Who was the real "New Dealer"?

Our history books tell us that the modern age of governmental regulations and guarantees against economic hardships began with FDR during the 1930's and his "New Deal". Programs like social security, for example, to name one of many.

FDR's  program was a product of the Great Depression. Imagine, however, if there had been no great depression. Would we still have the many social programs proposed by Franklin Roosevelt?
I argue that without World War 1, which caused the Great Depression, we would probably have had many of those programs much earlier, possibly by as early as 1920. Why do I say that?
        In a speech  in Osawatomie, Kansas.on August 31, 1910, FDR's distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt presented what he called his New Nationalism. He was in the process of expounding on what was then called Progressivism, a program carried on by Woodrow Wilson. Without the intervention of war, this is what we might have had.

The central issue he argued was government protection of human welfare and property rights, but he also argued that human welfare was more important than property rights. He insisted that only a powerful federal government could regulate the economy and guarantee social justice, and that a President can only succeed in making his economic agenda successful if he makes the protection of human welfare his highest priority. Roosevelt believed that the concentration in industry was a natural part of the economy. He wanted executive agencies (not the courts) to regulate business. The federal government should be used to protect the laboring men, women and children from exploitation. In terms of policy, Roosevelt's platform included a broad range of social and political reforms advocated by progressives.
In the social sphere the platform called for:

A National Health Service to include all existing government medical agencies
Social insurance, to provide for the elderly, the unemployed, and the disabled.
Limited injunctions in strikes.
A minimum wage law for women.
An eight hour workday.
A federal securities commission.
Farm relief.
Workers' compensation for work-related injuries.
An inheritance tax.
A Constitutional amendment to allow a Federal income tax.

The political reforms proposed included:
Women's suffrage.
Direct election of Senators.
Primary elections for state and federal nominations.
However, the main theme of the platform was an attack on the domination of politics by business interests, which allegedly controlled both established parties. The platform asserted that:
To destroy this invisible Government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.

To that end, the platform called for:
Strict limits and disclosure requirements on political campaign contributions.
Registration of lobbyists.
Recording and publication of Congressional committee proceedings.

Sound familiar?

Say it ain't so!

One of the most disappointing things about studying history are the things you find out that aren’t true, which you have always believed. As Will Rogers once said, “Our problem ain’t that we don’t know anything. Our problem is that we know too much that ain’t so.”

How about Betsy Ross designing the first flag. This account of the creation of our first flag was first brought to light in 1870 by one of her grandsons, William J. Canby, at a meeting of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. This took place 94 years after the event supposedly took place! Mr. Canby was a boy of eleven years when Mrs. Ross died in his home.
We all know the picture, but what is wrong with it. First of all, the supposedly took place in June 1776, when Washington asked Ms. Ross to design the flag. If you look, this flag has the traditional circle of 13 stars. Unfortunately, this flag design was only approved by the Continental Congress on June 14, 1777 (flag day). There is no historical evidence at all that discusses Ross and the flag. It seems that the story was concocted to draw attention to the Ross house in Philadelphia so that it could be made a historical monument.

What about Paul Revere’s Ride. In January 1861, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published a poem about Revere’s ride. We all know it. “Listen my children and you shall hear...” Funny thing, but before that poem appeared, most Americans had never heard of Paul Revere except as a silversmith. Not a single mention of him appears in any compendium of Revolutionary figures before 1863. I checked myself in a book about the Revolution published in 1854. No Paul Revere at all. We do find mention of William Dawes, who actually made the ride. The poem, however, made Revere a national hero in the latter part of the 19th century.        (Somewhere, I have a wonderful cartoon that I can’t find. It shows Longfellow sitting at his desk, thinking. “Listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of William Dawes... William Dawes.” He turns to his wife and asks, “Dear, what was the name of that other fellow who rode that night?”

Speaking of Revere. His famous painting of the Boston Massacre is filled with inaccuracies, all on purpose. The painting was done to inflame Bostonians against the British, not to depict history. The British didn’t fire as a group. And Captain Preston was not in front directing fire. As came out in the trial at which John Adams got the British acquitted, Preston did not give an order to fire.

Is this the “little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” So said Abraham Lincoln to Harriet Beecher Stowe when she visited the White House in 1863. Probably was never said. The earliest printed source for a similar version of the quote–“Is this the little woman who made the great war?”–appeared in the Atlantic Monthly  version of Annie Fields’s biography, entitled “Days with Mrs. Stowe” and published in August 1896, nearly contemporaneous with Stowe’s death on 1 July. Lincoln scholars hesitate to validate the quote.

