Don't Know Much About History

696 Pages·2003·2.43 MB·English

D O N ’ T K N O W
M U C H A B O U T®
H I S T O R Y
EVERYTHING
YOU NEED TO KNOW
ABOUT AMERICAN HISTORY
BUT NEVER LEARNED
K E N N E T H C . D AV I S
To my children, Jenny and Colin
C O N T E N T S
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION ix
INTRODUCTION xi
AUTHOR’S NOTE xxiii
CHAPTER 1
Brave New World
1
CHAPTER 2
Say You Want a Revolution
47
CHAPTER 3
Growth of a Nation:
From the Creation of the Constitution to Manifest Destiny
107
CHAPTER 4
Apocalypse Then: To Civil War and Reconstruction
183
CHAPTER 5
When Monopoly Wasn’t a Game:
The Growing Empire from Wild West to World War I
253
CHAPTER 6
Boom to Bust to Big Boom:
From the Jazz Age and the Great Depression to Hiroshima
319
viii Contents
CHAPTER 7
Commies, Containment, and Cold War: America in the Fifties
397
CHAPTER 8
The Torch Is Passed: From Camelot to Hollywood on the Potomac
437
CHAPTER 9
From the Evil Empire to the Axis of Evil
533
AFTERWORD 589
APPENDIX 1
The Bill of Rights and Other Constitutional Amendments
595
APPENDIX 2
Is the Electoral College a Party School? A Presidential Election Primer
618
APPENDIX 3
U.S. Presidents and Their Administrations
624
Selected Readings 631
Acknowledgments 657
Searchable Terms 659
About the Author
Also by Kenneth C. Davis
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
P R E F A C E T O T H E
R E V I S E D E D I T I O N
W
hen Don’t Know Much About® History first appeared in 1990, it
was simply meant to serve as a fresh new take on American his-
tory. Busting myths with a dose of humor and real stories about real
people, the book was conceived as an antidote to the dull, dreary text-
books we suffered through in high school or college. Nobody was more
surprised than I was when the book spent 35 weeks on the New York
Times Best-seller list and became an “antitextbook” that has sold
1.3 million copies. If nothing else, this little book proved that Ameri-
cans don’t hate history—they just hate the dull version they got when
they were growing up.
With the same question-and-answer style, this updated, revised, and
greatly expanded edition brings history right up to Bill Clinton’s
impeachment and the bizarre 2000 election. Incorporating new dis-
coveries, revelations, and theories about America’s past, this revised edi-
tion elaborates on such long-standing American controversies as the
Jefferson-Hemings affair, the Hiss and Rosenberg cases, and the Iran-
Contra adventure. There are also many new questions, many of them
resulting from readers’ questions to me over the years.
For history buffs and history-phobes, longtime fans and a new gen-
eration still in the dark about America’s past, this book provides “Every-
thing You Need to Know About American History.” And more!
Kenneth C. Davis
AUGUST 2002
I N T R O D U C T I O N
B
ack in the early 1960s, when I was growing up, there was a silly pop
song called “What Did Washington Say When He Crossed the
Delaware?” Sung to the tarantella beat of an Italian wedding song, the
answer went something like “Martha, Martha, there’ll be no pizza
tonight.”
Of course, these lyrics were absurd; everybody knew Washington
ate only cherry pie.
On that December night in 1776, George might have told himself
that this raid on an enemy camp in Trenton, New Jersey, better work.
Or else he might be ordering a last meal before the British strung him
up. But as the general rallied his ragged, barefoot troops across the icy
Delaware, one of his actual comments was far more amusing than
those fanciful lyrics. Stepping into his boat, Washington—the plain-
spoken frontiersman, not the marbleized demigod—nudged 280-
pound General Henry “Ox” Knox with the tip of his boot and said,
“Shift that fat ass, Harry. But slowly, or you’ll swamp the damned boat.”
According to Patriots, A. J. Langguth’s fascinating history of the Revo-
lution, that is how Knox himself reported the story after the war. I cer-
tainly never heard that version of the crossing when I was in school.
