Chapter Nine. Barging Westward

   The first major president to be elected after the War of 1812 was President Monroe Doctrine, who became famous by developing the policy, for which he is named. This policy, which is still in effect today, states that:
   1. Other nations are not allowed to mess around with the internal affairs of nations in this hemisphere.
   2. But we are.
   3. Ha-ha-ha.
   President Doctrine also purchased Florida from Spain for $5 million. Unfortunately, like many first-time buyers of vast New World territories, he failed to inspect the property first; by the time he found out that Florida mostly consisted of swamps infested with armor-piercing mosquitoes the size of Volvo station wagons, Spain had already deposited the check.
   In 1816, a political party called the Federalists nominated for president a man named Rufus King, then ceased to exist. The year 1819 saw the occurrence of the aptly named Panic of 1819 which was caused when the growing nation woke up in the middle of the night thinking it had a term paper due. Fortunately this turned out to be just a dream, and things remained fairly calm until 1825, which saw the election of yet another person named John Adams, who was backed by the Party to Elect Only Presidents Named John Adams.
   Meanwhile, hardy settlers continued to move westward and discover new virgin lands, unconquered and unclaimed by anybody, unless you counted the Native Americans, which these hardy settlers did not. And, anyhow, before long there were even fewer to count. Soon they had settled a number of territories—Missouri, Indiana, Illinois, Guam—and they were clamoring to become official states so they could start electing legislatures and having state mottoes and official state insects and stuff. But Congress could not readily agree on a procedure for admitting states to the union. The northern politicians felt it should be a simple ceremony, with maybe a small reception afterward; the southerners felt it should be more of a fraternity-style initiation, with new states being forced to do wacky stunts such as get up and sing “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain When She Comes” naked. Finally the impasse was broken by means of the Missouri Compromise, under which it was agreed that one half of the people would pronounce it “Missour-EE” and the other half would pronounce it “Missour-UH.”
   In 1828 Andrew “Stonewall” Jackson was elected president with the support of the Party to Elect Presidents with Stupid Nicknames. His running mate was South Carolinian John C. “Those Little Flies That Sometimes Get in Your Nose” Calhoun, a bitter rival of Secretary of State Martin “Van” Buren, who, with the backing of the brilliant orator Daniel “The Brilliant Orator” Webster, was able to persuade Jackson to replace Calhoun with Van Buren on the 1832 ticket, little aware that Denise and her periodontist were secretly meeting at the same motel where Rhonda had revealed to Dirk that she was in fact the sex-changed former Green Beret who fathered the half-Vietnamese twins that Lisa left in the O’Hare baggage-claim area the night she left to get her Haitian divorce and wound up as a zombie instead, thus resulting in the formation by Henry Clay of the Whig party. Their slogan was “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too,” and they meant every word of it.
   None of this would have been possible, of course, without the continued contributions of women and minority groups.

The Federal Banking Crisis Of 1837

   Trust us: This was even more boring than the Treaty of Ghent.

Culture

   Meanwhile, culture was continuing to occur in some areas. In New England, for example, essayist Henry David Thoreau created an enduring masterpiece of American philosophical thought when, rejecting the stifling influences of civilization, he went off to live all alone on Walden Pond, where, after two years of an ascetic and highly introspective life, he was eaten by turtles. That did not stop the march of culture. Authors such as James Fenimore Cooper (Pippi Leatherstocking, Hiawatha, Natty Bumppo Gets Drunk and Shoots His Own Leg), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Ludicrously Repetitious Poems That Nobody Ever Finishes), and Herman Melville (Moby-Dick, Moby-Dick II, Moby-Dick vs. the Atomic Bat from Hell) cranked out a series of literary masterpieces that will be remembered as long as they are required reading in high school English classes.
   Tremendous advances were also being made in technology. A nautical inventor named Robert Fulton came up with the idea of putting a steam engine on a riverboat. Naturally it sank like a stone, thus creating one of many underwater hazards that paved the way for a young man named Samuel Clemens, who got a job standing on the front of riverboats, peering into the water, and shouting out literary pseudonyms such as “George Eliot!” The steam engine also played a vital role in the development of the famous “Iron Horse,” which could haul heavy loads, but which also tended to produce the famous “Monster Piles of Iron Droppings” and thus was eventually replaced by the locomotive.
   Tremendous strides were also being taken in the area of communication. With the invention of the rotary press, newspapers were made available not just to the wealthy literate elite, but also to the average low-life scum, who were suddenly able to keep abreast, through pioneering populist papers like the New York Post, of such national issues as NAB FAIR IN NUN STAB and LINK PORN SLAY TO EYE SLICE MOB. Another major advance in communication was the telegraph, which was invented by Samuel Morse, who also devised the code that is named after him: “pig Latin.” Wires were soon being strung across the vast continent, and by October 8 a message could be transmitted from New York to California, carried by courageous Pony Express riders, who galloped full speed on courageous horses that would often get as far as thirty feet before they would fall off the wires and splat courageously onto the ground.
   This created a growing awareness of the practical value of roads, and in 1809 work began on the nation’s first highway, the Long Island Expressway, which is scheduled for completion next year (Barring unforeseen delays.). In 1825, New York completed the Erie Canal, which connected Buffalo and Albany, thus enabling these two exciting Cities to trade bargeloads of slush. The Erie Canal was an instant financial success, and became even more profitable fourteen years later, when a sharp young engineer suggested filling it with water.
   “MANIFEST DESTINY”
   “Manifest destiny” is a phrase you see in a lot of history books. Another one is “Fifty-four-forty or fight.”

The Formation Of Texas

   At this point Mexico owned the territory that we now call “Texas,” which consisted primarily of what we now call “dirt.” Gradually, however, it began to fill up with Americans, who developed a unique frontier life-style based on drinking Pearl beer, going “wooo-EEEE!” real loud, and making cash payments to football players. This irritated the Mexican government, which sent a general named Santa Anna (SAN-TA ANN-A) up to attack the Texans at the Alamo (AL-A-MO), where, in one of the most heroic, (HE-RO-IC) scenes in American history, the legendary Davy Crockett (played by Fess Parker) used his legendary rifle, “Betsy” (played by “Denise”), as a club in a futile (STUPID) effort to fend off Santa Anna’s troops. But the tragedy served as a blessing in disguise, because a short time later the legendary Sam Houston, showing that he had learned the harsh lesson of the Alamo, ordered his troops to try using their rifles as rifles. Not only did they rout the Mexicans, but they went on to defeat Oklahoma in the Cotton Bowl. And thus Texas was born although it was not permitted to enter the union for ten more years, because of NCAA violations.
   At this point the president of the United States, a stud named James K. Polk, declared war against Mexico. Don’t ask us why. We are a history book, not a mind reader. This resulted in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (GUA-DA ... OH, NE-VER MIND), under which the uNited States got the rest of the Southwest and California, and Mexico got smaller.

The Rush To California

   One day in the winter of 1848, a worker was digging in a pond on the northern California farm of Swiss immigrant Johann Sutter. Suddenly the man stopped and stared, for there, gleaming through the muck on his shovel blade, was a discovery that was to transform the entire California territory almost overnight: a movie camera. Word of the discovery spread like wildfire, and Soon thousands of actors, agents, producers, and so forth were rushing westward, overburdening the territory’s limited restaurant facilities and causing the price of valet parking to skyrocket. Soon there were more than a hundred thousand residents, which raised the issue: Should California be declared a state? Or, in this case, maybe even a separate planet?
   These were just some of the storm clouds now gathering over the nation’s political landscape. For meanwhile, back east, the cold front of moral outrage was moving inexorably toward the low-pressure system of southern economic interests, creating another of those frontal systems of conflict that would inevitably result in a violent afternoon or evening thundershower of Carnage. Also, it was time for the Civil War.

Discussion Questions

   1. In the song “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain When She Comes,” why do they announce so cheerfully that they intend to “kill the old red rooster when she comes”? Is it some kind of ritual thing? Or is it that they just hate the old red rooster, because maybe it pecked them or something when they were children, and now they’re just using the fact that she’s comin’ ‘round the mountain as an excuse to kill it?
   2. An-cay oo-yay eak-spay ig-pay atin-lay? Explain.
   3. Define the following: “Wooo-EEEE!

Chapter Ten. The Civil War: A Nation Pokes Itself In The Eyeball

   The seeds of the Civil War were sown in the late eighteenth century when Eli Whitney invented the “Cotton gin,” a machine capable of turning cotton into gin many times faster than it could be done by hand. This created a great demand for cotton-field workers, whom the South originally attempted to recruit by placing “help wanted” advertisements in the newspaper:
   ATTENTION SELF-STARTERS! Are you that special “Can-do” kind of guy or gal who’s looking for a chance to work extremely hard under horrible conditions for your entire life without getting paid and being severely beaten whenever we feel like it, plus we get to keep your children? To find out more about this exciting career opportunity, contact: The South.
   Oddly enough, this advertisement failed to produce any applicants, and so the South decided to go with slavery. Many people argued that slavery was inhuman and cruel and should be abolished but the slave owners argued that it wasn’t so bad, and that in fact the slaves actually were happy, the evidence for this being that they sometimes rattled their chains in a rhythmic fashion.
   By the mid-nineteenth century, slavery was the topic of heated debate among just about everybody in the country except of course the actual slaves, most of whom were busy either working or fleeing through swamps. The crisis deepened in 1850, when President Zachary Taylor died of cholera, fueling fears that we forgot to mention his election in the previous chapter. Taylor’s death led to the presidency of a man whose name has since become synonymous, in American history, with the term “Millard Fillmore”: Millard Fillmore.

