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American
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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 2007037356

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) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments ix

Chapter 1 After the Civil War 3

The Difficulties of Reconstruction 4
Reconstruction: Black and White 6
Mary Ames: A New England Woman in Dixie 10
W.E.B. DuBois and the “Problem of the Color Line” 16
Chapter 2 Cowboys and Indians 19
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West 20
Horses: Flesh and Iron 22
Buffalo Bill, Black Kettle, and the Wars for the West 24
Buffalo Bill: Violence and Theater 31
Annie Oakley 32
Sherman Alexie’s Poem on Buffalo Bill 37
Chapter 3 A Mosaic of American Life: 1875–1914 39
Millions of Watts: Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla 40
Millions of Immigrants 44
Sadie Frowne: Sweatshop Seamstress 48
Ida Tarbell: Muckraker 54
Chapter 4 The U.S. Government: At Home and Abroad 59
The Scene at Home 60
Theodore Roosevelt, Part 1: Of Silver Spoons and
Police Badges 62
An International Interlude: Cuba, Hawaii, and the
Prelude to War 66
Theodore Roosevelt, Part 2: Of Rough Riders, Talking
Softly, and Carrying a Big Stick 72
The Spanish-American War and the War Against Filipino
Nationalism 74
Theodore Roosevelt, Part 3: From Lieutenant Colonel
to President 75
Chapter 5 A Palette of Progressives 79
The “Full Dinner Pail” and the “Square Deal”:
Theodore Roosevelt as President 80
Defining “Progressivism”: Roosevelt and Robert
La Follette 84
Different Paths to Progress: Booker T. Washington,
W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Frances Willard 86
Birth Control and Conservation: Margaret Sanger and
Gifford Pinchot 91
Lines in the Water 94
Chapter 6 World War I 99
Did Civilization Civilize? 100
The Causes of World War I in Europe 101
War, Baseball, Ragtime: From August 1914 to
January 1917 103
The Yanks Are Coming 108
A Doughboy in the Trenches 110
Woodrow Wilson and Some Kind of Peace 114
Chapter 7 The 1920s 117
Introduction to the Twenties: Cars, Commercials,
and Crime 118
Al Capone: The Powers of Money 120
Zora Neale Hurston: The Harlem Renaissance,
American Letters, and the Great Migration 127
In Cars, on Roads, to Cities 134
Chapter 8 Into the Great Depression 137
From Plenty to Plenty of Nothing: Harding,
Coolidge, and Hoover 138
The Bonus Expeditionary Force and the Election of
Franklin Roosevelt 140
The Depression: Why? 144
Plenty of Dust: Stories from Inside the Storm 146
Eleanor Roosevelt: Before the Depression 150
Popularity from the Pulpit: Aimee Semple McPherson 152
Eleanor Roosevelt: Progressive Politics in the Depression 153
Chapter 9 Out of the Depression and Into War 157
What They Heard on the Radio 158
Pearl Harbor 162
Sacrifice 166
The Internment of Monica Sone 169
 Sergeant E.B. Sledge and Shakespeare: “What a piece
of work is a man” 174
Chapter 10 World War II 177
James Doolittle Gives America Hope 178
The War in Europe: 1941–1943 181
Dwight D. Eisenhower 183
The Liberation of North Africa and Italy 185
Daniel Inouye and the 442nd: D-day and the Fall of
the Third Reich 188
Chapter 11 From World War to Cold War 197
To the Surrender of Japan 198
After the War: “Give ’em hell, Harry!” 203
Alger Hiss and Joseph McCarthy: Spies, Superbombs,
and Circus Politics 210
Chapter 12 American Culture and Society in the 1950s and 1960s 219
White and Black, Apart and Together 220
Rebels in Denim and Diamonds, and Rebels with a Pen 224
Barbie in the Suburbs 227
The Many Faces of Feminism 231
Chapter 13 In Love and War: 1961–1969 239
Big Dreams 240
“Still crazy after all these years”: Castro, Kennedy, and
Khrushchev 244
The Vietnam Era: Civil Rights, the Great Society,
and War 248
Tim O’Brien: Citizen Soldier 253
Chapter 14 Contemporary America: The Life and Times
of Al Gore 259
You and History 260
Al Gore and Global Climate Change 260
Young Al Gore 262
Vietnam and the Making of Al Gore 263
Learning How to Be a Democrat in a Conservative
America 266
From Vice President to Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 272
The Early Twenty-first Century 274

About the Author 279

 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments

This book tells the history of the United States through the story of its inhabit-
ants. 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 cli-
mate change are likely to suffer; as of January 2008, the federal government
seemed prepared to lease oil exploration rights to private companies off the

ix
 PREFACE AND 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, experi-
ences, 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 sym-
phony 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 cor-
rected 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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 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

spelling, facts, syntax, style, and logic; finding all of it in distress, she thank-
fully 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-year-
old 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
 AFTER THE CIVIL WAR

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.)

