Kenneth C. Davis's Blog, page 102

Who Said It 9/4/12

Abraham Lincoln, First Annual Message to Congress (December 3, 1861)

“A Mormon and a Catholic Walk Into a Bar…”

Sounds like the opening line of a stand-up joke, doesn’t it?

The fact that a Mormon candidate for President and his Roman Catholic running mate seem to be attracting very little attention over their respective religions is almost news in itself. And good news. After all, the Constitution says,

 but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States. (Article VI)

But in 1844, a Mormon and a Catholic certainly wouldn’t be running together for the top two offices in America. And if they walked into a bar in Philadelphia, they might get their teeth knocked out. Or worse.

That is the story I tell in this video about the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant “Bible Riots” of 1844 in the City of Brotherly Love.

We’d like to believe in that old “melting pot” myth of American religious freedom. But in fact, the nation’s history is riddled with religious intolerance –and it often reared its head in presidential politics. The “Christian Nation” fallacy is a subject I addressed in the article “Why US Is Not a Christian Nation,” published on July 4, 2011 –but as timely as ever.

 

A Nation Rising (Harper)

The story of the “Bible Riots” is told in greater detail in A NATION RISING.

The subject of religion and the presidency is also explored in my forthcoming book Don ‘t Know Much About® the American Presidents, available on September 18.

Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents
(September 18, 2012-Hyperion Books)

Don’t Know Much About® Labor Day

Just in case you still don’t know what exactly we are celebrating today, here are two ways to find out.

•A CNN.com article called “The Blood and Sweat Behind Labor Day” (Written last year, it is still timely.)

•A new ABC.com video called “Labor Pains”

 

 

Why a Vice President Matters

Does it matter?

Now that Mitt Romney has made his Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan his choice for running mate, we can move on to next question. Does the choice of a running mate rally make a difference? According to a recent CBS News/New York Times poll, a majority of voters says it does.

History is not so certain. But the choice really matters: Nine of the 43 men who became president –about one in five– were vice presidents who succeeded to the office.

In my latest video with ABC News.com I offer  a little history behind the office that few say they want.

 

 

Don’t Know Much About® Herbert Hoover

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European Children Fed by Hoover’s Relief Efforts (Photo Courtesy of The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum)

 

Born on August 10, 1874, Herbert Clark Hoover, the 31st president of the United States.  

Herbert Hoover was born into a Quaker family in Iowa,  and orphaned at nine. He went to live with relatives in Oregon. A college education at Stanford led to a career in the mining industry and a great personal fortune.

You may know that he was the Republican president when the Stock Market crashed in 1929 and he attempted to lead the country through the first years of the Great Depression. Hoover was defeated by Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932.

But you may not know that Hoover was considered a hero and savior to millions of people. First during World War I, he had organized food relief programs in war-torn Belgium.  Later, in the aftermath of World War I,  Russia was in the throes of Europe’s greatest calamity since the days of the Black Plague . More than five million died in the new Soviet Russia when famine struck. In 1921,  Herbert Hoover led America’s response to the “Great Famine,” subject of this PBS documentary and is credited with saving millions of lives.

Hoover gets hard knocks for the hard times of the Depression and his flawed response to the problems confronting America. But others assess him more generously. Historian Richard Norton Smith once noted:

“Herbert Hoover saved more lives through his various relief efforts than all the dictators of the 20th century together could snuff out. Seventy years before politicians discovered children, he founded the American Child Health Association. The problem is, Hoover defies easy labeling. How can you categorize a ‘rugged individualist’ who once said, ‘The trouble with capitalism is capitalists; they’re too damn greedy.’ ”  (“Remembering Herbert Hoover,” New York Times, August  10, 1992)

President Hoover died on October 20, 1964 in New York City. He was 90 years old. This is his New York Times obituary.

The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library & Museum offers archival materials and online exhibitions.

You can read more about Hoover in the forthcoming Don’t Know Much About® the American Presidents, to be published on September 18, 2012 by Hyperion Books.

Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents
(September 18, 2012-Hyperion Books)

Don’t Know Much About Melville

Born August 1, 1819 in New York City, Herman Melville.

In New York’s West Village, where I live, the streets are filled with literary “ghosts” –reminders of the great writers who lived and worked in this historic district of New York. Every day that I walk around the neighborhood, is like getting a literary education. It’s one of reasons I love to live here.

Nearby is Grove Street, which is where Tom Paine once lived. They say the locals called it “Raisin Street” back then because Paine had recently written the Age of Reason –its French raison sounded like “raisin.”

And around the corner from Grove is winding, narrow Commerce Street and the Cherry Lane Theater, where Waiting for Godot had its premiere.

But one of my favorites is Herman Melville, who worked in the Customs House on Gansevoort Street –in what is now the white hot center of the “Meatpacking District.”

Melville’s early success did not last and he took the Customs House job to make a living. He died on September 28, 1891, in New York City. His unpublished work, the novella Billy Budd was discovered after his death and published in 1924, 33 years after his death.

Find out more about Melville at his home in the Berkshires, Arrowhead and the Melville Society

Truman Ends Discrimination in the Military

On July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman issued an Executive Order that ended official discrimination in the United States military.

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After Truman’s order. the U.S. military was desegregated and integrated units fought in Korea. (Photo: U.S. Army-November 1950)

 

It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale.

Coming in an election year, it was a daring move by Truman, who still needed the support of southern segregationists. It was also a controversial decision that led to the forced retirement of the Secretary of the Army when he refused to desegregate the Army.