Highlights Of The Fillmore Administration

   1. The Earth did not crash into the Sun.
   After Fillmore came Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, who as far as we can tell were both president at the same time. This time-saving measure paved the way for the election of Abraham Lincoln, who was popular with the voters because he possessed an extremely rustic Set of origins.

The Origins Of Abraham Lincoln

   Lincoln’s family was poor. He was born in a log cabin. And when we say “a log cabin,” we are talking about a cabin that consisted entirely of one single log. That is how poor Lincoln’s family was. When it rained, everybody had to lie down under the log, the result being that Lincoln grew up to be very long and narrow, which turned out to be the ideal physique for splitting rails. Young Abe would get out there with his ax, and he’d split hundreds of rails at a time, and people would come from miles around. “Dammit, Lincoln,” they’d say, “those rails cost good money!” But in the end they forgave young Abe, because he had the ax.
   He was also known for his honesty. In one famous historical anecdote, Lincoln was tending store, and a customer accidentally left his change on the counter, and young Abe picked it up and walked fourteen miles with it, only to glance down and realize that his face was on the penny. This anecdote gave Lincoln the nickname that was to serve him so well in politics—”Old Ironsides”—and it earned him an invitation to appear as a contestant on The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, the most popular show of the era. Lincoln was able to get to the bonus round, where he correctly answered the question “How much is four score plus seven?” thus winning the Samsonite luggage and the presidency of the United States.
   This resulted in yet another famous historical anecdote. When Lincoln assumed the presidency, he was clean-shaven, but one day he got a letter from a little girl suggesting that he grow a beard. So he did, and he thought it looked pretty good, so he decided to keep it. A short while later, he got another letter from the little girl, this time suggesting that he wear mascara and rouge and maybe a simple string of pearls. Fortunately, just then the Civil War broke out.

The Civil War

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

Reconstruction

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

Discussion Questions

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

Fun Classroom Project

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

Chapter Eleven. The Nation Enters Chapter Eleven

   The end of the Civil War paved the way for what Mark Twain, with his remarkable knack for coining the perfect descriptive phrase, called “the POst-Civil War era.” This was a period unlike any that had preceded it. For one thing, it occurred later on. Also it was an Age of Invention. Perhaps the most important invention was the brain-child of Thomas “Alva” Edison, a brilliant New Jerseyan who, in 1879, astounded the world when he ran an electrical Current through a carbonized cotton filament inside a glass globe, thus creating the first compact-disc player. Unfortunately it broke almost immediately and did not come back from the repair shop for nearly a century (And it still didn’t work right.). But this did not stop the prolific Edison from numerous other electronic breakthroughs that we now take for granted, including: the Rate Increase; the Limited Warranty; the Eight “C” Batteries That Are Not Included; the Instructions That Are Badly Translated from Japanese; and the Newspaper Ad Featuring Four Thousand Tiny Blurred Pictures of What Appears to Be the Same VCR. For these achievements, Edison was awarded, after his death, one of the highest honors that can be bestowed upon a dead American citizen: A service plaza off the New Jersey Turnpike was named after him (The first is named for Marvin Kitman, the second for Al Capone.). Parts of it still stand today.
   Another famous genius of the era was Alexander Graham Bell System, who in some specific year beginning with “18” invented “the area code,” thus paving the way for long distance, without which modern telephone-company commercials would not be possible. Originally there was only one area code, called “1” but over the years new ones were added steadily, and telephone-company researchers now foresee the day when, thanks to modern computers, every telephone in the nation will be a long-distance call from every other telephone, even if it’s in the same house.
   Meanwhile, the nation’s rural areas were being greatly affected by the MeCormick reaper, which was invented by Cyrus McCormick and paved the way for the Midwest, a group of flat Protestant states containing an enormous amount of agriculture in the form of wheat. Formerly, to reap a single acre of wheat, a farmer would have to work for four days, with the help of two farmhands driving six mules. But now he could sit back and relax as the reaper roared through as many as ten acres per hour, reaping the living hell out of everything that stood in its path, occasionally spitting out bits of mule fur or farmhand clothing, which could easily be reassembled thanks to the sewing machine, invented by Elias Howe. “Don’t ask me Howe it works!” he used to say, over and over, until finally somebody, we think his wife, shot him in the head with a revolver, invented by Samuel Colt.
   McCormick’s invention was so successful that by the early 1870s the Midwest was disappearing under an enormous mound of reaped wheat, and it became clear that some kind of efficient method was needed to get it to the big cities, where it could be converted into sandwiches, which had been invented earlier in England by Samuel Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato. This caused Congress to authorize work on the first transcontinental railroad corporation, Amtrak. Two work crews began laying rails, one starting on the East Coast and the other on the West Coast. It was hard going. The crews endured broiling heat and bitter cold, often simultaneously. But they persevered, and finally, on October 8, the two crews met at Promontory Point, Utah, where, in a moving and historic ceremony, top railroad executives gathered to explain to them that they were supposed to be nailing the rails down, for God’s sake. But even this setback did not prevent women and minority groups from achieving many notable achievements.

The Rise Of Heavy Industry

   Around this time heavy industry started to rise, thanks to the work of heavy industrialists such as Andrew “Dale” Carnegie, who made a fortune going around the country holding seminars in which he taught people how to Win friends by making steel. Another one was John D. Rockefeller, who invented oil and eventually created a monopoly, culminating in 1884 when he was able to put hotels on both Park Place and Boardwalk. This made him so rich that everybody started hating him, and he was ultimately forced to change his name to “Exxon.”
   As heavy industrialism became more popular, large horrible factories were built in eastern cities. The workers—often minority women and children—toiled under grueling, dangerous conditions for twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for an average weekly salary of only $1.80, out of which they had to “voluntarily” give 85 cents to the United Fund. On top of this, the factory workers were subjected to one of the most cruel and inhumane labor concepts ever conceived of by the mind of industrial man: vending-machine food. The suffering this caused can only be imagined by us fortunate modern corporation employees, but we can get some idea of what it was like by reading this chilling excerpt from a nineteenth-century New York factory worker’s diary:
   Nobody knows where the food comes from, or even if it really is food. There is a machine that dispenses liquids that are allegedly “coffee,” “tea,” “hot chocolate,” and even “soup,” which all come from the same orifice and all taste exactly the same. Another machine dispenses bags containing a grand total of maybe three potato chips each, and packages of crackers smeared with a bizarre substance called “cheez,” which is the same bright-orange color as marine rescue equipment. The machine for some reason is constructed in such a way that it drops these items from a great height, causing the contents, already brittle with age, to shatter into thousands of pieces. Also half the time it just eats your money, and forget about getting a refund ...
   Conditions such as these resulted in the Labor Movement, the most important leader of which was Samuel Gompers. And even if he wasn’t the most important, he definitely had the best name. We could just say it over and over: Gompers Gompers Gompers. This would be an excellent name for a large dog (Such as a Labrador retriever.). “Gompers!” we can just hear ourselves yelling. “You put that Federal Express man down right now!” Nevertheless it was to be a long, hard struggle before the Labor Movement was to win even minimal concessions from the big industrialists—years of strikes and violence and singing traditional Labor Movement protest songs such as “Take This Job and Shove It.” But it was the courage of these early labor pioneers that ultimately made possible the woring conditions and wages and benefits that American factory workers would probably be enjoying today if the industrialists hadn’t moved their manufacturing operations to Asia.