3
 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, how-
ever, 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 depres-
sion 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

4
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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 African-
Americans bent on gaining civil rights and ex-Confederates bent on maintain-
ing 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 repre-
sentatives than white. Mississippi elected a black U.S. senator, and African-
Americans 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 neces-
sary 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 Re-
construction 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 trav-
eled 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 coloniza-
tion 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 ac-
customed 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 govern-
ment 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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 AFTER THE CIVIL WAR

Union without fuss or vengeance. Lincoln imagined forgiveness. His succes-

sor, 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 Gen-
eral 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 Bu-
reau sent teachers (mostly women) into the South, built schools for African-
Americans, 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 es-
tates, 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 Ander-
son—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:

8
 AFTER THE CIVIL WAR

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.

9
 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 rav-
aged 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 po-
sition 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 Reconstruc-
tion 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 rattle-
snakes 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 plan-
tation 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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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” gath-
ered 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 planta-
tions 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, stamp-
ing 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 threaten-
ing: “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 rheuma-
tism, 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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 AFTER THE CIVIL WAR

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 pos-
sibility 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 African-
Americans, 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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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 unre-
constructed 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 estab-
lished 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 Amer-
ican 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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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

Cowboys and Indians

Annie Oakley (Keystone/Getty Images)

19
 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, rail-
road 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 feather-
draped Indian warriors.
William Cody’s audiences had other options for entertainment. A wide-
eyed 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 vaude-
ville 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 imita-
tion 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, depend-
ing on the client’s desire. Prostitutes were a staple of American life; illegal

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 COWBOYS AND INDIANS

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 guar-
antees 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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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 conquis-
tadors 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 buf-
falo. 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, some-
times 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 war-
rior 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 transcon-
tinental 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 Mis-
sissippi. 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 Chi-
nese. 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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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 Ameri-
cans 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 civili-
zation then goes about memorializing all that was lost. Indian shamans like
Geronimo and Sitting Bull were the prairie and desert witches of white Ameri-
can 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 command-
ers 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, cru-
cible 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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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 Novem-
ber 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 indis-
criminately, 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. Some-
how, 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 char-
acter, 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 transmut-
ing 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 Wil-
liam 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 arrange-
ments 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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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, Sit-
ting 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 re-
nown 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 sanctu-
aries 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 midsum-
mer. 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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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 prob-
ably 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 com-
ing 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-mox-
mox [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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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 stand-
ing 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 tour-
ing 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 de-
cided 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. Sit-
ting 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 res-
ervations, 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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 COWBOYS AND INDIANS

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 throw-
ing 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 “Ameri-
can,” 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,

35
 AMERICAN STORIES

the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and well-meaning (if presumptuous) “reform-

ers” 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 one-
husband-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

36
 COWBOYS AND INDIANS

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: Stack-
pole, 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).

38
 A MOSAIC OF AMERICAN LIFE

A Mosaic of American Life

1875–1914

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

39
 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 inven-
tory. 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 alternat-
ing 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 de-
velop 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 fair-
grounds 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

41
 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 unlim-
ited 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 cru-
cify 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 advance-
ment 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 achiev-
ing 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 pen-
etrate 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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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 re-
ceivable 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 work-
days. 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 Min-
nesota, 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 cit-
ies 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 dis-
tricts. 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 national-
ized, 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 con-
sequences of burning coal to generate electricity or stacking people on top of

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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 re-
formers—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 philoso-
phers, 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 authori-
ties 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 human-
ity. 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 Rock-
efellers, 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, pro-
gressive reformers like Jane Addams started the settlement house movement
in the United States, dedicated to assimilating immigrants. Addams believed

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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 con-
servative, 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 men-
tion 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 sew-
ing 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) wors-
ened 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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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 differ-
ent 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 cen-
tury. “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 Sch-
neiderman, 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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of certain professions set standards, thus drawing a line between, say, a “profes-
sional” 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 representa-
tion 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, coatmak-
ers, 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 employ-
ing 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 audi-
ences 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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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 indus-

try 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 interfer-
ence 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 genera-
tions 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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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 legisla-
tion 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 inven-
tion 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 con-
sequences 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 competi-
tion 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 weaken-
ing 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-%20Vol-
ume%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 Inter-
pretive 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: Macmil-
lan, 1939), 204.
12. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work, 230.