And that’s too bad, because it reveals more of Washington’s true, earthy
nature than all the hokey tales about cherry trees and nonexistent
prayer vigils in Valley Forge. And that’s the point of this book: much of
xii Introduction
what we remember about our history is either mistaken or fabricated.
That is, if we remember it at all.
For all too many Americans who dozed through American History
101, the Mayflower Compact might as well be a small car. Recon-
struction has something to do with silicone implants. And the
Louisiana Purchase means eating out at a Cajun restaurant. When the
first edition of this book appeared more than twelve years ago, several
writers had just enjoyed remarkable success by lambasting Americans’
failure to know our past. Americans were shown to be know-nothings
in the books Cultural Literacyand The Closing of the American Mind.
Well, we’re probably not as dumb as those books would have us.
But the sad truth is clear: we are no nation of scholars when it comes to
history. Just as I was writing the first edition of this book, a highly pub-
licized example of our “historical illiteracy” appeared. It was a 1987
survey of high school juniors that exposed astonishing gaps in what
these seventeen-year-olds knew about American history and literature.
A third of the students couldn’t identify the Declaration of Indepen-
dence as the document that marked the formal separation of the thir-
teen colonies from Great Britain. Only 32 percent of the students sur-
veyed could place the American Civil War in the correct half century.
Sadly, I must say that things have not improved much—if at all—in
the past fifteen or twenty years. Every few years, it seems, another sur-
vey comes along that blasts the historical ineptness of American stu-
dents. Part of the problem may be that those juniors who didn’t do so
well in 1987 may be teachers now!
But why dump on the kids? While there are constant warnings
issued about the yawning gaps in the education of American students,
another question looms larger. Would most of their parents or older
brothers and sisters do any better? Most thirty-seven-year-olds or forty-
seven-year-olds might not pass a similar pop quiz. Comedian Jay Leno
routinely proves this on Tonightwith his “Jaywalk” segments in which
adults demonstrate that they are incapable of answering the simplest
questions about history. When Bill Clinton went to Normandy as pres-
ident for a D-Day observance, even he had to be tutored on what had
happened there. So don’t ask for whom the gap yawns. The gap yawns
for thee.
The reason for these historical shortcomings is simple. For most of
Introduction xiii
us, history was boring, and a great many Americans were taught by a
football coach who got dropped into the history class to give him some-
thing to fill out his day. Many of us also learned about the past from
textbooks that served up the past as if it were a Hollywood costume
drama. In schoolbooks of an earlier era, the warts on our Founding
Fathers’ noses were neatly retouched. Slavery also got the glossy
makeover—it was merely the misguided practice of the rebellious folks
down South until the “progressives” of the North showed them the
light. American Indians were portrayed in textbooks in the same way
they were in Hollywood Westerns. Women were pretty much left out of
the picture entirely with the exception of a mythical Betsy Ross or a
lovely Dolley Madison rescuing the White House china.
Truth isn’t so cosmetically perfect. Our historical sense is frequently
skewed, skewered, or plain screwed up by myths and misconceptions.
Schools that packaged a tidy set of simplistic historical images are
largely responsible for fostering these American myths. There has
always been a tendency to hide the less savory moments from our past,
the way a mad aunt’s photo gets pulled from the family album.
On top of that, the gaping chasms in our historical literacy have
been reinforced by images from pop culture. Unfortunately, highly fic-
tionalized films, such as Oliver Stone’s JFK or Disney’s Pocahontas,
make a much greater impression on millions of people than a carefully
researched, historically accurate, but numbingly dull, documentary.
Occasionally there are films like Gloryor Saving Private Ryanthat can
stimulate interest in history they way few textbooks or teachers can.
Since this book was first written, there has also been an explosion of
cable television programming, including the History Channel, Dis-
covery, and The Learning Channel, that offers excellent documen-
taries. But for the most part, mainstream movies and network television
have magnified the myths and makeovers. It is important to understand
that looking past these myths is revealing. The real picture is far more
interesting than the historical tummy-tuck. And truth is always more
interesting than propaganda.
Somebody will surely read this and say, “So what?”
