so she decided to find a less bigoted boss. Better yet, she enrolled at Wendell College in Indiana and worked toward a PhD in psychology. In her second year of studies, Sone returned to Minidoka to visit her parents. The place was “quiet and ghostly,” the young people having gone to war or work. As she was leaving to go back to college, her mother said, “We felt terribly bad about being your Japanese parents,” as though they had burdened their children with birth. Sone’s reply not only soothed her mother’s feelings but evidenced the transformation she had made during the whole ordeal: “No, don’t say those things, Mama, please. If only you knew how much I have changed about being a Nisei. It wasn’t such a tragedy. I don’t resent my Japanese blood anymore. I’m proud of it, in fact, because of you and the Issei who’ve struggled so much for us. It’s really nice to be born into two cultures, like getting a real bargain in life, two for the price of one.” Kazuko Monica Itoi Sone’s sacrifices were not a matter of choice, and in no way did her internment help the United States win the war. While Sone did not legally challenge her incarceration, four other Japanese-Americans resisted one part or another of the internment process and had their grievances heard before the Supreme Court (in three instances as the final stop in an appeals process). The court upheld Minoru Yasui’s conviction (June 1943) for violating curfew; upheld Gordon Hirabayashi’s conviction (June 1943) for both breaking curfew and not reporting for relocation; and upheld Fred Korematsu’s conviction (December, 1944) for refusing to evacuate a restricted area. But the Supreme Court did not uphold the conviction of the one woman whose case they heard, Mitsuye Endo, decided on the same day in December 1944 that they ruled on

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AMERICAN STORIES Korematsu’s case. In the case of Endo, the Supreme Court decided that because she was a loyal citizen, she could no longer be held against her will. Endo’s release reopened the West Coast to Japanese-Americans and suggested that exclusion from military areas had been acceptable but incarceration no longer was. In 1982, the congressionally appointed Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians found that “not a single documented act of espionage, sabotage or fifth column activity was committed by an American citizen of Japanese ancestry or by a resident Japanese alien on the West Coast.”23 Then in 1984—because of evidence that demonstrated the military had knowingly hid information from, lied to, and misled the Supreme Court during the 1940s—a federal judge expunged Fred Korematsu’s 1944 conviction. The same stoic determination to prove their loyalty and decency that enabled more than 110,000 wrongfully interned Japanese-Americans to face their incarceration with grace also enabled them to return to their old homes or to new ones and integrate positively into the swell of larger community life. Historian Howard Droker suggests that “the most important element in the preservation of civic peace” when the Japanese-Americans internees were resettled back in Seattle “was the demeanor of the Japanese themselves: their acceptance of evacuation, their suppression of bitterness, and their quiet determination to rebuild their lives,”24 all attitudes demonstrated by Monica Sone. Sergeant E.B. Sledge and Shakespeare: “What a piece of work is a man” With the exception of ships being sunk off the coasts by Axis U-boats, the occasional shelling from Japanese submarines, and a Japanese incendiary balloon that landed in Oregon and killed two picnickers, the land of the United States never underwent invasion or material harm during the war other than at Pearl Harbor. However, Americans suffered the loss of 405,000 dead men and women who served overseas in the armed forces during some of the worst fighting the planet has ever known. President Roosevelt explained America’s participation as a clash of civilizations: democracy against tyranny, truth against lies, and freedom against slavery. “Democracy’s fight against world conquest,” Roosevelt called it.25 Democracy may offer a good chance at safeguarding individual liberty and freedom, but democracy is no guarantee against human frailties, particularly when the democratic process of decision making is muddled by fear and animosity. With each branch of government and the citizenry playing their parts, dislike and mistrust led to the mass incarceration of 110,000 JapaneseAmericans, a choice upheld three times during the war by the Supreme Court when a single Japanese man from each one of the West Coast states challenged relocation. And according to most accounts, the fighting in the Pacific was

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unparalleled for the atrocities and basic meanness evidenced by both Japanese and American forces. The Japanese tortured prisoners of war. American soldiers lopped off ears from dead “Japs” and knocked out their gold teeth to keep as souvenirs. In an interview some forty years after the end of the war, Sergeant E.B. Sledge recalled the state of mind that overcame American forces in the jungle fighting of the Pacific: “We had all become hardened. We were out there, human beings, the most highly developed form of life on earth, fighting each other like wild animals.”26 If the human spirit faces its greatest struggles under duress—torn by conflicting impulses to ravage and yet to preserve—war may be the crowning challenge. In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Hamlet muses about man’s potential: “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!” Where Abraham Lincoln had called on his countrymen to express “the better angels of our nature”; where E.B. Sledge found himself surrounded by a uniformed company of “wild animals” brought low by a “hatred toward the Japanese”; and where Hamlet ends his musing about human nobility by characterizing man as “this quintessence of dust”; a World War II veteran named Robert Lekachman savored a different, guileless remembrance of the war generation: “It was the last time that most Americans thought they were innocent and good, without qualifications.”27 There may be no good way to fight a war. There may be only trying to do good in an endeavor that tugs everyone’s soul toward the abyss. When Americans went to war in 1941, many of them meant to do good, and many of them did. Notes 1. “Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact: Many Flee Homes to Escape ‘Gas Raid’” New York Times, October 31, 1938, 1. 2. Jim Harmon, The Great Radio Heroes (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), 39, 3. 3. Mervyn Peake, Shapes and Sounds (London: Village, 1974), 1. 4. Franklin D. Roosevelt and J.B.S. Hardman, Rendezvous With Destiny: Addresses and Opinions of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2005), 170, 167. 5. Harry A. Gailey, War in the Pacific: From Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1995), 78. 6. Carl Smith, Pearl Harbor 1941: The Day of Infamy (University Park, IL: Osprey, 2001), 27. 7. Roosevelt and Hardman, Rendezvous With Destiny, 185. 8. Walter Lord, Day of Infamy, 60th Anniversary: The Classic Account of the Bombing of Pearl Harbor (New York: Henry Holt, 1985), 43–45. 9. An oral-history retelling of Private McDonald’s experiences can be found at www. pearlharbor.org/eyewitnesses/mcdonald-account.asp, where McDonald’s son, George, recounts the detail about rocks being thrown at the low-flying Japanese planes.

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AMERICAN STORIES 10. Stanley Weintraub, Long Day’s Journey Into War: December 7, 1941 (New York: Truman Talley, 1991), 233–234; and Gordon W. Prange, Donald M. Goldstein, and Katherine V. Dillon, Dec. 7 1941: The Day the Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 109–110. 11. The Perilous Fight: America’s World War II in Color, “Journal of George Macartney Hunter,” Seattle: KCTS Television, 2003, www.pbs.org/perilousfight/

battlefield/pearl_harbor/letters/.

12. “Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War Against Japan,” December 8, 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt Digital Archives, www.fdrlibrary.marist. edu/oddec7.html. 13. Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), 198. 14. Takaki, Double Victory, 200. 15. Stephen Ambrose, To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 95. 16. Roger Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 46. 17. Carlos Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 411. 18. Elaine Tyler May, “Pushing the Limits: 1940–1961,” in Nancy F. Cott, ed., No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 482. 19. Gail Collins, America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 372. 20. All quotations pertaining to Monica Sone’s life were taken—with gracious permission from the author—from Monica Sone, Nisei Daughter (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979). 21. Takaki, Double Victory, 147, 148, 149. 22. Robert Asahina, Just Americans: How Japanese Americans Won a War at Home and Abroad (New York: Gotham, 2006), 26. 23. Tetsuden Kashima, foreword, Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Seattle: Civil Liberties Public Education Fund and the University of Washington Press, 1997), 457. 24. Howard Droker, “Seattle Race Relations During the Second World War,” in Experiences in a Promised Land: Essays in Pacific Northwest History, ed., G. Thomas Edwards and Carlos Schwantes (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986), 367. 25. Quoted in Douglas Brinkley, ed., Franklin Roosevelt, “The Arsenal of Democracy, December 1940,” World War II The Axis Assault, 1939–1942: The Documents, Speeches, Diaries, and Newspapers Accounts That Defined World War II (New York: Times Books, 2003), 185. 26. Studs Terkel, The Good War: An Oral History of World War II (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 64. 27. Terkel, Good War, 67.

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Allied commander U.S. general Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1944. (AFP/Getty Images)

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AMERICAN STORIES James Doolittle Gives America Hope If they could have seen the future, the soldiers of Hitler’s army, the Wehrmacht, would have thrown down their machine guns and flamethrowers and surrendered in goose-stepping unison the minute Hitler declared war on the United States. If they could have seen the future, the Japanese would have skipped bombing Pearl Harbor, thereby avoiding the Bataan Death March in the Philippines, the firebombing of Tokyo, and the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If he could have seen the future, Allied Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower might have rushed his troops into Berlin in April 1945 rather than allowing the Soviet army to get there first. Instead the Wehrmacht occupied more than fifteen nations, slaughtered more than 15 million civilians and soldiers, and continued to fight even through the last cold winter of 1944–1945, when it equipped sixteen-year-olds to face Allied armies pounding in from east and west. The Wehrmacht’s last stand following the D-day invasion of Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944, enabled Nazi executioners at Treblinka, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and other death camps to kill more than half a million Jews during those last six months of 1944 alone: a hellish near-realization of the “Final Solution” that had sprung from the diseased imaginations of SS leader Heinrich Himmler and his deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, in a Berlin suburb called Wannsee in January 1942. Before Stalin’s Red Army liberated Auschwitz in January 1945, doctors Josef Mengele and Carl Clauberg erased the boundaries of cruelty in experiments that subjected Jewish and Gypsy men, women, and children to dehydration, starvation, chemical burns, sterilization without anesthetics, injection with tetanus and malaria, and all kinds of psychological tests, including the study of the brains of dead children who had been informed prior to execution that they were slated to die. Common foot soldiers of the Wehrmacht sent home grinning photographs of themselves standing proudly over the limp bodies of just-murdered Jews.1 Even after the death camps were liberated by Allied soldiers who saw living skeletons lying in mute anguish, the United States showed mercy to the citizens of West Germany and poured millions of dollars into the economy to rebuild what had been lost. Postwar Europe’s resurrection happened thanks to the manna of American money judiciously spent. The punitive reparation payments foisted onto Germany as part of the peace settlement after World War I were mostly discarded in 1945 in favor of making Western European democracies a stable barrier against Soviet-style communism looming to the east. In the Pacific in December 1941, Japanese forces stormed General Douglas MacArthur’s joint American-Filipino army the day after Pearl Harbor. Two weeks later, MacArthur ordered his forces to retreat from the capital of Manila

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WORLD WAR II and to fortify themselves in the forested mountains of the Bataan Peninsula. Facing starvation and no prospect of reinforcements—and with MacArthur gone in March 1942 to Australia—a U.S. general surrendered on April 9. The Japanese lost no opportunity to torture and humiliate their captives on what has become known as the Bataan Death March. After fourteen days and ninety mosquito-filled miles, nearly 20,000 American and Filipino soldiers were dead from disease, physical abuse, and lack of food and water. A few captives were crucified with bayonets, most had their possessions stolen, and all had to endure hours in the blazing sun sitting next to occasional supplies of potable water they were not allowed to touch. By June 1942, Japanese control over the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—a jelly-filled euphemism for “empire”—seemed certain. Dutch oil reserves in Indonesia, rubber plantations in Vietnam, and the unlimited resources of China’s coast were being plundered daily. All that remained was to capture Australia, defeat a few scraggly European, American, Chinese, and Indian armies, and rule. Japan was winning its war. However, a skinny pilot with a comic-book name, Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, ignored the odds when on April 18 he led sixteen twin-engine B-25 bombers off the wooden deck of the carrier Hornet, some 600 miles from the coast of Honshu, Japan’s main island. The Hornet group had been spotted and could risk going no closer. The Doolittle bombs did more damage to Japan in American newspapers than they did to the industrial buildings of Tokyo, Kobe, and Nagoya: the risky raid thrilled a dispirited American public. With the Hornet anchored too far away for a round-trip, Doolittle buzzed his squadron into China, where fifteen of the planes—each staffed by volunteers—crashlanded. The last plane made it into Russian territory. Japanese forces captured eight of the airmen, executing three of them. After receiving help from Chinese civilians (and after Doolittle parachuted into a pile of manure, making for a squishy but gentle reunion with the ground), he and the rest of his men made it back to the States for further action. Rather than facing court-martial for losing sixteen new bombers, James Doolittle returned to a hero’s welcome, including commendation by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a promotion. After the devastating losses at Pearl Harbor and the humiliating defeat in the Philippines, the United States suddenly had reason to celebrate. The war could be taken directly to Japan, if only in the air. What was more, partly in response to the Doolittle raid, Japanese commanders diverted their naval fleet to the Coral Sea (near Australia) in May and to Midway Island in June, in order to better position themselves for an attack on Australia and to knock out U.S. aircraft carrier groups, which were obviously capable of doing more harm to Japan than Japan had thought possible. Escorted by destroyers, cruisers, and refueling tankers, the carriers Lexing-

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AMERICAN STORIES ton and Concord motored into the Coral Sea in the first days of May, looking for prey. Japanese landing forces were preparing to take Port Moresby, New Guinea, a move that could have isolated Australia. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto—the eight-fingered, Harvard-educated tactician who had devised the raid on Pearl Harbor—now had the opportunity to finish what he had missed the previous December when the Lexington and Concord evaded his dive-bombers. But U.S. naval intelligence gave a crucial edge to U.S. forces. Admiral Chester Nimitz knew just where to send his fleet, while Yamamoto could only guess where trouble might be waiting. American pilots with outdated airplanes held the future in their gloved hands, waiting for the order to brave death and save democracy. On May 7 and 8, the tide of war in the Pacific started to change in America’s favor. With the fleets as little as seventy miles apart, repeated waves of fighter planes, dive-bombers, and high-altitude bombers engaged. When the chaos ended, one small Japanese carrier and one American—the Lexington—had been sunk, along with more than thirty planes each and a batch of escort ships. Technically the American fleet suffered greater losses of tonnage, but Yamamoto called off his planned assault on Port Moresby. The Japanese advance stopped at the Coral Sea. If the Battle of the Coral Sea was a tipping point, the Battle of Midway on June 4, 1942, was a disastrous change of tides for Yamamoto. Still with a numerical advantage in planes and ships, he set his sights again on Hawaii. Sitting to the west of Hawaii proper, the strategic jewel of Midway atoll hosted the westernmost outpost of the U.S. Navy along with lounging palm trees and a species of fluffy albatross known as gooney birds. Once again supplied with advanced knowledge of the massive Japanese armada approaching from three directions, Admiral Nimitz prepped his defenses with a string of submarines, aircraft carriers, and a complement of marines. The marines’ day ignited at 6:15 am when they did their dying best to arrest the onslaught of bombers whose escort of Zero planes shredded the marines in their inadequate airships. The gooney birds’ day started at 6:30 am when Japanese bombs rocked the few square miles of island with shudders and explosions. What seemed to be the start of another Japanese victory quickly turned into a rout. Counterstrikes from the still operational airstrips and U.S. carriers resulted in the loss of four Japanese carriers. Down with its carriers went the last vestiges of Japan’s hope to scare the United States into a forced settlement recognizing Japanese hegemony in the Pacific. Other than lives, there was nothing the United States could not replace. North America had been transformed into a three-thousand-mile–wide factory that spit out 300,000 airplanes and 77,000 seaworthy vessels in only four years. The Battle of Midway ensured American naval supremacy in the Pacific, but to win the war, Japanese ground forces would have to be scoured from the

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WORLD WAR II jungles of the Philippines, Burma, Wake Island, and all the other places they had occupied in their brief, furious advance during the previous few months. The worst fighting of the war in the Pacific was yet to come at places like Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. The War in Europe, 1941–1943 More than any other war previously fought, World War II pitted men against machines. Warriors have always sought some claw or club to drub an enemy, maximizing damage to the other and minimizing damage to themselves. For more than 2,000 years they had used swords, clubs, spears, and arrows. In only a few generations, inventors and their killing customers had leapfrogged from one-ball-a-minute smoothbore muskets to repeat-action, rifle-barreled guns to belt-fed machine guns spitting out thousands of bullets every minute; from horseback to the insides of steel tanks belching out explosive rounds; from sailing boats firing lumpy cannon balls to submarines launching explosive torpedoes; from the ground to the air where flying coffins dropped lethal explosives by the hundreds of pounds. Men had covered themselves in metal and were tearing through lines of fortifications like X-rays through bone. Machines had not replaced men, however. On every front of the war, millions of soldiers faced each other, and final victory depended on their willingness to die and kill. Six months after Hitler’s June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, there were 3 million dead Russians and 800,000 German casualties. And winter had not even joined the war yet, a winter of minus-fifty-degreeFahrenheit days, a winter that froze the Luftwaffe into immobility but gave 10 million acclimated Soviet workers time to move whole airplane factories one block at a time into the Ural Mountains. By spring 1942, even though Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa had initially demolished 5,000 Soviet airplanes, the Soviet proletariat was out-producing the fabled German factories and enabling the resigned Russian people to fight back with air support. In less than a year, the Soviet Union built 41,000 planes and trained 131,000 pilots. And at Stalingrad during the winter of 1942–1943, misery and sacrifice were redefined by the outnumbered Soviet defenders—including civilians—who proved more adept at starving and shivering than the million German, Hungarian, and Bulgarian invaders of the Wehrmacht. The Soviets resisted because the only alternative was certain death and enslavement. Civilian women and men picked up dead soldiers’ guns and held on to every basement, every bit of rubble, every street and alleyway. Frightening stories had already spread to the embattled populace about Nazi atrocities in conquered territory. Hitler’s army, however, fought because the führer demanded fighting of them on pain of execution. The little madman’s

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AMERICAN STORIES decree was “Surrender is forbidden”; this hard edict followed on the heels of his cold commentary months earlier concerning the high numbers of deaths in his officer corps: “Why, that’s what the young gentlemen are there for.” On January 31, 1943, trapped in the city he had stormed, German field marshal Friedrich Paulus and 90,000 remaining Wehrmacht soldiers surrendered to Soviet general Georgy Zhukov. Almost 500,000 Soviet people had died, civilians and soldiers. In their passing they had saved Mother Russia. Hitler would never again be able to attack effectively on the eastern front. The strategies and grandiose designs of Hitler, Hirohito, and Mussolini were countered and checked by the Allied leaders Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt. While Hitler saluted himself and sent his soldiers to the slaughterhouse with no more regard for their lives than an amateur chess player has for his pawns (even though he had undergone the gore of World War I trenches), Churchill and Roosevelt lamented the crumpled youth of America and the British Commonwealth. The prime minister and the president had not wanted this war, though both had seen it coming much earlier than their countrymen. And they had to meld two armies, two navies, and two air forces into one effective command. Stalin did not care whom they chose for supreme commander of forces on the western front so long as they chose someone who would distract the Nazis from his Soviet doorstep. But the two democracies had joined forces with the paranoiac Stalin out of necessity only, and the old fox Churchill felt with clairvoyant certainty that, if mishandled, the Allied defeat of Hitler would lead to a wounded Soviet-Russian bear occupying Europe with the same brutality inflicted by the Nazis. During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin had forced his people to industrialize and to collectivize their farms; anyone who resisted or whom Stalin’s vast network of informers thought might resist was labeled a traitor and sent to the labor camps—the death camps—of the gulag. Millions died. The officer corps had been bled of its best and ablest. Stalin was not a man that Roosevelt or Churchill trusted, other than to fight back against Hitler. That they could count on. Winston Churchill plugged his brilliant mouth with Havana cigars, scotch, tea, and champagne morning to night while churning out a stream of dictation to secretaries who struggled to gulp enough coffee to write down the speeches, books, and essays that Churchill orated from bed, bath, and garden. A daring soldier in his ambitious youth who had traveled into South Africa during the Boer War of 1899 as a journalist only to be captured and then to escape with a price on his head, Churchill had gone on to serve as a naval leader during World War I, the chancellor of the exchequer (the second most important job in British government), a member of the House of Commons, a popular historian, and the most far-sighted—and therefore disliked—man in England. During the 1930s, Churchill demanded that England arm itself for a war that

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WORLD WAR II Hitler would surely make. Next to no one agreed with him. On one occasion in 1939, prior to the Nazi blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) into Poland, Churchill attended a party thrown by Lady Astor, a woman with pro-German sentiments who detested Churchill’s anti-Nazi pessimism. While uncomfortably close in the coffee line, Lady Astor spat out a curse at Churchill: “If I were your wife I would put poison in your coffee.” Unfazed as usual, Churchill replied, “Nancy, if I were your husband, I’d drink it.”2 Willing to offend those with whom he disagreed, Winston Churchill knew how to court those whom he needed. His people’s only chance for survival sat 3,000 miles away in the White House. Roosevelt and Churchill met for the first time early in 1941 on a naval vessel in the North Atlantic, where they instantly minted a lasting respect and friendship. Agreeing to a set of idealistic principles under which their democracies would fight—the Atlantic Charter—all Churchill needed was for the rest of America to see as clearly as Roosevelt. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor cleared America’s vision, and Churchill had his ally: “We are all in the same boat now,” the prime minister happily told the president. The English-speaking armies of the United States and the British Commonwealth (including Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa) would need one man at the helm to craft a plan for victory. Dwight David Eisenhower became that man. Dwight D. Eisenhower Dwight D. Eisenhower—known as “Ike” while both a grade-school tyke and as president of the United States—was born poor and died bald. In between, he traveled the world on Uncle Sam’s dollar, earned Winston Churchill’s support, led the D-day invasion of France in June 1944, and served two terms as president. Born in 1890, Ike lived until he was seven in a rundown shack in Abilene, Kansas, once home to Wild Bill Hickok and thirsty teams of cowboys who visited Abilene as the final stop on the Chisholm Trail. Ike could still see remnants of Abilene’s frontier past all around him, and though he remained proud of his origins throughout his life, he wanted something more than farm labor or the small prospects of small-town America. As a kid, Ike scrapped often enough with his five brothers to prepare for the dash and crash of football, his favorite pastime other than baseball and history books, all of which shared a common ingredient: tactics. By 1911, with a good enough head on his shoulders to impress the right people, he got admitted to West Point, the appropriate place for a sports-loving history buff. Although few if any people at the military academy would have known it at the time, West Point provided a foundation for Dwight Eisenhower’s rise to the presidency. Ike the cadet did better running touchdowns and racking

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AMERICAN STORIES up demerits than following the strict standards of a spit-and-polish war college. Not long after getting knocked aside by the Olympic gold-medallist (and former Carlisle Indian School student) Jim Thorpe in an embarrassing tackle attempt, Ike busted his knee well enough that a sports career was out. So he finished his time at West Point coaching the junior varsity team and dreaming up some way to patch together a military career with a bum knee and uninspired grades. Ike’s answer was to sign up for the one assignment most officer candidates were only too happy to bypass: the infantry. For a junior officer eager to prove himself, there was no better opportunity than the Great War, which President Wilson had promised to stay out of, but into which he led the nation anyway. Posted to a base in Texas rather than to the Philippines as he had requested, Eisenhower continued to snatch fortune from failure. After marrying Mamie Doud in 1916, he found out that tanks rather than the fields of Flanders were his next assignment—the second time a direct request had been denied. At Camp Colt in Pennsylvania, he puzzled out every tactical advantage the tank could offer and demonstrated his penchant for organizing men and lifting their morale. With no actual tanks on base, Ike got the men to make believe with trucks. When a posting for European duty did arrive, the departure date fell within a week of Armistice Day. Now nearly thirty years old and with a blessed peace stretching into the foreseeable distance, Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Eisenhower had nothing to do. Peace was good for health and bad for promotion. The size of the army plummeted to 120,000, and those who did not get decommissioned often got demoted. Eisenhower flanked a loss in pay by signing up for a genuinely unique chance: jangling across country (at about six miles an hour, it turned out) as part of a military convoy designed to test the nascent federal highway system. After touring the nation more slowly than most people had since sweating along the Oregon Trail, Eisenhower served at the tank school at Camp Meade, Maryland; in Panama, where he studied military theory in the sweltering jungle environment of the great canal; at Fort Leavenworth’s General Staff School, “the seminary for future generals,” in Kansas;3 and in Paris. Paris worked out serendipitously, like all his other unwanted assignments. Fifteen years later, as the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force chasing after German panzer divisions, Eisenhower could refer back to the mental map of the French countryside he had plotted in 1928.4 Through these years Eisenhower made important military contacts, including the brash Colonel George S. Patton; an influential mentor, General Fox Conner; and George C. Marshall, later army chief of staff during World War II. Returning from Europe to an isolationist nation with a skeleton army, Eisenhower threw his considerable intelligence serving under Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur, the same egomaniac who had led the impromptu

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WORLD WAR II raid on the Bonus Army’s camp at Anacostia flats in 1932. When MacArthur headed for the Philippines to set the military in order, he demanded that the Eisenhowers go along. Mamie unhappily recalled the melting days in Panama, but the crew of servants at their home in Manila soon reconciled her to the third-world posting. Ike, on the other hand, had to suffer MacArthur’s pompous circus act as Philippine president Manuel Quezon’s field marshal, ordering lavish parades for a Filipino military that would end up insufficient to stop the Japanese invasion of 1941. During the 1936 presidential election, Eisenhower and MacArthur disagreed about which candidate was sure to win—Roosevelt or Alf Landon. MacArthur called Eisenhower’s pro-Roosevelt prediction “stupidity,” and Eisenhower went home and wrote in his diary, “Oh hell.”5 Unable to take as much of MacArthur as MacArthur could take of himself, Eisenhower got reassigned stateside in 1940—the first time one of his requests was granted. Now fifty years old, Eisenhower was just about past the point at which he could hope for anything more than a good desk job, where a general’s star would be as meaningful on a coffee cup as on a helmet. But during a massive battle simulation, he led a daring infantry assault on a tank corps and got his name (usually misspelled, once as Lieut. Colonel D.D. Ersenbeing6) splashed all over the front pages of national newspapers. The timing could not have been more fortuitous. Public adulation and the army’s need for a handsome hero got him posted to Fort Houston in Texas—sporting a brigadier general’s single star. Eisenhower heard word of Pearl Harbor from a major who woke him from a late morning nap. America was at war. Ike’s patience had paid off. The Liberation of North Africa and Italy Adolf Hitler was amazingly inept. He could have had most of what he wanted had he not tried to take more than he could have. As late as 1943, the German military was probably the best in the world. People who fought against it tended to say so. Its weapons were advanced (including prototype jet engine fighter planes and rockets). Its soldiers had extensive combat experience and worked well together. Collaborators aided the Third Reich in every country it took over. In France, for example, only the northern half of the country was occupied in 1940 because southern France ended up under the administration of the Vichy government headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, a World War I veteran who willingly went along with Nazi overlordship in order to spare the southern portion of his nation more direct meddling by Hitler’s most senior henchmen. But Hitler could not stop, would not stop. He invaded the Soviet Union and drained his resources to the snapping point. He invaded Egypt,