The Settlement Of The West

   When the Civil War ended, the West was still a region of great wildness, a fact that had earned it the nickname “The Great Plains.” In this rough, untamed environment had emerged the cowboy, a hard-ridin’ straight-shootin’ rip-snortin’ cow-punchin’ breed of hombre who was to become the stuff of several major cigarette promotions. To this day you can walk up to any schoolboy and mention one of those legendary Old West names—Wyatt Earp, “Wild Bill” Hickok, Gary Cooper, “Quick Draw” McGraw, Luke Skywalker—and chances are the schoolboy, as he has been taught to do, will scream for help, and you will be arrested on suspicion of being a pervert. So maybe you better just take our word for it.
   Nevertheless, the West was gradually being settled. The federal government had acquired assorted western territories like Utah through treaties with the Native American inhabitants under which the united States got the land and the Native Americans got a full thirty minutes’ head start before the army came after them. In 1889 the U.S. government opened up the Oklahoma territory, which resulted in the famous “Oklahoma land rush” as thousands of would-be settlers came racing in to look around, resulting in the famous “rush to get the hell back out of Oklahoma.”
   Another important acquisition was made in 1867, when Secretary of State Seward Folly purchased Alaska for $7 million, which at the time seemed like a lot of money but which today we recognize as being about one third the cost of a hotel breakfast in Anchorage. Alaska was originally a large place located way the hell up past Canada, but this proved to be highly inconvenient for mapmakers, who in 1873 voted to make it smaller and put it in a little box next to Hawaii right off the coast of California, which is where it is today.
   While all this expansion was going on, presidents were continuing to be elected right on schedule in 1868, 1872, 1876, and so on, and we’re pretty sure that at least one of them was named Rutherford. Also during this era the large eastern cities began to experiment with a new form of government, favored by newspaper cartoonists, called the Easily Caricatured Corrupt Spherical Bosses Weighing a Minimum of 400 Pounds system. This system was very unpopular, because it resulted in an unresponsive government filled with overpaid drones and hacks who, no matter how little they did or how badly they did it, could be removed from their jobs only by the unelected bosses. The result of this discontent, the Reform Movement, produced the modern “Civil Service” system, under which drones and hacks can be removed only by nuclear weapons.
   In 1880 the voters elected a president named Chester, and in 1884 they elected one named Grover. We now think this might have been caused by a comet. Also there was a hideous hassle involving William Jennings Bryan and something called the “gold standard,” but every time anybody tries to explain it to us we get a terrible headache. We have the same problem with the concept of “second cousins.”

Discussion Questions

   1. Can you name another famous person for whom a service plaza is named?
   (Hint: Vince Lombardi.)
   2. What is “rip-snortin’,” anyway? Do you think it should be legal?
   3. Do you have any second cousins? So what?

Chapter Twelve. Groping Toward Empire

   By 1890 the west had been tamed and could even obey simple commands such as “Sit!” Now the United States was no longer an infant nation but a mighty young colossus, bestriding (Unless there is no such word.) the continent—in the words of Mark Twain—”like some kind of mighty young colossus or something.” America was the Land of Opportunity, and its symbol was the Statue of Liberty, a gift from the French that had been dedicated in 1886 in a spectacular ceremony featuring a thousand John Philip Sousa impersonators. The statue was placed in New York Harbor, where its raised torch served as a welcoming beacon of hope andfreedom to millions of oppressed and downtrodden fish. Then somebody came up with the idea of taking it out of the water and putting it on an island, and from that day on it was a major tourist attraction for European immigrants, who flocked to America by the millions, drawn by the promise expressed in the stirring poem by Emma Lazerus:
   Give me your low-income individuals Tired of these dense tempest-tost huddles Yearning to get the hell off the boat And retch all over the teeming shore
   And so they came—the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Germans, the Greeks, the Klingons, the Marcoses—lured by tales of good jobs and streets paved with gold and plenty of closet space. But what they found was quite different. What they found was New York City—a frantic, bustling place; a giant (to use Mark Twain’s phrase) “fondue pot” in which people from many nationalities, crowded together by necessity, gradually began to realize that despite their differences in language, custom, and religion, they all, in the end, hated each other. Also the Americans who already lived here, except for Emma Lazarus, were not exactly crazy about immigrants either. And so the new citizens formed neighborhoods, and they moved into cramped tenement apartments, and a lot of them still live there. They don’t move out even when they die, because New York apartments are too valuable to give up.
   As New York City grew and prospered, it began to form corporations, enormous “super-companies” whose vast resources enabled them to do something that smaller firms could only dream of: transfer people. This created a demand for new Cities, which soon flourished in places such as Minneapolis, Chicago, and even, for a brief period, Cleveland.
   But perhaps the most important new industrial area was Detroit, founded by Henry Ford I, who also invented the Ford, forerunner to today’s Isuzu. The key to Ford’s success as an industrialist was his discovery of the assembly line, which worked on a simple principle: Instead of having the workers move from place to place to assemble the cars , he had the cars move from place to place to assemble the workers. For some reason this proved to be extremely efficient, and in 1913 the Ford Motor Company began cranking out thousands of the famous “Model T.” By modern automotive standards, the Model T was very primitive: It had no electric starter, no radio, no heater, no air conditioner, no brakes, no transmission, no engine, and no wheels. The only way to get it to actually move was to have four or five burly men pick it up and stagger down the street. But it was affordable, and people bought it like crazy. “What the hell,” they said. “There’S nowhere to go anyway, here in 1913.”
   Meanwhile, another historic transportation development was taking place in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a desolate spit of sand where two young bicycle mechanics named Wilbur and Orville Wright Brothers had gone to escape from people who teased them about their first names. Also they were interested in heavier-than-air flight. They used to sit on the dunes for hours, studying the soaring sea gulls, hoping to learn the aerodynamic secret that kept them aloft. And then one historic day, a shout rang out: “I’ve got it, Wilbur! They’re using propellers driven by gasoline engines!” And then another shout: “I’m not Wilbur! You’re Wilbur!” This was after many days on the dunes.
   Nevertheless they went ahead and built their “flying machine,” and on October 8, they were ready for their first flight. Unfortunately, it had to be canceled because of equipment problems at O’Hare, but they persevered, and finally came the historic moment when Wilbur, or possibly Orville, managed to get the frail, odd-looking craft airborne as far as Atlanta, where he changed to a connecting flight (Daily except Sunday; featuring “snack” service.), thus successfully launching the Aviation Age, although his luggage was never found.
   This new spirit of soaring optimism could also be detected in the arts, most notably in the work of Horatio Alger, who wrote a series of very popular “rags to riches” stories in which a poor but intelligent young man is able, through hard work and honesty, to locate the Wizard of Oz. A number of talented American painters whose names escape us at the moment sprang up and created a number of important paintings that we probably still cherish today. The same thing happened with sculpture, not to mention women and minority groups, who continued to make gigantic contributions despite continuing to have no more legal rights than gravel. All in all, the turn of the century was an exciting, boisterous time for America, a raucous cacophony of energy and invention, idealism and hucksterism—in short, to repeat the words of the brilliant poet and chocolate manufacturer Walt Whitman, it was “loud.” This caused imperialism to wake up.

The Awakening Of Imperialism

   The first thing American imperialism noticed when it woke up was Cuba. At the time Cuba technically belonged to Spain, which alert readers will remember as the country that, in previous Confrontations with the United States, had proved to be about as effective, militarily, as a tuna Casserole. So it seemed like the ideal time to barge down there and free Cuba from the yoke of Spanish imperialism by placing it under the yoke of U.S. imperialism, the only problem being that at the time the United States did not have what international lawyers refer to, in technical legalistic terms, as a treason.” So things looked very bleak indeed until one day in 1898 when, in a surprise stroke of good fortune, the U.S. battleship Maine exploded and sank in Havana harbor.
   Immediately the American news media, showing a dedication to accuracy and objectivity that would not be surpassed until nearly a century later (when the Weekly World News, available at supermarkets everywhere, reported that a Turkish farmer and four of his cows had been eaten by a giant purple flower from space), announced that the Maine had definitely, no question about it, been sunk by Spain. Soon the rallying cry went up from coast to coast: “Give ‘em hell Harry!” This inspired William McKinley, who had been elected president of the United States earlier in this chapter while we were not paying attention, to issue an ultimatum (From the Latin, meaning “a kind of a thing that a person issues.”) to Spain in which he demanded a number of concessions.
   Spain immediately agreed to all the demands, an act of treachery that the United States clearly could not tolerate. It was time to declare:

The Spanish-American War

   Although the Spanish-American War was over in less time than it takes to order Oriental food for six people by telephone, it ranks with the successful invasion of Grenada as one of the country’s mightiest military accomplishments. The highlight came when Teddy “Theodore” Roosevelt led his band of rough-riding cavalry persons, nicknamed the “Boston Celtics,” in the famous Charge up San Juan Hill, which turned out to be unoccupied, thus paving the way for the famous Charge Down the Other Side of San Juan Hill. After suffering several such military setbacks, Spain surrendered and gave the United States control of not only Cuba, but also Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Australia, Snooze Island, Antarctica, France, and the Crab Nebula. “Go ahead, take everything,” said Spain. “We’re going to get drunk and become a third-rate power.”
   But not the United States. Having flexed the triceps of its newfound military might and, aided by the steroidal substance of nationalistic sentiment, successfully bench-pressed the five-hundred-pound weight of international expansionism, the United States was now eager to play a dominant role on the international stage, with an option for the film rights. What the nation needed, as it entered this new era, was a dynamic leader capable of commanding this globe-begirdling (Or whatever.) young empire, but who (or possibly “whom?”) That was the question everybody was standing around asking him—or herself in 1901 when, in another amazing stroke of good luck, an anarchist shot William McKinley, who revealed, on his deathbed, that he had been elected president in 1900, and that his vice president was a man who happened to be not only a war hero, but a descendant of a distinguished family, a public servant, a statesman, a big-game hunter, a naturalist, a husband, a father, a heck of a fine human being, and one of my closest personal friends, I really love this guy, let’s give a big Las Vegas welcome to (drum roll) ...