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 THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

The U.S. Government

At Home and Abroad

Theodore Roosevelt (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

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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, Presi-
dent 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 em-
ployees 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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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 con-
nections 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, es-
sentially 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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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 in-
spection stamp applied to a package of Armour sausages, international buyers
could feel confident that American meats were safe to eat. Sometimes busi-
ness 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 material-
ism,” 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 owner-

ship 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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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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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 pos-
sibility 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, “rais-
ing 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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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 legis-
lature, 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 cof-
fers, 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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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 in-
creasingly 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 institut-
ing 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 tim-
ing, 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 grow-
ing 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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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 mission-
ary 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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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 rest-
less 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 Wil-
liam 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 enter-
ing 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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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 anti-
Spanish 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 cen-
tury. 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 work-
ing 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 adventur-
ess 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 Pitts-
burgh readers, a common gender subterfuge in an era when women’s opin-
ions 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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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 autono-
mous 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 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 influ-
ence 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 na-
tive 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 suc-
ceeded 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 sup-
ported 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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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 conven-
tions, 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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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 inef-
fective 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 al-
ways 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 Sac-
ramento 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 as-
sistant 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 is-
suing a directive to the commander of the Pacific fleet, Commodore George

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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, accord-
ing 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 opera-
tions 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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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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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 “Buf-
falo 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 Hard-
ing 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 af-
fairs adjusted by military interventions when deemed necessary. The legacy

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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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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 good-
governance 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. In-
novative 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, facili-
ties, 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, say-
ing 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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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, usu-
ally with the black facilities inferior in construction and amenities. Separation
itself was often a worse sting, though the leaking tarpaper roofs and the bit-
ing 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. Of-
ficials 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 vot-
ing. 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 cam-
paigned 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, Fred-
erick 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 African-
American 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 “prohibi-
tion.” 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 undergradu-
ate 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 insuf-
ficient 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 remar-
ried, 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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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 oppres-
sion, 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’ ac-
ceptance 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 Wil-
liam 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 Shake-
spearean 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 Com-
mission 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, Roos-
evelt 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 al-
lies 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 adjust-
ing 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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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 Con-
stitution 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 spokes-
man 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 pho-
tos 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 accom-

modation, 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 Ala-
bama, 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 practi-
cal, applicable skills like agricultural science and machining. Washington’s
educational efforts certainly had their successes: from 1900 to 1910, African-
American literacy improved by half, up to 70 percent. At nearby Atlanta Uni-
versity, 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.” Protest-
ing 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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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, cling-
ing 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 of-
fending 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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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 col-
lage. 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 mid-
1890s, 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 them-
selves. 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 lynch-
ing 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 produc-
tion 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 vi-
sion 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 con-
doms 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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of New England states were more in line with Comstock’s thinking than resi-
dents 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 abor-
tions 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 progres-
sive 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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Muir urged making federal lands wholly unavailable to loggers, miners,

and recreationists, Gifford Pinchot suggested “conservation” as an alterna-
tive—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 technolo-
gies, 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 govern-
ment 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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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 Ethnic-
ity 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 Nineteenth-
Century 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 Move-
ment 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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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 Roos-
evelt’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 recon-
naissance 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 annihi-
lation rather than continue to promote science, medicine, art, and above all
peace? (Then again, war often prompts fits of invention in science, technol-
ogy, 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 dur-
ing 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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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 theo-
ries, 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 gar-
dens 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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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 Haps-
burg 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 civil-
ians. 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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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 passion-
ate 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 pas-
sionate 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 par-
ticipants. 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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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 Bel-
gium 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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at least favored neutrality. While most Americans spoke English and recog-
nized 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, mechan-
ics, 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 torpe-
does sank a British luxury ship, the Lusitania, drowning almost 2,000 people,

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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 Ameri-
can 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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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 succes-
sion 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 American-
made 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 revolution-
ary 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 An-
glos. 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 incu-
bator, bat and ball being a safe outlet for rambunctious, discarded boys). At