Lincoln stories are always great in lectures. When told that his General Ulysses Grant had a drinking problem Lincoln is reputed to have said, “If I knew what brand he used, I send every General a barrel.” A great quote, but he never said it. In fact, Lincoln denied ever saying it.

One of my favorite scenes from history is General John Pershing striding off the boat in France in 1917 and saying, “Lafayette, we are here.” So dramatic a line to tell the French we are repaying them for the American Revolution. He didn’t say it. One of his aides said it at a dinner the next day. When asked, Pershing said that he wished he had said it.

Even our Independence Day is muddled when you look at history. American independence from England was voted and passed by the Continental Congress on July 2, 1776. John Adams wrote to Abigail on July 3, “from this date on the Second of July, 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.” We celebrate the 4th now because Jefferson’s Declaration was ratified that day and dated July 4th.

So what can we believe? It was Napoleon who said "History is myth agreed upon." To really know our history, we need to separate the myth from reality, even if the myths are so much more fun.

A hero for gun control folks.

If the gun control people need a hero, here he is. None other than Wyatt Earp.

He took no prisoners. And no guff.

A typical city ordinance in the old west.

In Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell, for the years from 1870 to 1885, there were only 45 total homicides.  This equates to a rate of approximately 1 murder per 100,000 residents per year. Something was working.

War on Germany, or war on booze?

Why did this never occur to me before? Perhaps too blatant. On December 18, 1917 the United States Congress passed the 18th amendment to the Constitution and sent it to the states for ratification. This is generally known as the prohibition amendment. That date never dawned on me before. There had been a prohibitionist movement for over 60 years before this but it had only been enacted in a couple of states by 1917. Why that year?

         I was watching Ken Burn's video on prohibition and suddenly I saw it. Do the names of these big brewers at the beginning of the war sound vaguely similar: Anheuser-Busch and Budweiser, Pabst, Schlitz, Schmidt's, Berghof? Sound somewhat Germanic. They are. They often came over during the wave of German immigration in the late 19th century.
         We have all heard about the extreme anti-Germanism that happened during World War I; not allowing German to taught in schools, German newspapers closed, etc. Then it occurred to me; beer is the national German drink and the breweries here often had ties to over there. Budweis, for example, is a brewing town in Austria. It seems that the prohibition movement used that to their great advantage. Suddenly beer became not just an evil drink, but an enemy drink.

By banning alcohol, and especially beer, we were fighting the foreign foe. Interesting how one set of events can trigger another that seems unrelated. And how historians need to learn to look at big pictures and connections to truly understand the world.

Do we Americans know our own history?

I haven't been here for a while, but today's editorial cartoon in the Fort Collins Coloradoan really set me off.

I wrote the following letter to editor.

How little we Americans know of our own history. The editorial cartoon in Sunday's paper is a perfect example, comparing our current Congress unfavorably to the Founding Fathers writing the Constitution. Our own mythology tells of a group of giants, gathering in Philadelphia, sitting down together and writing a document for the ages. Reality is a much different story. In many ways, the members of the Constitutional Convention acted exactly like our present Congress, fighting over issues, arguing about procedures, yelling at each other, threatening to go home. The Convention itself lasted from May through September. The number of issues that raised not just debate, but tempers, are too numerous to list here, but include things like how to elect Senators, the Electoral College (which we are still arguing about today), representation in the House , and perhaps most bitter, the debate over how slaves should be counted towards representation. They finally agreed to count each slave as three-fifths of a person. The cartoon suggests that the Founding Fathers did not defer difficult decision until later. They let a lot of thorny issues slide by in order to get the Document passed. After the document was written, several states refused to ratify because there was no Bill of Rights included in the original. Only the promise of, originally twelve, but finally ten amendments guaranteeing personal freedoms got the Constitution ratified. And still, many issues were not solved, as the Presidential election of 1800 showed so well. Twenty seven amendments later, we still aren't happy. And interestingly, amendment 27, was originally proposed in 1789 and only finally ratified in 1992. The subject of that amendment? Limiting the manner in which Congressmen get paid.

Here is our image.

Napoleon once said, "History is myth agreed upon." So much for the writing of our Constitution.