Theodore Roosevelt

   Roosevelt was a Man of Action, not words. The public loved the way he took on the businessmen who ran the big monopolies, or “trusts.” Roosevelt would invite these men to the White House and speak very softly, forcing them to lean forward, straining to hear, whereupon Roosevelt would hammer them over the heads with a big stick (Nicknamed “Betsy.”) that he always carried. This was just one of his famous mannerisms, another one being that he often referred to the presidency as a “bully pulpit.” Nobody knew what on earth he meant by this, but nobody asked him, either, because of the stick. Of all Roosevelt’s achievements, however, the most significant, as measured by total gallonage, was:

The Panama Canal

   In those days, there was no easy way for ships to get from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The usual procedure was for a ship to start picking up a head of steam as it went past Cuba, so it would be going full speed when it rammed into the Isthmus of Panama, sometimes getting eight or even ten feet into the jungle before shuddering to a halt. Clearly the United States needed to build a canal. The problem was that Panama technically belonged to Colombia which refused to sign a treaty leasing it to the United States. So Roosevelt sent a gunboat filled with marines down to Panama, on the off chance that a revolution might suddenly break out, and darned if one didn’t, two days later. Not only that, but the leaders of the new nation of Panama—talk about lucky breaks!—were absolutely thrilled to have the United States build a canal there. “Really, it’s our pleasure,” they told the marines, adding, “Don’t shoot.”
   Over the next few years the marines in their role as Heavily Armed Ambassadors of Friendship and Fun, were to meet with similar outpourings of cheerful cooperation in Nicaragua, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and other Latin American countries that the United States decided to befriend as complete diplomatic equals in a spirit of mutual respect and without regard for the fact that we could squash them like dung beetles under a cement truck. We were a Happy Hemisphere indeed. It was time to think about branching out.

Discussion Questions

   1. You know what really ticks us off? The way the Boston Celtics bitch and moan whenever a foul is called against them.
   2. What does “all in all” mean, anyway?
   3. How about: “by and large”?

Chapter Thirteen. Deep International Doo-Doo

   The year 1908 saw the election of the first U.S. president to successfully weigh more than three hundred pounds, William Howard Taft, who ran on a platform of reinforced concrete and who, in a stirring inauguration speech, called for “a bacon cheeseburger and a side order of fries.” Another important occurrence in the Taft administration was the famous BallingerPinchot Affair, which is truly one of the most fascinating and bizarre episodes in the nation’s history, although it is quite frankly none of your business (Especially the part about the dwarf goat.).
   After that not much happened until approximately 1912, when Teddy Roosevelt, who had gone over to Africa to unwind from the pressures of the presidency by attempting to kill every animal on the entire continent larger than a wristwatch, decided he wanted to be president again. So he came barging back and formed a new party, which was called the Bull Moose party so as to evoke the inspirational image of an enormous animal eating ferns and pooping all over the landscape. Despite this concept, Teddy lost, which is a real tragedy because a Bull Moose victory might have started a whole new trend of giving comical animal names to political parties, and today we might be seeing election battles between the Small Hairless Nocturnal Rodent party and the Stench-Emitting Ox party, and this country would be a lot more fun.
   The winner in the 1912 election was Woodrow Wilson, known to his close friends as “Woodrow Wilson,” who garnered many votes with the popular slogan “Wilson: He’ll Eventually Get Us into World War I.” The appeal of this concept was so strong that Wilson was easily swept into office despite widespread allegations of vote-garnering.

The Suffragette Movement

   Meanwhile, out on the streets, there was a lot of movement by “suffragettes,” a term meaning “girl suffrages.” The suffragettes, led by Susan B. Anthony Dollar, believed that women should be given the right to vote on the grounds that they Could not possibly screw things up worse than men already had. They ultimately achieved their goal by marching around in public, wearing hats the size of elementary schools, a tactic later adopted, for reasons that are still unclear, by Queen Elizabeth.
   Another major social development of the time was the Temperance Movement, led by Carrie Nation, who headed an organization called Scary-Looking Women with Hatchets. They would swoop down upon saloons and smash all the whiskey bottles, then go back to their headquarters, fire up reefers as big as Roman candles, and laugh until dawn. This resulted in so much social turmoil that in 1918 Congress decided to have a total prohibition on alcohol, which was approved early on a Saturday morning by a vote of 9-2, with 416 members unable to attend because of severe headaches. Thus began the nation’s “Noble Experiment,” which was eventually judged to be a noble failure and replaced by the current sensible and coherent alcohol policy of showing public-service TV announcements wherein professional sports figures urge people not to drink, interspersed with TV commercials wherein professional Sports figures urge people to drink.
   But all of this paled by comparison with international tension, which was—get ready for a bulletin here—mounting.

The Causes Of International Tension

   The major cause of international tension was Europe, which in those days was made up of the Five (or possibly Six) Major Powers: Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, the Ottomans, the Barca-Loungers, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an alliance between Australia and Hungary that was not really all that major a power but was allowed to participate in international tension anyway because it had some pretty good restaurants. These powers had spent roughly the past thousand years trying to see who could set the land speed record for breaking treaties with each other, and they had been involved in so many complex alliances and double crosses that in 1903, in one of the more hilarious moments in international diplomacy, France accidentally declared war on itself (And lost.). By 1914 Europe was, in the words of the bad writer Elrod Stooble, “a tinderbox with a hair trigger just waiting for the other foot to drop.”
   And thus the entire continent was extremely tense and irritable, just generally in a bad mood, that fateful summer day, October 8, when a young archduke named Franz Ferdinand chanced to pass by the fateful spot where a young anarchist named Gavrilo Princip happened to be standing in a fateful manner, and, through an unfortunate quirk of fate, got into an argument over who had the silliest name. Not surprisingly, this caused Austro-Hungary to declare war on Serbia, only to be ridiculed by France, Great Britain, and Russia when it was discovered that there actually was no such place as “Serbia.” This discovery, needless to say, caused Germany to invade Belgium (one key lesson of history is that virtually anything, including afternoon or evening thundershowers, causes Germany to invade Belgium). Soon all of Europe was at war.
   In America , the prevailing mood was that this was a truly dumb war and we should stay the hell out of it. Just about everybody agreed on this: the public, the press, barnyard animals, even leading political figures. Anybody who even talked about the possibility of the United States getting into this war was considered to be a cretin. In the presidential election campaign of 1916 (Often referred to by historians as “The Election Where Both Candidates’ Names Could Be Read in Either Direction.”), both President Woodrow Wilson and the Republican nominee, Charles Evans Hughes, went around stating in loud, emotion-choked voices that they were definitely by God not going to get the country into the war. So it was clear that the United States had no choice but to get into the war, which, in 1917, it did. And a darned good thing, too, because the official title of the war turned out to be:
   “The War to End All Wars”
   President Wilson’s theory at the time was that America would march over there and help France and Britain win the war, and then the winners would be extremely fair and decent and not take enormous sums of money or huge chunks of land from the losers, plus the entire system of world government would be reformed so that everybody would live in Peace and Freedom Forevermore. Needless to say, France and Britain thought this was the funniest theory they had ever heard, and they would beg Wilson to tell it again and again at dinner parties. “Hey Woody!” they’d shriek, tears of laughter falling into their cognac (CONEYAK). “Tell us the part where we don’t take money or land!”

The Actual War Itself

   The actual war itself was extremely depressing and in many cases fatal, so we’re going to follow Standard History Textbook Procedure for talking about wars, under which we pretty much skip over the part where people get killed and instead make a big deal over what date the treaty was signed.

The Treaty Of Versailles

   The Treaty of Versailles (PA-REE) was signed on a specific date—our guess would be October 8—and it incorporated Wilson’s basic proposals, except that instead of not taking enormous sums of money and huge chunks of land from the losers, the winners at the last minute decided that it would be a better idea if they did take enormous sums of money and chunks of land from the losers. Other than that the war accomplished all of America’s major objectives, and by 1919 Europe had been transformed, at a cost of only several million dead persons, from a group of nations that hated each other into a group of nations that really hated each other. Thus it came as no surprise when, in 1920, American voters overwhelmingly voted to elect a president named Warren G. Harding (Also known as G. Harding Warren.), who called for a return to “normalcy,” which as far as we know is not even a real word.
   THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS Standings as of 1920
   COUNTRY WINS LOSSES
   Austria 0
   England 1
   France 1
   Germany 0
   United States Did not, technically, participate in the league.
   Serbia Did not, technically, exist.

The Russian Revolution

   Somewhere along in here the Russians overthrew the corrupt murdering scumball ruling aristocrats who for centuries had lived like kings while brutally oppressing the masses, and replaced them with the communists, who did the same thing but at least had the decency to wear ill-fitting suits. Ultimately, of course, this event was to have a major impact on the United States, but for right now, the hell with it.