Why bother with history anyway? What difference does it make if
our kids know what the Declaration says—or doesn’t say? Why does it
matter if most people think Watergate is just old news?
xiv Introduction
The answer is simple because history is really about the conse-
quences of our actions—large and small. And that has never been
more apparent than in the aftermath of the terror attacks of September
11, 2001. This revised edition is being written in the wake of that hor-
rible day, and if the terror attacks haven’t changed anything else, they
certainly changed many Americans’ appreciation of the past and what
it has to do with the present.
But perhaps more importantly, history can explain how we got
where are. We can use it to connect the dots from past to present. Take
the Versailles Treaty. (Please!) I know. The very words sound BOR-
ING. I can see your eyes grow heavy as you read the words “Versailles”
and “Treaty.” But consider what that treaty, which supposedly settled
World War I back in 1919, actually did. In one very clear and obvious
sense, it laid the groundwork for another world war only twenty years
later.
But look past that. You can draw a straight line from the Treaty of
Versailles to the modern Middle East, Iran and Iraq, the Balkan coun-
tries of Europe, and even Vietnam. All these hot spots of the past few
decades were created in the aftermath of Versailles, when the European
powers carved up the world into colonies that they thought they could
rule as they pleased.
When the CIA overthrew the government of Iran in 1953 during
the Eisenhower administration, nobody thought about what it might
mean in 25 years. At the time, Americans were worried about Russia
and the oil companies. What did it matter what the Iranians thought?
Restoring the shah to the Iranian throne in place of a government hos-
tile to America seemed like a good idea. Until the Iranian people
thought otherwise in 1979 and began the first wave of Islamic revolu-
tions that have altered recent history.
Another example closer to home is COINTELPRO, a largely for-
gotten FBI program of illegal wiretaps, dirty tricks and smears of indi-
viduals first aimed at suspected Communists and later at members of
the antiwar and civil rights movements. Today, as America debates the
future of its intelligence agencies and domestic spying, it is important
to remember FBI operations like COINTELPRO and other abuses by
America’s intelligence agencies in the past. People in the American
government, some of them with the absolute best intentions, have
Introduction xv
trampled rights and destroyed lives in pursuit of short-term goals. As
George Kennan, the American diplomat and architect of America’s
Cold War “containment” policy, once said, “The worst thing the
Communists could do to us and the thing we have most to fear from
their activities is that we should become like them.” This is the essence
of learning from history. But if we all have those enormous gaps in our
understanding of the past, how can we possibly learn from it?
This book’s intent is to fill those gaps in our historical knowledge
with some simple, accessible answers to basic questions about Ameri-
can history. This single volume is obviously not an encyclopedic his-
tory of America. For simplicity, I use a question-and-answer approach,
and there are literally shelves of books about each of the questions I
have included. My intent is to refresh the shaky recollection, remove
the old myths, or reshape the misconceptions with some simple
answers. Or, in some cases, to point the way to longer answers. I like to
consider a Don’t Know Much Aboutbook the first word on the subject
rather than the last.
What’s different about this version? First, there is an entire new
chapter that includes a review of the events that have taken place since
I completed the original edition in 1989, including some of the most
remarkable events in American history. Like the original, this new edi-
tion is organized along chronological lines, moving from America’s
“discovery” by Europe to more recent events, including the Gulf War,
the end of the Cold War, and the events leading up to the enormous
national tragedy of September 11, 2001. At this writing, we are still try-
ing to uncover the “truth” about the terrorist attacks on September 11,
2001, what the American government knew beforehand, what it did—
and didn’t do. The answers to those questions are still very much in the
air, and it is difficult as a historian to assess some of these issues yet. But
we can try to figure out how we got to that awful moment in history.
In addition to the new material covering events since the late 1980s,
I have included a host of new questions in every chapter. Some of these
are stimulated by discoveries made in recent years, such as the archaeo-
logical dig that uncovered the original fort at Jamestown, Virginia. In
other places, I answer questions that readers have asked me over the past
twelve years. Often, when I speak on the radio or in lectures, I get a
question that was not in the original edition, and I have included some