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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 radi-
cal, 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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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 ex-
ample 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 U-
boat 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 inflam-
matory 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 scream-
ing 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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not just as an aggressor, but as a body without principle, just cause, or de-
cency 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 in-
vented. 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 well-
educated, well-to-do Americans. There he could visit cathedrals and statues,

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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 ex-
traordinary 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 synony-
mous 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 newspa-
pers 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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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 Le-
gion, 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, recuper-
ated 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 kill-
ing 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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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 African-
American—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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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 call-
ing 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 Na-
tions. 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. Sena-
tor 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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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 con-
vinced 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 bor-
row 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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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 Ameri-
can 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

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 com-
munism; 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 tech-
niques, 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 spill-
ing 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 produc-
tion 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 hollowed-

out 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 indus-
trial 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 mem-
bers 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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and we have not stopped enjoying the fast cars, the soothing voices of gor-
geous 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 harm-
ful 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 pre-
ferred 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 enforce-
ment 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 electri-
fied 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 re-
surgence 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 opportuni-
ties. 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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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 orga-
nization 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, Tor-
rio 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 dol-
lars 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 regu-
larly 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, Tor-
rio 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: pros-
ecuting 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 gang-
related 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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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 Gen-
eral 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 Cot-
ton 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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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, han-
dlers, 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 “mil-
lionaire 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 consoli-
date 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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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 convic-
tions 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, reha-
bilitated 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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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 busi-
ness 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 end-
stage 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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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 hold-
ing 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 punish-
ing mind about her, especially regarding what she perceived as lying. For Zora,

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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 open-
faced 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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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 permis-
sion. 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, wall-
eyed, 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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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 middle-
class 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 subdivi-
sions. 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, how-
ever, 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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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 equal-
ity. 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, toss-
ing 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 start-
ing 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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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 Gar-
vey’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 back-
ground 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 joy-
ful 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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point forward, she would experience what DuBois in 1903 called “this double-
consciousness, 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 Watch-
ing 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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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. Unfor-
tunately, 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: Law-
rence Erlbaum, 1996), 152.
2. Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Fords: An American Epic (San Fran-
cisco: 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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 INTO THE GREAT DEPRESSION

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 thirty-
three 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 philoso-
phy 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 mov-
ies, 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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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 farm-
ers 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 Hoover-
ville, 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 pay-
ment 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 thou-
sands 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, stick-
bodied 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 van-
ish. 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 Roos-
evelt’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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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 hap-
pened 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 pre-
September 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, hav-
ing 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, how-
ever, 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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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 econo-
mists 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 commemora-
tion 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 Prohibi-
tion 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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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, strip-
ping 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 imple-
mented 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, cotton-

picking labor that slaves had done for 200 years. Sharecroppers owned noth-
ing 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 sup-
port 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 Ameri-
can 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 concentra-
tion 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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the fields of the West from which the Japanese had been plucked. When they
were needed as cheap labor, Mexicans were invited—officially and unof-
ficially—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 com-
mon 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 coming-
of-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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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 5,300-
seat 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, Tennes-
see, 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 riot-
ous 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 Gal-
lup 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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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 Presi-
dency: A Reappraisal (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974), 52.
4. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (New York: Mari-
ner, 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 Ad-
journs 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––Police-
men 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

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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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 griz-
zlies 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-and-
white 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 inter-
views 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 satisfac-
tion 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 Ameri-
cans 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 ho-
boes 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 ser-
vices, 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 bug-
eyed 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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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 Po-
land, 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 ma-
jority 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 Mess-
erschmidt 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 boat-
ing 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 ne-
cessitated 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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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 cash-
and-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 mili-
tary 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 crew-
men 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 all-
night 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 de-
stroy its paperwork and close up shop; on November 22, an intercepted mes-
sage 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 Japa-
nese 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 particu-
lar 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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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 in-
formed 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 com-
mander 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 gun-
nery officer aboard the USS West Virginia, remembered, “those yellow bastards
were bombing with hairline accuracy.”11 In teams of five, the Japanese dive-
bombers 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, poker-
playing 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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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 mil-
lion 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: “Fol-
lowing 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. High-
minded 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 en-
listed 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 mili-
tary. 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 “buz-
zard” 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, Ari-
zona, 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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passed “alien land laws,” which stated that resident aliens could not own
property. Because of the government’s ongoing adherence to the Naturaliza-
tion 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, second-
generation) 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 al-
ready 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 serv-
ing 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 real-
life 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 nick-
named “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 danger-
ous 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 moth-
ers 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 African-
Americans 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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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 Japa-
nese 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 wa-
terfront 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 an-
nounced 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 Ger-
man 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’ ances-
try 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 Mexican-
American 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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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 Mes-
siah 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. Japanese-
American 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 Japanese-
American 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 cir-
cumstances. 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 cur-
few 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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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 espio-
nage, 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 in-
carceration 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 occa-
sional 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 Japanese-
Americans, 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 Japa-
nese 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 con-
flicting 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 facul-
ties! 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: Ad-
dresses 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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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 Com-
mission 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 Democ-
racy, 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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10