Discussion Questions

   1. A dwarf goat?

Chapter Fourteen. A Nation Gets Funky

   The era immediately after World War I came to be known as the “Roaring Twenties,” and with good reason: Each of the years had a “twenty” in it, as in 1923, 1925, and so forth. Also there was a lot of wild and zany activity, with “flappers” going to “speakeasies” where they would listen to “jazz,” dance the “Charleston,” and drink “bathtub gin” until they “puked” all over the “floor.” It was a very exciting time, but it also made for an exhausting life-style, which is why you will notice that any people who happened to live through it tend to look kind of elderly.
   But all was not fun and games during the twenties. There was also Labor Unrest, caused by coal miners emerging from the ground and making radical demands such as: (1) they should get paid; or, at least (2) they should not have the tunnels collapse on them so often. The coal companies generally responded by bringing in skilled labor negotiators to bargain with the miners’ heads using clubs. This often resulted in violence, which forced the federal government, in its role as peacekeeper, to have federal troops shoot at the miners with guns. Eventually the miners realized that they were safer down in the collapsing tunnels, and there was a considerable decline in Labor Un rest.
   Another significant accomplishment of the federal government during the twenties was the refinement of high-level corruption, which peaked during the administration of President Harding G. Harding with the famous ...

Teapot Dome Scandal

   The Teapot Dome Scandal involved a plot of federal land in Wyoming that derives its unusual name from the fact that, if viewed from a certain angle, it appears to be shaped like a scandal. The government had placed a large amount of oil under this land for safekeeping, but in 1921 it was stolen. The mystery was solved later that same evening when an alert customs inspector noticed former Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall attempting to board an oceanliner with a suitcase containing 3.256 trillion barrels of petroleum products, which he claimed had been a “gift” from a “friend.” At this point President Harding, showing the kind of class that Richard Nixon can only dream about, died.
   Harding’s successor was Calvin Coolidge, who was popularly known as “Silent Cal” because that was his nickname. The major accomplishment of the Coolidge administration is a group of humorous anecdotes revolving around the fact that Coolidge hardly ever talked. For example, there’s the famous story of the time that Coolidge was sitting next to a woman at a White House dinner and the following hilarious exchange took place:
   WOMAN: So, Mr. President. How are you?
   COOLIDGE:
   WOMAN: Is there something wrong?
   COOLIDGE:
   WOMAN: WhY won’t you answer me? COOLIDGE:
   WOMAN: What a cretin.
   Another popular humorist of the day was Will Rogers, who used to do an act where he’d twirl a lasso and absolutely slay his audiences with such wry observations as: “The only thing I know is what I read in the papers.” Ha-ha! Get it? Neither do we. Must have been something he did with the lasso.
   But there was more to the twenties than mere hilarity. A great deal of important breakthroughs were being achieved in the field of culture by giants such as F—Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, who, in 1924, after years of experimentation at their laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, successfully tested the modern American novel, which is still in widespread use today. Poets such as T. S. Eliot and e. e. “buster” Cummings were producing a new type of “free-form” verse designed to prove that a poem did not have to be long to be boring. Then, too, in Memphis, Tennessee, the first supermarket, a Piggly Wiggly, was opened. On the West Coast, the motion-picture industry was producing “talkies” featuring such stars as Douglas Fairbanks, Edward G. Robinson, the young Joan Collins, and numerous twitching pieces of film lint magnified to the size of boa constrictors. It was also a Golden Age of Sports, with the most famous hero of them all, of course, being the immortal Babe “Herman” Ruth, who provided what is perhaps baseball’s finest moment during the seventh game of the 1927 World Series when with the score tied and two out, he pointed his bat toward the left-field bleachers, and then, on the very next pitch, in a feat that will live forever, he knocked out the immortal Jack Dempsey.
   But no achievement symbolized the spirit of the Roaring Twenties more than that of a tall young American aviator named, simply, Charles A. Lindbergh. Those of us who are fortunate enough to live in this era of modern commercial aviation, where air travel is extremely safe, thanks to advanced safety procedures such as making the airports so congested that airplanes hardly ever take off, can little appreciate the courage it took for Lindbergh to climb into the cramped cockpit of his single-engine plane, the Heidy-Ho IV, and take off into the predawn October 8 gloom over Roosevelt Field, Long Island, towing a banner that said, SIMPLY, TAN DON’T BURN WITH COPPERTONE.
   It was not an easy flight. Because of air turbulence, there was no beverage-cart service, and it turned out that Lindbergh had already seen the movie (The Poseidon Adventure.). Nevertheless he persevered, and thirty-three hours later, on the afternoon of October 8, he arrived at an airfield near Paris, where, to the joy of a watching world, he Plowed into a crowd of French persons at over 140 miles per hour. An instant hero, he returned in triumph for a motorcade ride in New York City, where millions welcomed him, in typical “Big Apple” style, by covering the streets with litter, much of which can still be seen today. But little did the cheering crowds realize, as streams of ticker tape fluttered down from office windows, that within just two years, the falling paper would be replaced by falling stockbrokers. If the crowds had realized this, of course, they would have stayed to watch.

Discussion Questions

   1. What do coal companies do with the coal, anyway? You never see it for sale.
   2. Is “Big Apple” a stupid nickname, or what?

Chapter Fifteen. Severe Economic Bummerhood

   The day the stock market crashed—October 8, 1929—will forever be etched on the Etch a Sketch of the American consciousness as “the day the stock market crashed,” or Sometimes “Black Tuesday.” For on that fateful day, the nation’s seemingly prosperous economy Was revealed to be merely a paper tiger with feet of clay living in a straw house of cards that had cried “wolf” once too often. Although this would not become clear for some time.
   Oh, there had been warning signs. Just a few weeks before Black Tuesday, there had been Mauve Wednesday, which was followed, only two days later, by Dark Navy Blue with Thin Diagonal Yellow Stripes Friday. But most Americans paid little heed (“Little Heed” would be a good name for a rock band. Also “Short Shrift.”) to these events, choosing instead to believe the comforting words of President Herbert Hoover Dam, who, in a reassuring nationwide radio broadcast, said: “Everybody STAY CALM, because there is NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT! Do you HEAR ME?? NOTHING!! HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA [click].”
   What were the underlying causes of the Crash? To truly understand the answer to this question, we must examine:

The Underlying Causes Of The Crash

   The stock market of the 1920s was very different from the stock market of today. Back then, the market was infested by greed-crazed slimeballs, get-rich-quick speculators with the ethical standards of tapeworms, who shrieked “buy” and “sell” orders into the telephone with no concern whatsoever for the nation’s long-term financial well-being. Whereas today they use computers.
   Another big flaw in the stock market of 1929 was the practice of “buying on margin.” To illustrate how this worked, let’s take a hypothetical example. Let’s say Investor A had x amount of dollars that he wished to invest in the stock market. He would pick up telephone B, dial 1234567, and tell stockbroker C he wanted to buy stock “on margin” in Company D. And the stockbroker would sell it to him, even though Company D did not really exist (Although as of yesterday it was up two points in active trading.). We just made it up, for this hypothetical example.
   Clearly, this kind of thing Could not go on forever, and on Black Tuesday, it did not. As stock prices plummeted, panic selling spread. A number of speculators, realizing that their dreams of wealth had turned to ashes and seeing no hope of repaying their debts, hurled themselves from their office windows. Even this failed to brighten the national mood. Because it was becoming increasingly apparent that the Roaring Twenties were over and that a new era had arrived: an era of unemPlOYment, poverty, social turmoil, despair, and—worst of all—Shirley Temple movies. And thus began what became known, following a highly successful “Name That Era” contest sponsored by the New York World Herald Journal Telegram Bugle and Harmonica, as:

The Great Depression

   The Great Depression was horrible. Ask the people who lived through it. Or, don’t even bother to ask. Just stand next to them for more than two minutes, and they’ll tell you about it. “It was hard, during the Great Depression,” they’ll say. “We had nothing to eat except floor sweepings and we walked eighteen miles to school. Even if the school was only two miles away, we’d have to walk back and forth nine times, because times were bad, and you had no choice, so you worked hard for every nickel, which in those days would buy you two tickets to a movie plus four boxes of popcorn plus a used Buick sedan, but of course we couldn’t afford it because Dad only made two dollars and fifty-seven cents per year and our shoes were made out of grapefruit rinds, but we never complained, no, we were happy, because we had values in those days, and if you had values you didn’t need a lot of money or food or toilet paper, which was a luxury in those days to the point where we’d get through a whole year—this was a family of eleven—on just six squares of toilet paper, because we had this system where if you had to ... HEY! Come back here!”
   As the federal government began to recognize the seriousness of the situation, it swung into action with the historic enactment, in 1930, of ...

