American History Revised: 200 Startling Facts That Never Made It into the Textbooks - Softcover

Morris Jr., Seymour

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307587606 ISBN 13: 9780307587602

Publisher: Broadway Books, 2010

Synopsis

“American History Revised is as informative as it is entertaining and humorous. Filled with irony, surprises, and long-hidden secrets, the book does more than revise American history, it reinvents it.”—James Bamford, bestselling author of The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, and The Shadow Factory
 
This spirited reexamination of American history delves into our past to expose hundreds of startling facts that never made it into the textbooks, and highlights how little-known peopleand events played surprisingly influential roles in the great American story. 
 
We tend to think of history as settled, set in stone, but American History Revised reveals a past that is filled with ironies, surprises, and misconceptions. Living abroad for twelve years gave author Seymour Morris Jr. the opportunity to view his country as an outsider and compelled him to examine American history from a fresh perspective. As Morris colorfully illustrates through the 200 historical vignettes that make up this book, much of our nation’s past is quite different—and far more remarkable—than we thought.

We discover that:
 
· In the 1950s Ford was approached by two Japanese companies begging for a joint venture. Ford declined their offers, calling them makers of “tin cars.” The two companies were Toyota and Nissan.
· Eleanor Roosevelt and most women’s groups opposed the Equal Rights Amendment forbidding gender discrimination.
· The two generals who ended the Civil War weren’t Grant and Lee.
· The #1 bestselling American book of all time was written in one day.
· The Dutch made a bad investment buying Manhattan for $24.
· Two young girls aimed someday to become First Lady—and succeeded.
· Three times, a private financier saved the United States from bankruptcy.
 
Organized into ten thematic chapters, American History Revised plumbs American history’s numerous inconsistencies, twists, and turns to make it come alive again.

About this title

About the Author

"Everyone has a book in them,” it is commonly said. For Mike Morris, growing up in Princeton, NJ, then Harvard College and Harvard Business School, such a book must involve American history, his favorite subject. Harvard Business School doesn’t teach you history, obviously, but it does stress the need to think creatively and differently. “In business and investing, you try to predict what’s going to happen in the future,” he says. “In reading history, you try to figure out what happened in the past. The two activities are essentially the same, they require the same mental skills.” Interpreting history, like trying to assess the potential of a new business venture, requires imagination, connecting the dots, seeing the big picture.

Working in New York for twenty years in business, he had no time to write. His favorite hobby was browsing bookstores and buying books faster than he had time to read them. The wonderful life of being a man of letters would have to wait for another day...

It came sooner than expected. Moving to Romania to search out business opportunities in 1994, he ended up staying for twelve years as a founder and owner of two businesses. Life in Europe is a lot slower than in America, and Bucharest does not have all the activities and distractions that New York does. Like in childhood when he read American Heritage from cover to cover, in Bucharest he read every history book he brought over from the United States. He kept copious notes, and filed away stories he found particularly intriguing. But writing a book?

The spur to action can come from an unexpected source. For Mike Morris, it came from his part-time activity as Harvard representative for Romania, responsible for interviewing Romanian high school students applying to Harvard. He was surprised by the interest these students had in America and how America came to be so much more successful than their own country. Their optimism and belief in America was a far cry from high school students in the United States who take America for granted. Clearly, if this was such a dream for them, he must know more about it. So every evening and every weekend, he plunged into his life-long hobby.

“American history,” says Gore Vidal, “has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.” Indeed, there exists in much of academia a blind obeisance to over-specialization at the expense of imagination and seeing the big picture. What are needed are people who can write intelligent but lucid history for the general public: “popular history.”

This he set out to do in writing a book about America’s hidden past. For a first-time author to be published by Random House is a perfect start for his second career. He has two other books now under development.

He lives in New York with his wife Gabriela. Every day he works in his magnificent new office, rent-free: the New York Public Library, a treasure trove even more interesting than the internet..