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AMERICAN STORIES wanting the Suez Canal and its direct route to Middle East oil. He signed a treaty with Mussolini, which meant that every mistake the Italians made (which were many) had to be cleaned up by yet more German troops. And stupidest of all, Hitler kept attacking the British, which meant he was sure to drag the United States into the war. If Hitler had stopped at France without attacking Britain and the Soviets, he quite likely could have kept more than half of Europe under his sick thumb. The United States had to figure out how to fight what amounted to two separate wars: one against the Germans and Italians, the other against the Japanese. By 1942, both sets of Axis forces were dug in to their respective conquests. The Germans were busy building fortifications along the Atlantic coast of Europe—concrete pillboxes with slits just wide enough for the barrel of a machine gun, mines adrift in the sea lanes outside likely invasion points. And the Italian peninsula was a natural wall of valleys and mountains that would make for bleak prospects if the British and Americans chose to drive up from the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, the Japanese built bunkers and tunnels throughout the scattered atolls and islands of the Pacific. Americans in 1942 wanted to beat Germany, but they wanted to annihilate Japan. The feelings were mutual. Left without allies, U.S. planners would likely have thrown their might against Japan and dealt with Germany later. But Winston Churchill exerted an almost magical influence on American leaders, and for good reason. Other than the United States, Great Britain was the last democratic bulwark in the world to stand against fascism. If Hitler had his way with Britain, the United States would stand alone. So the United States concentrated at first on the struggle against Hitler. To coordinate the joint effort, Army Chief of Staff George Marshall selected Dwight Eisenhower, a man well liked but with not two seconds of actual combat experience. British generals, especially field marshal Bernard “Monty” Montgomery, sniffed and snorted at the choice. But once Eisenhower reached London in June 1942, he quickly justified Marshall’s and Roosevelt’s confidence in him. Ike listened and synthesized; he made self-effacing jokes and broke English rules of etiquette in a peculiarly Midwest American sort of way that seemed to make everyone laugh, for instance by lighting cigarettes at banquet tables before the king had been properly toasted. Ike lunched weekly with Churchill (who called him a “prairie prince”), attended formal to-dos when not avoidable, got the prickly British press on his side (one writer labeled him a “jolly good bloke”), and impressed other military men with his studied gift for strategy, tactics, and organizing.7 With a joint command in place, confidence rising, and American troops arriving in England at the rate of 50,000 a month by mid-1942, it was time to fight. Churchill convinced Roosevelt to delay an invasion of France and instead to

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WORLD WAR II go after the fascists in North Africa, part of Churchill’s overall plan to attack the Nazis from the “soft underbelly” of Europe, i.e., Italy. Secret landings at three separate locations were scheduled for November 8, 1942, code named Operation Torch. Arriving within an hour of their scheduled landing, 35,000 marines and green army troops under Eisenhower’s tank-school confidant, General Patton, spilled onto the beaches near Casablanca, Morocco, where they were met by brief but intense opposition from Vichy French troops. Another 10,000 army troops splashed ashore farther to the east under a British command. From an underground bunker on the British rock at Gibraltar, General Eisenhower tracked the clash, and five days later he flew to Africa to confer with François Darlan, a Nazi stooge in a Frenchman’s body who could nevertheless get the Vichy troops to stop fighting the Allies. The bad press generated by dealing with Darlan was worth the American lives saved, and Darlan himself was soon taken care of by an assassin’s bullet delivered by a Frenchman recently escaped from a German prisoner-of-war (POW) camp. For five more months—until May 7, 1943, when the last 150,000 Axis soldiers in North Africa surrendered—the U.S. Army figured out how to fight. German general Erwin Rommel, billed as the “Desert Fox,” gave Allied commanders like Patton and Omar Bradley an excellent chance to chip their teeth while matching metal with the Afrika Korps, Rommel’s hard bitten cavalry. Rommel himself returned to Europe to fight another day, but not before he gave Eisenhower a stinging defeat at Kasserine Pass in the Atlas Mountains of Tunisia in February 1943. In only a few minutes, Rommel’s Korps ripped through the American defensive line and sent most of the troops into a swarming retreat, weapons and matériel left behind for the Germans to collect at will. Like all good generals before him, Eisenhower accepted his newspaper bruises and learned from the defeat. Namely he figured out which generals he could count on, Patton and Bradley making it to the top of his list. Incidentally, many of the German soldiers captured in North Africa waited out the duration of the war in POW camps scattered throughout the United States, more than thirty in Texas alone. Rommel’s personal barber was one of the POWs who got sent to Fort Lewis, Washington, where he enjoyed the fine hospitality of American camp life, including plenty of flour for baking cakes. A fellow German POW escaped from Fort Lewis and made his way into downtown Seattle, where he lived with a two-week girlfriend. When she broke up with him, he returned to Fort Lewis, saying he had nowhere else to go. Driving Hitler out of North Africa was one thing. Defeating him in Europe would be another. In December 1943, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill met in Tehran, Iran, the first time the “Big Three” all sat together. The stakes could not have been greater. Stalin did not trust his two English-speaking equals to throw their combined strength headlong against Hitler, and they certainly did

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AMERICAN STORIES not trust Stalin to respect any nation’s independence in the event of an Allied victory. But the two and the one did a good job of pretending to get along well, posing for the cameras in chairs to accommodate Roosevelt’s inability to stand on his own. To some extent Roosevelt even managed to charm Stalin by whispering in his ear, giving Stalin the sense that Churchill was the odd man out. Along with ego-saving games, Roosevelt and Churchill pledged what Stalin most wanted to hear: an invasion of the French coast in spring 1944, Operation Overlord. Before the Axis was defeated in North Africa, Churchill and Roosevelt met in Casablanca once it was secured. After enjoying a desert sunset over the Moroccan hills and likely a drink or four, the president and the prime minister agreed to strike at Hitler through Sicily and Italy. Then Roosevelt announced on January 24, 1943, that Germany must submit to unconditional surrender—unusual in the history of European warfare but nonnegotiable for the leader of an American people who demanded that the German war machine be put out of business permanently. Seven months later, on July 10, the largest amphibious assault in recorded history (up to that point) descended on the island of Sicily; some 3,000 boats delivered a first wave of 150,000 British, Canadian, and American assailants. Italian resistance was nonexistent, but 60,000 German soldiers got away and relocated to Italy proper, where they joined twenty-two other crack divisions of the Wehrmacht that would push back against the Allied incursion for two straight years. The Italian campaign was a success and a failure. Hundreds of thousands of German troops were tied up, relieving pressure on the Soviets and making Operation Overlord less daunting for the Allies to envision. Two weeks after Sicily was invaded, Mussolini was removed from office and thrown in jail (though German paratroopers rescued him six weeks later and installed him as head of a northern Italian Nazi-puppet regime). Under a new government headed by Pietro Badoglio, the Italians gratefully surrendered to the Allies, many not having wanted to fight alongside the Nazis in the first place. And Allied troops got more of the training they would need to beat the main German armies in Western Europe. However, the training came at the cost of about 90,000 Allied lives with many more wounded, including Daniel Inouye, the young JapaneseAmerican who had tended to the wounded at Pearl Harbor for five straight days in December 1941, a time he called “the great turning point of my life.”8 Daniel Inouye and the 442nd: D-day and the Fall of the Third Reich Wanting to serve his country in the military, Inouye had had to wait until Japanese-descended citizens were cleared of their “enemy alien” status, which

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WORLD WAR II happened on February 1, 1943. He then joined the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, consisting exclusively of Japanese-Americans, for a year’s training in Mississippi. Two thirds of the recruits were from Hawaii; most of the rest had come straight from internment camps. When the two groups met, friction escalated to fracas. Differences in attitude and culture between mainlanders and islanders led to alcohol-fueled brawls in the barracks at night. The Hawaiians called the mainlanders “kotonks” after the sound their noggins made when they hit the floor. The mainlanders taunted the Hawaiians with the nickname “Buddhaheads,” “a play on the word buta, Japanese for ‘pig.’”9 With military command ready to break up the unruly regiment, a salve was applied by sending the group to visit the nearby internment camps of Jerome and Rohwer in Arkansas. Once the Japanese recruits from Hawaii saw the barbed-wire enclosures where their mainland rivals had been living, what indignities they had endured, all grievances eased into instant comradeship. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team shipped out for Italy in May 1944. When Sergeant Inouye disembarked at Naples, he saw wrecked ships sulking in the harbor and long lines of soldiers winding their ways toward battlefronts not far away. Bivouacked on the outskirts of town, Inouye and his team were watched from a stand of nearby trees by a dozen Italians with, as he remembered it, “dark and haunted eyes.” The Italians were starving and offered to trade their labor for food. When Inouye agreed, the bedraggled Italians launched into a late lunch of servicemen’s garbage, a mixed-up assemblage of food scraps, cigarette dust, and spit. Frantic at the sight, Inouye insisted that they return later that night for a better meal. The company commander agreed to help, and the men set aside apples, dollops of mashed potatoes, and slices of bread to be given to the returned Italians at nightfall. Inouye commented, “so I began to find out what war was all about.” Sadness and charity were part of Inouye’s war, but within the year the 442nd earned its boot-camp motto, “Go for broke,” by sacrificing more than apples and sliced bread. Sergeant Daniel Inouye’s fellow kotonks and Buddhaheads had landed in Italy one month before D-day—the planned invasion of the beaches of Normandy. While the 442nd was getting its first combat outside of Rome in late May 1944, the final preparations for D-day were being executed in Britain. Eisenhower and Churchill motored from camp to camp, shaking confidence into the hands of men receiving last-minute specialty training: how to scale cliffs defended by entrenched machine gunners; how to make it off a landing craft and into a foxhole freshly scooped out by 100-pound bombs dropped moments in advance by B-17s; how to parachute behind enemy lines without detection and storm key artillery batteries that, if left in German hands, could obliterate D-day assault forces; in short, Allied GIs and their British Commonwealth comrades were trained to adapt and survive in a killing zone.

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AMERICAN STORIES D-day was originally slated for May 1944, but Eisenhower had to put it off by a month so that enough ship-to-shore landing craft could be delivered from the States. During the last days of May, 5,000 ships lay anchored off British shores with more than 150,000 assault troops and nearly 30,000 vehicles of all sorts, all waiting in tomb-like secrecy for a June 5 launch across the English Channel into Nazi-occupied France. Over the previous year and just in time, Allied air forces had established dominance in the skies, without which D-day could never have been launched. Ever since the Battle of Britain, British Bomber Command and the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) had been sending squadrons on nearsuicidal missions to bomb German industrial and civilian sites. There had been a constant, terrible, and dispiriting loss of crews and planes. Many missions suffered at least an 8 percent loss rate, which meant that pilots could not expect to reach their twenty-fifth mission, considered a complete tour of duty by the USAAF. Flying was tough to start with. Planes were not pressurized, so at 25,000 feet, temperatures dropped well below zero. A careless pilot who took off a glove to scratch his nose and then absentmindedly touched a metal part of the plane could end up having to rip off the skin of his hand to break it free. And German engineers had designed rocket-fired mortars mounted under fighter planes’ wings. Freezing Allied airmen on a five-hour mission faced deadly swarms of German planes defending their homeland with airto-air missiles. The effects were unnerving and exhausting. One night over Berlin, Britain’s Royal Air Force lost 96 planes and 960 crewmen while killing fewer than 100 Germans. Numbers like that did not add up. Even the B-17 Flying Fortress, bristling with machine gun turrets above, below, and behind, could not compete with antiaircraft fire and Luftwaffe ME-109s. And although vital factories, like one that produced Messerschmidt fighter planes, received repeated pummelings from above, Germany still produced 44,000 planes in 1944. Although the bombing campaign seemed to exact too great a cost for the minimal damage it caused, Churchill had little else he could throw at the Germans dug in throughout Europe. The proverbial tables turned, however, when the P-51 Mustang long-range fighter arrived in England in September 1943. The British mounted their superior Merlin Rolls-Royce engines, and with 450-caliber machine guns blazing, the Mustang ruled the air, acing 2,121 Luftwaffe planes in February 1944 alone and another 2,115 in March. Loss of Allied planes during an average mission dropped to below 1 percent, and as D-day approached, Churchill and Eisenhower decided to concentrate on installations within occupied France itself to soften German defenses, even though that would mean the deaths of innocent French civilians. The leader of Free French troops, Charles de Gaulle, had said the French would willingly die in order to be free. With that kind of permission, Allied

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WORLD WAR II sorties laid waste to German railroad lines and oil and gas depots. Nonetheless and totally unbeknownst to Allied intelligence, underground factories in Germany increased production of tanks, shells, bullets, and other essential war matériel. During the years of bombing German targets, terror had become a tactic, deplored by many but seen as morally acceptable by those in charge. German troops simply did not yield, often because Hitler refused to let them do so, as had been his order at Stalingrad in 1943. If the Nazis were willing to sell their lives to the last woman and child, how many soldiers would the Allies have to consign to death in order to win? Somehow—Churchill, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower agreed—they needed to sap the average German citizen’s will to fight, thus reducing Hitler’s base of support at home. It was well known that whatever dictatorial powers he had, Hitler was still a politician reliant on his people’s complicity. In this vein of desperation and altered moral standards, Allied engineers and bombers figured out how to create artificial firestorms through the use of incendiary bombs. All the advances in medicine that graced army field hospitals during the war—namely blood plasma and penicillin—could not keep pace with the new methods devised for exterminating tens of thousands of people in minutes. On July 27, 1943, British Air Command unleashed 729 bombers toward Hamburg. For the previous three evenings the city had been hit, and fires still burned. On the 27th, even before the last aircraft had departed, the multiple fires in Hamburg had become a single holocaust, with temperatures reaching 1,000 C, creating an enormous tornado of fire that uprooted huge trees, set asphalt streets afire, and sucked human beings huddling in their homes into the heart of the storm. Bomb shelters were turned into crematoriums, where the victims were first asphyxiated by carbon monoxide and then burned to ashes. . . . As many as 50,000 died.10

Later, on February 13, 1945, a historically more infamous firebombing devastated Dresden, where an American GI named Kurt Vonnegut, captured during the Battle of the Bulge in late December 1944, was held in a meat plant basement known as Slaughterhouse Number Five. Using the techniques pioneered at Hamburg nearly two years earlier, British and American planes set the town of more than half a million people ablaze, killing at least 25,000. In 2003, in a National Public Radio interview, Vonnegut—by then a famous author known for Slaughterhouse-Five—recalled the Dresden inferno as “pure nonsense,”11 echoing many historians’ opinion that the city had been burned out of retribution rather than for any justifiable military necessity.

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AMERICAN STORIES Before Dresden, however, came D-day. By June 1944, 2 million Allied soldiers were grouped in southern England waiting to do what they had come to do—liberate Europe from the Nazis. The average American GI could not name even three of Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”—the ostensible soul of the mission. Nor did the average soldier cotton to the autocratic style of military life; after all, these were citizen soldiers fed political spoonfuls of freedom language since childhood, raised to be equal, not subordinate. But the mood on the ships drummed with purposeful resignation to duty. A handsome Hungarian-born Life magazine photographer named Robert Capa circulated among 2,000 anxious men aboard the USS Chase, winning at poker and letting them know he would go in with the first wave, E Company, on its surf-soaked charge at Omaha Beach. On June 5, Eisenhower surveyed the skies and the tide reports. Although the cloud cover mitigated against effective and safe tandem use of bombers and ground forces, he did not want to delay another day. On his own he gave the go-ahead. Then he sat down and wrote a note to be used in the likely event that the invasion failed. The note placed all blame for a failed landing on his shoulders alone. Just after midnight on June 6, some 15,000 paratroopers whooshed toward their drop points up and down the coast, charged to disable bridges, to take artillery installations, to prevent panzer tank divisions from making it to the beaches. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had left the coast the afternoon before to celebrate his wife’s birthday in Germany and to meet with Adolf Hitler and try to convince the führer to release all panzer divisions to Rommel’s direct control effective immediately. Hitler not only refused, but Rommel was injured a month later in France in a bombing raid (and soon committed suicide after being implicated in an unsuccessful plot to kill Hitler with a suitcase bomb). The Desert Fox, who thought very little of Hitler’s abilities, knew the Allies were getting ready to strike, but he assumed the main brunt would land at Pas-de-Calais, the point on the coast nearest to England and hence easiest for a massive troop transport. By the time Rommel caught word of the landings and got his driver to speed back, 156,000 Allied troops had made their mortal assaults at Omaha, Utah, Gold, Sword, and Juno beaches—the code names for the coastal strike points. German machine guns shot out 1,200 bullets per minute, enough to inflict death rates exceeding 100 percent in some rifle companies.12 (Rates could exceed 100 percent because replacements were nearly continuous.) Robert Capa hit the water at Omaha Beach with E Company and—after hiding with other men behind metal obstacles strewn on the beach by Germans—sprinted toward a shattered tank for cover. There were no foxholes in the sand because the bombardiers had all missed their marks half an hour earlier for fear of hit-

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WORLD WAR II ting their own troops. Capa clicked about 100 exposures and chanted a phrase to himself he had picked up during the Spanish Civil War in 1936: “This is a very serious business.” Unable to load another roll of film because his hands were shaking too much, Capa splashed back onto one of the rectangular troop transports and headed back toward England to get the film developed. Once aboard the landing craft, Capa later said, “I felt a slight shock and I was all covered with feathers. ‘What is this? Is somebody killing chickens?’ Then I saw that the superstructure had been shot away and the feathers were the stuffing from the Kapok jackets of the men who were blown up.”13 Only eleven of Capa’s pictures ended up usable because the film technician, in a rush, dried the roll too quickly and ruined most of it. Although only a handful, Capa’s photos—grainy and blurred—evoke the confusion and hectic scramble of young men charging headlong into hell. By the end of the day, 4,720 Allied men had been killed, wounded, or gone missing on Omaha Beach alone. All told, 6,603 U.S. servicemen died on D-day. Allied casualties amounted to nearly 10,000. Unfortunately for everyone, the most deadly and intense fighting of the war was yet to come. Over the next six months, the Allies liberated Western Europe under Eisenhower’s overall planning. His second-in-command, Omar Bradley, an old friend from West Point, helped keep internecine bickering between the joint commanders from becoming too raw, while the pearl-handled-pistol-toting George Patton got his Third Army to devastate German divisions (in between bouts of insisting that his men wear neckties unless actually in combat). American commanders on the ground were fighters. Patton wanted action as much as one of his subordinates, Creighton Abrams, who wore out six tanks and preferred to be “way out on the goddam point of the attack, where there’s nothing but me and the goddam Germans and we can fight by ourselves without stopping to report back to Headquarters.”14 More than 200,000 resistance fighters—French, Belgian, Luxembourgian—ripped up rail lines, passed along secret intelligence, and joined in skirmishes. Loss of life mounted, reaching 12,000 to 18,000 dead American GIs every month toward the end of the year. In the Vosges Mountains of southern France in late October, Daniel Inouye’s 442nd made a nearly week-long assault on entrenched German troops who had surrounded the “Lost Battalion”—275 soldiers from a Texas-based unit who had charged too far, too fast into a trap. The 442nd lost more men than it saved and became the most highly decorated unit of its size in U.S. military history. Nearly a year later, Inouye (who had missed the rescue of the Lost Battalion) lost the use of one arm in battle. Having already been shot in the gut after tossing a grenade and cutting down a handful of Germans, he was “shuffling” toward a bunker when he spotted a German soldier preparing to shoot him again. Then, Inouye remembered, “as I cocked my arm to throw,

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AMERICAN STORIES he fired and his rifle grenade smashed into my right elbow and exploded and all but tore my arm off. I looked at it, stunned and unbelieving. It dangled there by a few bloody shreds of tissue, my grenade still clenched in a fist that suddenly didn’t belong to me anymore.” Inouye killed the German and then slumped into unconsciousness. The fact that Inouye was still fighting in spring 1945 testified not to the failure of Operation Overlord, but to the stupefying overconfidence caused by its success. By December 1944, the European war seemed just about over. The Wehrmacht had been pushed back inside Germany, cognac flowed sweet and free into servicemen’s glasses in the cafés of Paris, and the only question remaining was to figure out who would get the glory of finishing off Hitler’s western armies: the British general Montgomery or the necktieobsessed Patton. Then, on December 16, a quarter-million well-equipped German troops— many teenage Hitler youth, old men long past their prime, and conscripted criminals—made the question of Allied glory academic. Along an eightymile front bordering a weak spot in Allied defenses near Luxembourg, the Wehrmacht began the Battle of the Bulge, some of the most ugly, most tiring fighting of the war. Hitler knew the Red Army was about to obliterate Germany from the east, so he gambled on disrupting the Allied alliance with an unexpected lunge at the port city of Antwerp. For more than a month, exemplary courage and ferocity enabled Allied front-line rifle companies, paratroopers from the Eighty-Second and 101st, and any other able-bodied, patched-together GIs in the western theater to repulse Hitler’s last mistake. America suffered 80,000 casualties in little more than a month—20,000 young men dead and many others permanently damaged by the incessant shelling and the splattered shock of a comrade’s blood and brains. In the region’s coldest winter in decades, GIs had not yet received winter boots; feet and toes swelled with frostbite and then turned metallic black as gangrene set it. For many there was no relief, and some rifle companies suffered 250 percent loss rates, the replacements coming from desk jobs or anywhere else men with two arms could be found. But the Germans’ offensive was thrown back over their own dead bodies. Patton and Bradley’s tanks rushed in after them. The Soviets crossed the Oder River and ploughed toward Berlin. Eisenhower had a choice to make: take Berlin from the west and risk a clash with the numerically superior Red Army or let Stalin have Berlin and go after the remnants of the Wehrmacht to the south. In February 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill set the basis for Eisenhower’s decision. At the Yalta Conference on the Crimea, they met one last time with Stalin and decided the world’s fate. Germany would get divided

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WORLD WAR II between the Soviets, French (a token gesture), British, and Americans. Berlin, although falling within the Soviet sphere, would get subdivided between the four occupiers, another token symbol of goodwill. So Eisenhower let the Soviets “take” Berlin, at the further loss of another 100,000 Soviet fighters who had to claw their way through the unyielding Germans. On April 12, 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a brain hemorrhage only months after taking the presidency for a fourth term. Vice President Harry S. Truman—a former dirt farmer, World War I veteran, and two-term senator from Missouri who could swear impressively in private, never smoked, and felt like the sky had fallen on his head—took the oath of office on April 13. On April 30, Adolf Hitler, having gone completely crazy in his underground bunker, shot himself in the mouth with a pistol. On May 7, German high commander Alfred Jodl surrendered, and the following day, Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed V-E Day, victory in Europe. With the Soviets and Americans promising each other all sorts of yummy trust and peace, but nobody believing them for a moment, the war in Europe came to a deafening silence. The Soviets had promised at Yalta to help the United States defeat Japan within three months of V-E Day. President Truman turned his gaze toward the east. Notes 1. For a thorough examination of common German soldiers’ seeming enthusiasm for killing Jewish people, see Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage, 1997). 2. Quoted in Dominique Enright, The Wicked Wit of Winston Churchill (London: Michael O’Mara, 2001), 103. 3. James C. Humes, Eisenhower and Churchill: The Partnership That Saved the World (New York: Prima, 2001), 105. 4. Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower (New York: Touchstone, 1990), 43. 5. Ambrose, Eisenhower, 46. 6. “Eisenhower: Soldier of Peace,” Time, Friday, April 4, 1969, www.time.com/ time/magazine/article0,9171,839998-4,00.html 7. Humes, Eisenhower and Churchill, 167, 166. 8. For this and all other quotes from Daniel Inouye, please see Daniel K. Inouye with Lawrence Elliot, Journey to Washington (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967). A condensend version of Senator Inouye’s war experiences can be found at his Senate website: http://inouye.senate.gov/gfb/index.html. 9. Robert Asahina, Just Americans: How Japanese Americans Won a War at Home and Abroad (New York: Gotham, 2006), 60. 10. Walter J. Boyne, Clash of Wings: World War II in the Air (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 319. 11. Quoted in “Novelist Vonnegut Remembered for His Black Humor,” Day to Day, April 12, 2007, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9539740.

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AMERICAN STORIES 12. Joseph Balkoski, Omaha Beach: D-Day June 6, 1944 (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2004), 121. 13. Richard Whelan, Robert Capa: A Biography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 215. 14. William L. O’Neill, A Democracy at War: America’s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1993), 371.

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From World War to Cold War

Albert Einstein (on left) and J. Robert Oppenheimer. (Alfred Eisenstaedt/Getty Images)

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AMERICAN STORIES To the Surrender of Japan On the morning of August 6, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets, a former medical student, arrived in the air space over the Japanese city Hiroshima. The plane, the Enola Gay (named after Tibbets’s mother), flew unobstructed, but its crew was not without apprehension. They carried a small, unlit uranium sun in the belly of the silver fuselage. Down below on the streets of Hiroshima, air raid sirens were silent. Another American plane had been in the air earlier, gauging the weather and visibility, relaying its data to Tibbets. Once it flew off, everyone in Hiroshima could relax and enjoy the day. People returned to work. Soldiers went back to drilling. Children scurried to school. Pedestrians and bicyclists jammed the old streets and walkways. Japanese air defenses were all but nonexistent after months of pounding by U.S. bombers, and B-29s like the Enola Gay could fly above 30,000 feet, too high for fighters or antiaircraft bursts. The high-altitude temperatures would have frozen the crews of other planes, but B-29s were the first pressurized combat airplanes, so its flyers had relative warmth and comfort. As the clock neared 8:15 am, a crewmember scribbled mission notes in a diary. His hand paused as word went through the plane that it was time to release the “gadget.” The Japanese empire was in dire straits. Tokyo was half ruined, well more than 100,000 of its citizens having perished in fire bombings, 83,000 in one night alone. Another sixty Japanese cities had recently undergone a similar fate as the USAAF tried to subdue the Japanese will to go on through the direct use of terror. Gelatinized gasoline dropped from low-altitude bombers stuck to the skin, burning and incinerating civilians. Throughout the South Pacific at places like Tinian and Iwo Jima, ferocious hill-to-hill battles had raged as the forces of General MacArthur closed in on Japan’s mainland islands. In February and March 1945 on Iwo Jima (site of the famous flag raising above Mount Suribachi immortalized in a photograph taken by Joe Rosenthal and recently re-created in Clint Eastwood’s 2006 film Flags of Our Fathers), 90 percent of the 22,000 Japanese defenders died. Ever since the decisive battle at Midway atoll in June 1942, U.S. and Japanese forces had fought a seemingly never-ending series of struggles for bits and pieces of land scattered south and west of Japan. Marines would storm ashore and get cut down in frightful numbers while taking heavily fortified positions, just as Allied troops had at Omaha Beach. The farther inland they went, the more combat became a nightmare of jungle rot, skin ulcers, and diarrhea. During the battle for Saipan island in the summer of 1944, not only were there 14,000 U.S. casualties, but two-thirds of the approximately 12,000 Japanese women and children on the island committed suicide, some out of a sense of obliged honor, others because they had heard rumors that Americans

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would torture them if found alive. Many families had plunged ritualistically off a cliff. To the GIs faced by such prospects and to leaders in Washington responsible for plotting the next move, the fatal devotion of Japanese citizens and soldiers did not seem noble; it seemed scary. From April through June 1945 at Okinawa, U.S. Marines took the island one hot inch at a time from unyielding Japanese defenders. Fully one-third of Okinawa’s civilians, about 150,000, died during the fighting. This was home turf for them and part of the sacred domain of Emperor Hirohito. Japanese resistance to the U.S. invasion had been particularly tough because from Okinawa U.S. bombers could have close, fighter-escorted access to Yokohama, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and other major cities. Japanese suicide attacks by 1,400 specially trained kamikaze pilots had shaken GIs’ nerves and further convinced American war planners that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would take untold lives, estimates ranging as high as one-half million—extrapolated from the casualty rate on Okinawa. After all, 2 million Japanese soldiers waited along with thousands more kamikaze planes on Honshu, Kyushu, Hokkaido, and Shikoku, where resistance would be more intense. Civilians had been exhorted to fight, and they seemed likely to do so, in part because of Roosevelt’s 1943 demand that the Axis powers surrender unconditionally, which meant the Americans could remove the emperor, an unacceptable loss for many Japanese. Consequently, in an effort to try alternatives to a full-scale invasion, the Allies mined Japanese ports in an honestly titled mission, Operation Starvation. Between the mines and U.S. submarine patrols, Japan’s supplies of imported food and gas plummeted. One official U.S. estimate suggested that within six months the Japanese would have to surrender. U.S. bombers continued to demolish military and civilian targets, but as had been the case throughout Europe, the Japanese people showed an unfathomable willingness to suffer. In July 1945, President Harry S. Truman waited to meet one final time with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill at Potsdam, near Berlin. Truman had a secret he wanted to share with Stalin. Stalin had a secret of his own. Hovering above all this uncertainty and with just enough fuel to return to the airstrip at tiny Tinian, the Enola Gay carried only one weapon, “Little Boy,” an atomic bomb. A ten-foot-long metal tube wrapped itself around a uranium bullet poised to unleash an eight-mile-high mushroom cloud superheated at its core to 100 million degrees Fahrenheit—what would have been an incredible science fiction story had it not been for an international assortment of physicists—J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe—and roughly 120,000 other men and women who had labored for four years at numerous locations across the United States to unravel the mysteries of atomic fission.