The Hawley-Smoot Tariff

   Quite frankly we have no idea what this is, but we think it has a wonderful ring to it, and we just like to see it in large bold letters:
   THE HAWLEY-SMOOT TARIFF
   And yet, as the weeks dragged into months and the economy continued to founder, it soon became clear that some economic “medicine” even more potent than ...
   THE HAWLEY-SMOOT TARIFF
   would be needed to get the nation “back on its feet.” This paved the way for the historic election of 1932. The Republicans, showing the kind of sensitivity they are famous for, renominated President Hoover Dam, who pledged that, if elected, he would flee to the Bahamas. The Democrats countered by nominating Franklin Delanor Roosevelt—or, as he was affectionately known, “J.F.K.”—who ran under the slogan “Let’s Elect Another President Named “Roosevelt” and Confuse the Hell out of Future Generations of Students.” The voters responded overwhelmingly, and Roosevelt was elected in a mammoth landslide that unfortunately left him confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
   Nevertheless he began immediately to Combat the Depression, implementing a series of bold and sweeping new programs that came to be known, collectively, as:
   THE HAWLEY-SMOOT TARIFF
   No! Sorry! We can’t control ourselves. The programs implemented by Roosevelt were of course called the “New Deal,” which consisted of the following:
   1. Bank Protection—A major problem during the Depression was that people kept trying to get their money out of banks. To put a stop to this kind of thing, the government instituted modern banking regulations, under which:
   The banks are never open when it might be convenient. The customer is never sure what his bank’s name is, since they keep changing it, usually from something like “The First Formal Federal National State Bank of Savings Loans and Of Course Trust” to something like
   “InterContiBankAmeriTransWestSouthNorthCorp.” There are always stupid people in line ahead of you trying to cash checks from the Bank of Ye men and using underwear labels for identification.
   2. Job Creation—The government instituted a massive program of public works, under which tens of thousands of men and women were put to work strewing barricades and traffic cones on all the major roads in America, then using red flags to give halfhearted and confusing signals to motorists and sometimes waving them directly into the path of oncoming traffic. These projects are still fully operational today.
   3. The Infield Fly Rule—Under this program, when there is a runner on first or second base and there are fewer than two out, and the batter is the son of the runner’s first cousin, then the batter and the runner are legally considered “second Cousins.”
   Not surprisingly, these programs had an immediate impact on the Great Depression. And although some members of Congress charged that Roosevelt was overstepping his legal authority, he was able to win them over by inviting them to the White House for a series of “Fireside Chats” (“Perhaps, Senator, You would understand these Policies better if Ernst and Victor moved you even closer to the fire?” “NO! PLEASE!”).
   But even firm measures such as this did not prevent huge clouds of dust kicked up by ...
   THE HAWLEY-SMOOT TARIFF
   from covering entire states such as Oklahoma and turning them into a gigantic “Dust Bin,” forcing tens of thousands of people to pack up and head toward California, lured by the hope of finding jobs and a new life and maybe some decent sushi. This troubled era was chronicled brilliantly by John Steinbeck in his moving novel The Grapes of Wrath, part of a series that also includes The Pinto Beans of Lust and Bloodsucking Death Cabbages from Hell. And we could go on for days talking about the contributions being made during this period by women and minority groups.
   But the bottom line was, things were still not going well. The only really positive aspect of the situation was that at least the nation was at peace. Yet at that very same moment, across the dark, brooding waters of the Atlantic, there was growing concern. “My God, look at those waters!” people were saying. “They’re brooding!” Clearly this did not bode well for the next chapter, which would see the outbreak of the most terrible and destructive event in the history of Mankind:
   THE HAWLEY-SMOOT TARIFF

Discussion Questions

   1. Did you ever see the movie Attack of the Killer Tomatoes ? Explain.
   2. You know how on the evening news they always tell you that the stock market is up in active trading, or off in moderate trading, or trading in mixed activity, or whatever? Well, who gives a shit?

Chapter Sixteen. Major Nonhumorous Events Occur

   While the United states was struggling to get OUt of the Depression, the nations of Europe were struggling to overcome the horror and devastation and death of World War I so they could go ahead and have World War II. By the 1930s everybody was just about ready, so Germany, showing the kind of spunky “can-do” spirit that has made it so Popular over the years, started invading various surrounding nations. Fortunately these were for the most part Small nations, but Germany’s actions nevertheless alarmed Britain and France, which decided to strike back via the bold and clever strategy of signing agreements with Adolf Hitler. Their thinking was: If you can’t trust an insane racist paranoid spittle emitting criminal dictator, whom can you trust?
   Shockingly, this strategy did not prove to be effective. In 1939 Germany invaded Poland in retaliation for Poland’s flagrant and provocative decision to be right next door. Britain and France then declared war against Germany, which immediately invaded France and managed to conquer it after an epic battle lasting, by some accounts, as long as thirty-five minutes, with the crushing blow coming near the end when Germany’s ally, Italy, sent in its much-feared troops, who penetrated nearly two hundred feet into southern France before their truck broke down.
   At this point things looked pretty bleak for the Allied or “good” side. The last bastion of goodness was Great Britain, a feisty, plucky little island in the North Atlantic led by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had won the respect and loyalty of the British people for his ability to come up with clever insults at dinner parties. For example, there was the famous one where this woman says to him, “Lord Churchill, you’re drunk!” And he replies, “Madam, I may be drunk, but BLEAAARRRGGGHHH” all over her evening gown. Churchill used this gift of eloquence to rally his countrymen when Britain was down to a three-day supply of pluck and a German invasion appeared imminent. “We shall fight them on the beaches he said. “We shall fight them in the streets, and in the alleys, and in those things where it’s like a dead end, only there’s like a circle at the end, you know? Cul somethings.” Thus inspired, the British persevered, but by 1941 it was clear that they could not hold out long without military support from the United States. At the time Americans were strongly opposed to becoming directly involved, but that was to change drastically on the fateful December morning of October 8, when the Japanese, implementing a complex, long-term, and ultimately successful strategy to dominate the U.S. consumer-electronics market, attacked Pearl Harbor. And so it was time to have ...

World War Ii

   The best evidence we have of what World War II was like comes from about 300 million movies made during this era, many of them featuring Ronald Reagan. From these we learn that the war was fought by small groups of men called “units,” with each unit consisting of:
   One Italian person
   One Jewish person O
   ne Southern person
   One Tough but Caring Sergeant (Played by William Bendix.),
   and of course
   One African-American.
   These men often fought together through an entire double feature, during which they would learn, despite their differing backgrounds, how to trickle syrup from the corners of their mouths to indicate that they had been wounded. In the actual war of course, real blood was used. In fact, the actual war was extremely depressing, which is why we’re going to follow our usual procedure here and skip directly to ...

The Turning Point

   The turning point of the war came when the Allies were able to break the code being used by the Axis high command. The way this happened was, a young British intelligence officer was looking at some captured Nazi documents, and suddenly it hit him. “Hey!” he said. “This is written in German!” From that moment on, it was only a matter of time bef ore June 1944, which was when the schedule called for the Normandy Invasion. The Germans knew it was coming, but they didn’t know where; thus it was that when, on the morning of October 8, thousands of ships disgorged tens of thousands of troops on the beaches of NorMandy, the Germans felt pretty stupid. “So that’s why they were calling it the ‘Normandy Invasion’!” they said (In German.). Stunned by this blow, the Germans began a slow, bloody retreat before the forces of General George C. Scott, and within months the Americans had liberated France, whose people continue until this day to show their gratitude to American visitors by looking at us as though we are total Piltdown men when we try to order food.

The Final Stages Of The War

   America entered the final stages of the war under the leadership of Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S Truman, a feisty, plucky little island in the North Atlantic, who ... No, excuse us, we mean: a feisty, plucky native of Missouri (the “Sho’ Nuff’!” State) who grew up so poor that his family could not afford to put a period after his middle initial , yet who went on to become a failed haberdasher. It was Truman who made the difficult decision to drop the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the rationale being that only such a devastating, horrendous display of destructive power would convince Japan that it had to surrender. Truman also made the decision to drop the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, the rationale being that, hey, we had another bomb.
   When the war finally ended, Truman shrewdly realized that it was time to enter the Postwar Era. His first order of business was to work with the leaders of the other devastated and war-weary nations to establish some kind of mechanism to guarantee that there would be lasting world peace for a couple of months while everybody developed better weapons. It was this idealistic hope that gave birth to a noble organization that has survived and flourished to this day, an organization that affords an opportunity for representatives of virtually every nation on the globe to gather together for the purpose of freely and openly using their diplomatic license plates to violate New York City parking regulations. We refer, of course to ...