As historical documents and pronouncements go, “Executive Order 9981″ doesn’t have quite the same ring as “Emancipation Proclamation” or  “New Deal.” But when President Harry S. Truman issued this Executive Order, he helped transform the country. This order began the gradual official process of desegregating America’s armed forces, which was a groundbreaking step for the American civil rights movement. (It is worth noting that many of the arguments made at the time against integration of the armed services  –unit cohesion, morale of the troops, discipline in the ranks– were also made about the question of homosexuals serving in the military, a policy effectively ended when “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was overturned in 2011.)

In a Defense Department history of the integration of the Armed Forces, Brigadier General  James Collins Jr. wrote in 1980:

The integration of the armed forces was a momentous event in our military and national history…. The experiences in World War II and the postwar pressures generated by the civil rights movement compelled all the services –Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps — to reexamine their traditional practices of segregation. While there were differences in the ways that the services moved toward integration, all were subject to the same demands, fears, and prejudices and had the same need to use their resources in a more rational and economical way. All of them reached the same conclusion: traditional attitudes toward minorities must give way to democratic concepts of civil rights.

Integration of the Armed Forces: 1940-1965

 

Here is the text of the Executive Order 9981 (dated July 26, 1948)

A Chronology of events leading to the Order and more information can be found at the the Truman Library.

You can learn more about Truman in my forthcoming book Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents 

Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents
(Hyperion Books/September 18)

War Within a War (A Don’t Know Much About® Minute)

 

As the nation marks the 200th anniversary of the beginning of the War of 1812,  many Americans remain puzzled over what that war was about. Fought between the United States and Great Britain, it was a conflict over the British policy of forcibly taking American sailors off of American ships and “pressing” them into service in the Royal Navy, border issues, the future of American territory in the West and a number of other minor issues. They were all issues that could have and should have been settled without bloodshed. The War of 1812 was, in other words, avoidable and unnecessary.

But one of the other issues that inflamed Americans was England’s support for native nations that were still attempting to stop the westward expansion of American settlers. This was the hidden “war within a war” fought as part of the larger War of 1812.  One of the most devastating of these conflicts was the Creek War fought largely in what is now Alabama. That war began in August 1813, when a group of Creek Indians, led by a half-Creek, half-Scot warrior named William Weatherford, or Red Eagle, attacked an outpost known as Fort Mims north of Mobile, Alabama. The attack turned into the most deadly frontier massacre in American history.

And it was an event that shocked the nation. Soon, Red Eagle and his Creek warriors were at war with Andrew Jackson, the Nashville lawyer turned politician, who had no love for the British or Native Americans. You know the name of  Andrew Jackson, the future hero of the Battle of New Orleans and future 7th president of the United States., But you don’t know the name William Weatherford. You should. He was a charismatic leader of his people who wanted freedom and to protect his land. Just like “Braveheart,” or William Wallace of Mel Gibson fame.

Only William Weatherford, also known as Red Eagle, wasn’t fighting a cruel King. He was at war with the United States government. And Andrew Jackson.

This video offers a quick overview of Weatherford’s war with Jackson that ultimately led the demise of the Creek nation. You can read more about William Weatherford, Andrew Jackson, and Jackson’s role in American history in A NATION RISING

PBS also offers a good look at the different sides of Andrew Jackson

Don’t Know Much About® Thoreau

 I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Born in Concord, Mass. on July 12, 1817, Henry David Thoreau was the son of a pencil-maker. Thoreau attended Harvard and later was befriended by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who eventually gave him a job as a gardener and tutor, while encouraging Thoreau’s writing.

Then, in July 1845, he moved to the cabin at Walden Pond, where he lived for the next two years, two months and two days. The Walden site of Thoreau’s cabin.

Compressing those two years into a single year, he wrote Walden, his now-revered account.

It is not an “easy” book. It is not a simplistic “back to Nature” book. Even though Thoreau’s work has often been reduced to bumper sticker aphorisms –“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”–the book is far more complex. Part memoir, part practical guide, it is really more about a sense of self-discovery –a spiritual search. Writing in a time of growing industrialism and mechanism, he did urge, “Simplify, simplify.”

In an Introduction to a 2004 edition of Walden, the late novelist John Updike wrote:

A century and a half after its publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible. Of the American classics densely arisen in the middle of the 19th century – Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850), Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), to which we might add Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1854) as a nation-stirring bestseller and Emerson’s essays as an indispensable preparation of the ground – Walden has contributed most to America’s present sense of itself.

Thoreau eventually published several books and essays, including his classic “Civil Disobedience” in opposition to the war against Mexico.

From “Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau (1849):

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority?Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? . . . Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?

An ardent abolitionist, Thoreau gave a speech, “A Plea for Captain Brown” (later published as an essay), in honor of John Brown, whose 1859  raid on a federal arsenal was intended to provoke a massive slave insurrection and deepened the nation’s divisions. Thoreau was uncompromising in his defense of Brown, despite his own image as the spokesman for nonviolent civil disobedience.

He contracted tuberculosis and suffered from it sporadically. Thoreau died in May 1862 at age 44.

An excellent collection of resources on Walden, Thoreau and his other writings can be found at the Thoreau Society website.

Thoreau and his era of the mid-19th century leading up to the Civil War are discussed in Don’t Know Much About History: Anniversary Edition.

 

 

The Don’t Know Much About® Online Video Series With ABC News

The latest video from ABC News celebrates the Fourth of July:

 

 

In partnership with ABC News, I have begun a new series of videos that will explain presidential history and explore the presidents as well as have some fiun with other aspects of America’s Hidden History.

The first in this series explains the Electoral College.

“The Electoral College Explained”

 

The second video looks at the curious first presidential election… Who did elect George Washington?

“America’s Funky First Election”

 

The third installment asks: Why do we have political parties if the founders didn’t like them?

“Party Poopers: The Founders Didn’t Like Political Parties”