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AMERICAN STORIES Hungarian émigré scientists like Szilard and Teller knew as far back as the mid-1930s that Adolf Hitler had capable physicists figuring out how to exploit the power of the atom, which if properly split could trigger an explosive chain reaction. Some scientists, including Robert Oppenheimer, feared that such a reaction, if done by fusion rather than fission, might ignite Earth’s atmosphere and turn the planet into an uninhabitable cinder. When war broke out in Europe in 1939, Leo Szilard enlisted Albert Einstein to sign a letter requesting that Roosevelt use government funding to promote American development of atomic weaponry. Government funding for science had dwindled to a nub after the close of World War I, but Einstein’s celebrity ensured that the letter reached Roosevelt, who authorized an exploratory committee. For two years, a few brilliant theoreticians like Enrico Fermi made very little progress in the States. Only a few thousand dollars had been committed, and the United States was not yet at war, so an institutional sense of urgency was lacking. In late 1941, at the urging of Fermi and a few colleagues, Roosevelt agreed to accelerate the process. A new committee, the Top Policy Group, met the day before Pearl Harbor got bombed, the spark that lit so many fuses. Whereas in the past scientists had chased an elusive money trail, competing for thin crumbs of research funding, the Manhattan Project—as the overall development effort got titled—invested $2 billion over four years to create a weapon capable of turning people into vapor. Pudgy, ambitious, and never far from a secret stash of chocolate, Colonel Leslie Groves was chosen to play ringleader and boss of bosses to uncommon geniuses like Robert Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe, the men who would actually create the bomb. Groves made an unlikely selection when he picked Oppenheimer, a former Communist Party member with distaste for fat men, to lead the research team. When military intelligence officers waffled over giving Oppenheimer clearance, General Groves (enjoying his new promotion) ordered them to approve his choice. As a mere colonel, Groves had overseen construction of the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Cajoling building contractors to keep to a construction schedule had taken skill, but it would take more than a head for logistics and timetables to keep Oppenheimer’s team working in strict secrecy and abject isolation from the rest of the world. These were open-minded nuclear physicists used to sharing every scrap of formuladoodled paper they produced. Groves soon ordered them to keep their ideas to themselves on a need-to-know basis, a command not surprisingly avoided by men like the project’s originator, Leo Szilard, who had never had much interest in taking orders. (Another Manhattan Project scientist, Klaus Fuchs, also bypassed Groves’s efforts at maintaining a total security lockdown. Twice a month, Fuchs passed top-secret documents to his Soviet contact in a park in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This was Stalin’s secret: he knew about the bomb before President Truman did.)

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The professorial brainiacs of the Manhattan Project also enjoyed good drinks, conversation, and romance. Partway into the project, Groves fumed to Oppenheimer that the scientists were too busy making babies to get anything essential accomplished. Oppenheimer told Groves it was not a scientific director’s job to police trysts. Figuring out how to imitate the sun was not going to happen without some rest and relaxation along the way, playing a round of cards, stretching the muscles. So Groves was forced to allow more goofing off than he liked at the research facilities in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where Oppenheimer and crew lived for nearly two straight years, not allowed to travel far for fear of their dread secrets escaping with them. Gruff General Groves would have to add patience and tact to his list of skills. He managed well enough; Oppenheimer and Groves—the reader-of-books leftie and the by-the-book conservative—even developed an unexpected kind of friendship, each respecting the other’s capacities, each doing his part to set up the first test of the nuclear age. At 5:30 am on July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer and Groves stood in a stretch of southwestern desert known appropriately as the Journey of Death, the Jornada del Muerte. Together with hundreds of other military men, engineers, and scientists spread out over neighboring hills and inside shacks, they witnessed “Trinity,” the effective fissioning of atoms in a cascading nuclear chain reaction that lit the sky with a blinding white light, shattered windows in cities farther than 100 miles from ground zero, and heated the air at the epicenter of the blast to temperatures exceeding the sun’s surface. Watching in subdued awe, Oppenheimer (as he later remembered events) murmured a line from the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu text that he read in the original Sanskrit: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”1 Two days later, on July 18, at the Potsdam Conference, President Truman hinted to Stalin that the United States now had a powerful weapon of “extraordinary destructive power.” Stalin took the news effortlessly, saying that he hoped the weapon would be put to good use, hamming up the moment by saying “What a bit of luck!” before walking away from the president. Stalin did not act surprised because he was not surprised. His scientists were working on their own atomic bomb, thanks in part to the information they received from spies like Klaus Fuchs. In certain ways, this exchange between Truman and Stalin was the start of the Cold War. With Germany defeated and the prospects for a Japanese surrender looking much better thanks to Trinity, Truman was worried about what the Soviet Union might do next. At Yalta only months before, in his withered and mortal state, Roosevelt had acquiesced to a robust Soviet presence throughout Eastern Europe. When Truman learned about the Yalta accords, he assumed that Stalin, with his pumped-up army already in Berlin, might choose to push even farther west. For his part, Stalin realized

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AMERICAN STORIES that neither Churchill nor Truman bore him much, if any, goodwill or trust. Churchill complained to Stalin at Potsdam on July 24 that his diplomats in Bucharest, Romania, were facing “an iron fence [that] has come down around them,” a metaphorical fence of ill will and interference “built” by the Soviet occupiers. Stalin’s tart retort was simply, “Fairy tales!”2 Truman let Stalin know about the bomb not because Truman was in the mood to politely share top-secret information with a friend, but instead because he wanted to shock Stalin into fear and submission. Stalin knew this, so he did not act afraid. In fact, Stalin believed Truman might indeed turn on him. If this was not the start of the Cold War, it was at least a lowering of the temperature. Barely three weeks later, on August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay’s bombardier, Theodore “Dutch” van Kirk, released the bomb doors. Tibbets spun the plane around and pitched into a nosedive designed to pick up enough speed that the shock from Little Boy would not toss the Enola Gay earthward like an old tin can. Seconds later, Little Boy’s hurtling drop toward earth was arrested in its own explosion at 1,850 feet. Within only seconds, more than 70,000 people in Hiroshima were killed. Of those who escaped instant death, many wandered toward remaining medical facilities, their skin hanging from them in bloody sheets and strings, the center of their town nothing but rubble and ruin. Salt water was used to clean and sterilize what remained of living victims’ flesh. Of those who died on the spot, many simply vanished into the absorbing heat; others remained only as shadows burnt into fragmented walls of concrete, charred silhouette ghosts. A final death count cannot be made with certainty. Hiroshima’s residents continued to die in the ensuing days and years, radiation sickness and cancer putting another 70,000 to 100,000 people into their graves. While Tibbets and his crew were feted with liquor and beer back on base at Tinian, the Japanese government tried to assess what had just happened. Some people were initially unbelieving, the stories seeming like mad rumor. Disbelief melted in the heat of a second attack. Only three days later, on August 9, Fat Man—a plutonium rather than uranium bomb—landed on the outskirts of Nagasaki and killed another 70,000 people. Whole families and whole futures ceased to exist. Whatever shards of innocence may have been left in America surely drifted away. Horror had been stopped with horror. Finally enough people had died. Emperor Hirohito pushed his government to surrender. World War II was finished, and the world had been transformed. The United States had been awakened from its long isolationist slumber, but it had been awakened with kicks and stabs, with Pearl Harbor, with D-day, with the sight of the undead at Dachau and Treblinka, with Okinawa and Saipan. The Russian people had undergone two German invasions in twenty years—99 times more Russians than Americans died during World

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War II—and they responded by making Eastern Europe into a “sphere of influence.” The American people in turn felt fear, anger, and insecurity. Now Americans and Russians would visit their collective fears and demons on each other and on the rest of the planet for the next forty years in a hodgepodge of bluffs, covert wars, conservative domestic politics, nuclear brinksmanship, and influence peddling. After the War: “Give ’em hell, Harry!” Harry S. Truman liked to play the piano. One night not long after the close of World War II, the president invited a junior staff member, Ken Hechler, to have dinner. At one point during the evening, President Truman played the piano for a little while, making the young man feel as though he were “soaring” with the notes. The presidential fingers slowed down, the music stopped, and in the hushed moment—to the surprise and delight of Hechler, Truman said that if he had not got caught up in the mess of politics he would have made a “helluva good piano player in a whorehouse.”3 Truman was a mild-mannered former clothing salesman from Independence, Missouri, who spoke a workman’s dialect and had only a high school education, but when the time came to be serious, Harry Truman could “give ’em hell.” Harry S. Truman had been president for only a few months when he issued the order to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. This was quite a turnaround from the understated role of vice president—a job about which one of Roosevelt’s earlier vice presidents, John Garner, had said, “The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.”4 The war had been won, and it remained to be seen if victory would work. Troops were coming home by the hundreds of thousands. Women were being asked to leave their factory jobs and hand over the rivet guns and welding torches to returning veterans. Economic recession seemed imminent, a slowdown in the economy being normal after the massive wartime expenditures slowed to a trickle. There was a housing shortage, and there was a baby boom to make the few rooms available feel even more cramped. The nation was delirious with victory but starting to stumble otherwise. The federal government had instituted price controls during the war, but now industry was demanding a free hand with its own business affairs. And big corporations had only grown bigger and more powerful during the war, posing a more formidable front to unions. Coca-Cola Company, for example, had been awarded the contract to provide 95 percent of all soft drinks to the overseas PX stores, boosting its already near-monopoly of the cola market and ensuring that veterans would harbor a lifelong soft spot for Coke. The deal with the military had been smoothed by Coca-Cola Company’s president giving generously to the Roosevelt campaign when his industry competitors

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AMERICAN STORIES had fizzed their money into the campaign coffers of the Republican challenger in 1940, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York State. During 1946, more than 1 million American workers went on strike. They had sacrificed enough for four long years, and now they wanted enough money to buy a transistor radio, a dishwasher, and a new car (or two). Wages were terrible, prices were rising (as much as 6 percent a month), and workers did not want to return to the depressing wages or circumstances of the 1930s. As strike lines snaked from one factory to the next, railroad workers nationwide also went on strike in May 1946, essentially stalling the entire country and preventing most goods from getting anywhere. Some 17,000 passenger trains stopped in their tracks. President Truman was exasperated. Having already verbally committed himself to continuing with Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, Truman was in theory a supporter of collective bargaining, which could naturally lead to collectively marching off the job. In practice, however, Truman did not think the strikes were coming at a good time. A few weeks into the railroad strike, this former World War I artillery captain with a quiet voice and a good poker bluff addressed a joint session of Congress and presented one of the most brash and—to the men and women on the picket lines—offensive presidential requests in more than 150 years. Truman wanted the legislators to “draft into the armed forces of the United States all workers who are on strike against their government.”5 This was a blunder of the first order, the kind of draconian threat least likely to win Truman the electoral support of the Democrats’ staunchest constituents: workaday Americans, many of whom he was threatening to toss into a military uniform. Moments after the words smoked out of Truman’s mouth, an aide handed him a note that Truman promptly read to Congress: management and workers had just agreed to end the railroad strike. The applause of congressmen was not repeated by unions, and in the midterm elections of 1946, Republicans took the Senate and the House of Representatives. Now Truman, the unknown and unpopular heir to the lauded and loved Roosevelt, would have no chance for congressional cooperation on legislation he would propose during the next two years, including a raise in the national minimum wage and civil rights action. Although history has given credit to later presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson for promoting civil rights, Truman was the first to do so on his own accord without prompting or prodding. In June 1945, Truman confided to his diary a simple belief in all people’s capabilities: “It is my studied opinion that any race, creed or color can be God’s favorites if they act the part—and very few of ’em do that.”6 Theodore Roosevelt, on his own initiative, had invited Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House. Franklin Roosevelt had created the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) in 1941, which attempted

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to ensure that black people would receive equal pay in all government and government-contracted jobs. But the FEPC had been squeezed out of Roosevelt by A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union with an all-black membership. Randolph had threatened a march on Washington in 1942 if Roosevelt did not address employment inequality, and the timing of a civil rights march could not have been more embarrassing or emblematic of hypocrisy, given that Roosevelt was preparing to lead the nation into a crusade against Nazi racism. Furthermore, typical of the hesitant, half-hidden, halfhearted support that presidents had given African-Americans, neither of these progressive Roosevelt presidents, nor any other, had ever addressed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Unassuming Harry Truman broke through that color barrier on June 29, 1947, under the shadow of the towering Washington Monument, an obelisk pointing skyward like an exclamation mark at the end of the Bill of Rights. The gathered members of the NAACP and affiliated friends listened to Truman issue promises of federal protection for “all Americans.” He said, “We must not tolerate . . . limitations on the freedom of any of our people and on their enjoyment of basic rights which every citizen in a truly democratic society must possess.”7 Half a year later, in February 1948, Truman asked Congress to draft a civil rights bill intended, among other goals, to protect voting rights and to stop discrimination in interstate transportation facilities. Consequently, Truman deepened the attachment between the Democratic Party and African-American voters while simultaneously alienating a majority of white southern Democrats. Congress would not enact any of his legislative requests, and it seemed certain that he had handed the upcoming presidential election to Thomas E. Dewey, the slick Republican with a pencil-thin mustache who had proved popular even against Roosevelt in the 1944 election. At the same time that Truman seemed to be shoveling out a political grave for himself by offending unions and supporting civil rights, his stance toward overseas events seemed strong and sure. Truman’s genuine love for the United States did not initially sour him to Joseph Stalin or the Russian people. Only a few months into his time as president in 1945, Truman jotted into his diary a warmhearted appraisal: “I’m not afraid of Russia. They’ve always been our friends and I can’t see any reason why they shouldn’t always be.” Recognizing that Soviet-style communism was actually a one-party, one-man rule, Truman wrote, “The dictatorship of the proletariat is no different from the Czar or Hitler. There’s no socialism in Russia. It’s the hotbed of special privilege.” While Truman preferred American democracy and capitalism to the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” he thought that American and Soviet foreign policy were twin versions of the same thing. As he put it:

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AMERICAN STORIES They evidently like their government or they wouldn’t die for it. I like ours so let’s get along. You know Americans are funny birds. They are always sticking their noses into somebody’s business which isn’t any of theirs. We send missionaries and political propagandists to China, Turkey, India and everywhere to tell those people how to live. Most of ’em know as much or more than we do. Russia won’t let ’em in. But when Russia puts out propaganda to help our parlor pinks [domestic communists]—well, that’s bad—so we think. There is not any difference between the two approaches except one is ‘my’ approach and the other is ‘yours.’

However, Truman’s desire for a lasting peace did not induce him to share atomic secrets with Stalin, only atomic threats. “I have some dynamite . . . which I’m not exploding now,” Truman had coyly written to himself after his first talk with Stalin at Potsdam, two nights after the Trinity test in July 1945. Fascist militarism lay ruined and dead by September 1945, but large swaths of Asia and Europe also lay in ruins. Wars always harm soldiers, but World War II had wrecked civilians, cities, towns, and fields more than any human conflagration had since the horse-blood-drinking Mongols of Genghis Khan had galloped over the Asian steppes 800 years earlier. (Mongol horsemen sometimes slit open small veins in their horses’ necks and sipped the salty sauce when time was precious and they could not stop for a less liquid snack.) Firebombing had obliterated entire cities: Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo. Almost every Jew in Europe was dead. Bacterial diseases festered in municipal water supplies and in refugee camps. Peace would be no good if everyone starved to death. And although fascism had gone down with its leaders, other political ideologies competed worldwide. Shattered civilizations breed more than flies and cholera. They also breed discontent, fear, and openness to new perspectives. The minute Japanese guns stopped shooting in China, the nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek went back to fighting the communists under Mao Zedong. Mao was a former librarian who had embraced Marxist-Leninist theories in 1920 when China was having a very difficult time transitioning from monarchy to democracy. With Soviet guidance, the Chinese Communist Party mounted an armed struggle for control of the nation. Forced deep into the Chinese interior in the mid-1930s, Mao took communist theory in a radical direction by arguing that peasants were just as capable of communist revolution as their urban proletariat counterparts. Fashioning himself after the cult of personality shamelessly used by Stalin (statues and posters in every town square, the homey nickname “Uncle Joe”), Mao presented himself to the masses as the vanguard of the revolution. His revolutionary Red Army was large and capable in 1945, and Chiang Kai-shek’s

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army was weary after its four-year drama against the Japanese. The ensuing civil war in China was no less fierce than had been the Japanese invasion. Perched only a hangnail away and ripe with equal volatility, the Korean peninsula got divided in 1945 at the thirty-eighth parallel after the Japanese occupiers were forced to evacuate: North Korea dominated by Kim Il-sung, a zealous communist beholden to Stalin; South Korea dominated by the pretend-democrat Syngman Rhee, who owed his power and hopes to the United States. Their armies peered perilously over the thin dividing line. Far away, civil wars raged in Greece and Turkey as well. Instability threatened whatever hopes leaders like Truman had for a better world. By 1945, Joseph Stalin was sick and old, but still a force. His support for Mao in China was virtually nonexistent, Stalin thinking in genuinely Marxist terms that Mao’s rural peasants were not ready for the communist engines of history. Stalin did, however, prop up Kim Il-sung in North Korea and funneled aid to the communists in Greece while stirring up trouble in Turkey by demanding some of its territory. The Soviet Union controlled Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary. Marshal Broz Tito, a strict communist, had control of Yugoslavia, independent from Stalin as it turned out. It seemed to Truman that World War II would have been fought in vain if all of Europe and most of Asia gave up on democracy and capitalism. So despite his diary notes in 1945 concerning what he saw as America’s habit of sticking its nose into other people’s business, Truman went before Congress on March 12, 1947, and asked for precisely $400 million in direct aid for Turkey and Greece. Isolationism had died in World War II. Arguing that the “national security” of the United States was at stake, Truman said that a “militant minority” of communists was undermining the impoverished Greek government by using “terrorist” tactics. Like any president before him seeking to involve war-weary, generally isolationist Americans in an overseas muddle, Truman cast the scenario in idealistic yet frightening terms. “I believe,” he said, “that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”8 This was his challenge to the Republican majority in Congress: either go with me and go with freedom, or do nothing and help the tyrants. Truman had taken the initiative. Ten days later, he signed the bill authorizing the requested $400 million, and with his signature the United States embraced the Truman Doctrine, the commitment to put men and money into places in the world where freedom—as defined by a president—was being threatened. Truman had also clearly labeled communists as the opponents of freedom. Lines were being drawn on global maps separating the United States and the Soviet Union into two separate camps. Between March 1947 and the presidential election of November 1948,

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AMERICAN STORIES Harry Truman burnished his aura as a tough defender of human liberties. In March 1947, he instituted a loyalty program for all federal employees designed to root out “any disloyal or subversive person.” The program targeted anyone with “totalitarian, fascist” or “communist” inclinations.9 Meant to safeguard American democracy, the loyalty program arguably damaged it by suppressing individual political freedoms and by creating a heightened mood of mistrust. In February 1948, Truman asked congress to authorize the civil rights legislative agenda he had outlined before the NAACP on the Washington Mall. In April, he pushed through the Marshall Plan, a massive aid package to rebuild Europe, named after George C. Marshall, now secretary of state and one of America’s favorite sons due to his very public role during the war as army chief of staff. George Marshall recommended the plan after studying a 3,500-word telegram from a brilliant State Department officer named George F. Kennan, who worked out of the American embassy in Moscow. Kennan asserted, in this “Long Telegram,” that the Soviet power elite—rather than the Russian people themselves—would continue to be aggressive toward the outside world indefinitely. Only by depicting democracies as hostile could Stalin foist his cruel dictatorship onto the Soviet people. (Personally, Kennan thought the United States and the Soviet Union could coexist to each other’s mutual benefit. And he feared that if the United States overreacted to the Soviets, Americans could “become like those with whom we are coping.”10) The solution, in Kennan’s widely accepted opinion as made available to the public in a 1947 Foreign Relations article, “Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published under the pseudonym “X,” was to enact “firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” The word “containment” was key because Kennan thought “threats or blustering” would merely spark similar macho posturing from the Kremlin.11 The Marshall Plan, therefore, allocated billions of dollars (roughly $13.5 billion by 1952) to rebuild the rubble piles of European cities in order to create stable markets for American goods and in order to fend off the encroachment of communism, which most Americans believed would grow like a weed if the ongoing hard times in Europe were not turned around. This economic aid made America immensely popular throughout Western Europe, and it put many Americans to work producing the food, cloth, and steel that Europe needed. This was pragmatic idealism, the perfect fit for a Midwest president who preferred quiet evenings with his wife, Bess, at their house in Independence, Missouri, to the hectic humbuggery of the nation’s capital. Stalin, however, refused money from the Marshall Plan, since taking it would be an admission that the Soviet Union was unable to feed its own people. He also prevented each Eastern European country under his domination from accepting American aid. Stemming from this same mentality of retreat behind

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his “iron curtain”—a term used by Winston Churchill in March 1946—Stalin blundered big in June 1948. The city of Berlin had been divided into four sectors, one belonging to the Soviets, the others to Britain, France, and the United States. The whole city, however, was enveloped inside East Germany, placing all Berliners at the mercy of the Soviets. Only one road and one rail line led from West Germany into communist-encircled West Berlin, and its residents had justifiable reason to fear the Soviet occupiers. Soviet soldiers had raped 2 million German women in 1945 and 1946. Then the Soviets’ German communist protégés had clamped down on freedom of the press, on a fairly held election for mayor in Berlin, and on other expressions deemed threatening by a totalitarian mind-set that equated dissent with anarchy. In June 1948, for reasons that continue to baffle, Stalin shut off Western access to West Berlin, saying only that he was doing this for defensive purposes related to issuance of a new deutsche mark by the Western powers, a monetary unit of the capitalist world. The 2.5 million residents in West Berlin had enough food to last one month at the most. Truman’s response was magnificent. For the next year, Truman orchestrated the constant delivery of food, medicine, coal, and other essential goods to West Berliners in a feat of philanthropic flying dubbed the Berlin airlift. Truman turned the sky into a highway bustling with transport planes and retooled bombers filled with goodies going in and refugees going out. Every Berlin child’s best friend was Gail S. Halverson, known as the “Chocolate Flyer” because he dropped little bundles of chocolate bars and gum into prancing crowds of hungry kids only just starting to recover from the reeling shock of round-the-clock wartime bombing. Donations from the American Confectioners Association kept pace with Halverson’s demand, and American schoolchildren contributed to what became known as Operation Little Vittles by bundling the parachute chocolate bombs. In May 1949, the Soviets removed the barriers and blockades around West Berlin. The crisis had passed, and it had served only to strengthen America’s image and to weaken Stalin’s. Within four years, the United States and the Soviet Union had gone from allies to adversaries. Together they had defeated German Nazism, yet by 1949 the United States had cozied up to Germany and begun to rearm its military even as West German democracy sprouted with U.S. insistence and encouragement. Of more lasting significance in the deepening trenches of the Cold War separating communists from capitalists was the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in April 1949, the last month of the Berlin blockade and airlift. The original twelve NATO members—the United States, Canada, and most of the countries of northern and western Europe—committed themselves to defend one another in time of peril. This was the first mutual defense pact the United States had signed in more than 100 years. General Dwight D. Eisenhower became NATO’s first

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AMERICAN STORIES supreme commander, a signal that he as well as Truman no longer believed Stalin could or should be trusted. By late 1948, the ongoing airlift had made Harry S. Truman eminently more electable. With his loyalty program in place and his willingness to outmaneuver the Soviet blockade of Berlin, Truman appeared tough, caring, and capable. Still, the Democrats had been in power since 1932, and polls indicated that Thomas E. Dewey of New York was going to steal the election with no problem at all. Truman thought otherwise and campaigned otherwise, touring the nation on a whistle-stop extravaganza reminiscent of Woodrow Wilson’s in 1920. The difference was that Wilson suffered a stroke and lost the election while Truman came into his own, seeming revitalized by the smalltown crowds that cheered him. When the train left Washington, DC, at the beginning of the tour, Truman’s vice-presidential candidate, Alben Barkley of Kentucky, called out, “Give ’em hell, Harry!” Journalists grabbed the sentence out of the air, tossed it into their papers, and made it Truman’s slogan. A large bloc of southern Democrats bolted from the ticket, joined the States’ Rights Party, and nominated their own “Dixiecrat,” segregationist candidate, Strom Thurmond, governor of South Carolina. With the Dixiecrats gone from the Democratic Party, Truman no longer had to play to their prejudices. So he gave them even more hell and integrated the armed forces. And contrary to the forecasts of political pundits, newspaper hacks, and fortune-tellers, Truman won the election. He would be president for four more years, a string of forty-eight months that would witness the baby boom, veterans going to college and buying suburban homes with money from the GI Bill, and commercial television’s flickering fandango. Although the economic heyday and new consumer novelties lifted the nation’s mood, nothing continuously dominated the presidential agenda more than the Cold War during the long decade following the armistice with Japan. In 1949, Mao Zedong’s communist forces won control of China, and the Soviets detonated their own atomic bomb. Then, in 1950, a war started in Korea sponsored by Soviet and Chinese communists. Truman would need to figure out not only how to give ’em hell, but who to give the hell to in the first place. By the late 1940s, Americans’ fears of international communism transformed into a second red scare: a resurgent fear of domestic communism, spies, and boogeymen. Alger Hiss and Joseph McCarthy: Spies, Superbombs, and Circus Politics In 1949, J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the atom bomb’s central creators, came out in opposition to use of the as-of-yet undeveloped “superbomb,” more commonly called the hydrogen bomb, a horrifically powerful weapon.