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ONE    
A Razor's Edge: It Almost Never Happened    

An interviewer once asked that notable man of letters Gore Vidal, "What would have happened in 1963 had Khruschev and not Kennedy been assassinated?" Vidal answered, "With history one can never be certain, but I think I can safely say that Aristotle Onassis would not have married Mrs. Khruschev."  

Humor aside, the real point of the story is, don't take history too seriously. There's a lot of history that barely managed to happen. History, said Hugh Trevor-Roper, is what happened "in the context of what could have happened." Like baseball—"a gameof inches"—famous people and events can be more circumstantial than historic. Many books will aver that history is made by great men and women performing prodigious feats. Sometimes this is so, but often not. As we all know from our own lives, the prize wewon in school, the career we chose, the person we married, the big sale we made—these are frequently a function of our being at a particular place at a certain time and making the right choice at a pivotal fork in the road. "Every true story," says the novelist Siri Hustvedt, "has several possible endings." Ecclesiastes says, "I returned and saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither bread to the wise nor riches to men of understanding, but time and chance happeneth to them all." (9:11) That's right: timing and chance.  

One of the reasons history can be so distant and uninteresting to schoolchildren is that it is fixed in stone. What happened, happened—end of story. There are no possible alternative endings, unless we engage in counterfactual "what if?" exercises. Stimulating though they may be, they tend to be exercises in intellectual gamesmanship: "Interesting, but so what?" More useful is to focus on "the fork in the road": What really happened at that pivotal moment, seconds ticking away? However it turned out, call it luck, coincidence, perseverance, or whatever—much of history was a close call, a razor's edge.  

Take our greatest foreign-aid program, the Marshall Plan. When President Harry Truman proposed it in 1948, he knew he had a problem: winning congressional support for a costly new program that would consume 16 percent of the federal budget. An additional problem was that the most powerful man in the Senate was also a strong isolationist: Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan. When Truman's aides did their homework, however, they uncovered a fascinating nugget: for the previous seventeen years Senator Vandenberg had taken his annual vacations abroad, to a different country each time, and had stayed for as long as two months. Clearly this was not your typical provincial congressman. The president met with the senator and they eventually reached a meeting of the minds,and history was made—all because of a senator's unusual vacations that enlightened him to the needs of other countries.  

Consider a different subject etched in black-and-white finality: war. Even here the determining factors can be quite happenstance. The weather, for example. One does not read in history books how important the weather was. In 1776, General George Washington lost the Battle of Long Island and needed desperately to get his army out of the clutches of the superior British forces. The only path of retreat was to cross the East River and escape to Manhattan. But in the meantime the British fleet, parked off the southern end of Manhattan, was trying to sail upriver and block off any chance of escape. The weather intervened. For the better part of a week a fierce rainstorm prevented the British ships from moving. On the chosen day, Washington's rowboats made numerous sorties throughout the night. As dawn approached and the rebels were fearful of being seen by the advancing British army, a pea-soup fog—a "manifestly providential" fog, "an American fog"—descended upon the riverbank, obliterating all vision and enabling the American rebels to conduct their escape. Alas, a woman living near the ferry woke up and sent her servant off to warn the British. The man made his way through the lines to a German officer heading the British patrol, but the German spoke no English and arrested the servant! Had it not been for the incredible triple luck of first a storm and then a fog and finally a non-English-speaking German officer, Washington and half of the American army would have been captured and the American Revolution all but over.  

One of Jefferson's crowning achievements as president was the Louisiana Purchase. What is not widely known, however, is that the French territory was offered first to England, who refused it. A further irony: the funding that enabled Jefferson to pull off his coup came from bonds provided by Hamilton's U.S. Bank, which Jefferson had once viewed as unconstitutional. Finally, the money to buy the bonds came mostly from French and Dutch investors, not American, meaning that the U.S. got the land for practically nothing by using other people's money. Jefferson, no financier himself, had pulled off one of the greatest financial deals of all time.  