World War II

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 Weh-
rmacht, 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 Him-
mler 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, includ-
ing 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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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—crash-
landed. 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 promo-
tion. 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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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 Yama-
moto—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 air-
ships. 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. Coun-
terstrikes 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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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 explo-
sive 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, mil-
lions of soldiers faced each other, and final victory depended on their willing-
ness 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-degree-
Fahrenheit 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, Hun-
garian, 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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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, civil-
ians 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 Com-
monwealth. 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 com-
mand. 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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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 sup-
port, 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 foot-
ball, 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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up demerits than following the strict standards of a spit-and-polish war col-

lege. 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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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 mas-
sive 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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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 ex-
erted 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 confi-
dence 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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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 Brit-
ish 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 com-
manders 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 swarm-
ing 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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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 Japanese-
American 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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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 es-
calated 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 send-
ing 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 remem-
bered 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 Nor-
mandy. 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 with-
out 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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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 near-
suicidal missions to bomb German industrial and civilian sites. There had
been a constant, terrible, and dispiriting loss of crews and planes. Many mis-
sions 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 air-
to-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 pro-
duced 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 civil-
ians. 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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sorties laid waste to German railroad lines and oil and gas depots. Nonethe-
less 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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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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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 Al-
lied 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 with-
out 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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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 ques-
tion remaining was to figure out who would get the glory of finishing off
Hitler’s western armies: the British general Montgomery or the necktie-
obsessed 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 eighty-
mile front bordering a weak spot in Allied defenses near Luxembourg, the
Wehrmacht began the Battle of the Bulge, some of the most ugly, most tir-
ing 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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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 So-
viets “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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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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11

From World War to Cold War

Albert Einstein (on left) and J. Robert Oppenheimer.

(Alfred Eisenstaedt/Getty Images)

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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 Japa-
nese 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 Japa-
nese 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 mil-
lion 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 Al-
lies 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 incred-
ible 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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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 reac-
tion. 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 in-
stitutional 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 uncom-
mon 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 contrac-
tors 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 formula-
doodled 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 any-
thing 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 reac-
tion 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 “ex-
traordinary 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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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 vic-
tims’ 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 mas-
sive 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 other-
wise. 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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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 nation-
wide 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. Wash-
ington 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 Roos-
evelt 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 affili-
ated 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 at-
tachment 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 “dictator-
ship 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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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 fun-
neled 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 com-
munists 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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Harry Truman burnished his aura as a tough defender of human liberties. In

March 1947, he instituted a loyalty program for all federal employees de-
signed 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 So-
viets, 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 bil-
lions 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 humbug-
gery 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, medi-
cine, 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 deep-
ening 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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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 small-
town 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, vet-
erans 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 con-
tinuously 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 su-
perbomb, though “a dreadful weapon,” was one that the United States might
well use; the possibility was a “humane problem” that needed serious consid-
eration.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 smart-
est 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 Hun-
garian-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 revela-
tions, 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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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 evi-
dence 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, reactionar-
ies, 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 equation-
wielding 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, particu-
larly 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 accusa-
tions 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 ac-
cused 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 unsuccess-
fully 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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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 ambassa-
dor 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 geopo-
litical 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 com-
munism.” 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 archconserva-
tives 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 skew-
ering testimony of Oppenheimer’s former colleague, Edward Teller. Though

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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 depres-
sion, 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 mo-
rality 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., Op-

penheimer 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 Mis-
souri 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 Advance-
ment 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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12

American Culture and Society in

the 1950s and 1960s

Marilyn Monroe (Evening Standard/Getty Images)