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When the United States set off the first hydrogen explosion on the Pacific island of Elugelab in 1952, the force of the blast was three times greater than the combined force of all the bombs that had exploded during all of World War II; Elugelab literally evaporated. Oppenheimer’s ordeal during the late 1940s and early 1950s speaks to the variant, and often clashing, opinions of Cold War Americans about the best ways to remain both safe and ethical in the face of world-wrecking technologies. By 1950, Oppenheimer mistrusted the Soviet Union and felt that the superbomb, though “a dreadful weapon,” was one that the United States might well use; the possibility was a “humane problem” that needed serious consideration.12 By 1952, the year of the Elugelab test, Oppenheimer thought that committing to the hydrogen bomb as “the way to save the country and the peace appears to me full of dangers.” He believed the hydrogen bomb “does have to be done,” but did not think its existence would have the desired results.13 Oppenheimer argued, probably mistakenly, that if the United States halted work on the bomb, the Soviet Union would follow suit. A host of increasingly influential military men and scientists thought Oppenheimer was being naive. They included Omar Bradley, one of D-day’s heroes, and, more importantly, Lewis Strauss, a millionaire navy rear admiral without a college education who resented Oppenheimer’s moral nannying and his ivory-tower attitude and demeanor. Strauss took up the hydrogen crusade with all the truculent force of a man described as having “more elbows than an octopus.”14 Oppenheimer had little tact with meat-gravy-and-bullets bullies like Strauss. A few years into the Great Depression, Oppenheimer had been totally unaware that the nation was in a financial and social crisis. He did not listen to the radio or read newspapers. What time was there for such distractions when neutrons danced before his eyes? Oppenheimer was repeatedly described as the smartest man that smart men had met, and he could be dismissive of unlettered ideologues like Strauss. In 1943, just as the Manhattan Project was gaining momentum, the Hungarian-born physicist Edward Teller—a hyper-intelligent paranoiac and lover of classical piano—had suggested setting aside work on the fission bomb in favor of creating the hydrogen bomb. His suggestion was bypassed, but Teller did not let go of it. Convinced that the Soviets would never be trustworthy, he continued to advocate for a hydrogen bomb in the aftermath of World War II. Oppenheimer and numerous other intellectual and scientific celebrities opposed Teller, many of them sickened at the thought of a hydrogen bomb’s ruinous potential, its damning immorality, its lethal enormity. A few revelations, however, tipped the argument in Teller’s favor, revelations that set a brittle cultural and political tone for the next forty years. In late August 1949, half a year into Truman’s second term as president,

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AMERICAN STORIES the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb. Flying from Japan to Alaska, an American weather plane equipped with detection equipment registered the radiation as it drifted outward over the North Pacific. This happened only months after Mao’s communist conquest of China. On September 23, 1949, Truman announced to a stunned nation that the Soviets had atomic capability. Truman’s disclosure amplified the anxiety being generated by a high-profile court case involving a suave, highbrow State Department official named Alger Hiss, who was accused of having spied for the Soviet Union for more than a decade. A former acquaintance and once-upon-a-time Communist Party member, Whittaker Chambers, had indicated to a congressional investigative committee—the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)—that Hiss was a Soviet agent. To many prominent people, the accusation sounded ludicrous, totally impossible. Alger Hiss palled around with Supreme Court justices and had been part of the American delegation at the Yalta Conference in 1943. His pedigree spoke of herringbone suits and martinis. Hiss naturally denied the charges and in turn defamed Chambers’s character, a relatively easy thing to do given that Chambers was unattractive, obscure, and had already admitted his own former Communist Party affiliation. However, a young California congressman and HUAC member named Richard Nixon followed through on Chambers’s claims and revealed that Hiss was lying, not only about having been friends with Chambers but also quite likely about his purported covert ties to the Soviet Union. Alger Hiss underwent two trials, the first ending in a mistrial. A fascinated nation sat glued to their radios—and the few who had them watched the grainy images on the small screens of their televisions. Hiss’s trial was the first ever to be televised. With all the shadows and surprises of a good spy thriller, the evidence of Hiss’s actual espionage turned out to be transcribed government documents and rolls of film that Hiss had given to Chambers in the 1930s, all initially squirreled away by Chambers in a dumbwaiter cavity in his mother’s house. Before the trial, Chambers had moved the packet of incriminating evidence into a hollowed-out pumpkin, which led journalists to refer to the whole lot as the “Pumpkin Papers.” But since the film and papers were more than five years old, Hiss had luckily passed the statute of limitations and could not be charged with treason. Instead he stood accused of perjury, of lying when under oath to HUAC: a congressional coven of men once described as “the most unattractive men in American public life—bigots, racists, reactionaries, and sheer buffoons.”15 After more than eighteen months of trials, with testimony from Supreme Court justices, a secretary, a government expert on typewriters, former spies turned state’s witness, and both men’s wives, Alger Hiss was found guilty on two counts of perjury on January 20, 1950. His conviction landed him in jail for almost four years, and though he maintained

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his innocence until his death in 1996, a document recently released by the National Security Agency (NSA) from its VENONA files inclines most experts to conclude that Hiss was indeed part of an elaborate series of spy rings run throughout the nation, particularly in Washington, DC. VENONA was the name of an NSA operation to decode incoming and outgoing messages from Soviet officials in the United States to their bosses back in Moscow. Few people at the time knew about VENONA’s existence (although, laughably, the Soviets did) or about the evidence its equationwielding crypto analysts uncovered, but lack of evidence did not prevent an opportunistic, parasitic, alcoholic, egomaniacal Wisconsin senator named Joseph McCarthy from announcing at a minor Republican convention in Wheeling, West Virginia, in September 1950 that he had a list of 205 known communist agents working at the highest levels of the government, particularly in the State Department. As it turned out, the list had been in the public domain since 1946, and of the few folks on it identified as communists, those working for the State Department had already resigned. McCarthy’s accusations were, in other words, false. But McCarthy’s claim—and subsequent ones—rode on the waves of fear emanating from the Alger Hiss trial and from Soviet nuclear capability. By 1951, one of America’s most steadfast loyalists and defenders, George C. Marshall (namesake of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and mentor to Dwight Eisenhower), had become a favored target of McCarthy and his fellow Republican congressional gangsters. By that point, McCarthy had accused everyone but the pope and his own grandmother of being a communist. With a showman’s innate sense for working a crowd, McCarthy established a policy for right-wing Republicans to accuse Democrats of being “soft” on communism and on national defense, accusations with no factual merit but with tremendous political consequences. McCarthy would go on to wreak terror and havoc throughout the United States until 1954, when his reign of lies ended in a series of televised Senate hearings during which he unsuccessfully defended his crusade against the U.S. Army as a bastion of communism. For more than thirty days, millions of television viewers sat transfixed and bothered at the spectacle of McCarthy hurling spurious accusations at any and all who opposed him and comporting himself, generally, with “no sense of decency”—a fitting critique of McCarthy provided by Joseph Welch, an army attorney whom McCarthy had attempted to slander.16 Later in the year, on December 2, 1954, the Senate officially condemned McCarthy, a symbolic parallel to McCarthy’s loss of public good will, which had steadily eroded throughout the year. As the Alger Hiss trial was ending and McCarthy’s acid spittle was starting to fly, one final jolt rattled the nation’s slipping sense of security. On June

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AMERICAN STORIES 25, 1950, Kim Il-sung’s battle-hardened troops motored across the Korean Peninsula’s thirty-eighth parallel. Secure inside Soviet-made tanks, the North Korean communists shredded South Korean defense forces and occupied Seoul, the southern capital, within ten days. Would the United States remove its few military advisers and allow the communists to unify the peninsula under their rule because it lay outside America’s “defense perimeter”? Or would the United States throw its young men back into combat so soon after the close of World War II? At a hastily convened meeting on June 27, 1950, the United Nations Security Council denounced North Korean aggression and decided to physically assist the tottering South Korean forces. The Security Council was able to pass these resolutions only because the Soviet ambassador had recently withdrawn from the council in a diplomatic huff. Under the command of Douglas MacArthur, American forces in Japan, many without combat experience, assembled for deployment. The U.S. Navy owned the sea; the U.S. Air Force owned the skies; but Kim Il-sung owned all but a southeastern crumb of Korea itself. The upcoming three-year war in Korea solidified a conservative bastion within Congress; made the Cold War into something more and worse than simple posturing and ideological jabs; helped draw the United States into Vietnam by making the goings-on in Southeast Asia part of American geopolitical interests; intensified the fear-based political theater of men like Joseph McCarthy; entrenched “the militarization of American life”17 by providing justification for an ever-growing military budget; and killed 33,629 American GIs in a conflict that ended with the reestablishment of the original parallel dividing North from South Korea. While the war did not result in the use of an atomic bomb, the intensified fearful and conservative mood in the United States did lead to the official ouster of J. Robert Oppenheimer from all his official government jobs and the loss of his security clearances. Suddenly, Edward Teller’s hydrogen superbomb seemed necessary to a nation gripped by fear—and, in fact, President Truman authorized funding for the superbomb in January 1950, just before the start of the Korean War. Oppenheimer’s loyalty seemed suspect, though it was not. Teller and his ally, Rear Admiral Strauss, accused Oppenheimer of obstructing work on the superbomb, and even Harry Truman was disenchanted with the skinny father of the atom bomb. When Oppenheimer and Truman first met soon after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the scientist had said to the president, “I feel we have blood on our hands.” As bloodstained as Oppenheimer, the president did not appreciate the implication of guilt and later told a senior adviser, “Don’t you bring that fellow around again. After all, all he did was make the bomb. I’m the guy who fired it off.”18 Sixty-six years old in 1950, President Harry S. Truman was already under

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indirect attack from Senator McCarthy, who enjoyed targeting Democrats in Truman’s administration as either communist sympathizers or “soft on communism.” Although General MacArthur led a daring amphibious assault at Inchon in September 1950, soon retaking Seoul, his follow-up drive through North Korea gave Mao Zedong an excuse to send 300,000 Chinese troops into Korea, where they turned the whole war into a mud-and-ice stalemate reminiscent of World War I. As Truman tried to arrange for a cease-fire during the spring of 1951, wild-card MacArthur fired off press releases about how he wanted to escalate the war. Truman fired MacArthur. It had to be done. MacArthur was ignoring the president’s constitutional role as commander in chief. The United States could no longer wave the nuclear threat at North Korea, as MacArthur seemed to have been doing, because the Soviet Union could strike back. However, with a hydrogen bomb in the American arsenal, people in Teller’s camp argued, the Soviets would have to tread warily—the old my-gun-is-bigger-than-your-gun routine. The most dangerous man in the United States during the 1950s may have been J. Edgar Hoover, long-term director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). A man with no wife, no children, little contact with his birth family, a gambling habit, and secret files full of morally damning evidence about most American politicians, Hoover extolled himself as the defender of the American family. As one of the nation’s top cops, Hoover regularly ordered illegal wiretaps that he would use in his personal campaigns to rid America of Americans he did not like. It was Hoover who had supplied Joseph McCarthy with what passed for FBI “evidence” (often hearsay or stories many years out of date) about communists in America. J. Edgar Hoover was corruption personified, and along with Lewis Strauss and Edward Teller, Hoover had it in for J. Robert Oppenheimer, who seemed to these three archconservatives the most un-American American of all by 1953. After all, he had been a “fellow traveler” (i.e., communist) in the 1930s; his brother, Frank, was a communist; and he had complicated hydrogen bomb policy from his roost as head of the General Advisory Committee (GAC), part of the Atomic Energy Commission, which controlled nuclear policy from 1946 onward. Though no longer with the GAC in 1953, Oppenheimer still had top-level security clearance and advised the GAC. In the spring of 1954, during the Senate investigation of McCarthy’s charges against the army and right after a hydrogen bomb was tested on Bikini Atoll (raining radioactive ash onto unsuspecting inhabitants of nearby islands), the conservative cabal aligned against Oppenheimer brought him up for security clearance hearings—a kind of quasi-legal trial. The proceedings relied on illegal FBI wiretaps, the use of a private prosecuting attorney, and the skewering testimony of Oppenheimer’s former colleague, Edward Teller. Though

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AMERICAN STORIES Teller said that his old friend was “loyal to the United States,” he claimed, “I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in” hands other than Oppenheimer’s. The coffin had been nailed. Oppenheimer lost his security clearance, which also “severed [him] from the cutting edge of work in his field.”19 Although Oppenheimer’s work as a physicist was hobbled, most top-notch scientists retained their respect for him while turning their backs on Edward Teller, whom they saw as fanatical in his campaign against Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer spent the next decade devoted to promoting science and to engendering a more peaceful world; he died of cancer in 1967. Teller lived until 2003, and though sick with intestinal problems and plagued by depression, during the 1980s he was a major impetus behind development efforts for President Ronald Reagan’s boondoggle “Star Wars” defense system of satellite-to-missile laser beams. Hoover lived until 1972, running the FBI like a feudal lord and spying on such admirable Americans as Martin Luther King Jr., whom Hoover deemed as great a threat to American civilization as Oppenheimer had seemed in the early 1950s. Congressman Richard Nixon of California used his role in the Alger Hiss trial as a springboard to the vice presidency, a job he held from 1952 through 1960 under President Eisenhower. Nixon fancied himself the ultimate cold warrior, a hunter of subversives and “reds,” and a champion of American morality on par with J. Edgar Hoover. In 1969 he became president and in 1974 became the first president to resign, which he did to avoid impeachment for his probable role in the Watergate scandal, essentially an illegal series of break-ins and frauds that dismally recalled Hoover’s wiretapping operations. Notes 1. Joseph Canon, “A Novel Idea of Oppenheimer,” in Cynthia C. Kelly, ed., Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project: Insights Into J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Father of the Atomic Bomb” (Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific, 2006), 28. 2. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Knopf, 2004), 499. 3. Quoted in Ken Hechler, Working with Truman: A Personal Memoir of the Whitehouse Years (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982), 22. 4. Nigel Rees, Brewer’s Famous Quotations: 5000 Quotations and the Stories Behind Them (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006), 208. 5. Jonathan Daniels, The Man of Independence (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 330. 6. With permission of the Ann Elmo Agency, Inc., all excerpts from Truman’s diary are taken from Robert H. Ferrell, ed., Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 44–45.

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7. Harry S. Truman, “Address Before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,” June 29, 1947, Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, www. trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=2115&st=&st1=. 8. Harry S. Truman, “The Truman Doctrine,” March 12, 1947, in The Annals of America, 1940–1949 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1976), 16: 434–436. 9. Annals of America, “Harry S. Truman, Loyalty Order,” 16: 446–450. 10. Quoted in Gaddis Smith, The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1945–1993 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 69. 11. Quoted in Annals of America, 440–446. 12. Abraham Pais and Robert P. Crease, J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 204. 13. Pais and Crease, J. Robert Oppenheimer, 188. 14. David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard, 1993), 39. 15. Halberstam, The Fifties, 12. 16. Thomas Patrick Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 204. 17. Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman and the Modern American Presidency (New York: HarperCollins, 1983), 129. 18. Pais and Crease, J. Robert Oppenheimer, 152. 19. Halberstam, The Fifties, 351, 353.

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American Culture and Society in the 1950s and 1960s

Marilyn Monroe (Evening Standard/Getty Images)

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AMERICAN STORIES White and Black, Apart and Together With the war won and the boys coming home, people wanted to enjoy the peace. Prosperity seemed like the best reward possible, and by 1950 a brief postwar recession had been sorted out. Suburban subdivisions sprouted, providing jobs for the builders, the bankers and lenders, the loggers felling the trees to turn into lumber delivered from forest to sawmill to subdivision by truckers on new interstate highways funded by the federal government. After four years of government rationing, Americans bought big cars moved by high-compression engines, gulped Pepsi or Coke and munched popcorn at sprawling drive-ins featuring two or even three movie screens, purchased television sets at the rate of more than 1 million a year, and butter-knifed through the salty Salisbury steaks of a Swanson TV dinner. Women hosted Tupperware parties. Dads came home from work to throw a ball with the kids and help with the homework. There was time to work and time to play. As had always been the case, peace and prosperity for some did not mean peace and prosperity for all. After witnessing the lack of segregation in Europe and the Pacific, African-American soldiers returned to a segregated America. Lynching continued in the South. Schools for black children remained secondrate. White men still called grown black men “boy.” And in the deep south of Mississippi, it was dangerous for a black man or teenager to look at a white woman, except from the corner of a downward-turned eye. Stepping outside the boundaries was a bad idea. Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago vacationing at his uncle Moses Wright’s place in Mississippi, stepped outside the race boundary. Inside a drugstore, Till apparently flirted with a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, maybe by whistling, maybe by calling her “baby.” Four nights later, on August 28, 1955, two white men—the woman’s husband, Roy, and his friend, J.W. Milam—took a sleeping Emmett Till from a bed at his uncle’s house and, equipped with pistols and a flashlight, drove for hours, looking for the right spot to “scare some sense into him,” as the men admitted a year later in a Look magazine article.1 They pistol-whipped Till in the face and head with a Colt .45 so severely his skull bones turned to mush. They castrated him, shot him through the ear, and then sank his body under water with a giant metal fan tied to his neck, satisfied that they had done the right thing. Less than a month later, with the whole nation following the case, an all-white jury acquitted Bryant and Milam in sixty-seven minutes, one jury member saying it would have taken less time but they had slowed down to sip a soda. The killers lived until 1990 and 1980, respectively, shunned but free. Emmett Till’s mother held an open-casket funeral for her mangled son in Chicago, and a stunned nation reacted in outrage. But there were also letters to editors

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of various newspapers expressing support for Bryant and Milam. Changing southern culture would take a revolution. In Montgomery, Alabama, three months after Emmett Till’s grisly murder, Rosa Parks, a seamstress and secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, got arrested, and sparked a year-long bus boycott that generated enthusiasm for the burgeoning civil rights movement, which had been run for decades by the NAACP largely through lawsuits. In 1954, one year before both Emmett Till’s fateful trip to Mississippi and Rosa Parks’s brave defiance of social custom, the Supreme Court had ruled unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation was unconstitutional and did not provide “separate but equal” treatment for blacks and whites, as many whites had been claiming for fifty years ever since Plessy v. Ferguson. However, in a follow-up ruling in 1955, the Supreme Court said that with regard to implementing the new policy of integration, district courts could give “such orders and decrees consistent with this opinion [in Brown] as are necessary and proper to admit to public schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the parties to these cases.”2 The key phrase was “with all deliberate speed.” School districts could, in other words, integrate very slowly if they chose (and white people could move to the suburbs and continue putting their children into mainly homogeneous schools). Still, a reversal had been made, and the federal government now aligned itself—even if cautiously—with the hopes of African-Americans like Thurgood Marshall, who had argued the Brown case, and Martin Luther King Jr. While Thurgood Marshall’s very public role in the Brown case helped him to become the first African-American member of the U.S. Supreme Court (in 1967), the Montgomery bus boycott elevated a young Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr., to prominence and gave him a platform to demonstrate the effectiveness of nonviolent activism and protest. In fact, during the long bus boycott, King’s house had been firebombed—with his wife, Coretta, and baby daughter at home—and he had been arrested. But King remained publicly calm and strong, if anything growing more resolute in the face of hostility, learning how to cast his voice through the storm. Not since the days of Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey had there been a black man with King’s emerging popularity. With a warm-honey voice, a Baptist preacher’s rise-and-fall, hush-then-hurry rhythm, and a dignified message, Martin Luther King Jr. was the kind of man who could inspire a revolution, the kind of man who could make other people want to do good. Race bigots were watching their rule, their privileges, their arguments fall before a slowly building wave of justice.

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AMERICAN STORIES While northern suburbs passed covenants barring black people from buying a home and southern juries propped up the sad sight of Jim Crow, black Americans bonded together with white allies to challenge the laws, the customs, and the attitudes that perpetuated oppression. When Thurgood Marshall had argued the Brown case during the early 1950s, his staunchest supporter on the bench had initially been Felix Frankfurter, who had known how to slow down the judicial process long enough to rally the other justices. After President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren chief justice in 1953 (while the Brown decision was pending), he put his considerable political skills to the task and wrangled a unanimous ruling in Brown by getting hesitant fellow judges to see the moral value in a united court opinion. When Martin Luther King Jr. formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, sixty black ministers joined him in a pledge of nonviolent direct action for change. Their peaceable tactics soon attracted white allies from north and south. In 1960, four black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s department store lunch counter. Within a few days, three white co-eds (as female college students were called in the 1950s) from the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina had joined their growing ranks. By year’s end, more than 50,000 people—well-dressed and polite—had participated in similar sit-ins across the South and North, with ever more white volunteers joining the young black men and women sitting quietly at counters for burgers or sodas fifty years in the coming. In April 1960, a coalition of black and white students, inspired by the SCLC’s adherence to nonviolence and by the ongoing integration sits-ins, formed a new civil rights organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”). Then, when the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized “freedom rides” on interstate buses in 1961 to speed integration of public transportation, the freedom riders were white and black, and they bled together when members of the Ku Klux Klan and various other goons pulled them off their buses in Alabama and beat them savagely. To say you were nonviolent was one thing, but to let another person hit you, kick you, trample you, required the fastening of your soul to a greater purpose. Once when Martin Luther King Jr. was giving a speech on stage, a man ran up and punched him three times in the face. When audience members rushed to King’s aid, he asked them not only to leave the assailant untouched but also to pray for him. Sometimes, at night in the privacy of his kitchen, King would tremble with visions of his death. But on the dais or the street talking to the milling crowds, King radiated calm, slow courage. He mingled with the members of his congregation and with prime ministers and presidents. They had to meet him. King was their future. From the presidential perch, Harry S. Truman watched African-American

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baseball star Jackie Robinson swat his way out of the Negro Leagues and into a major league ballpark in 1947 when he debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Other sectors of the business world also started to open doors. With an eye for progressive profits earned fairly and decently, the PepsiCola Company, under its president, Walter Mack, promoted its products by hiring and training the first African-American sales team in a major U.S. corporation. Sales skyrocketed in black communities and an example was established for integration via the business corridor, though most of the fanfare showed up in black-owned newspapers.3 Although Truman was not able to get a hemming and hawing Congress to pass his proposed civil rights initiatives, he did order the armed forces to integrate and mandated that civilian agencies attached to the federal government would have to enact fair employment standards. While Truman acted openly without prompting, President Eisenhower supported civil rights when nudged. Eisenhower took Truman’s military integration order and made it happen. He had, after all, been the nation’s premier war hero—who better to change military culture? After the Supreme Court overturned “separate but equal” segregation, nine black students in Little Rock, Arkansas, tried to enroll at Central High School, but Governor Orval Faubus ordered the state national guard and state police to surround the school and prevent the “Little Rock Nine” from entering. Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne, federalized the National Guard, and provided bodyguards for the black students, one of whom graduated at the end of the year (after which, Governor Faubus shut down all the schools in Little Rock). However, Eisenhower was reluctant to use the courts or legislation to promote racial equality. He believed laws would not change “the hearts of men.” King, on the other hand, said, “A law may not make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me.”4 Nonetheless, despite the president’s stalling, Congress passed the 1957 Civil Rights Act (which was shuttled through the Senate by a war veteran from Texas named Lyndon Baines Johnson, the youngest-ever Senate majority leader). Although most Americans tried to sink into a quiet peace, in many ways World War II had made America ripe for social revolution. The nation had fought Hitler’s obvious racism. Black men had once more worn a military uniform, and some of their white brothers in arms were willing to join the civil rights cause. In Florida, for example, when a bus driver told a black veteran to either move to the back of the bus or get off, the man’s fellow veterans, both white, told the driver to mind his business and drive or they would throw him off and drive the bus themselves. A growing segment of Americans demanded that peace and prosperity should be made equally possible for all citizens. The struggle expanded in the mid-1950s and grew to a crescendo during the 1960s, leading to the legal dismantlement of Jim Crow segregation.

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AMERICAN STORIES Rebels in Denim and Diamonds, and Rebels with a Pen Somehow the popular imagination sees the 1950s and early 1960s as a time of square-top haircuts, gentle manners, safe neighborhoods, and cold milk before bed. The buzz cuts and barbecues were real and ubiquitous, but for every half-gallon jug of milk left on a doorstep there was a rowdy teenage boy greasing his hair, rolling up the cuffs of his coal-blue jeans, and daydreaming about drag racing toward a drop-off cliff, just like James Dean did in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). For every malt milkshake or Coca-Cola served by a freckly soda jerk at the local drug store or soda fountain there was a cold beer served to a war veteran at the local American Legion or to a down-and-out alcoholic at the local dive or to a two-wheeled loner wearing “black denim trousers and motorcycle boots”5—like Willie Forkner, the real-life inspiration for another era-defining film, The Wild One (1953), starring Marlon Brando, a cool hunk first made famous for his steamy performance in the movie adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). In July 1947, Willie Forkner and some vet buddies—part of the Boozefighters motorcycle club, whose motto was “A drinking club with a motorcycle problem”—rode their cycles into Hollister, California, triggering two nights of brawls with townspeople who did not like the bikers parking their rides indoors in the quiet off-hours between incessant street races. Years down the road, Forkner remembered feeling bitter about the way he had been treated after serving in World War II: “We were rebelling against the establishment, for Chrissakes. . . . You go fight a goddamn war, and the minute you get back and take off the uniform and put on Levi’s and leather jackets, they call you an asshole.”6 The 1950s were anything but simple, and emerging music genres gave voice and melody to the itch that people were feeling. Country music rambled at the Grand Ole Opry, and delta blues slid and wailed in the backwaters of Louisiana and Mississippi. Someone somewhere on one guitar was bound to introduce country music to the blues. In 1954, a shy, polite, pimple-faced, blue-collar boy from East Tupelo, Mississippi, stopped off at Sam Phillips’s Sun Records studio near Memphis, Tennessee, and recorded a few little ditties that he claimed were for his mama. But really Elvis Aaron Presley wanted to hear how his voice sounded on a record. Before long, Elvis’s hips were gyrating from one dance hall to the next while “Jail House Rock” blasted out of every radio and turntable from East Tupelo to Tacoma. Parents who worried about the “race record” sound of Elvis’s electrified rock ’n’ roll could take their teenagers to see comforting movies starring safe-joke Bob Hope, who had long since made a name for himself in goofball comedies and by entertaining troops as part of the United Service Organiza-

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tions (USO). The same Hollywood producers and directors who sponged millions from Hope’s clean-cut comedy also squeezed green from another USO performer, Norma Jean Mortenson, who dyed her hair blonde and changed her name to Marilyn Monroe. Monroe winked, teased, pouted, and purred in sexy, irreverent films like The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Bus Stop (1956). Elysian Marilyn Monroe, antiauthoritarian Marlon Brando, and teen-dream James Dean delivered equal doses of sexy, rebellious, and dangerous. Tough guys wore jeans and diamonds were a girl’s best friend. Monroe’s movies and Presley’s songs gave something essential to a generation taught at school by a cartoon turtle to “duck and cover” if they saw a bright flash of (atomic) light. A poet-musician named John Trudell put it best when he sang that Elvis was a “Baby Boom Che,” a revolutionary fighting “a different civil war” against a culture of “restrained emotion” with the help of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Bo Diddley, Elvis’s “commandants.” Trudell grew up during the 1950s, and like a lot of other kids who would go on in the 1960s to challenge the status quo (which he did after serving in Vietnam), he thinks Elvis “raised our voice, and when we heard ourselves, something was changing.”7 Part of what was changing during the 1950s was the public attitude toward sex and sexuality. The closeted restraint of the old Comstock laws would not last much longer. While major magazines, daytime television soap operas, and nighttime favorites like The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy encouraged women to drop their welding aprons and put on kitchen aprons, the first issue of Playboy magazine was issued in December 1953. Marilyn Monroe graced the cover smiling and waving in a slinky, v-cut black dress; she also graced the centerfold dressed casually in her birthday suit; and Playboy’s founder, Hugh Hefner, joked that the magazine would provide “a little diversion from the anxieties of the Atomic Age.” After all, Hefner wrote, frisky men enjoyed “putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” The contrast between Playboy’s nudity and network TV’s modesty highlighted the schizophrenic three-way divide in 1950s America between puritanical timidity, playful titillation, and outright sexual extravagance, as exemplified in Alfred Kinsey’s reports, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Both were best sellers that exposed in the frankest of terms that about 75 percent of people interviewed had had premarital sex, almost all men masturbated, and about one-third of men had had at least one homosexual experience ending in orgasm—this at the same time that the State Department proudly proclaimed that once each day it was firing a homosexual, part of the “Lavender Scare” that falsely conflated homosexuality with communism and anti-Americanism.