The United Nations

   The U.N. consists of two main bodies:
   The General Assembly, which is, in the generous spirit of the U.N. Charter, open to just about every little dirtbag nation in the world. It has no power. Its functions are to: (1) Have formal receptions; (2) Listen to the Grateful Dead on headphones; and (3) Denounce Israel for everything, including sunspots.
   The Security Council, which is limited to nations that have mastered the concept of plumbing. It is very powerful. Its functions are to: (1) Pass sweeping resolutions intended to end bloody conflicts; and then (2) Veto, ignore, or walk out on these resolutions.
   But despite the presence of this potent force for peace, trouble was looming between the United States and the Soviet Union. Indeed, even as the final battles of World War II were still being fought, the battle lines were being drawn for yet another struggle—an epic struggle between the archenemy ideologies of communism and capitalism; a struggle that was to take many forms and erupt in many places; a struggle that threatened and continues to threaten the very survival of life on the planet; a Struggle that has come to be known as ...
   THE HAWLEY-SMOOT TARIFF
   No! Sorry! That’s it for the Hawley-Smoot Tariff; you have our word. The struggle we are referring to is of course the Cold War, which we will cover in extreme detail in the next chapter, but first let’s pause for this:

Trick Discussion Question

   1. What did the “S” in Harry S Truman’s name stand for? (Hint: “Lucille.”)

Chapter Seventeen. International Tension City

   The end of World War II brought an economic boom to America, as factories that had been cranking out tanks and planes for the war effort were suddenly free to produce for Mr. and Mrs. Joe Consumer (Not their real name. Their real name was Mr. and Mrs. Bob Consumer.). This made for some pretty exciting times, because Mr. and Mrs. Consumer had very little experience with tanks and planes, and sometimes tempers would fray in traffic. (“Hey, that’s my parking space!” “Oh yeah?” “Look out! He’s turning his turret!!” “KABLAMMMI!!” “AIEEEEEEE ...” But while things were doing well on the domestic front, problems were looming on the international front in the form of

The Cold War

   The Cold War gets its name from the fact that it was formed first in the Soviet Union, also known as the “U.S.S.R.” or simply the “Union of the Society of Socialistic Soviet Union Communist Russians.” The Soviet Union had actually been our ally during World War II, although today many people do not realize this, in large part because we forgot to mention it in the last chapter.
   What caused the Cold War? Why did two nations that had both spilt so much blood in a common cause, suddenly become archenemies? And how come it’s acceptable to write “spilt”? We don’t write: “I was truly thrilt when the service-station attendant filt up my car with gasoline,” do we? Of course not! There are no service-station attendants anymore! This is just one of the grim realities that we have been forced to learn to live with in the Cold War era. But what—we are going to finish this paragraph if it kills us—caused this to come about? Respected historians agree that many complex and subtly interrelated factors were involved, which is why we never sit next to historians at parties.
   Speaking of parties, the soviet Union at this time was being run by the Communists, a group of men fierce in their dedication to wearing hilariously bad suits. Their leader was Josef Stalin (Russian for “Joey Bananas”), who had risen quickly . through the party ranks on the basis of possessing a high level of personal magnetism, as measured in armed henchpersons.
   Stalin’s strategy at the end of World War II was to acquire a small “buffer zone” between Russia and Germany, consisting of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, and most of Germany. In an effort to garner public support in these nations, Stalin mounted a public-relations campaign built around the upbeat theme “Maybe We Won’t Have Your Whole Family Shot,” and in 1945 Eastern Europe decided to join the Communist bloc by a vote of 28,932,084,164,504,029-0. Heartened by this mandate, Stalin immediately ordered construction work to begin on the Iron Curtain, which was given its name by Sir Winston Churchill, who, in a historic anecdote at a dinner party, said: “Madam, I may be drunk, but an iron curtain has descended upon BLEAAARRRGGGHHH.”
   Alarmed by these prophetic words, the United States joined with eleven other nations to form the North American Treaty Organization, or UNICEF. Under this treaty, the United States agreed to station tens of thousands of troops in Western Europe. In return, the Western Europeans agreed to station tens of thousands of their troops in Iowa, but after a couple of weeks they got bored and went home to make imported cars. (Our troops are still over there; we keep trying to get them back, but they like the beer.) And thus the Cold War continued to deepen and broaden and widen and become larger, and by 1948 it became clear that some kind of confrontation was inevitable, and so the two Superpowers decided to hold one.

The Berlin Crisis

   The Berlin Crisis was caused when Stalin, encouraged by the success of his Iron Curtain, decided to set up a blockade cutting off the West’s land access to West Berlin, a city that was on the good side in the Cold War but that was located, due to computer error, some 120 miles (325 kilograms) (30936.54 hectares) (2,342,424,323.3432 millipedes) behind the Curtain. As food supplies ran low, it began to appear as though the Berliners, despite the fact that they were feisty and of course plucky, would be starved into surrender. Just then (October 8.), President Truman had an idea, an idea that showed the kind of straightforward, no-nonsense, homespun wisdom that had served him so well in the past. “Let’s drop an atomic bomb on Japan,” he said. His aides, however, detected several flaws in this plan, so instead Truman decided to proceed with:

The Berlin Airlift

   This was one of the most dramatic feats in the history of dramatic aviation feats. Day after day, around the clock, U.S. planes took off from West Germany, carrying thousands of tons of clothing, medicine, fuel, and food destined for besieged Berlin. It was a stirring sight indeed to watch these mighty aircraft sweep over the surrounded city and open their cargo doors, allowing the life-giving supplies to hurtle majestically toward the grateful Berliners below. Individual cans of Spam were clocked at upward of 130 miles per hour. Despite the casualties, it was a triumph of the “can-do” American spirit, and when Truman threatened to escalate the relief effort by having the planes fly over Soviet territory and drop huge amounts of cafeteria-grade ravioli or even—remember, these were desperate times—fruitcake, Stalin had no choice but to call off the blockade.
   But it was clear by now that communism would continue to be a serious threat abroad, and it was equally evident that the only intelligent way for Americans to deal with it was to develop a firm yet cautious and intelligent policy, based on a realistic assessment of the situation rather than blind hatred, uncontrolled emotion, and shrill accusation. Still, that seemed like an awful lot of work, so instead we had ...

The Red Scare

   The Scare was started by Joseph McCarthy, who was a senator from Wisconsin. That’s the strange thing about Wisconsin: You think of it as being this nice friendly state full of decent, God-fearing, cow-oriented people, and here they elect this vicious alcoholic psychopathic lunatic. And it’s not just an isolated incident: In recent years, Wisconsin has also attempted to elect Charles Manson, Hermann Goring, Jabba the Hutt, and, chillingly, Geraldo Rivera. We think it’s something in the cheese.
   Anyway, McCarthy made a series of speeches in which he charged that Communists had infiltrated the federal government to the point where the State Department had an actual Communist dining room, Communist men’s bowling team, and so forth. At first, skeptics scoffed at these charges, but when McCarthy produced solid evidence in the form of a piece of paper that appeared, at least from a distance , to have something written on it, the press, displaying the kind of journalistic integrity that we normally associate only with restroom bacteria, had no choice but to print the story, and the Scare was on.
   Speaking of bacteria, a highly active Communist-finder during this era was a young attorney named Richard “Dick” Milhous “Milhous” Nixon, who had gotten elected to Congress from a California district despite the handicap that he reminded people of a nocturnal rodent. It was Nixon who nailed proven suspected Communist and Red Fellow Traveler Alger Hiss, the turning point in the case coming when Nixon, accompanied by reporters, went to a Maryland farm, where he reached into a hollowed-out pumpkin and, in a moment of high drama, pulled out a cocker spaniel named Checkers. This was widely believed to be the end of his career. (Nixon’s.)
   Eventually the public came to its senses and the Red Scare hysteria died down, and today, thank goodness, we no longer see politicians attempting to gain power by accusing their opponents of being unpatriotic, except during elections. Speaking of which, we almost forgot to mention the dramatic ...

1948 Presidential Election

   in 1948 the Democrats had little choice but to nominate President Truman, under the banner:
   HE IS GOING TO LOSE.
   Everybody felt this way: the politicians, the press, the pollsters, the piccolo players, Peter Piper, everybody. The Republicans were so confident that they nominated an individual named Thomas Dewey, whose lone accomplishment was inventing the decimal system. Truman campaigned doggedly around the nation, but his cause appeared to be hopeless. A Dewey victory seemed so inevitable that on election night, the Chicago Tribune printed the famous front-page headline DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. This was because Dewey had defeated Truman who immediately threatened to drop an atomic bomb on Chicago, so everybody went ha-ha-ha-ha, just kidding, and wisely elected to let the feisty ex-haberdasher have another term.
   This was typical of the carefree attitude widespread in the nation during the postwar years. Popular culture saw millions of “bobby soxers” (Not their real names.) swooning over a feisty, skinny crooner named Frank Sinatra, while young “hep cats” wore “zoot suits” and danced the “jitterbug” to “platters” on the “jukebox.” In short, the whole nation was behaving like “dorks,” and it was only a matter of time before some kind of terrible event occurred.

The Korean War

   The Korean War was, as is so often the case with wars, not especially amusing, except for those soldiers who were fortunate enough to get in a fun unit featuring Alan Alda and a host of wacky and zany characters and young nurses with terrific bodies. So we’re going to continue our policy of skipping over the depressing parts and hasten ahead to the fifties, although we would like to “toot our own horn” just a little bit here and point out that we have managed to get through this entire chapter without once mentioning ...
   THE H***-S**** T*****
   If you get our drift.

Discussion Questions

   1. Remember when the United States was supposed to switch over to the metric system, and the federal government put up road signs in kilometers, and in some areas people actually shot the signs down? Wasn’t that great?
   2. Do you think “Checkers” is a good name for a dog? What about “Booger”? Explain.

Extra-Credit Project

   Think of a joke that starts this way: “Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “Lithuania.” (Hint: This joke could involve lisping.)