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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 second-
rate. 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 Bry-
ant, 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, Mar-
tin 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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While northern suburbs passed covenants barring black people from buying
a home and southern juries propped up the sad sight of Jim Crow, black Ameri-
cans 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 Pepsi-
Cola 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 gradu-
ated 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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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 adapta-
tion 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 re-
ally 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 mil-
lions 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 gen-
eration 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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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 percep-
tions 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 Al-
fred 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 Har-
ley 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 popula-
tion 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 bar-
racks 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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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 un-
orthodox 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, how-
ever, 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 organiza-
tion (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 Mac-
Donald 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 chil-
dren 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 mil-
lion 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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job with Stanley morphed into a wildly successful attempt at selling Tupper-
ware—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 commut-
ing 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 buy-
ing 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 scien-
tific 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 thera-
pies for treating cancer, muscle relaxants like diazepam (commonly known

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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 chang-
ing 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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teurs and communist dupes. From the FBI to HUAC was a natural progres-
sion 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 demon-
strations 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 college-
educated 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 person-
ally 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 chemi-
cal 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 prob-
lems 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 Tomor-
row,” 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 land-
scape 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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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 Nar-

rative (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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 IN LOVE AND WAR: 1961–1969

13

In Love and War: 1961–1969

Lyndon B. Johnson (left) and Martin Luther King Jr. (right)

(Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

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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 star-
ship 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. Ken-
nedy 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 rock-
etry. 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, con-
verged 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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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 Trek-
kies 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. En-
tropy, 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 na-
tion 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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By presenting himself as the beacon of “law and order,” the Republican

candidate for president, Richard Nixon, used disturbances like the one in Chi-
cago 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 head-
quarters 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, how-
ever, 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 play-
ing 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 show-
down 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 govern-
ment. 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 be-
ing 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 busi-
nesses 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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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 obvi-
ous that the United States and Cuba were not going to be good neighbors,
Khrushchev decided to help his new ally by sending Castro sixty nuclear-
capable missiles, some medium-range, others able to reach as far as Maine
or the Panama Canal. The missiles, nuclear warheads, 40,000 accompany-
ing 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 en-
emy 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 methamphet-
amines directly into his knotted back muscles. Three billion people were sit-
ting 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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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 hair-
raising 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 Ken-
nedy 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 bod-
ies 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 downtrod-
den 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 harmoni-
ous 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 emo-
tion might overwhelm him. What he wanted was what his audience wanted,

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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 impover-
ishing 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 paral-
lel 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 agree-
ments 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 ef-
fect,” 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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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 Viet-
nam. 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 skirt-
ing (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 bomb-
ing 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 African-
Americans 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 grue-
some 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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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 Veter-
ans 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 wrong-
headed, 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 dy-
ing 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 national-
istic 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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War fear and confusion. The United States committed itself unthinkingly to
“containing” communism wherever and however it might appear. “Contain-
ment” 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 fit-
ting 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 con-
temporary 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 abor-
tions 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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big crowds or generate much popular interest. After all, he wanted to turn Gen-
eration 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 popu-
lar 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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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 cir-
cumstances, 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. trail-
ing 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 Demo-
crat 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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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.” Thur-
mond 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 Uni-
versity. 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 Conven-
tion 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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(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 sen-
ate 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. Work-
ing 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 outpour-
ing 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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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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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 com-
munist 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 com-
munist 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 mov-
ing 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 pro-
gram) 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 govern-
mental 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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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 ballot-
box 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 Re-
publican 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 allot-
ments, 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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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 alterna-
tive 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 Petro-
leum 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 admin-
istration, 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 social-
ism. 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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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. Dur-
ing 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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care showed in increased epidemics of petty crime and preventable disease.

By 2006, African-Americans, though only about 12 percent of the popula-
tion, 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, phy-
sicians 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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Republican positions of the day, gave him something of a bipartisan tough-

on-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 sup-
port 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 inno-
vations. 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 roast-
ing 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, afford-
able, 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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the founders of Microsoft realized the profits to be made in software applica-

tions, 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. How-
ever, 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 Founda-
tion, 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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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 seri-
ous 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 (be-
cause 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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more deeply with Americans in the 1990s than did worries about global
warming. Notably, from before the time he entered office until his impeach-
ment 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 en-
abling 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 hole-
punched 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 intensi-
fied, 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 win-
ning if the process continued. Although the Florida state supreme court ruled

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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 op-
portunity for authority, one that he did not request but could not shirk. The
choices that President Bush would make in the coming years would reverber-
ate 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 terror-
ism 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 invita-
tion 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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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 Hus-
sein, 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 be-
lieve 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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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 harvest-
ing, 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 acknowl-
edged 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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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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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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