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AMERICAN STORIES If one-third of American men kissed and touched other men, homosexuality was, as Kinsey insinuated, quite American. As for marital fidelity, Kinsey reported that about 50 percent of men cheated, as did nearly 34 percent of women. And well-to-do businessmen cheated more than anyone else, more than 75 percent having strayed at least once. Although Kinsey’s percentages have since been questioned, his reports completely altered American perceptions of sexuality by making it a topic fit for public consumption, by allowing for recognition of women’s equal right to orgasm, by generating sympathy for homosexuals in a very homophobic society, and by suggesting that sexual orientation was fluid rather than fixed. Television shows featuring families rarely showed bedrooms, and when they did, mom and dad slept in separate beds—a not terribly accurate portrayal of American family life considering the 76 million babies born from 1946 to 1964. Ward and June Cleaver had to conceive the Beaver somewhere; maybe they went to the drive-in. As one interviewee in the 2006 documentary Drive-in Movie Memories recalled, “Many lives were caused by accident last night.”8 Henry Ford’s lamentations about the amorous use of his Model T were more on-target than ever after World War II when automakers could stop making army jeeps and start making cars again. In 1950 alone, Americans bought 6 million cars. By 1953 almost two-thirds of Americans owned a car; 40 percent of women had a driver’s license.9 General Motors, under the direction of Alfred P. Sloan, made and sold nearly one-half of all automobiles, and Sloan’s deputy, Harley Earl, innovated the yearly release of a new model, ensuring better sales for carmakers by encouraging customers to “keep up with the Joneses” who sported the latest Cadillac. This was conspicuous consumption taken to a new level where social status derived not from family history, good deeds, or academic degrees but from make and model. Advertisers provided the outline, and Americans bought the image. From his corporate perch Harley Earl himself emphasized the central role of image: his office closet was stocked with a ready supply of outrageously colorful suits, and since he would not let his son drive a Ferrari, he ordered the design department at General Motors to whip out a one-of-a-kind Corvette to keep the young man happy, hip, and inside the brand. Cars needed roads, so the federal government paid for an asphalt flood of road and highway construction. President Eisenhower’s 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act created the interstate highway system—free of tolls. The last and full transformation of America into the world’s premier car country was under way. Not only did this nation with a mere 6 percent of Earth’s population own two-thirds of the world’s cars,10 but Americans were driving their tail-finned Ford Fairlanes and cherry-red Chevrolet Corvettes to and from the spreading suburbs as quickly as men like William Levitt could get them built.

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The cars were flashy; the suburbs were functional. And anybody who wanted to be middle-class and could afford the entrance fee packed up and headed for suburbia. By 1960, half of all Americans lived in the suburbs. Barbie in the Suburbs William Levitt came from a contractor’s family and was a Navy Seabee in the Pacific theater during World War II, ironing out instant landing strips in malarial jungles and watching fellow Seabees building Quonset huts and barracks efficiently and sturdily. With a sense for mass production of housing and communities, Levitt returned to the States and set about designing a town of tiny, identical two-bedroom houses with no basements, whitewashed picket fences out front, and a red-brick chimney poking up from every roof. Just as Henry Ford had placed one worker doing one task in one spot on one factory floor all day long, Levitt hired single-job men who monotonously banged on the siding, painted the windowsills, or ratcheted in the washing machines. Before long, the first Levittown—on Long Island, NY—had 17,000 houses. To outsiders, the uniformity seemed stultifying. To homebuyers, the sameness was either irrelevant or comforting. Levitt’s houses sold for an affordable $8,000, and for war veterans, the GI Bill furnished the down payment. By 1950 nearly 30 percent of Americans lived in suburbs. Immediately after the war, the national housing shortage was so acute that veterans were sleeping in government-donated Quonset huts, in rented-out railroad cars, and in their parents’ basements. But at Levittown, every new family got not only immediate entry into the independence of middle-class living but also a free television on which Michael and Mary (the most popular boy and girl names in 1955) could watch fourteen-year-old Annette Funicello singing “M-i-c k-e-y M-o-u-s-e” as one of The Mickey Mouse Club’s original Mouseketeers. Walt Disney had been making movies for twenty years; Disney World—a one-stop subdivision for cartoon characters come to life—opened in Florida in 1954, giving outwardly conformist suburbanites a common destination for a prefabricated vacation. Before long, Disney World visitors could stay in nearby Holiday Inns, first opened in the early 1950s, and eat fifteen-cent hamburgers at a franchised McDonalds. Family destinations were starting to look alike no matter where the average family of five went. And just like the ubiquitous “Mary” at home watching The Mickey Mouse Club, child star Annette Funicello wore a cotton sweater and bobby socks, attended school, and was expected to be polite and cheery. Unlike Michael and Mary, Annette had on mouse ears . . . but the family could pick up a couple of pairs on their trip to Disney World. More than ever before in American history, corporate products, logos, ad-

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AMERICAN STORIES vertisements, and attitudes were defining a monolithic national culture that cut across regional and ethnic lines. Individual television shows usually had one sponsor only. When I Love Lucy first aired in 1951, the Philip Morris Company (purveyor of cigarettes) sponsored a wild redhead, Lucille Ball (aka Lucy), and her real-life Cuban bandleader husband, Desi Arnaz (aka Ricky), in their on-screen marital antics: a risky duo in segregated America that paid off almost instantly for Philip Morris and CBS. The show went to number one. Average people could relate to Lucy’s lovable but fiery independence and to Ricky’s consequent headaches. Each show started with a little sponsored coaching on how to inhale cigarette smoke deeply into the lungs, a method Philip Morris’s commercials guaranteed would make for better, smoother breathing (useful information for the 50 percent of Americans who smoked by 1950). When Lucille Ball got pregnant in 1952, the executives at CBS wanted to hide the pregnancy, but Lucille and Desi protested, demanding both creative control and the freedom for Lucille to show the resplendent roundness of her belly. Desi appealed directly to Alfred Lyons, the chief of Philip Morris, who, after all, controlled the show’s finances. After their conversation, Lyons wrote to his contact at CBS, “Dear Jim, Don’t fuck around with the Cuban.” Thanks to star power and advertising power, CBS allowed Lucille to be pregnant on screen (though the word “pregnancy” itself was not allowed to be uttered).11 The show’s ratings went up. Here was a depiction of a good, if slightly unorthodox marriage, supported by cigarettes. Families and products, families and sales, were married. Sometimes corporate successes came in pairs. When two brothers named Maurice and Dick MacDonald started a drive-in hamburger joint in San Bernadino, California, in 1940, they dropped the Scottish “a” and called their new venture McDonald’s. Within a few years, they were making good money, driving new Cadillacs, and feeling content. Lines of customers, however, snaked down the block from opening till closing, and it was obvious to everybody that the hamburger brothers had a good thing going. A milkshake mixer salesman named Ray Kroc sat outside McDonald’s one day in 1954 and marveled at the potential. That year, Kroc became the franchise manager for McDonald’s, and in 1961 he bought out the company for $2.7 million. The MacDonald brothers had never wanted to manage such a monstrous organization (with 228 stores by 1960); Dick MacDonald said that if he had taken on the expansion the way Kroc did, “I would have wound up in some skyscraper somewhere with about four ulcers and eight tax attorneys trying to figure out how to pay all my income tax.”12 Ray Kroc, on the other hand, nearly sixty in 1960 and weakened by diabetes, thrived on competition. While the MacDonald brothers had shared technology with anyone who asked, Kroc said that if a competitor “were drowning to death,” he would “put the hose in their

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mouth.”13 In order to drown McDonald’s imitators, Kroc made Coca-Cola the drink of choice for America’s fastest-growing fast-food restaurant. Cash-poor suburbanites on a budget could afford $2.50 for enough hamburgers, fries, and Cokes at McDonald’s to feed the family. They could also afford to buy for their daughters that other American icon, the Barbie doll. Barbie was born in 1958, only a few inches tall with impossible hips and unlikely breasts. Her mother and father were Ruth and Elliot Handler, the founders of Mattel Corporation. The Handlers had arrived in Los Angeles in 1938—optimistic despite the Depression—and started a furniture business using new kinds of plastics, like Plexiglas. Elliot was good with plastics. Ruth was good at everything else. On a trip to Europe in 1956, she noticed some sexy German dolls that were toted around by adults. She knew the dolls were too racy for the average American adult, but she had a hunch that children would love them. So she convinced the rest of Mattel’s decision makers to create something similar, and the result was Barbie. To bypass conservative mothers and fathers warily monitoring their children’s exposure to the outside world, Ruth Handler paid half a million dollars to become the sole sponsor of The Mickey Mouse Club. She ran ads for Barbie, ads that directly targeted children, who did exactly as Ruth expected: they begged and demanded a Barbie. Pressured parents complied, and the age of direct marketing to children began. Handler was one of America’s top two female executives in an era when women worked for men, not as their bosses. Her position explains why she chose to create multiple lines of Barbie. They were career dolls— stewardesses, nurses, and businesswomen—that little girls could play with and imagine a future for themselves as equal members of a democratic society. The career dreams that Ruth Handler had sewn into each Barbie outfit were fulfilled in the short run not by the girls themselves but by their mothers, who were selling Tupperware. After World War II, four out of five working women wanted to keep their jobs, of whom 69 percent were “working wives.”14 And while the number of women in the workforce continued to rise during the 1950s (up to 10 million by 1960), the jobs typically available were in low-paying sectors of the economy, and there was rarely equal pay for equal work. Ruth Handler was an exception; so was Brownie Wise, the woman who sold Tupperware to America. In fact, Wise figured out how to combine a suburban housewife’s seemingly incompatible needs: being home with the children all day long, sharing in a network of female friends, and earning at least some extra money for the family. Tall, glamorous, and as gorgeous as a movie star, Brownie Wise took the plastic storage wares of Earl Tupper and trained a generation of American women to sell the snap-seal containers to each other. A single mother in 1947, Wise started to sell Stanley Home Products door to door. The

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AMERICAN STORIES job with Stanley morphed into a wildly successful attempt at selling Tupperware—which a fellow salesman had seen in a department store—from home to other mothers. By the early 1950s, Wise had convinced Earl Tupper to give her complete control over all sales, which would be made from that point on at home parties. Selling kitchenware from home merged suburban realities with capitalist impulses and was something that women of any skin color, any religious orientation, and just about any financial status could try. In the same way that any mass-produced phenomenon like Barbie dolls or Levittowns could be reshaped to individual tastes, Tupperware sales allowed saleswomen (and their occasional husband helpers) to throw parties according to their own culinary and decorative aesthetics—a little gumbo here, a little Manhattan chowder there. While the overriding impulse in 1950s America may have been conformist, individual expression was never far from the surface. Barbie lived like a jet-setting debutante in one house but performed open-heart surgery down the block. Suburbs became social test tubes. Would sameness lead to mundaneness, and if so, what would be the consequences? A Gallup poll taken in 1962 indicated that two-thirds of American women were satisfied with their lives. For most, their days revolved around family, part-time jobs, and local community activities. This neighborly world of children, chores, and appointments was aided by a shared interest in safety and comfort, but typically impaired by the lack of big parks, neighborhood restaurants, and other public and private spaces within walking distance. More and more, family and community gave right of way to the car and to the television, both of which tended to seclude and separate. Paradoxically, the car connected people and isolated them, simultaneously. In contrast to many other suburban developers of the early 1950s, William Levitt had intentionally subdivided his first sprawling development according to a few community-building concepts: no fences were allowed in backyards in order to provide a type of my-yard-is-your-yard commons for children’s play; concrete swimming pools, one for every 1,000 houses, provided a nexus where families—including dad on the weekends when he was not commuting to his job in New York City—could gather, splash, and relax together; kitchens were placed in the back of the houses to encourage mothers to do housework while simultaneously keeping an eye on the kids in the backyards. The original Levittown on Long Island in New York was meant to encourage the nuclear family’s success within a context of like-minded peers who could talk sports and politics at a backyard barbecue and discuss their children’s education at PTA meetings, largely the domain of mothers. But could young mothers recently relocated to a suburban development find satisfaction in a redux cult of domesticity? Were daytime television soap operas, canned-soup casseroles, Tupperware parties, and other stamps of mass-culture America

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going to provide genuine satisfaction for suburban women, especially when many of them were starting to feel that their college degrees were not being put to use? Modern memory has the 1950s mother Jell-O-molded into place between the stove and the sink, and in theory, her life was supposed to be getting easier and better—at least according to advertisements for Betty Crocker cake mixes and Campbell’s soup, popular magazines like McCall’s, and other purveyors of iconographic images. After shooing the children (an average of three per mother) off to school and doing the laundry (in the finally fully automated washer and dryer), she might drink freeze-dried Folgers coffee with other mothers of the same age, skin color, and religious orientation while sitting together around the brand-new avocado or tangerine laminate table. Dinner would be ready for dad’s happy arrival at six or six-thirty each night, at which point he might play a little catch with Junior, help with the homework, or simply sink into a plush martini and tap his weary feet to Bing Crosby or Pat Boone records. During Levittown’s early years, only “Caucasian” people were allowed to either rent or buy. However, covenants preventing people of color from buying in collapsed in 1954, perhaps inspired by Brown v. Board of Education and the military’s full push to integrate housing on bases as per President Truman’s 1948 order. As minority populations pushed to be included in the American Dream, indicating that the middle-class lifestyle was tempting to those excluded from it, some women began to speak out against what they felt was not a golden era. The Many Faces of Feminism Between 1945 and 1965, the percentage of young Americans going to college tripled, from 15 to 45 percent. The GI Bill did a lot to make this possible, as did the need for more educated professionals. Business management became an academic discipline and a job. Legions of tie-and-jacket MBAs were part of an expanding corporate culture, which relied also on scientists and engineers who were inventing new drugs and technologies. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine eradicated a viral scourge that struck indiscriminately at victims of any age or income, and people realized there was money to be made investing in similar kinds of remedies. The white lab coat became the secular emblem of a scientific America guided by the priests of physics, chemistry, and biology whose pocket protectors and slide rules measured the distance from dismal ignorance to unending progress. Literally hundreds of pharmaceuticals appeared on the market during the 1950s and 1960s: varieties of antibiotics, chemical therapies for treating cancer, muscle relaxants like diazepam (commonly known

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AMERICAN STORIES as Valium), and a birth control pill. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first orbital satellite, in 1957, President Eisenhower called for the nation to churn out mathematicians and scientists so that communism could be crushed by calculus. Nerds were the new patriots. College, then, was more than a ticket to the suburbs, more than a slip of paper; college was the door to a new America, a land of benevolent capitalism. Americans of every color and both sexes wanted to participate in these new manifestations of the American Dream, wanted a chance to earn decent money, wanted a chance to help cure a disease, at least wanted a chance. In some ways, however, earlier markers of progress and change had been rolled back after the war. Women made up 51 percent of the population in 1958 but only 35 percent of the college students, though women had been 47 percent of college students in 1920. Harvard Medical School did not admit women until 1945, and Princeton University did not admit any women at all until 1969. What is more, in the mid-1950s only 37 percent of college women completed their college course, often under pressure from popular culture to seek marriage rather than a degree. “As one writer in the Ladies’ Home Journal advised, ‘Many young men find that they can do much better work if they get the girl out of their dreams and into their kitchens.’”15 Somehow the Victorian era had sprung out of its grave and was running around loose. Here was the central dilemma: the general national ideal was for women to be at home raising children, cooking, and safeguarding American morality through a cheery domesticity, as though the right mixture of pancakes, love, and bedtime stories would prevent communism from seeping into the hearts of innocent children. But even by the late 1950s, in order for families to have enough money to be middle-class, most women had to work outside the home. Some worked only out of necessity, others for the satisfaction, and many for both. In other words, the popular message was not the national reality. Stay at home and be a mom was what women heard. Go to work and earn some money was what most black women had to do and what increasing numbers of white women faced as well. “The proportion of married women in the labor force had increased from 15 percent in 1940 to almost 25 percent in 1950.”16 Of the millions of employed mothers holding college degrees, almost none received equal pay for equal work, and many could not get a job commensurate with their degree in the first place. Feeling overworked and underpaid, women faced yet another puzzle because they were also expected to be uncomplaining. Responses to these sets of contradictory expectations varied. Often a cause can first be noticed by the appearance of a manifesto, credo, or leader—for example, back in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other feminists met at Seneca Falls, New York, and released their Declaration of Women’s Rights. As time passed, the issue of women’s rights became more

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complex; the movement splintered, and new leaders appeared to spearhead each of the factions. On the other hand, sometimes a cause gets ignored because the people in power (the democratic majority) do not want to recognize that there is a problem, as had been the case for blacks in the United States until the late 1700s. Occasionally someone like Frederick Douglass or Booker T. Washington would draw attention and inspire a bit of reform, but then white people would tire of the issue and collectively turn their backs. In that case, a leader may be not evidence of a cause but instead a necessary torch that burns bright and hot enough to attract proper attention, as Martin Luther King Jr. was starting to do by the late 1950s. The suffrage movement, naturally, had always had women for leaders: Elizabeth Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Alice Paul. As for the movements initiated by black people to obtain fair and equal treatment socially and legally, men had more often been the faces on the podiums and on the posters, but women had done just as much work. Rosa Parks was typical, not unique. In fact, a good argument can be made that the modern, public civil rights movement initiated by Parks in 1955 spun into the women’s rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. According to historian Elaine Tyler May, credit for the revolutions of the 1960s is too easily and often given to college students, when in fact it was the baby boomers’ mothers who paved the walkways of protest, dissent, and rebellion. That growing numbers of women were becoming discouraged by their lack of opportunity and equal treatment was made clear in 1961 when the newly elected and youngest-ever president, John F. Kennedy, created the Commission on the Status of Women. A cold warrior, schooled by military service in the navy during World War II, John Kennedy was also attuned to the nuances of a changing nation and people. In 1963, just before his assassination, the commission’s report “focused attention on the pervasive inequities women experienced on the job, preparing the way for the Equal Pay Act of 1963.”17 The commission had been established from the top down, but it had been preceded by tens of thousands of ordinary women who had marched, picketed, appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and done whatever else they could to get the United States to step back from the nuclear arms race. Women were mobilizing on behalf of peace and prosperity. Beginning on November 1, 1961, 50,000 women took to the streets, calling themselves “Women Strike for Peace.” For more than a year, pushing baby carriages, holding up signs, trudging up and down the pavement, mothers got mad, and they got noticed. Over at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), director J. Edgar Hoover naturally assumed the “commies” had infiltrated the nurseries and kitchens, so he ordered the peace strikers put under surveillance. Other red hunters agreed with Hoover, seeing the mothers as accidental sabo-

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AMERICAN STORIES teurs and communist dupes. From the FBI to HUAC was a natural progression in a nation partly run by the paranoid, and the activists were called to testify. However, although university professors, actors, and movie directors had been easy targets for HUAC during the 1940s and 1950s, the members of Women Strike for Peace put the congressmen of HUAC on the defensive. In a chamber packed by hollering women whose babies yodeled alongside them, the hearings lasted for three days, during which it was made abundantly clear that defiance in the face of possible nuclear war (and of nuclear testing that laced cows’ milk with radioactive strontium 90 fallout) was much more patriotic than the witch hunt HUAC had hoped to have. Blanche Posner, “a retired school teacher who was serving as the volunteer office manager of the New York WSP,”18 informed committee members, “This movement was inspired and motivated by mothers’ love for children.” The president of the strikers, Dagmar Wilson, was asked if she would knowingly let communists into the organization. “Well, my dear sir,” she replied, “I have absolutely no way of controlling, do not desire to control, who wishes to join the demonstrations and the efforts that women strikers have made for peace. In fact, I would also like to go even further. I would like to say that unless everybody in the whole world joins us in the fight, then God help us.”19 Deciding not to wait for divine intervention, Betty Friedan, a collegeeducated mother of three who had once been fired simply for being pregnant, published The Feminine Mystique in 1963. The title of the book was a term Friedan coined to describe what she called “the problem that has no name.”20 This problem was the isolation, lack of fulfillment, and unending drudgery experienced by many American women whose lives Friedan had studied for six years after reading the results of a questionnaire sent out to the members of her university graduating class. Friedan’s fellow respondents, of whom 89 percent were housewives, indicated that the constant cycle of car to kitchen to cleanup was not enough. Most of them loved being a mother, and most of them wanted something more. Friedan gave them a voice through her book. With strong sales, The Feminine Mystique gave Friedan the popularity and leverage to do more than merely publicize the discontent. She wanted to find a cure. In the next two decades, Friedan worked with such luminaries as Gloria Steinem (who started Ms. magazine in 1972) to found the National Organization for Women (NOW), fight vigorously, although unsuccessfully, for an equal rights amendment to the Constitution, and generally create a public atmosphere that fostered debate about women’s issues typically not covered elsewhere in print, television, radio, or lecture. Betty Friedan helped resuscitate feminism, that mixture of understanding, belief, and action geared toward giving women equal treatment, equal access, and equal choice personally and in society at large.

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While feminists worked to establish rape crisis centers, women’s studies programs at universities, and equal access to good jobs and good educations, other reformers looked to cure maladies of a chemical bent. The modern age had, from the start, been built on industry. And the new atomic and chemical industries created both vast potential and vast waste. For example, ever since the 1940s, modified crop dusters had been flying over fields, farms, and towns spraying DDT, a lethal insecticide that wiped out mosquitoes, flies, and birds, killing most within minutes of contact by disrupting their nervous systems. During the war, DDT was given to soldiers in the Pacific to prevent the spread of lice and mosquitoes; it was instrumental and effective in quelling malarial outbreaks. After the war, trucks drove through suburbs belching out clouds of insecticide. Children skipped through the spray. At drive-in movie theaters, patrons could pay a nickel or dime to have their cars hosed down with DDT so their popcorn munching would not be shared with dive-bombing horseflies or mosquitoes. Meanwhile, suburban housewives sprinkled new chemical fertilizers and toxic pesticides on identical patches of ever-greener grass during the summer and then purchased boxes of “artificial snow” made of powdered asbestos for the Christmas tree. Directions on the festive red and green boxes indicated that the “snow” should be spread freely. After all, it was fireproof! Chemical power and nuclear power evinced the technological optimism of the times, yet their use highlighted the consequences of attacking problems with relatively unexamined cures. The cures could be worse than the problems. A few contemporary skeptics realized the hazards—moral and medical—inherent in using new technologies before they could be thoroughly investigated. For example, in 1962 the biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a wake-up call to the chemically uneducated populace about the hazards of using substances like DDT to eradicate insects. Carson infused science with morality. Herbicides and pesticides were not just killing droves of unwanted bugs and “weeds”; they were polluting the entire planet at an unsustainable rate. Carson began the book’s first chapter, “A Fable for Tomorrow,” with an idyllic portrait: “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” Deciduous trees “set up a blaze of color” in the autumn and “foxes barked.” The landscape rippled with birds, wildflowers, and fish dilly-dallying in the streams. Carson’s fable, however, soon revealed itself as a eulogy for paradise lost. “Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change,” she wrote. Where birds had once been plentiful, those left “were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices.”21 This calamity came not from lack of rain or volcanic ash, Carson argued, but rather from the thoughtless use of DDT and other pesticides. In 1972, ten

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AMERICAN STORIES years after the publication of Silent Spring, DDT was banned in the United States for all but a few uses and in all but a few places. However, DDT had been in widespread use for thirty years, and it had taken twenty years to piece together sufficient evidence of its toxicity. Unbounded optimism, it seemed, might not always lead to favorable results. And as the 1960s dawned, optimism seemed to be the flavor of the day. The middle class was expanding its reach as the formerly impoverished moved into suburbia. John F. Kennedy was elected president, and he promised Americans that together they could march into a “New Frontier” where the motto would be not “ask what your country can do for you,” but rather “ask what you can do for your country.” A cold warrior with plenty of vitality and a great smile, he created the Peace Corps (an international aid organization staffed by American idealists) and promised to find ways of providing health care for all Americans. Kennedy brought with him to Washington advisers with Ivy League educations—the “best and the brightest.”22 Together, they governed from a White House affectionately dubbed “Camelot,” a reference to the fabled court of King Arthur, who sent his knights on quests to find the Grail—the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper—and whose kingdom fell apart after he was killed. It was with optimism, then, that Americans entered the 1960s, and for a time, it would carry them a long, long way. Notes 1. Christopher Metress, ed., The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 206. 2. Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, Race, Law, and American Society: 1607–Present (New York: Routledge, 2007), 265. 3. Stephanie Capparell, The Real Pepsi Challenge: The Inspirational Story of Breaking the Color Barrier in American Business (New York: Free Press, 2007). 4. Marshall Frady, Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Lipper/Viking, 2002), 40. 5. The Cheers, “Black Denim Trousers,” Capitol Records, 3219, 1955. This was a popular rockabilly song, with words written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who also wrote songs for Elvis Presley. 6. James Sullivan, Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Gotham, 2007), 90–91. 7. John Trudell, “Baby Boom Che,” from AKA Grafitti Man, Rykodisc, 1992. 8. Drive-in Movie Memories (New Jersey: Janson Media, 2006). 9. Owen D. Gutfreund, 20th-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 54–55. 10. Gutfreund, 20th-Century Sprawl, 54. 11. David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Ballantine, 1993), 201. 12. Halberstam, The Fifties, 160. 13. Halberstam, The Fifties, 170.