The United States was even luckier in its other mammoth land acquisition, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War. On January 25, 1848, after nine months of intense negotiations with the defeated Mexicans, Nicholas P. Trist, special envoy for President Polk, got the Mexicans to accept $15 million for California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. Trist consummated the deal just in time.  

The day before—January 24, 1848—gold was discovered in California.  

"Hindsight," says the British broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, "is the bane of history."  

It is corrupting and distorting and pays no respect to the way life is really lived—forwards, generally blindly, full of accidents, fortunes and misfortunes, patternless and often adrift. Easy with hindsight to say we would beat Napoleon at Waterloo; only by a whisker, according to the honest general who did it. Easy to say we would win the Second World War: ask those who watched the dogfights of the Battle of Britain in Kent in 1940. Easy to say the Berlin Wall was bound to fall. Which influential commentator or body of opinion said so in the 1980s? Hindsight is the easy way to mop up the mess which we call history; it is too often the refuge of the tidy-minded, making neat patterns when the dust has settled. As often as not, when the dust was flying, no one at the time knew what the outcome might be.    

"Very nearly everything that happened in history very nearly did not happen," said the renowned mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Here are some other histories that almost never made the history books.      

A Statement of Allegiance, Not of Rebellion    
Might war have been avoided? Most likely not, but the way it started was the result of bone-headed miscalculations.  
In an effort to appease the American colonists who were smuggling in Dutch tea rather than pay the stiff duty on British tea, the British came up with what they thought was a noble plan. Under the new Tea Act of 1773, they would cut the twenty-shillings-per-pound duty in half.  

The plan backfired: instead of appreciating the ten-shilling savings, the colonists reacted to the ten-shilling duty and instigated the Boston Tea Party. It was a classic case of glass half full or half empty: one side seeing it one way, one side seeing it the other way.  

How could the British get it so wrong? By being out of touch with their subjects. Ever since 1760 the British Parliament had been conducting much debate about how to handle the colonies, with arguments and ideas being tossed to and fro. But never once during this period did a British minister or member of Parliament bother to go to America and investigate what was going on. Had the British exercised some basic hands-on management, this breakdown in diplomacy might not have occurred.  

As late as 1776, England was still "the mother country." On January 1, during the siege of Boston, George Washington raised a new flag visible to many of the British soldiers on the other side. It was the first flag in America. It had thirteen red and white stripes, signifying the union of the thirteen colonies, and in the upper left corner was the Union Jack, representing the British Empire. "The flag," says the historian Thomas Fleming, "affirmed America's determination to resist Britain's authoritarian pretenses—and at the same time somehow to maintain an allegiance to the ideal of a united British empire." Called the Grand Union flag, it was more a statement of allegiance than of rebellion. A British intelligence agent in Philadelphia described the flag as "English colors but more striped." The commanding general of the British army, William Howe, agreed: the flag was a signal of the colonies' respect for British authority.  

Unfortunately, the king didn't see it that way. Proving the axiom that people invariably see only what they want to see, King Gorge III saw the flag as exactly the opposite: an act of rebellion. How dare the colonies put the Union Jack in a small corner! When the Continental Congress sent an emissary with an "Olive Branch Petition" expressing loyalty to the Crown and requesting a possible reconciliation, the king refused to consider it.  

Had he interpreted Washington's gesture correctly, he might have had a New World partner for decades longer. Washington continued to be conciliatory: when he crossed the Delaware in his famous Christmas victory a year later, the flag he took was the Grand Union flag (not the stars and stripes we see in every painting). Rebels though they were, the colonists still thought of themselves as subjects of the king.  