Chapter Eighteen. The Fifties: Peace, Prosperity, Brain Death

   Because of scheduling problems, the fifties did not officially begin until 1952. This, coincidentally, was the year of the 1952 presidential election campaign, in which both parties, recognizing that the nation was locked into a deadly Cold War struggle, when the slightest mistake could mean the destruction of the entire planet, nominated bald men with silly names. The Democrats went with Adlai Stevenson, a suspected intellectual, and the Republicans went with Dwight “David” Eisenhower, who was extremely popular for winning World War II and having the likable nickname “Ike,” which he got from a sound that his friend Sir Winston Churchill made just before pitching face-first into his food at a dinner party.
   Going into the race, Eisenhower had a strong tactical advantage stemming from the fact that nobody, including himself, knew what his views were. But his campaign quickly became enmeshed in scandal when it was discovered that his running mate, Senator “Dick” Nixon, had received money from a secret fund. Realizing that his career was at stake, Nixon appeared on a live television broadcast and told the American people, with deep emotion in his voice, that if they didn’t let him be the vice president, he would kill his dog. This was widely believed to be the end of his career.
   Nevertheless, Eisenhower, buoyed by the inspirational and deeply meaningful campaign theme “I like Ike,” won the election and immediately plunged into an ambitious and arduous schedule that often involved playing golf and taking a nap on the same day. This resulted in a humongous economic boom that caused millions of Americans to purchase comically styled big cars and hightail it to the suburbs. Thus began a Golden Era in this country that is still looked back upon with nostalgia by the millions of Americans who are involved in the manufacture and sale of nostalgia-related products.

Culture In The Fifties

   The fifties were an extremely important cultural era, because this was the phase when the postwar “Baby Boom” generation grew up, and we Boomers are quite frankly fascinated with anything involving ourselves. Like when we started having our own babies, it was all we could talk about for years. We went around describing our child—having and child-rearing experiences in breathtaking detail, as though the rest of you had no experience whatsoever in these fields. We’re sorry if you find all this boring, but it’s not our fault that you were not fortunate enough to have been born into such an intriguing and important generation. We Can only imagine how interesting we are going to be at cocktail parties when we start getting into death.
   But back to the fifties: The best archival source for accurate information about life during this era is the brilliant TV documentary series Ozzie and Harriet. From this we learn that the fifties were a time when once per week some kind of epochal crisis would occur, such as Ricky borrowing David’s sweater without asking, and it would take a half an hour to resolve this crisis, owing to the fact that the male head of household had the IQ of dirt. But other than that, life was very good, considering it was filmed in black and white.
   Another important television show of the era was The Mickey Mouse Club, which made enormous cultural contributions, by which we mean: Annette Funicello. Annette had a major impact on many of us male Baby Boomers, especially the part where she came marching out wearing a T-shirt with her name printed on it, and some of the letters were considerably closer to the camera than others. If you get our drift.
   But the most truly wonderful fifties show was Queen for a Day, starring Your Host, Jack Bailey. This was a kind of Game Show from Hell where three women competed to see who had the most miserable life. We are not making this show up. Contestant Number One would say something like, “Well I have terminal cancer, of course, and little Billy’s iron lung was destroyed in the fire, and ...” and so on. Everybody in the audience would be weeping, and then Contestant Number Two would tell a story that was even worse. And then Contestant Number Three would make the other two sound like Mary Poppins. After which Jack Bailey would have the members of the audience clap to show which woman they thought was the most wretched, and she would receive some very nice gifts including (always) an Amana freezer. It was fabulous television, and a nice freezer, and it remained unsurpassed until three decades later, with the emergence—probably as a result of toxic waste in the water supply—of Geraldo Rivera.
   Of course television was not the only cultural contribution of the fifties. There was also the Hula-Hoop, and Marlon Brando. And let’s not forget the interstate highway system, which made it possible for a family to hop into a car in Cleveland, and a little over four hours later, find themselves still delayed by road construction just outside of Cleveland. We are still benefiting from this system.
   But the significant cultural innovation of the fifties was musical—a new “sound” called “rock ‘n’ roll—an exciting, high-energy style of music that, in its raucous disregard for the gentler, more complacent tastes of an older generation, reflected the Young people’s growing disillusionment With the stultifying, numbing, bourgeois, and materialistic values of an increasingly homogeneous society through such lyrics as:
   Ba bomp ba bomp bomp A dang a dang dang A ding a dong ding, Blue moon.
   Of the many legendary rock “performers” to emerge during this era—”Fats” Checker, the Pylons, the Gol-Darnits, Buster and the Harpoons, Bill Hawley and the Smoots, and so on—the greatest of them all was “The King,” Elvis Presley, who went on to become the largest (Ha-ha!) (Get it?) record-seller of all time, and who is to this very day sometimes seen shopping in rural supermarkets.
   So there’s no question about it: By the mid-fifties, America was definitely in a Golden Era, an era of excitement and opportunity for all citizens, regardless of race or creed or color, unless the color happened to be black. Then there was a problem. Because at the time the nation was functioning under the racial doctrine of “Separate but Equal,” which got its name from the fact that black people were required to use separate facilities that were equal to the facilities that white people kept for their domestic animals. This system had worked for many decades, and nobody saw any real reason to change until one day in 1954 when a group of outside agitators arrived from outer space to file a suit against the Topeka, Kansas, Board of Education. This led to the historic and just Supreme Court ruling, a landmark, that nobody, black or white, should have to go to school in Topeka, Kansas. Thus was born the civil rights movement—an epic struggle that has required much sacrifice and pain, but which has enabled the United States to
   progress, in just three decades, from being a nation where blacks were forced to ride in the back of the bus, to being a nation where, due to federal cutbacks, there is no bus.

The Presidential Election Of 1956

   Things were going so smoothly at this point that the voters didn’t really feel like going through a whole new presidential election, so they decided to hold the 1952 election over again, and it came out the same. In a word, everything seemed to be working out very well, and the fifties would probably have been pure perfection except that—it seems like this always happens—all these pesky foreign affairs kept occurring in the form of crises, starting with ...

The Suez Crisis

   This crisis involved the Suez Canal, which was built by the French (“Suez!” is the word used to call French pigs.) (Not that they come.) and which is extremely strategic because it is the only navigable water route connecting the Red Sea with Albany, New York. Hence, you can imagine how tense the world became on the morning of October 8 when this area became the scene of a full-blown crisis, although we cannot for the life of us remember what the hell it was. But we’re fairly sure it’s over. You never hear about it on the news.
   At around this same time a number of other international crises, most of them also fully blown, occurred in Hungary, Poland, Lebanon, and the quiz-show industry. But all of these paled by comparison to ...

The Sputnik Crisis

   One day in 1957 everybody in the United States was minding his or her own business when suddenly the Russians launched a grapefruit-size object called Sputnik (literally, “Little Sput”) into an Earth orbit, from which it began transmitting back the following potentially vital intelligence information
   (and we quote): “Beep.” This came as a severe shock to Americans, because at that point the best our space scientists had been able to come up with was a walnut-size object that went: “Moo.” And thus began the Space Race which was to have an enormous worldwide impact on Mrs. DeLucia’s fifth-grade class, which was where we were at the time. All of a sudden Mrs. DeLucia was telling us we were going to have to study a LOT more science and math, including such concepts as the “cosine.” As if the whole thing were our fault.
   So it was a difficult time, but by 1960 the nation was starting to feel a little better. “Well,” we said brightly in unison, “at least there haven’t been any crises for a while!” Which was of course the signal for the International Crisis Promotion Council to swing into action and produce:

The U-2 Crisis

   This crisis occurred when the Russians shot down an American U-2
   reconnaissance plane flying deep into their airspace, and then accused us—this is the kind of paranoid thinking that makes the Russians so untrustworthy—of conducting aerial reconnaissance. Our government offered a number of highly plausible and perfectly innocent explanations for the flight, such as:
   It was a weather plane. It was a traffic plane. It was swamp gas. The dog ate our homework.
   But eventually President Eisenhower, emerging from a high-level nap, was forced to admit that it was in fact a spy plane, at which point the Russians, led by Nikita “The Human Potato” Khrushchev, stomped Out of the Paris summit conference before the appetizers had even arrived, leaving “Ike” with nobody to negotiate with except himself. And although he won several major concessions, the feeling was becoming widespread among the American People that maybe it was time for a change—time to get some “new blood” in the White House and “get the country moving again.” And it just so happened that at that very moment, a new “star” was rising on the public scene—a young man whose boyish good looks, energy, quick wit, and graceful charm would soon capture the hearts of the nation and even the world: Pat Boone. Or maybe that was 1955.

Discussion Questions

   1. Do you think we’ve had enough Winston Churchill jokes? Explain.
   2. Have you, or has anybody you have ever met, ever found any use for the cosine? We didn’t think so.

Extra Credit

   Try to think up a campaign slogan even more inane than “I like Ike.” (Hint: This is not possible.)

Bonus Question

   What does one do with extra credit, anyway?