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14. Elaine Tyler May, “Pushing the Limits: 1940–1961,” in Nancy F. Cott, ed., No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 493. 15. May, “Pushing the Limits,” 498. 16. William H. Chafe, “The Road to Equality: 1962–Today,” in Nancy F. Cott, ed., No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 534. 17. Chafe, “Road to Equality,” 535. 18. Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 110–111. 19. May, “Pushing the Limits,” 525–527. 20. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 15. 21. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 1–2. 22. The phrase “the best and the brightest” was first applied to Kennedy’s circle of advisers by journalist David Halberstam in the eponymously titled book, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random, 1972), 10.

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Lyndon B. Johnson (left) and Martin Luther King Jr. (right) (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

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AMERICAN STORIES Big Dreams On November 8, 1966, people whose television sets were tuned to NBC launched themselves into outer space along with Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Lieutenant Uhura, Bones (the doctor), and all the rest of the crew of the starship Enterprise, “its five-year mission . . . to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Enter angelic voices “ooh-oohing” at the stars. Cut to the flash of light from the twin propulsion systems of the USS Enterprise as it winks out of sight, bound for a beautiful future somewhere far, far away. Star Trek was written by Gene Roddenberry, but it was created by the 1960s. Theoretically, everyone in the United States was aboard the beeping and flashing deck of the Enterprise. With America deep in the midst of its own shame and glory—with the Vietnam War heating up, President John F. Kennedy three years dead of an assassin’s bullets, civil rights leaders divided over methods of peace and violence, homosexuals stepping out into public and proclaiming pride, Native Americans and Latino-Americans demonstrating for their rights—maybe it took an interracial, interplanetary crew blasting away from all the craziness on Earth to give proper perspective to the best parts of the American Dream. In 1962, Kennedy had challenged the nation to put a man on the moon. But with the Apollo space program mired in problems—including a January 1967 flash fire that killed a flight crew during a routine on-ground training mission—the starship Enterprise seemed to be the collective fantasy needed to keep spirits high. With equally lofty ambition, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act (which Kennedy had proposed) in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965—both monumental in their pledge of federal support for civil rights that had been till then no more substantial than thin dried ink. Although both the space program and the civil rights program faced monumental challenges, racism proved a more stubborn foe than the difficulties of extraterrestrial rocketry. In 1964, in Selma, Alabama, only 2 percent of African-Americans were able to register for the vote. Regardless of new laws, many white southerners continued to resist integration and other forms of equality in despicable, ugly ways. During the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, when civil rights workers, including hundreds of primarily white college students from the North, converged in Mississippi to register African-Americans to vote, violence engulfed the region. Most memorably, two northern whites—Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman—and one black man from Mississippi, James Chaney, were kidnapped by Ku Klux Klansmen, tortured, murdered, and buried. A visiting physician who examined Chaney’s recovered corpse said that in his long career he had never seen a body as badly ruined as Chaney’s except when

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corpses had been pulled from car or airplane crashes. And at the Democratic National Convention that year, when delegates from the new, 60,000-strong Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) tried to participate, white southern Democrats laid down an ultimatum that amounted to racist blackmail: either the MFDP delegates would be ignored or segregationist Democrats would leave the party and thereby steal President Johnson’s base in Congress. The MFDP was composed of African-Americans who had registered during Freedom Summer, and now their own nominal parent organization refused to seat them. With television cameras rolling, a sharecropper and descendant of slaves named Fannie Lou Hamer sat at a table in the convention hall and told how she had been driven off her land in 1962 after daring to register and how she had later been arrested (essentially for being black) after attending a civil rights workshop. The arresting officer kicked her in the stomach before shoving her into a patrol car and then into a jail cell. Then, Hamer recounted: [I]t wasn’t too long before three white men came to my cell. One of these men was a State Highway Patrolman and he . . . said, “We’re going to make you wish you was dead.” I was carried out of that cell into another cell where they had two Negro prisoners. The State Highway Patrolman ordered the first Negro to take the blackjack. The first Negro prisoner ordered me, by orders from the State Highway Patrolman, for me to lay down on a bunk bed on my face. And I laid on my face, the first Negro began to beat me. And I was beat by the first Negro until he was exhausted. I was holding my hands behind me at that time on my left side, because I suffered from polio when I was six years old. After the first Negro had beat until he was exhausted, the State Highway Patrolman ordered the second Negro to take the blackjack. The second Negro began to beat and . . . I began to scream and one white man got up and began to beat me in my head and tell me to hush. One white man, my dress had worked up high, he walked over and pulled my dress—I pulled my dress down and he pulled my dress back up . . . All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens. And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?1

History and tradition still had the South by the throat. But out in space, in a future cut loose from the past, no federal laws or marshals were there to stop the first interracial kiss in television history between Kirk and Uhura—he the

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AMERICAN STORIES white captain, she the black communications officer. That is what stories are for sometimes: to show us who we can be. Then there was the “prime directive” handed down to the space trekkers aboard the Enterprise. Whenever they encountered an alien civilization, Kirk and crew were instructed not to unduly interfere, not to introduce advanced technologies that might alter or even ruin a thriving and ancient culture. The Enterprise crewmembers could fire their photon torpedoes and lay down a barrage of laser beam fire when necessary, but their best moments came from diplomacy and negotiated respect with whatever planet full of wrinkly faced humanoids they found. This grander purpose of peace was a modern allegory. The crew of the Enterprise could escape Earth but they could not escape being human. Wherever they went, conflict waited for them. And just about every species had the same capacity to kill. This was the Cold War in space. Gene Roddenberry, having fun all the way, was doing his best to raise people’s consciousness. By June 1969, when the last of the eighty episodes aired, Star Trek’s universal popularity had spread through the living-room temples of Trekkies implanted like alien invaders in every town and city. Trekkies looked like normal people, but they wanted to speak Klingon and plot a utopian revolution of logic, reason, and pointy ears—all inspired by a low-budget show with props that looked more like wobbly cardboard than space metal. The dream was what mattered. Besides, reality was catching up with fiction: six months earlier, three American astronauts on Apollo 8 had been in and out of a moon orbit, and July 20, 1969, was only a month away, when Neil Armstrong would set his white boot onto the powdery surface of the moon and proclaim, “That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.” Humans really were star trekking, and it seemed that Spock’s extraterrestrial Vulcan salutations, “Live long and prosper” and “Peace and long life,” might really come true. In mid-August, on Max Yasgur’s farm in Woodstock, New York, young people gathered to bask in the beat of Janis Joplin’s wail, Joan Baez’s folk, the Grateful Dead’s transcendent space riffs, and Jimi Hendrix’s guitar licks. On a mere 600 acres, about 400,000 tripped-out freaks, sober collegians, and other happy fans waded through rain and mud, smoked bushels of pot, and coexisted peacefully with the neighboring farmers who helped feed and water the legions of love. If humans could tear free from gravity and soar some 238,000 thousand miles away, the thinking went, surely poverty, inequality, and strife could be overcome. As in space, so on earth: at solemn moments of goodbye, Leonard Nimoy’s character Spock flashed the Vulcan salute, a kind of spaceman’s peace sign and handshake in one, his whole hand turned into a V; flower children—the baby boomer college kids who wanted to “make love, not war”—flashed their own

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two-fingered V for peace at cameras, cops, and each other. The V-for-peace became so common that Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s younger brother, used it during his 1968 presidential campaign on the night he told a mostly black audience in Indianapolis that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot to death by a white man. Kennedy cautioned calm, expressed his grief, and shared a line from an ancient Greek playwright. “My favorite poet,” he said into the microphone, “was Aeschylus. He once wrote: ‘Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’”2 He then offered the peace sign in parting. The “Establishment” was being co-opted by the counterculture, and the crowd in Indianapolis did stay calm even as rioting engulfed other cities throughout the nation. There was reason to hope. Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a harmonized human future squared with the mystic awe felt by television viewers when Apollo 8 astronauts beamed back narrated color photos of Earthrise over the moon’s horizon. In the vastness of dark space, Earth floated blue, a minuscule ball of color and life bobbing in the abyss. The perspective of distance made people feel close. The Soviets posted congratulations to America in a state-run newspaper right after Apollo 8 made its splashy return into the Pacific. Maybe even Cold War competition could be healthy and differences bridged. But in 1968, two months after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Robert Kennedy also was gunned down, right after winning the California presidential primary on a platform dedicated to social justice and peace. Entropy, anger, and fear were trying to strangle love and hope. As Kennedy’s funeral train chugged eastward, tens of thousands of mourners spontaneously gathered along the tracks, holding signs proclaiming, “Bobby, we love you.” In Vietnam in January 1968, during the Vietnamese lunar New Year, Tet, communist forces attacked more than 100 sites and installations across the country (including the U.S. embassy), shocking the public into a realization that the United States most definitely was not about to “win” in Vietnam, as the administration and military leaders had been saying for three years. In Chicago, riots erupted between demonstrators and Mayor Richard Daley’s police squads during the Democratic National Convention. Daley had more than 6,000 police and federal army troops at his disposal, including about 1,000 operatives from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Once more, but not for the last time, men with badges and clubs battered unarmed demonstrators. The whole nation watched on television in stunned disbelief. Faith and trust seemed to be leaking away. Good people kept dying, and the goodness they invoked in the hearts of a confused nation started to seem as impossibly distant as the alien civilizations Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock had visited.

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AMERICAN STORIES By presenting himself as the beacon of “law and order,” the Republican candidate for president, Richard Nixon, used disturbances like the one in Chicago to get elected. Six years later, in 1974, Nixon would resign from office to avoid impeachment by Congress concerning his role in one foul disgrace after another. From the White House, Nixon spent six years consolidating a Republican grasp on national political power while simultaneously and illegally indulging his own paranoia and hunger for control. Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to pester political opponents. His appointed henchmen illegally used funds from the Committee to Reelect the President to pay former government agents to break into the offices of a psychiatrist who had treated Daniel Ellsberg, the man who released the Pentagon Papers, which revealed previous presidents’ lies concerning the war in Vietnam. And Nixon ordered the same team of “plumbers” to break into and bug the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC, in 1972, hoping the “intelligence” gathering might provide him with nasty details that could help him get reelected. After he resigned from office (the only president to do so), his successor, Gerald Ford, gave Nixon a blanket pardon before congressional inquiries could sift through the reams of evidence and determine whether to bring Nixon to trial for his alleged crimes. No wonder Star Trek reruns became more and more popular year after year. Captain Kirk was an ethical chief executive motivated by (an admittedly brash) sense of responsibility, not by secrecy, lies, and paranoia like the chief executive in the White House. “Still crazy after all these years”: Castro, Kennedy, and Khrushchev In 1962, humans did not blow up planet Earth. In 1962, humans were, however, afraid that they might blow up planet Earth. The fear seemed reasonable enough. The Soviet Union, under its unpredictable, cue-ball-headed leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had resumed atmospheric nuclear testing. Not wanting to appear a thermonuclear weakling, President Kennedy ordered the resumption of atmospheric nuclear testing as well. Kennedy and Khrushchev were playing Russian-American roulette with loaded hydrogen bombs and spreading radioactive waste around the globe in the process. Khrushchev seemed like a nutty wildcard who enjoyed bluster and threats that he might really mean. He once yelled at one of Kennedy’s cabinet-level secretaries about America’s hypocrisy; while U.S. atomic warheads ringed the Soviet Union from Turkey to West Germany, Kennedy was carping about a few surface-to-air missiles lately installed in Cuba. Khrushchev bellowed at the secretary, “Let’s not talk about using force; we’re equally strong . . . we can swat your ass.”3

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Although Europe appeared to be the likeliest dirt patch for a major showdown between communists and capitalists since the close of the Korean War in 1953, Fidel Castro, a bearded revolutionary in olive green, had changed the equation in 1959 by overthrowing the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. Though Castro was not originally a communist, he was brutal, and a series of bumpy incidents with the United States pushed him into Khrushchev’s Soviet embrace. Plus, Fidel’s younger brother, Raul, was already a communist. The Castro brothers ran with a good friend and fellow revolutionary, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, an Argentine doctor who diagnosed the United States with a case of imperialism and prescribed communist revolution as the antidote. Guevara had been in Guatemala in 1954 when CIA-funded, -trained, and -led paramilitary forces had violently overthrown a democratically elected government. He witnessed the start of an American-installed, right-wing, repressive government that led to civil war and 200,000 Guatemalan deaths by 1996, “mostly civilian lives, with an estimated 80 percent of those deaths caused by the U.S.-trained military.”4 Che Guevara had real reason to see the United States as an interfering, destructive force in Latin America. From the outset, Fidel Castro’s relationship with the United States had been strained. In 1958, the United States had supplied Batista’s forces with weapons, and in return Castro’s followers had taken U.S. Marines hostage. The crisis had been resolved peacefully, but it established a shaky basis for friendship once Fidel Castro took control in January 1959. Also, during the fighting against Batista’s forces, Castro had obtained weapons from communist Czechoslovakia with the Kremlin’s okay.5 Lines were being drawn. Then, in April 1959, while the American public was enjoying Castro’s rumpled-bandit look during his hotdog-eating, public-relations tour of the States, President Eisenhower refused to meet with Castro and went golfing instead. More problematic for U.S.-Cuban relations than that diplomatic snub was Castro’s decision to nationalize foreign-owned businesses in Cuba, most of which were U.S. corporate property. When Castro offered to buy the properties at the devalued rates previously claimed by companies like United Fruit, American enchantment with Castro eroded. Over a series of months, the United States slowed its purchases of Cuban sugar, and Castro signed an oil deal with the Soviets. Eisenhower broke off all relations with Castro in January 1961, just as John Kennedy was preparing to enter the White House. In this as with so much else, Kennedy inherited unresolved problems. Fidel Castro was originally a nationalist, not a communist. He had wanted to empower Cubans, but the schemes and fears of Soviets, Americans, and his own advisers had convinced him that in order to nationalize, he would have to communize. What is more, Castro never showed any reluctance when it came to stifling opposition at home.

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AMERICAN STORIES Castro’s supporters overlooked the political executions and imprisonments he ordered. U.S. observers paid close attention. In 1960, with Eisenhower’s approval, the CIA began training about 1,400 Cuban exiles to invade their homeland in hopes of inciting a counterrevolution to oust Castro. The plan relied on presidential willingness to use the U.S. Air Force to bomb Cuba in preparation for the invasion. Just before assuming the presidency, Kennedy learned about the plan and decided to go ahead with it, though he had serious doubts. On April 15, 1961, U.S. bombers disguised as part of the Cuban Air Force struck lamely at Cuban airfields, destroying only three planes. Nobody in the world was deceived by the paint job on the U.S. bombers, and critical responses were instantaneous. So President Kennedy temporarily grounded the bombers, which might have made a difference for the 1,310 exile-commandos who landed the next day at the Bay of Pigs, not far from Havana. The Bay of Pigs invasion was a short-term disaster for Kennedy, a coup for Khrushchev, and the final inducement for Castro to go indelibly communist. Within days of the debacle, a humbled but honest Kennedy went on national television and assumed complete responsibility for what had happened. His approval ratings shot up above 70 percent. The whole experience convinced him that he should not bow to the pressure of U.S. military leaders, most of whom had been urging him to continue the bombings on April 15 and 16. Kennedy’s choice to be his own man paid off well in October 1962. After Castro pronounced Cuba a socialist country, and after it was obvious that the United States and Cuba were not going to be good neighbors, Khrushchev decided to help his new ally by sending Castro sixty nuclearcapable missiles, some medium-range, others able to reach as far as Maine or the Panama Canal. The missiles, nuclear warheads, 40,000 accompanying soldiers and engineers, and launch equipment were shipped to Cuba on innocuous-looking freighters beginning in July 1962. Given the increasing commerce between Cuba and the Soviet Union, the ships themselves were no cause for concern. But photo images delivered by American U-2 spy planes told a different, more chilling tale. Misguided by the logical nonsense of nuclear deterrence, the United States and the Soviets were following a natural progression to the point of near disaster, partly to test the mettle and resolve of the opponent, partly because each leader had to appear strong to his conservative constituency, partly because that is what happens eventually when a nation has a weapon: it gets brandished. Ever since 1957, American pilots had been flying U-2 spy planes over enemy territory, a genuine flouting of international law. The plane itself, basically a glorified glider, looked like a tiny needle suspended between seventy-foot thin wings. American designers had thought the planes would remain above

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the range of Soviet or Chinese missiles, but in 1960, a U-2 was shot down near Sverdlovsk in Russia. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, decided not to use his poison pin (a last-ditch suicide capsule), and he was captured, convicted in a Soviet court, and used as proof that the Americans were not playing fair. Eisenhower responded that, laws or no laws, the utter destructive force of nuclear weapons necessitated spying. Even so, the U.S. military scaled back its U-2 missions, and by summer 1962, the planes were not flying over Cuba, though flights soon resumed. In September 1962, rhetoric over Cuba between Kennedy and Khrushchev heated. Both leaders made public declarations that all necessary measures would be taken to safeguard their relative interests. They also exchanged private letters full of bewildered language, each accusing the other of turning up the temperature unnecessarily. Although always handsome and collected in public, John F. Kennedy had suffered excruciating back pain for years, and at times like these, his personal physicians concocted all sorts of remedies, including five hot showers daily and dangerous injections of methamphetamines directly into his knotted back muscles. Three billion people were sitting on his shoulders. The world’s fate literally rested on choices that could easily be wrong. For all their posturing, neither of the superpowers’ leaders wanted war. Still, with new evidence pouring into the White House, Kennedy finally ordered new U-2 flights. He had to know if Khrushchev was or was not placing nuclear warheads off the coast of Florida on the island of a dictator against whom Eisenhower had issued assassination orders. (In fact, through CIA intercessors, Eisenhower had dealt with senior members of the Mafia, hoping one of their boys in Cuba could poison, stab, or strangle Commandante Castro.) A marked man cornered on his home turf was not someone whom Kennedy wanted to have access to the power of the gods. By October 16, Kennedy had irrefutable photographic evidence of missile placements throughout Cuba. “Oh shit! shit! shit!” moaned Robert Kennedy, who was privy to all meetings as U.S. attorney general.6 The crisis was on. Kennedy needed to figure out why the missiles had been placed on Cuba. He thought they had something to do with the delicate negotiations ongoing between the United States, West Germany, and the Soviet Union about the fate of West Berlin: that encircled half-city of a million people whom Kennedy had promised to defend even unto the obliteration of all of them. In 1961, with East German citizens streaming into West Berlin—all the essential doctors, engineers, and other professionals—Khrushchev had ordered the Berlin Wall to be built across the middle of the city, not to keep out the capitalists, but to keep in the unhappy communists. The whole project was really a statement about how poorly communism was working, but Kennedy denounced it all the same. Believing that Khrushchev wanted some new accord over Berlin,

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AMERICAN STORIES Kennedy was perplexed not that Khrushchev would use nuclear leverage, but that he had personally lied about the contents of the ships going to Cuba for the last few months. “The lies, Kennedy concluded, were more dangerous than the missiles,”7 evidence that Khrushchev might do anything. Military advisers to the president urged immediate offensive action, but Kennedy maintained his command and his cool, having learned his lesson during the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Not wanting to be a dangerous fool, Kennedy also did not want to appear weak, and from October 22 to 28, he matched Khrushchev with one hairraising public threat after another. Kennedy made the world know that the United States would not allow the missiles to remain. He ordered a full naval blockade and promised to sink any Soviet ships that crossed the line, but secretly he allowed a number of ships to get through as a goodwill gesture to Khrushchev. An invasion force assembled on the beaches of Florida, and Kennedy even considered evacuating all cities along the East Coast. He could smell Armageddon. The Cuban missile crisis passed into history on Sunday, October 28, when the two leaders reached an agreement—part public, part private—as a way for both of them to save face. Khrushchev promised to dismantle all launch sites and return the warheads to the Soviet Union. That was public. And Kennedy promised never to invade Cuba. That was also public. Inside a veil of letters, Kennedy also agreed to remove missiles stationed in Turkey. Perhaps the most dangerous days of the Cold War had ended, though the rhetoric, weapons making, and fear lasted—as Paul Simon sang, “Still crazy after all these years”8—until the last days of Soviet power in the early 1990s. With regard to Cuba and the Soviets, John F. Kennedy had proven himself worthy of leading the most powerful nation in the history of the world, not so different, perhaps, from the deft, scripted maneuvers of James Tiberius Kirk, captain of the Enterprise, that flying fortress of futuristic freedom. There were other tests for Kennedy, however, including one in Vietnam. The Vietnam Era: Civil Rights, the Great Society, and War What is power? If power is the ability to destroy, then white segregationists and the United States military had power. In April 1962, when Martin Luther King Jr. called for a civil rights march to protest segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, the sheriff of Montgomery, Bull Connor, unleashed snapping and charging German shepherds and blasted fire department water hoses at full force against nonviolent protesters, many of whom were children. That was the power to destroy. But the use of power bears unforeseen consequences. Bull Connor’s bully tactics had far less historical force than the persistent

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determination of black and white demonstrators who used their battered bodies to teach the nation how to feel compassion. King was thrown into jail in Birmingham, where he wrote a letter on whatever scraps of paper he could scrounge. That Letter from Birmingham Jail became the bible of the civil rights movement in its eloquent demand for immediate justice. The letter had the power to educate. Bull Connor and others like him had the power of guns, dogs, and hatred. From the pulpits of their feet and the thrones of their voices, the downtrodden broadcast their plight, and it became impossible not to listen. On August 28, 1963, over 200,000 people marched on Washington, DC, to revolutionize the politics of race in America. Many people gave speeches that day to the hopeful advocates of change packed together in pride on the National Mall. And there was music, too: a young folk singer named Bob Dylan; the harmonious trio Peter, Paul and Mary, who sang Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”; and Mahalia Jackson, a Louisiana-born gospel singer who had serenaded President Kennedy at his inaugural. In the festival spirit of high expectations, the young leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), John L. Lewis, a future congressman who had been smashed in the head with a wooden crate during the Freedom Rides of 1961, criticized Kennedy’s impending civil rights bill for not offering protections for “young children and old women from police dogs and fire hoses, for engaging in peaceful demonstrations.”9 Lewis said that with or without the government’s help, “by the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the desegregated South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of God and democracy.”10 He spoke well, but few people could talk in the lyrical dream language of Martin Luther King Jr., who gave the last address of the day. Some things that we hear, or see, or touch are so right they seem to have been pulled out of a shared ancestral well of memory, like words inscribed on DNA. When King took the stage, he spoke partly from his notes and partly from that well of memory, a place he always returned to when speaking. “Now is the time,” he said, “to open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s children.” The words poured out of him, an American hymn. There at the end of a long good day, after cheese sandwiches had been passed through the crowd, after the hot sun had heated the people, King dove deeper into the well of truth, set his script aside, and said, “I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. . . . I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.” His voice was unique, sweet and strong, with an occasional slight quiver as though the emotion might overwhelm him. What he wanted was what his audience wanted,

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AMERICAN STORIES to be able to sing out “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”11 On the winds of King’s words, the movement soared and gained more powerful advocates. The day after the march, President Kennedy met with King and congratulated him. Peace was power. Three months later, John F. Kennedy, who had lately addressed racism as a national moral issue, who had been learning that some causes could not wait, was shot to death in Dallas, Texas, while sitting next to his wife, Jacqueline, in an open car in a motorcade. He was wearing a back brace that day to ease the muscle pain that never seemed to let up, and after a first bullet passed through his neck, the brace kept him from slumping over, allowing the second bullet to enter his skull. He died on November 22, 1963, taking a certain portion of national light with him into his grave. Grief poured like rain, but Kennedy’s death gave sanction to the next president to push through bold programs for social justice. Lyndon Baines Johnson took very little time to declare war on poverty, to infuse federal money into inner-city housing, to create Medicare insurance for the elderly, and to invite young people into his domestic peace corps, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). And Johnson railroaded Kennedy’s Civil Rights Act through Congress. Kennedy’s legacy was Johnson’s mantle; and it was a mixed legacy, alternately transcendent and troubled. Whatever legislative good Kennedy had actually done for the civil rights movement—which his critics claimed was too little and too slow—or for international peace, he had inspired much of the nation, and the assassin’s bullets dampened the exuberance Kennedy called forth. But national mourning could last only so long, and Johnson, a respected politician with immense clout on Capitol Hill, accomplished more liberal governance than perhaps anyone ever had in the history of the nation. However, just as Kennedy had been left a Cold War legacy by his predecessors in office, he bequeathed to Johnson an escalating struggle in the poor and distant nation of Vietnam. Johnson’s choices concerning Vietnam did a lot to ruin the chances for his Great Society program at home. Military power proved to be, in this case, the most impoverishing power of all. By the time Johnson declared that he would not run for a second term as president in 1968, the costs of Vietnam had sapped the Left’s momentum and had robbed the U.S. Treasury of money that would otherwise have gone into urban renewal, schools, and other uplifting programs. Since the early 1950s, the United States had been footing about 80 percent of France’s colonial war in Vietnam, which the French called “Indochina.” The situation on the ground was confusing, with many different political parties and factions vying for control. From a distance, however, a few things were relatively clear. The United States wanted France’s support in Europe to halt communism. France wanted its colony back: Indochina was rich in rubber trees

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and opium (which the French trafficked as heroin all the way to the United States, often through Cuba). Ho Chi Minh, a French-educated revolutionary who had also spent time in Moscow, led the Vietminh, a nationalist-communist militarized organization that had fought against the Japanese invaders during World War II. In 1945 and 1946, Ho had asked the United States to help him establish a democracy throughout North and South Vietnam, which, he said, could become “a fertile field for American capital and enterprise.”12 The French demanded that the United States stay away from Ho, whose communism they highlighted. In order to get French anticommunist support, the United States agreed. Ho’s eight requests for help were answered with silence. With no other source for assistance, Ho turned to China and the Soviets, who were more than glad to help. The fighting dragged on until 1954, when a French force at Dien Bien Phu was slaughtered by Ho’s Vietminh forces, led by General Vo Nguyen Giap, a former history teacher. An armistice was signed, stipulating that, for the time being, Vietnam would be divided at the seventeenth parallel and that in 1956 one set of elections would be held for the entire nation. President Eisenhower looked on but never actually had the United States sign the armistice. When 1956 rolled around and it became obvious that Ho Chi Minh would win easily in the North and South, the United States and its allies in the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO, the South Pacific counterpart of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) said that they would defend South Vietnam’s political integrity against any outside aggressors—a not terribly surprising statement given an internal U.S. government document admitting that South Vietnam was, in essence, a creation of the United States. The elections never took place. Historian Stephen Ambrose points out that, in fact, with its SEATO partners, the United States “violate[d] the Geneva agreements by bringing Vietnam into an alliance system.”13 The United States was willing to break international law because senior administration officials had the hubris to think they knew best. Ho Chi Minh did not get elected because the United States would not allow a communist a shot at an open election. Instead, Ngo Dinh Diem, who had been living in exile in New Jersey, was installed as president of South Vietnam. President Eisenhower was afraid of something he called the “domino effect,” the theory that if one nation went communist, it would surely topple its neighbors into communism also, one after the next. His thinking was as black and white as a domino and entirely simplistic: he made the mistake of assuming that communism was monolithic. But Ho hated the Chinese, once having said, “It is better to sniff French dung for a while than eat China’s all our life.”14 And in 1969, the Soviets and Chinese got involved in a small border war. Nevertheless, by the end of Eisenhower’s term in office in 1961, he had sent more than 1,000 military “advisers” to Vietnam to train and advise the