Six months later, in mid-1777, the colonists finally changed their flag to the stars and stripes. After further fighting and neither side getting anywhere, the British in early 1778 changed tack and offered the colonists a sweeping program of concessions so radical that it left Parliament "stunned and unbelieving." Under the Conciliatory Propositions, the tea duty and other punitive acts would be repealed entirely, all taxation by Parliament would cease, Congress would be granted full recognition as a constitutional body, and membership in the House of Commons would be offered.  

No question, this was quite an offer. Problem was, it was too little, too late. The colonists had upped their demands, and now wanted complete independence and removal of all troops and warships. Continued negotiations might have been fruitful except for one basic fact: having taken on France as an ally, America could not have cut a deal with Britain even if it had wanted to.  

But old sentiments don't die easily. In the American Centennial celebration of 1876, the flag flying above Independence Hall in Philadelphia was not the flag showing the thirteen colonies, but the Grand Union Flag showing the Union Jack.      

Crucial Messages That Never Reached Their Destinations    
On three occasions, the simple failure to deliver a message shaped the destiny of America. No great immutable forces of history here, just plain blind luck.  

When George Washington decided to launch his daring crossing of the Delaware on Christmas Day 1776, he was down to his final out—and he knew it. "I fear the game will be pretty well up," he confessed to his brother in despair. After eight months of fighting, he had lost almost all his battles, and the enlistment period of more than half his army was due to expire at the end of the year, leaving him with no resources to carry on the struggle. His crossing of the Delaware, as we all know, was a stroke of genius that breathed new hope into the revolutionary cause.  

On the night of the Delaware crossing, however, things did not get off to a good start. A contingent of nervous American troops shot five Hessians, waking up the Hessian guard. When the contingent caught up with Washington, Washington did not mince his words: "You, sir, may have ruined all my plans by putting them on their guard." Fortunately, when the Hessians found the bodies of their dead comrades, Johann Rall, the Hessian colonel in charge of the British forces, dismissed it as the work of some local farmers. Then when he returned to his Trenton tavern, he neglected to leave an outpost to guard the river; advised to mount patrols all along the river, he said no, it could wait until the morning. For the rest of the night, he and his officers played cards and got drunk. Around midnight he received a visit from a loyalist farmer. Refused access because the colonel was busy playing cards, the farmer scribbled an urgent note to Rall alerting him that the Americans were about to cross the Delaware. Rall got the note, but never bothered to read it. He put it in his pocket and continued with his card game. Three hours later, drunk and asleep, he got a rude surprise. George Washington's army had crossed the Delaware and was about to attack.    

The year: 1862
The Civil War was beginning to look very bleak for the North. General Grant had just barely escaped defeat at the bloody Battle of Shiloh, where both armies lost more men than the total casualties in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War put together. Robert E. Lee had taken command of the Confederate Armies of Northern Virginia and shown everyone why he was the most esteemed general in the nation, the man Lincoln had once tried to hire. In less than thirty days, Lee had beaten two Union armies, one under George McClellan and the other under John Pope, and proceeded all the way up to the outskirts of Washington, D.C. Lee was on a roll. On the offensive for the first time in the war, he prepared to take on the North at Antietam and then march into Washington. Panic set in at the Northern capital, and citizens began to pack their bags. Who was going to stop the invincible Lee now?  

Fate intervened. Two Union soldiers, resting at a site where the Confederates had camped several days earlier, discovered a copy of Lee's Special Orders #191 wrapped around three cigars, obviously lost by a careless Southern courier. In full detail, these orders presented a picture of Lee's attack plan, allowing General McClellan to anticipate Lee's moves. The advantage of the attacker—surprise—shifted from Lee to McClellan.  

The odds against this incredible piece of luck? At least a million to one.  

Several days later there occurred the three-day Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest of the war. McClellan, knowing what Lee was going to do, reorganized his forces and slugged it out with Lee, neither side able to win. His momentum blunted, Lee was forced to withdraw. Never again would he mount a sustained offensive or come close to Washington, D.C.

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadway Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0307587606
• ISBN 13: 9780307587602
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432