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AMERICAN STORIES South Vietnamese army, and there were CIA agents at work also (who were, incidentally, orchestrating the opium trade formerly run out of Laos by the French military.) South Vietnam’s President Diem, a Catholic, rudely ruled a majority Buddhist populace, greatly reducing the chance for democracy in his country; his regime was called an emerging “fascist state” by a Saigon-based CIA officer named Edward Lansdale.15 South Vietnamese communists, the Vietcong, were killing thousands of Diem’s supporters in the countryside; Diem retaliated by ordering whole villages destroyed if they were suspected or accused of collaborating with the Vietcong. During the summer of 1963, Buddhist priests protested Diem’s regime by pouring gasoline over their yellow robes and setting themselves on fire in the streets of Saigon. It was a civil war, and the United States was already deeply involved when, within a month of each other, Kennedy and Diem were assassinated. Lyndon Johnson took over the presidency with 16,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam. There were 220,000 by the end of 1965 and 543,000 by late 1968.16 The war had become one part civil strife; one part Cold War with the United States, the Soviets, and the Chinese funding their respective allies; one part direct conflict between U.S. forces and the North Vietnamese army; and finally, a terrible mess because U.S. combat troops were often at a loss to determine who was friend and who was foe. How, though, did Vietnam transform from an American concern to an all-out American war? Korea had established the precedent for U.S. military engagement in Southeast Asia, and the Cold War set the basic context of fear within which both the Korean and Vietnamese wars took place. Communism, capitalism, nationalism, colonialism, democracy, and totalitarianism were the driving and dividing forces of the mid-century. These “isms” mattered to people because they equaled freedom and power. Regrettably, many bad things were done in the name of freedom. In 1964, with President Johnson fully in control of U.S. foreign policy, a small incident in a body of water few Americans had ever heard of gave him a pretext to escalate American involvement in Vietnam. On August 2, a U.S. naval vessel, the Maddox, was fired on as it was skirting (and perhaps crossing into) North Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin. The North Vietnamese were feeling twitchy because the Maddox’s spy mission took place at the same time South Vietnamese commandos were raiding the North Vietnamese coast. Two days later, the United States claimed that the Maddox had been fired on a second time, an attack that never actually happened, as newly released National Security Agency documents make clear.17 Johnson went before Congress and claimed the Maddox had been in international waters when it was fired on twice in two days. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, granting Johnson the authority to make war. That was the power of a lie, or at least an untruth. (When irrefutable revelations about the incident

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came to light in December 2005, the results of the military and administration officials’ lie could not be undone; the war was already over.) With his new war-making authority, Johnson initiated nearly nonstop bombing of North Vietnam: first, “strategic” infrastructure targets like oil dumps and munitions depots; later, cities like Hanoi, the capital of the North. By 1970, when Nixon was in office and continuing to order bombing raids over North Vietnam (and neighboring Cambodia and Laos), the United States had dropped more bombs than had been dropped in the entire history of World War II. But the North Vietnamese army and the Vietcong would not give up. They and their commanders, like Ho Chi Minh, who died in 1969, knew they were not just fighting the U.S. military; they were fighting against the will of the citizens of the United States to continue spilling money and blood into a cause that seemed, as the body count mounted, to make less sense to more people. “And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?” asked the folk-rock group Country Joe & the Fish in 1965. “Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,” answered the chorus. “Next stop is Vietnam.”18 Tim O’Brien: Citizen Soldier When the U.S. government and military sent American boys into combat in South Vietnam in 1965, probably more than 50 percent of the population, and in some villages 100 percent, supported the Vietcong. This had been true ever since 1956, when Eisenhower and Diem refused to allow elections. What is more, an even larger majority of South Vietnamese citizens opposed their own government. Diem and his successors were at best inept. The U.S. military force of citizen soldiers was, in essence, being deployed to support an unpopular regime against a relatively popular, indigenous foe. College deferments and plum placements in the U.S. National Guard ensured that the draft army was composed overwhelmingly of the poor. And although AfricanAmericans constituted less than 15 percent of the U.S. population, “blacks accounted for 24 percent of all Army combat deaths” in 1965.19 Commanding officers disproportionately placed black soldiers in front-line combat units. Brown, black, and white soldiers held on as best they could with the aid of CIA-transported opium injected under noxious clouds of Agent Orange, a poisonous defoliant used to wipe out wide swaths of jungle in a failed effort to steal cover from the North Vietnamese army (NVA). By war’s end, at least one-third of Vietnam’s jungles were ruined, the wildlife gone, and the poison sunk into the ground. Nonetheless, plenty of lush arboreal canopy remained to provide cover for the NVA. One marine, Leo Cawley, remembered a gruesome incident from 1966 when the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) shot an antitank explosive into a bus full of Buddhists. “Everywhere there were

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AMERICAN STORIES dead, spattered with blood,” Cawley recalled. “What did it all mean? These were the Vietnamese that we were supposed to be defending. It was some gook hassle the gunnery sergeant explained. . . . We had freed up the ARVN to crush the Buddhists.”20 It really is no wonder that the average American GI upgraded the World War II phrase SNAFU (“Situation Normal All Fucked Up”) to FUBAR (“Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition”). Fifty-eight thousand American men died in Vietnam, and more than 300,000 more were wounded, some of whom went home to participate in antiwar demonstrations as members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (as did John Kerry, a future U.S. senator and contender for the presidency in 2004). More than 4 million Vietnamese people—men, women, and children—were wounded and killed between 1945 and 1975, when the North Vietnamese forces declared victory through unification. Of those injured, an uncountable number were South Vietnamese civilians hurt by ARVN and U.S. soldiers unleashing their machine guns, sniper rifles, pistols, and mortars into so-called free-fire zones, plots of land in which anything moving could be shot. In 1968, a college graduate named Tim O’Brien received his draft notice. O’Brien had grown up in a small Midwestern town where the driving force was devotion to God and country. Most of the men he knew were veterans of World War II, Korea, or both. They huddled together at the local Veterans of Foreign Wars post, nursing their beers or coffees, and told tales about the rightness of serving in the military. Tim O’Brien had decided by the time his draft notice arrived in the mail that U.S. involvement in Vietnam was wrongheaded, misguided, and immoral. Because of this conviction, he faced the toughest choice in his life up to that point. Should he show up for duty because his government told him to? Should he refuse to report for duty and face jail time, thereby acting on his conscience? Or should he flee the country, never to return, thereby acting on his conscience and saving himself years in a tiny jail cell? He wondered which choice was right and which choice was brave. The year of Tim O’Brien’s decision, 1968, was a tough year for the United States. The Tet Offensive showed North Vietnamese and Vietcong tenacity. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were killed. President Johnson told the nation he would not run for a second term. And antiwar demonstrations picked up intensity. Men burned their draft cards. Cities burned after King’s assassination. And although the public would not find out about it until more than a year later, 504 residents of a tiny village called My Lai were lined up by ditches and assassinated by a U.S. military company under the cold direction of Lieutenant William Calley. Under these tensions near and far, Tim O’Brien mulled over his options. In his memoirs, O’Brien recalled, “The summer of 1968 . . . was a good

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time for talking about war and peace.”21 So he jotted his thoughts onto napkins, debated moral philosophy with friends, played golf and pool, gulped coffee, and remained confused—not about the war, but about whether he should enter into it. “I was persuaded then, and I remain persuaded now,” he wrote, “that the war was wrong. And since it was wrong and since people were dying as a result of it, it was evil.” But O’Brien thought he could be “mistaken, and who really knew, anyway?” Perhaps if he had been an orphan, he would have evaded the draft, but “piled on top of” the philosophical conundrums “was the town, my family, my teachers, a whole history of the prairie. Like magnets these things pulled in one direction or the other, almost physical forces weighting the problem, so that, in the end, it was less reason and more gravity that was the final influence.” In August 1968, Tim O’Brien boarded a bus to boot camp and entered the U.S. Army to fight a war he disagreed with in a country he had never seen against a foe he did not know. After going through infantry training; after suffering through the nationalistic platitudes of a chaplain who refused to discuss morality and preferred to lecture about unquestioning “faith and discipline”; after listening to officers inculcate loathing for the Vietnamese people into the raw recruits by yelling things like “Dinks [Vietnamese] are little shits. . . . If you want their guts, you gotta go low”; and after deciding not to go AWOL by flying to Europe, Tim O’Brien did his one-year tour of duty in Vietnam from February 1969 through March 1970. After sleeping in jungles; after hiking through jungles; after figuring out how to sleep with mortar explosions “splitting the ground”; after soaking in the brotherhood of obscene misery and fear; after learning that “REMF means ‘rear echelon motherfucker’” (someone with a cushy job away from the front lines) and that “no one in Alpha Company gave a damn about the causes or purposes of their war”; after realizing that some of his fellow soldiers carried around Vietnamese body parts as trophies, like Mad Mark who “unwrapped a bundle of cloth and dangled a hunk of brown, fresh human ear under the yellow beam of light”; after all that and more, Tim O’Brien came home with unfinished and unpolished conclusions: “Now, war ended, all I am left with are simple, unprofound scraps of truth. Men die. Fear hurts and humiliates. It is hard to be brave. It is hard to know what bravery is. Dead human beings are heavy and awkward to carry, things smell different in Vietnam, soldiers are dreamers, drill sergeants are boors, some men thought the war was proper and others didn’t and most didn’t care.” The Vietnam War ended for the United States in 1973, when the last U.S. troops left, though a few American personnel remained until 1975 when the North Vietnamese took Saigon, which they renamed Ho Chi Minh City. The conflict began as a colonial war and morphed into another fragment of Cold

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AMERICAN STORIES War fear and confusion. The United States committed itself unthinkingly to “containing” communism wherever and however it might appear. “Containment” sounds like a jar but looked like burning gasoline, the kind called napalm that was dropped on jungles, villages, and people. Was it brave for Tim O’Brien to face his fear of violent death and go into battle? Would it have been braver for O’Brien to burn his draft card and go to jail in defense of his opposition to a war he thought wrong? Is it more courageous to fight with fists and guns or to fight with words and peaceful deeds, as Martin Luther King Jr. tried to do during his too-few years? Does the answer depend on circumstance? As O’Brien explains it, “Courage is nothing to laugh at, not if it is proper courage and exercised by men who know what they do is proper. Proper courage is wise courage. It’s acting wisely, acting wisely when fear would have a man act otherwise. It is endurance of the soul in spite of fear—wisely.” Notes 1. Permission to reprint this portion of Fannie Lou Hamer’s speech was graciously granted by Amanda LaForge, Chief Counsel, Democratic National Committee. 2. Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy: His Life (New York: Touchstone, 2000), 367. 3. Max Frankel, High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Krushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Ballantine, 2004), 34. 4. Derek Leebaert, The Fifty-Year Wound: The True Price of America’s Cold War Victory (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002), 172. 5. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy J. Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: Krushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 12–13. 6. Frankel, High Noon in the Cold War, 41. 7. Frankel, High Noon in the Cold War, 76. 8. “Still Crazy After All These Years” was the title of a Paul Simon song released in 1975, arguably not possible without the events of the 1960s and, at any rate, a fitting anthem for the Cold War. 9. Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, eds., Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 407. 10. John Lewis and Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (Orlando: Harcourt, Brace, 1999), 228. 11. John E. Lewis, A Documentary History of Human Rights: A Record of the Events, Documents and Speeches That Shaped Our World (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003), 475–477. 12. George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (New York: Knopf, 1986), 10. 13. Stephen Ambrose, To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 129. 14. Herring, America’s Longest War, 15.

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15. Ben Kiernan, “The Vietnam War: Alternative Endings,” American Historical Review 97, no. 4 (1992): 1123. 16. Marilyn Young, Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 166; Kiernan, “Vietnam War,” 1131. 17. Robert J. Hanyok, “Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2–4 August 1964,” National Security Archive, www.gwu. edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/relea00012.pdf. 18. Country Joe and the Fish, I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag (Vanguard, 1967). 19. Scott Sigmund Gartner and Gary M. Segura, “Race, Casualties, and Opinion in the Vietnam War,” Journal of Politics 62, no. 1 (2000): 116. 20. Kiernan, “Vietnam War,” 1132. 21. All quotations of Tim O’Brien are taken from If I Die in a Combat Zone Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (New York: Laurel, 1969).

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14

Contemporary America The Life and Times of Al Gore

Planet Earth, as seen by Apollo 17 astronauts, 1972. (Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

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AMERICAN STORIES You and History Once a history book moves out of the distant past and into recent and contemporary scenarios, a new prospect presents itself. The person reading the book—you—can actually remember the events being described on the page. You might zoom in a whole lot more when you read about George W. Bush and the war in Iraq, or about Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy, or about how Congress funds college educations, than when you were reading about Andrew Jackson and the Bank of the United States. But should the past be considered history if its major players are still alive? And if so, how best should disco, rap, Ronald Reagan, crack cocaine, cell phones, abortion, the Internet, Hillary Clinton, double-tall iced lattes, Harry Potter, the first Gulf War, AIDS, autism, and the toppling of the Twin Towers be dealt with in a history book designed for a survey course? This stuff is relevant. But how does it involve you, your friends, or the guy who sits near you in class listening to his iPod? Remember that not one single history book is objective. Merely choosing which topics to include and which to exclude indicates an author’s personal understanding of historical significance. Choice is bias. Some authors focus primarily on politics. This book argues that pop culture, race relations, and gender relations have done at least as much to shape the past and the present as have politicians and legislators. Furthermore, scholars using the same exact sources often arrive at conflicting conclusions. Some critics look at Ronald Reagan’s presidency and see a moral-minded administration that scaled back harmful federal involvement in the economy. Other critics look at the Reagan years and see a fear-mongering administration that pandered to immoral business interests. History is, and can only be, interpretive. Inevitably, historians infuse their books with their own perspectives. Now that this book dips its pages into the present, you naturally will have ideas and opinions about the events being described. You probably know someone who has AIDS or have wondered about your own risk for infection. You probably care about the cost of Internet access and the download speeds available. You probably care about whether or not abortions are legal or illegal. You probably have heard something about former vice president Al Gore, the 2000 election, and global climate change, but you may not know enough to have formed your own opinion. Indeed, understanding both the past and the present involves much more than basic facts or emotional reactions. Understanding grows from exposure to new perspectives and from studying the nuances of an issue. Al Gore and Global Climate Change In 2006, Al Gore released his documentary An Inconvenient Truth to movie theaters across the country. He did not anticipate that the movie would draw

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CONTEMPORARY AMERICA big crowds or generate much popular interest. After all, he wanted to turn Generation SUV into environmental healers driving quiet, sensible cars. Earth’s polar ice caps and glaciers are melting, he pointed out in the film. Carbon in the form of coal and oil is being dug and pumped out of the ground, burned in power plants and cars to make energy, and released into the atmosphere where it is heating up the planet at rates not felt in a millennia. And we should all be doing something, Gore intoned in the movie’s narration, to reverse the deadly pollution spewing from our cars’ tailpipes. Not only did Al Gore want to stir up some eco-crusading, but also he was trying to do it with a documentary, the American equivalent of trying to get Texans to stop watching football by asking them to read medical journals written in ancient Greek. With few exceptions, documentary film directors in the United States can count on getting about as much attention as poets and playwrights. Only one man with a nonfiction camera in the United States has made waves in the popular mind: Michael Moore. Dressed in casual clothes with his shirt untucked, and usually sporting a scruffy beard, Moore has played David to corporate America’s Goliaths. Moore is the populist everyman whose documentaries champion the proverbial “little guy”: jobless Detroit auto workers in Roger and Me; peace-loving suburbanites snoozing safely in the mushroom-cloud shadow of the National Rifle Association in Bowling for Columbine; and duped voters paying the price for President Bush’s 2003 war in Iraq in Fahrenheit 9/11. By the late 1980s, Moore already had a reputation as a wily common Joe sticking up for other common Joes. But by the time An Inconvenient Truth hit theaters, Al Gore had a doubly undeserved reputation as both a boring public speaker and an out-of-touch liberal. Making Gore’s film even less likely to thrill crowds was its subject matter: environmental disaster and global climate change caused by the very same people he hoped would go see the movie, Americans raised on four and a half hours of mindless television every day. However, by 2007, in these United States where 5 percent of Earth’s population uses 25 percent of Earth’s energy, An Inconvenient Truth became the third best-selling documentary in history. By 2007, President Bush had admitted, with six years of reluctance behind him, that humans were indeed contributing to changing global weather patterns—and this from a president who had refused in 2001 to sign the international Kyoto treaty that would have committed the United States to reducing its discharge of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. And by 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a worldwide consortium of scientists, had publicly proclaimed that humans were the leading cause in an impending disaster capable of making large portions of the globe uninhabitable. In 2007, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded a joint Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the IPCC for publicizing humanity’s pivotal role in altering the globe’s

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AMERICAN STORIES climate. The committee argued that Gore and the IPCC were contributing to future peace; if climate change is not arrested, one certain consequence is future chaos, strife, and suffering. Al Gore, almost single-handedly, made environmental disaster sexy, or at least scary. Young Al Gore Albert (“Al”) Gore Jr. grew up in two places that came, by the late 1970s, to represent the bases of power in the United States: Washington, DC, and the Sun Belt (stretching like a superheated Bible train from Georgia to southern California). With one foot planted in a Tennessee tobacco row and the other in a Washington hotel where his parents lived most of the year while his father served in Congress, Al Gore acquired a fine fusion of rural and urban values. He is a devout Baptist who has studied theology and taken a pro-choice stance on abortion rights. He loves his family, his country, and the Boston Red Sox—no offense to southern baseball teams intended. He is a successful high-tech businessman who has worked in Congress to help small farmers make a living. Gore graduated from Harvard, served as an army journalist in the Vietnam War, served as a congressman, a senator, and the vice president of the United States, lost a presidential election in 2000 under unusual circumstances, and emerged as the leading alarm bell for humanity’s role in the current global climate crisis. As of late 2007, Gore claimed not to be in the running for president, but he has not ruled out the possibility. As a boy, Al Gore had access to the privileges of his parents’ money and connections, but his father, Senator Albert Gore Sr., wanted to make sure his son would know the value of farm labor and country life. So young Al spent childhood summers in Carthage, Tennessee, often on sharecroppers’ land plowing hillsides, feeding pigs, tending tobacco shoots, and playing with children less advantaged than himself. His mother, Pauline, a lawyer and hard worker herself, thought her husband might have been pushing their child a bit too hard. She reportedly told her Albert that a boy could grow up to be president even “if he couldn’t plow with that damned hillside plow.”1 When not learning to rough it, Al Jr. attended a premier DC–area prep school, St. Albans, and mingled with political powerhouses at Washington dinner parties. Visitors and regulars in the halls of Congress would see Al Jr. trailing Albert Sr. as the senator walked briskly from meeting to meeting. The son was expected to keep up. Albert Gore Sr.’s political career rested on shaky ground. He was a Democrat from the South during the years that many middle-of-the-road Democrats in Dixie headed into the Republican Party. In the late 1950s and early 1960s,

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CONTEMPORARY AMERICA some white southerners and Midwesterners were dismayed by policies they associated with the Democratic Party, especially public school integration and expansion of welfare programs. Al Gore watched his father struggle to make sense of a liberal agenda in a state headed in a conservative direction. In 1956, for example, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina approached Albert Sr. on the floor of the Senate and asked him to sign the “Southern Manifesto,” a pro-segregation declaration that Senator Gore later called “insane.” Thurmond already knew how Gore felt about the manifesto; his intention was to embarrass Gore in front of their southern colleagues. Gore did not care. He would stand by his principles. So when Thurmond handed over the manifesto in front of a room crowded with other southern senators and newsmen and said, “Albert, would you care to sign our Declaration of Principles?” Gore Sr. bellowed back, “Hell no.”2 Albert Sr.’s dedication to liberal values provided a moral map for his son to follow in his own political career, though Al Gore Jr. would choose his own issues to champion. At St. Albans, teachers and friends saw Al Gore as gifted, studious, and sometimes mischievous. His mother and father had done their utmost to nurture Gore’s mental acuity. The mischief seems to have arrived on its own: smoking cigarettes out of sight of school authorities; cutting his church shirt in the back so he could slip it on and add precious seconds to his morning sleep; and cutting a friend’s hair while the guy slept.3 Gore could have gone to any college he wanted, and he chose Harvard, the incubator of success. His four years at Harvard coincided with the U.S. escalation of the Vietnam War, the reality that defined a generation. Vietnam and the Making of Al Gore Al Gore entered Harvard in 1965 and graduated in 1969. During those four years he developed an academic fluency in politics, an interest in journalism, a passion for environmental policy, and an abiding love affair with his future wife, Mary Elizabeth “Tipper” Aitcheson, who was attending Boston University. While some fellow Harvard students protested the war in Vietnam by seizing an administration building in April 1969 (for which police beat them in the head with batons), Al Gore had already chosen to express his antiwar opinions privately or at least sedately, depending on the circumstances. At Gore Sr.’s invitation, Al Gore had attended the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and watched National Guard troops patrolling the streets in armored vehicles. Men and women his own age cast their bodies like ballots in protest against national military policy, and the National Guard and police responded with tear gas and handcuffs, chaining the sounds of dissent. On the floor of the convention, Al Gore watched his father give a rousing speech

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AMERICAN STORIES (which they had coauthored) publicly opposing U.S. military activities in Vietnam, an increasingly difficult position for a Tennessee politician to keep if he also intended to keep his seat in the Senate. As 1970 approached, bringing with it an election race for Gore Sr.’s senate seat, Al Gore, having graduated from college, stood at a crossroads. He knew he was likely to get drafted to fight in a war he thought was wrong. How could he best serve his conscience, his country’s call to duty, and his father’s precarious political position? He disagreed with the U.S. military presence in Vietnam, yet he thought he was obliged to serve. He and Tipper planned to marry, and she was only one year away from graduation. With his father’s connections, Al Gore could have found a way out of active duty service, probably by landing a spot in the National Guard. Instead, he enlisted in the army in August 1969. Al and Tipper got married in 1970 after he finished basic training, and they moved into a trailer in Alabama. The accommodations were abysmal, but at least their trailer was better than the first one they checked out, with its battle-ready platoon of cockroaches roosting inside the refrigerator. Working as an army journalist on a two-year enlistment, Gore received orders that he would be shipping out for Vietnam in the fall of 1970. During the spring and summer months of waiting, Private Gore wrote small news pieces and enjoyed his new marriage, but the nation went through the greatest outpouring of antiwar demonstrations since 1968 and his father lost his reelection race for the Senate to a conservative Republican named Bill Brock, who ran nasty campaign ads and received illegal funding from a secret program called Operation Townhouse—run by aides to President Richard Nixon. The year 1970 was a difficult time for America. During the late 1960s and on into 1970, the North Vietnamese army had infiltrated South Vietnam by hiking through neighboring Laos and Cambodia on a route called the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In 1968, the U.S. Air Force had begun nonstop bombing runs on the trail, hoping to disrupt the flow of troops and supplies. The bombs had devastated vast swaths of land in Cambodia and Laos but had not stopped the North Vietnamese. On April 30, 1970, President Nixon went on television to tell the nation about an imminent U.S. Army intrusion into Cambodia. A new wave of domestic protests rolled across America, most on college campuses. The most poignant tragedy took place on the campus of Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. Student demonstrations had been going on for four days, and Ohio’s Governor Jim Rhodes ordered a detachment of the National Guard to enter the campus at the request of Mayor Leroy Satrom. On the morning of May 4, 1970, a few hundred students on the campus commons were protesting the presence of the troops. Many more students were milling around, simply watching. At 11:45, ninety-six guardsmen stood in formation

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CONTEMPORARY AMERICA just as classes got out. Thousands of students spilled onto the commons, most heading home or to lunch. The soldiers’ commanding officer misinterpreted the moment and thought the extra students were joining the protest. He ordered the students to disperse immediately. Over the next half hour, the guardsmen lobbed tear gas canisters into the crowds of students and marched over the commons, forcing the students backward. A few students began hurling rocks. As the confusion intensified, one knot of soldiers knelt in the grass, aimed their M-15s, and shot sixty-one rounds. The soldiers killed four students—one more than 200 yards away—and injured nine others. Subsequent investigations, including one by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), established that the guardsmen had not been in danger and that more use of tear gas would have finished dispersing the crowd. Furthermore, the four students who died had neither been taunting the soldiers nor throwing stones at them. Just barely out of college himself, Al Gore, in his GI drab green, could only watch the news and sympathize. About 5 million university and college students across the nation spilled onto quads and streets, and by the end of May 1970, more than 900 universities had closed their doors for the remainder of the term. President Nixon had not yet done as promised in Vietnam. He had reduced the army’s presence on the ground to about 225,000 men, but he had increased the air war and had invaded Cambodia, a nominally neutral country. More than 100,000 professors joined their students in protest. In solidarity with the student strikes sweeping through the States, American GIs in Vietnam refused to fight. Pandemonium reigned in America. Nixon pulled the troops out of Cambodia, hurried the rate of troop withdrawal from Vietnam, and emphasized his policy of “Vietnamization,” whereby the South Vietnamese army itself would be responsible for defending South Vietnam. Congress nullified the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Student activism worked, but even as the United States lurched toward withdrawal, Al Gore headed into Vietnam, where enlisted men were known to “frag” (i.e., toss hand grenades at) officers who ordered them into worthless reconnaissance missions. Perhaps as many as one-fourth of the soldiers in Vietnam were smoking marijuana, and many were using heroin. Gore was heading for dispiriting times. Private Al Gore served five months in Vietnam as an army journalist, mainly attached to the Army Corps of Engineers, which was building roads and bridges near Bien Hoa. Casualty rates remained high in Vietnam throughout 1970 and 1971, but only about 15 percent of military personnel ever served on the front lines, which were ragged and ill defined in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Gore seems to have genuinely wanted to be treated the same as any other enlisted man in the army, but he was an ex-senator’s son, and at least one team of biographers—David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima—seem to think Gore’s immediate superiors did what they could behind his back to keep him safe.4

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AMERICAN STORIES Whatever the exact reasons, Private Gore did not get close to much fighting, but he did see its consequences: burned-out villages, burned-out spirits of his fellow GIs, and death. While these tragedies may have strengthened his opposition to the war, Gore also learned that the situation in Vietnam was more complex than any anti- or pro-war stance could encompass. Significant numbers of South Vietnamese people expressed their strong desire to have the U.S. military remain to protect their freedoms from the encroaching communist forces. Gore would take this new sense of complexity with him and, in later years as a congressman, would vote based on the certainty that little in war or politics was certain. Al Gore returned to the United States in 1971, got out of the army, and moved with Tipper to Nashville, where they both got jobs working for the Tennessean, a progressive newspaper owned by John Siegenthaler, a former aide to President John Kennedy. During the four years Gore worked for the newspaper, the last U.S. troops left Vietnam, and in 1975 the North Vietnamese army streamed into Saigon, the capital of the South, and declared a communist victory. Ho Chi Minh was dead, but his cause had triumphed. More than 58,000 U.S. soldiers had died, more than 300,000 had been wounded, and the mood in America alternated between somber and disco. Al Gore’s transformations in the coming years would mirror many of the changes moving through the nation. Learning How to Be a Democrat in a Conservative America From the time of the Tet Offensive in 1968 through the shootings at Kent State in 1970, citizen distrust of the federal government had escalated. The Nixon administration’s role in Watergate only worsened the distrust, and the Pentagon Papers had revealed two decades of intentional lying. Nixon resigned in 1974 over allegations and revelations about his abuses of power. By 1978, the public learned about various illegal FBI and Central Intelligence Agency domestic spying operations, and in turn Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, designed to create congressional and judicial oversight of the nation’s various spy and police agencies. The FBI’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, had established COINTELPRO (a counterintelligence program) in the 1950s to spy on and disrupt any domestic political groups that Hoover saw as threatening to the American political order. Hoover’s number one target had been Martin Luther King Jr. By the late 1970s, federal governmental power seemed out of hand, and many people were simply exhausted from two decades of war and civil rights struggles. By the late 1970s, Al Gore Jr. was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Tennessee. He was not exhausted by the struggles but rather infused with a calling to steer

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CONTEMPORARY AMERICA the nation into a moderate form of liberalism that he thought would be both acceptable and useful. Responses to the nation’s emotional anxiety and malaise varied. Vast swarms of 1960s refugees threw their love beads into a box in the closet and took jobs in education, social service, or the private sector. Disenchantment with Vietnam combined with adult financial impulses to tame their social crusading. The hippies’ younger brothers and sisters were entering high school and college in the mid-1970s. They listened to their siblings’ old Beatles and Jimi Hendrix albums, but they also bought disco records and disco jackets. Big boots, big hair, and late-night clubs signaled a shift away from ballotbox activism and into social revolutions on the dance floor, where black and white kids could forge a new alliance of fun without the hassle of marching on Washington. From 1971 through early 1976, Al Gore sampled many of the same impulses and trends. His hair was long, and his sideburns were thick. He liked wearing sandals to the office and at least occasionally smoked pot. He bought all the latest rock albums and wrote articles for the Tennessean about a five-week-long series of meetings between local evangelicals and members of a spiritualist commune who had just set up camp near Nashville. Yet he also investigated local government corruption, studied theology at Vanderbilt University for a year, worked on a law degree, and talked politics with anyone who could keep up. Meanwhile, as the Gores helped create a liberal enclave of friends, family, and acquaintances in Nashville, Tennessee, a new coalition of conservative Christians and fiscal conservatives began to solidify its control over the Republican Party. That process, beginning in the early 1960s, emanated from a transformed, suburbanizing South stretching from coast to coast. Conservative northern Catholics and disgruntled blue-collar workers began joining southern conservatives in an effort to keep prayer in public schools, reduce welfare allotments, and stymie the efforts of racial minorities to gain full equality. In fact, out of disgust with Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s aggressive support for civil rights and integration, many southern white Democratic voters switched their allegiance to the Republican Party during the late 1960s. The transformation helped explain why many conservative Democrats gave their vote to Nixon in 1968 and why Albert Gore Sr. lost his Senate seat in 1970. While traditional elected politicians worked crowds at county fairs and staged rallies, televangelists like Jerry Falwell urged evangelicals to take up the burden of politics, to throw their combined weight into the ballot box and tilt the nation’s policies toward their conservative understanding of inerrant biblical morality. However, during the 1970s, the nation as a whole was not quite ready to embrace Falwell’s brand of Christian politics. Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, lost a lot of support by pardoning Nixon, so the citizens elected

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AMERICAN STORIES Jimmy Carter in 1976, a former nuclear engineer who had served in the navy and who seemed like the moral antidote to the nastiness and lies of Richard Nixon. Carter projected an image of plain decency. More importantly, Carter was a born-again Baptist who wore his religion like a badge of honor, and he was from the New South. He lectured America to uphold its moral mission in the world and to conserve energy. He installed solar collection panels on the White House grounds to symbolize the government’s commitment to alternative energy sources. He enforced a 1975 law mandating that U.S. carmakers bring all their models up to a 27.5 mile-per-gallon standard. President Carter could not, however, accomplish the one thing people most wanted from him: to feel better about America’s prospects. Carter had entered office during an economic slump. Beginning in 1973, after the United States supported Israel in a war against Egypt and Syria, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had embargoed its oil shipments to the United States for one year. The resulting oil shortages sliced into the economy and worsened an already bleak financial situation. Throughout Carter’s administration, factories struggled, sales of American cars slumped, and long lines of needy applicants stretched around social services offices. The president’s faith-based moral politics appealed to much of the electorate, but he seemed ineffective. He had the United States boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow because the Soviet Union had just sent its tanks rolling into Afghanistan under flimsy pretenses. But when Iranian students seized American embassy workers and officials in Tehran as hostages in 1979, Carter proved unable to secure their release. In the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan from California, a former movie actor, once-upon-a-time Rooseveltian Democrat, and recent two-term governor, campaigned on the new conservative Republican platform: low taxes, a strong military, and cautious attitudes toward the use of government to solve or ease social problems. Reagan easily won. The election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980 signaled a shift in American culture. The modern conservative Republican Party had arrived at the pinnacle of political power by piggybacking on people’s discontent with three things: a flagging economy, the social chaos of civil rights and Vietnam War protests, and what seemed to many a secular and immoral drift in society. Reagan Republicans supported a big military, lower taxes, balanced government budgets (which Reagan never accomplished), voluntary prayer in schools, and deregulation of business—in particular by allowing corporate mergers in all sectors. Many of Reagan’s supporters opposed pornography, homosexuality, and most welfare programs. In fact, the whole network of Roosevelt’s New Deal struck conservative Republicans as a shift into socialism. They agreed with President Calvin Coolidge’s old 1920s dictum that “the business of government is business,” which Reaganites understood to mean

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CONTEMPORARY AMERICA that government should do what it could to help businesses make profits, generally by leaving them alone.5 President Reagan had Carter’s solar panels removed from the White House grounds and gutted the funding for solar energy research. Reagan had sold himself as the ally of big business, and renewable energy sources had nothing to do with his constituents’ objectives. He cut money out of welfare programs and cut income taxes for all Americans, mainly benefiting the wealthy. During his eight years in office, the economy seemed to rebound, but at the cost of a mushroomed federal debt and increased poverty in inner cities and rural districts. His administration condoned the illegal sale of weapons to Iran and used the proceeds to fund a right-wing paramilitary organization in Nicaragua, the contras, who overthrew a democratically elected, left-leaning government. Reagan officials thought of themselves as the last of the cold warriors, and they intended to win what they saw as a never-ending struggle between “good” and “evil.” Reagan called the Soviet Union the “evil empire” and pumped money into the military. In particular, he spent more than $30 billion for a space-based missile defense system called the Strategic Defense Initiative, “Star Wars,” which never worked. Reagan’s carefully projected image as a virtuous leader armed to the teeth with nuclear missiles appealed to many voters who had felt emasculated by the United States’ failure to prevent a communist takeover in Vietnam. When Berliners tore down the Berlin Wall in 1989, many Americans saw its collapse as a symbol of Reagan’s right-minded strength. Within another two years the Soviet Union collapsed, yet further proof to many that an increased military budget could create the kinds of changes in the world that Americans wanted—namely the end of communist regimes and the spread of free-market capitalism. George H.W. Bush followed Ronald Reagan as president from 1989 through 1992. Bush had to raise taxes to cover the twin costs of running the government and paying off the morning-after headache from Reagan’s tax cuts and military expenditures. During the 1980s, the wealthy had generally grown wealthier and the poor had not only grown poorer but had also grown in numbers. Inner cities increasingly resembled racial ghettoes, filled with African- and Latino-Americans who could not afford to get out. With “white flight” to the suburbs, city budgets strained to find the tax base to pay for adequate police forces, social services, and education. White flight became the new segregation. By the late 1990s, primarily white suburban schools received more money per student per year than mostly black and Latino schools in the inner cities. Suburban residents could fund bonds for school funding; inner-city residents had fewer resources. Brown v. Board of Education could not prevent neighborhood segregation, even if it could increase school integration. Poor people’s decreased access to quality education and medical

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AMERICAN STORIES care showed in increased epidemics of petty crime and preventable disease. By 2006, African-Americans, though only about 12 percent of the population, constituted 51 percent of all new HIV diagnoses in the United States. Poverty, lack of access to equally funded public school education, and distrust of a medical establishment notorious for experimenting on black people led to cycles of hopelessness and sickness. As for the race-based medical experiments, the most notorious example had taken place in Macon County, Alabama, where from 1932 through 1972, physicians from the U.S. Public Health Service had knowingly and intentionally allowed about 400 African-American men with syphilis to remain untreated, even after the advent of penicillin, which could have eradicated the syphilis bacterium but was intentionally withheld. The physicians tracked the men’s deteriorating health by taking yearly spinal taps and then autopsied their cadavers. The syphilitic men were lied to during the whole forty years, were never informed they actually had syphilis, and were prevented during World War II from joining the military, where they might have received adequate health care. The story, broken in the media in 1972, had added to the sense in many African-American communities that influential white people were willing to use black people like guinea pigs. What health care poor people could get by the 1990s consisted primarily of treatment at underfunded Medicaid clinics. On the heels of twelve years of conservative Republican administrations, Bill Clinton from Arkansas stepped into the White House in 1993. He was young, southern, and affable, the first progressive populist president in a long time. Clinton stayed up late at night devouring books and fried food, had a hybrid Roosevelt-Kennedy smile, and charmed well more than half the nation. He was to the Democrats what Reagan had been to the Republicans: a reason to celebrate. And there by Clinton’s side was Albert Gore Jr., lately a member of the U.S. Senate, formerly a member of the House of Representatives, and a failed contender for the Democratic presidential ticket in 1988. Al Gore had run for an open congressional seat in 1976 and gotten elected along with Jimmy Carter. The two men shared southern roots, military service, born-again Christian renewal, a liberal social vision, and a certain kind of thoughtful public presence, but where Carter—a relative political outsider—would prove unable to achieve his short- or long-term goals, Al Gore had been raised to go the political distance. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Congressman Gore established a reputation as an expert on global issues, especially nuclear weapons research and deployment. Gore opposed President Reagan’s unprecedented spending on new missile systems while simultaneously supporting a vigorous maintenance of existing nuclear capabilities. Gore’s stance, somewhere between the typical Democratic and

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CONTEMPORARY AMERICA Republican positions of the day, gave him something of a bipartisan toughon-communism image during an era of increasing political strife, a useful image in his successful 1984 race for the Senate. Gore grew and changed during his years in Congress, reflecting both the changes in American society and personal experiences of his own. While he would weigh in on topics like abortion (pro-choice), regulation of cigarette manufacturers (labels with warnings about cancer), foreign affairs (tepid support for funding the Nicaraguan contras), and campaign finance reform (more transparency), Gore made himself a recognized expert in two particular fields: computer technologies and the environment. In both cases, but especially with regard to environmental policy, the 100-year-old relationship between the federal government and private industry was at stake. Computers in one form or another are at least as old as the Chinese abacus. Computers compute. They add and subtract; they multiply and divide. Or, more accurately, humans program computers to compute. The twentieth-century history of computers starts with engineers and mathematicians working with next to no funding in relative isolation from one another. As with so many other technologies, however, the federal government and military had a use for high-number calculating starting in World War II. From the 1940s forward, military budgets included ever-higher stipends for computers. Universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford and corporations like General Electric and IBM won government contracts to develop increasingly complex computers, using, in essence, public dollars to jump-start their innovations. By the late 1950s, engineers had solved various problems. Originally, computers had used vacuum tubes as a power transfer, but vacuum tubes ran very hot and took up lots of space. In the 1940s, some computer engineers worked in boxer shorts and undershirts because the laboratory felt like a roasting desert with all the vacuum tubes radiating heat. Over a thirty-year period, engineers invented first transistors, then integrated silicon circuits, and finally silicon microprocessors with smaller and smaller gridworks of circuitry. The four problems of heat, space, speed, and memory storage were solved with the advent of silicon microprocessors. It had become possible by the early 1970s to envision and even build computers that could fit onto a desk. Until the advent of personal computers in the late 1970s, computers had been used almost exclusively by big companies and the government. They had been expensive to buy and expensive to maintain. However, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak, and Steve Jobs did a lot to make small, affordable, enjoyable computers a reality for the average consumer. Gates and Allen formed Microsoft to sell computer programs, or software, that could be installed on a machine named the Altair 8800, a clunky-looking desktop model that resulted from a 1973 competition in Popular Electronics. Whereas

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AMERICAN STORIES the founders of Microsoft realized the profits to be made in software applications, the two Steves—Wozniak and Jobs—decided that they could integrate form and function, hardware and software, inside the plastic shell of their Apple I and II designs. By 1977, the Apple II could be purchased for $790, and third-party creators were selling games and even spreadsheets that ran on the Apple II, which came with a pop-top monitor and a keyboard. As early as 1969, the first electronic messages, or e-mails, were sent through the first computer-to-computer connections that linked four computers through a network called ARPANET. Goodbye, Flintstone slide rules and compasses. Goodbye, board-game chess. Hello, computers. Al Gore’s role in the computer revolution was much less sublime than the mathematical splendors of the Gateses and Wozniaks of the world. However, Gore did substantially involve the federal government in funding and organizing the modern Internet, as people know it in the twenty-first century. Beginning in 1986, one year into his first term as a senator, Gore sponsored legislation calling for studies, completed within a year, to check the feasibility of fiber optics as a means for conveying information relays from computer to computer. Five years later, he helped push through a more robust bill, the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, which allocated approximately $1 billion to make the Internet faster and more ubiquitous. While most of the work was to be done under the guidance of the National Science Foundation, Senator Gore made sure to include a directive for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to “conduct basic and applied research directed toward the advancement and dissemination of computational techniques and software tools which form the core of ecosystem, atmospheric chemistry, and atmospheric dynamics models.”6 In other words, Gore wanted the EPA to figure out how to use computers and computer networks (the future Internet) to improve understanding of global weather patterns. While the 1991 Internet legislation was important for fostering the United States’ lead role in Internet connectivity until the end of the 1990s, Gore would soon make a bigger name for himself as vice president of the United States and as a leading advocate for understanding and addressing what was then called global warming but is increasingly being referred to as global climate change. From Vice President to Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize A few events shaped the choices Al Gore would make in the early 1990s. First, he lost his bid to receive the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency in 1988. Despondent, he organized a series of meetings with advisers to decide what he should do next. The Senate was a fine place to work but perhaps a bit

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CONTEMPORARY AMERICA stultifying for someone with Gore’s ambitions. Then, in 1989, after leaving a Baltimore Orioles baseball game, a car in the parking lot ran into his son. The boy suffered major internal injuries. He had, in fact, stopped breathing and was resuscitated on the spot. Al and Tipper spent two weeks in a hotel room across the street from the hospital to make sure one or the other of them would be with their son at all times. The political defeat and near-loss of his son sparked something in Al Gore, something already there—a passion for saving the planet. During the next two years he hatched a plan for a book, proposed it to Houghton Mifflin, wrote it, and got it published in January 1992 as Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. His name on the book read “Senator Al Gore,” but he was already in the race for the vice presidency by the time Earth in the Balance hit the marketplace. The book gained monumental attention, moving instantly onto the top ten list of the New York Times. The book described a planet under siege from capitalism gone wrong and laid out a plan for putting people back into balance with the cycles of life surrounding and pervading them. Not all scientists at the time even agreed with Gore’s contention that global warming was a serious threat, but the book provided a platform from which, as vice president, he could prod the nation to pay serious attention to the environment. During the eight years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the United States and Al Gore enjoyed similar fortunes. The Clinton-Gore team balanced the budget and left a surplus at the time of their departure. Unemployment fell, and the minimum wage went up from $4.25 to $5.15 per hour. The consumer high-tech industry took off, with names like Amazon.com and eBay sounding no funnier than MTV had ten years earlier. Often with Vice President Gore’s prompting, Congress passed new environmental laws. For example, most road building in federal forests was halted, and billions of dollars were set aside to restore the Florida Everglades. Policies that put money in banks and wallets and protected the few remaining old-growth forests satisfied business owners, workers, and conservationists. In 1997, Gore went to Kyoto, Japan, to participate in the first international meeting to establish global plans for lowering the emissions of greenhouse gases—a touchy prospect in the United States, where corporations argued that any step-down in emissions would also hurt their business. Gore signed the Kyoto Protocol, but the U.S. Senate has never ratified the treaty (because no president has submitted the treaty for ratification), meaning that while more than 165 other nations have been actively trying to solve the global climate crisis, the United States has been effectively sitting on the sidelines with the motor running for the last ten years. Nevertheless, in October 2007, Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on behalf of the environment. Other challenges beset the Clinton presidency, challenges that resonated

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AMERICAN STORIES more deeply with Americans in the 1990s than did worries about global warming. Notably, from before the time he entered office until his impeachment in 1998, Bill Clinton was dogged by allegations about one sex affair after another. The last one, involving a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky, provided an engrossed news audience with tawdry details about private affairs that Democrats argued were irrelevant and Republicans argued were germane to determining a chief executive’s fitness to lead the nation. Though the House impeached Clinton for lying under oath (after he claimed not to have had sexual relations with Lewinsky), the Senate overwhelming acquitted Clinton in 1999 of any legal wrongdoing. The censure cast on him by the impeachment also cast a shadow over Al Gore, who became smeared by association. This would affect his run for the presidency in 2000 by enabling Republican Party politicos to register conservative voters displeased by Clinton. The Early Twenty-first Century In 2000 Al Gore ran against Governor George W. Bush of Texas for the presidency of the United States. Nearly 500,000 more people voted for Gore than for Bush, but the electoral votes of the state of Florida went to Bush, giving him the election, after a rare turn of events. In Florida, the initial count revealed that Bush led by fewer than 2,000 votes, so the state’s laws mandated an automatic recount, after which Bush’s lead was cut to a mere 327 votes. Gore exercised his right to request a second, manual recount in certain counties where complaints about voting machine irregularities had been most pronounced. But ballot recounters had difficulty tabulating the results quickly. The automatic counting machines could not read holepunched ballot cards with what got called “hanging chads”—the bits of the card that voters had failed to punch out completely—and those ballots needed to be recounted individually. There were also 175,000 ballots that had been disqualified, for a variety of reasons—some, as it would later turn out, quite illegal. More time was needed to do a thorough recount, but Florida’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, a Republican and the leader of Florida’s campaign to elect Bush, ordered all counting to be completed by November 15 unless the four counties in question could offer a valid reason why their recounts were ongoing. The Florida Supreme Court overruled Harris and decreed that the recount continue until November 26. As the debate intensified, Bush partisans did their utmost to stop the recount, while Gore partisans tried to keep it going: By November 26, the gap between Bush and Gore stood at 537 votes, with Bush in the lead. Gore still seemed capable of winning if the process continued. Although the Florida state supreme court ruled

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CONTEMPORARY AMERICA on December 8 that the count should proceed, Bush’s legal team appealed directly to the U.S. Supreme Court, which made its ruling on December12. The court, in a five to four decision, said that because different counties had different procedures, the whole process was arbitrary and thus violated the Fourteenth Amendment by denying “equal protection of the laws” to certain people’s ballots. The recounting halted, and George Bush became president without a majority mandate. When hijacked jet airliners hurtled into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers on the morning of September 11, 2001, the whole world changed, in part because the unpopularly elected President George Bush had a new opportunity for authority, one that he did not request but could not shirk. The choices that President Bush would make in the coming years would reverberate around the globe. Bush vowed a swift revenge on the plotters of the hijackings. Immediate blame rested with what author Mahmood Mamdani calls the terrorism of one branch of “political Islam,”7 and more specifically with Osama bin Laden and his organization known as al-Qaeda. Religious fundamentalists—worshippers who believe that holy scriptures are literally true—are common to all major world religions, including Christianity. To say that members of al-Qaeda are radical Muslim fundamentalists (as media outlets and government officials often do) is to accidentally group all fundamentalist Muslims into one group, which is not accurate. The vast majority of the world’s fundamentalist Muslims do not advocate terror as a tool, tactic, or objective. However, bin Laden and his Salafi cohort do advocate the use of violent terror. Salafis are a tiny minority of a minority of Muslims who want to re-create the social and religious systems current during the Prophet Muhammad’s lifetime. Al-Qaeda also advocates the overthrow of the nation of Israel and the removal of all U.S. troops from Muslim-majority countries, in particular from Saudi Arabia, which is home to the cities of Mecca and Medina, Islam’s two holiest sites. George W. Bush vowed to destroy bin Laden and al-Qaeda. He would not prove able, as of 2007, however, to defeat bin Laden, al-Qaeda, or terrorism as the questionably named “war on terrorism” suggests. Terrorism is a behavior, not a group. The United States invaded Afghanistan immediately following the attacks of September 11. Al-Qaeda had roosted in Afghanistan thanks to the invitation of the mullahs of the Taliban regime, a ruling group of men who used a public soccer stadium as a stage to cut off women’s heads as a punishment for infractions of sharia (Islamic law). The initial invasion quickly pushed the Taliban out of power and into the mountains bordering Pakistan, where they fought alongside al-Qaeda guerrillas against combined U.S.-Afghan troops. By 2007, a democratically elected Afghan government sat shakily in a wartorn

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AMERICAN STORIES nation. The Taliban was not wiped out. They had allies in the Pakistani secret services and military, but U.S. fighting power was diverted elsewhere because President Bush decided to invade Iraq in the spring of 2003. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 had nothing and everything to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center. The government of Saddam Hussein, despot of Iraq, had not planned or enacted the events of September 11, 2001. In fact, most evidence indicates that Hussein and bin Laden were more opponents than allies: Hussein wanted to keep political Islamicists out of Iraq so they could not undermine his regime. Although Hussein paid lip service to Islam, his public acts of piety were a thin cover for his gang of thieves and murderers. Nearly every 9/11 hijacker had actually come from Saudi Arabia. So the United States did not invade Iraq in retaliation for 9/11 because Iraq had not been involved in 9/11. On the other hand, Americans were gripped by panic throughout 2002 and 2003. Many people mistakenly came to believe that Iraq had had something to do with the attacks on the Twin Towers, likely as a result of Bush administration rhetoric—often repeated by certain news organizations—that lumped talk of 9/11, terrorism, and Iraq into the same framework. And the Bush administration spent more than a year putting together a case to show (inaccurately as it turned out) that Hussein’s regime possessed many powerful weapons, including a budding nuclear weapons program. Arguing that Hussein threatened the security of the United States, President Bush claimed the right to wage preemptive warfare to protect the United States from possible future harm, and under that pretext the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003. By the summer of 2007, some 3,700 U.S. soldiers had died in Iraq, and more than 20,000 had been seriously injured. Estimates for the number of Iraqis killed during the war ranged as high as 500,000. The Sunni and Shiite factions were unable to reach political accords with each other, and the Kurds of northern Iraq continued to maintain a generally safe, autonomous enclave. Al-Qaeda had infiltrated Iraq, but only after the U.S. invasion had destabilized security enough that foreign fighters could enter unopposed; and internal debate within the United States was confused and fractious. The Democrats took back both houses of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections, largely on their promise to change the course of the war. By 2007, they had proven unable to do that. The nation waited to see what a new president would do in 2009. Meanwhile, American soldiers sweated in hundred-degree heat, loaded down with water, ammunition, and a burning sense that their mission’s objectives were complicated by the political, religious, and civil strife of the society into which they had been deposited. All was not gloom in either the world or the United States in 2007, though a variety of perplexing issues competed with the ongoing war in Iraq for news

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CONTEMPORARY AMERICA space. In spring 2007, while about 12 million illegal immigrants waited to find out what Congress and the president would do about their status, citizens spilled into the streets across the nation to advocate a humane, decent solution to the immigrants’ plight. Illegal immigrants—many from Mexico, Central and South America—provide the labor force for fruit and vegetable harvesting, animal slaughtering and processing, and a host of other low-paying jobs, particularly in the construction trades. Farm labor is one of the few job types to which the minimum wage laws do not apply, enabling farmers to pay paltry wages to migrant laborers who work stoop-backed in fields regularly coated in pesticides and herbicides all so that U.S. consumers can buy oranges, orange juice, beets, lettuce, and the full cornucopia of produce at affordable prices. The inconsistencies and paradoxes of the system are staggering. Many U.S. citizens want the economic benefits of inexpensive labor but do not seem to want the laborers themselves. In his 2007 State of the Union address, President Bush finally acknowledged that scientists’ repeated warnings about global climate change had some merit and committed the nation to a policy of finding and developing energy sources alternative to the burning of fossil fuels. While critics of the administration contended that little money was actually being devoted to the problem, the president’s admission about the realities of climate change provided a top-down forum for a more cohesive national program sometime in the future. And in 2007, Al Gore rode on high waves of publicity after winning the Nobel Peace Prize a year after the release of his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which dovetailed with growing unanimity of opinion among the world’s scientists that the planet perched perilously on a global climate catastrophe capable of wreaking untold havoc. Most scientists would not have been ringing the alarm bells if they did not bear some measure of hope that humanity could alter its present course and implement more sustainable, less polluting energy sources—like solar, wind, and geothermal—to power the homes, businesses, and conveyances of the world. The history of events in this last chapter obviously does not come close to encompassing the infinite realities of life in the early twenty-first century. The chapter could just as well have looked at the increasing incidence of obesity, the enforcement of laws pertaining to nonviolent felony offenses, or the recent history of genetically modified food and the implications for global health. Or the chapter could have taken a lighthearted spin and examined the cultural roles of celebrities like Angelina Jolie, Oprah Winfrey, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Or the chapter could have digressed into the most populist realm of all: YouTube. After all, if you cannot find it on YouTube, it must not have happened. And if it is on YouTube, it must be worth knowing about. Future historians, however, will have to figure that one out later.

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AMERICAN STORIES Notes 1. Margaret Carlson, “We Raised Him for It,” Time, February 8, 2000. 2. Bob Zelnick, Gore: A Political Life (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1999), 34. 3. Bill Turque, Inventing Al Gore (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 40–44. 4. David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima, The Prince of Tennessee: The Rise of Al Gore (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 131–132. 5. Herbert Stein, Presidential Economics: The Making of Economic Policy From Roosevelt to Clinton, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: AEI, 1994), 28. 6. 15 USC CHAPTER 81 - HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING, http:// uscode.house.gov/download/pls/15C81.txt. 7. See chapter 1 in Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon, 2004).

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COLONIAL NEW ENGLAND

About the Author Jason Ripper lives with his wife, Diane, and their two children in Bellingham, Washington, a gentrified redoubt of 1960s America. He strives to make history more interesting for the general reader, and currently teaches history courses at Everett Community College.

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