Kenneth C. Davis's Blog, page 39

Don’t Know Much About® Harry S. Truman

Harry Truman “Gave’ Em Hell.” I gave him a  A. Born on May 8, 1884, the 33rd President of the United States.

 

President Harry S. Truman
(Photo: Truman Library)

It was on his birthday in 1945  that Truman was able to tell Americans that the war in Europe was over with the surrender of Germany.

THIS IS a solemn but a glorious hour. I only wish that Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived to witness this day. General Eisenhower informs me that the forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations. The flags of freedom fly over all Europe. For this victory, we join in offering our thanks to the Providence which has guided and sustained us through the dark days of adversity.

Described as “a minor national figure with a pedestrian background,” Truman was a World War I veteran and a Senator from Missouri when Franklin D. Roosevelt chose him to become his running mate in the 1944 election. Truman became vice president when FDR won his fourth term and then took office on April  12, 1945 when FDR died.

When he took office, Truman had been largely left “out of the loop” by Roosevelt as World War II entered its final months. Truman did not know of the existence of the “Manhattan Project” and the development of the atomic bomb until he became president. Then he had to make the decision to use it against the Japanese.

Fast Facts

•Truman was a member of the Sons of the Revolution and the Sons of Confederate Veterans

•He wanted to attend West Point but poor eyesight kept him out. He enlisted in the Missouri National Guard and served as the commander of an artillery battery in World War I.

•Before entering politics, he was a farmer, bank clerk, insurance salesman and owner of a failed haberdashery store.

•As president he once threatened to punch the nose of a newspaper critic who had given his daughter a poor review after her debut singing recital. Margaret Truman went on to greater fame as a mystery novelist, beginning with Murder in the White House published in 1980.

•After Grover Cleveland, Truman is the only president who did not attend college. He attended law school briefly but dropped out.

After the end of World War II, Truman had to shift America’s attention to the new “Cold War” with the Soviet Union and his policies of “containment” and the Marshall Plan to rebuild war-torn Europe were hallmarks of his presidency.

Harry S. Truman died on December 26, 1972.

The Truman Library and Museum is located in Independence, Missouri

Read more about Truman, his life and administration in Don’t Know Much About® the American Presidents. Truman is also featured in the Berlin Battle chapter of The Hidden History of America at War.

Don’t Know Much About History (Revised, Expanded and Updated Edition)

THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF AMERICA AT WAR: Untold Tales from Yorktown to Fallujah

Don’t Know Much About® the American Presidents (Hyperion paperback-April 15, 2014)

STRONGMAN: The Rise of Five Dictators and the Fall of Democracy

In October 2020, my new book, STRONGMAN: The Rise of Five Dictators and the Fall of Democracy, will be published  (Preorder from Holt Books) (An audiobook edition will be released by Penguin Random House)

 

In it, I recount the story of the rise to power of five of the most deadly dictators of the 20th century — Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Saddam Hussein.

In addition to telling how these men took unlimited power, brought one-party rule to their nations, and were responsible for the deaths of millions of people, the book offers a brief history of Democracy and discusses the present threat to democratic institutions around the world. In a time when Democracy is under assault across the globe, it is more important than ever to understand how a Strongman takes power and how quickly democracy can vanish –even as millions cheer its death.

Strongman: The Rise of Five Dictators and the Fall of Democracy (October 2020)

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR STRONGMAN

“I found myself engrossed in it from beginning to end. I could not help admiring Davis’s ability to explain complex ideas in readable prose that never once discounted the intelligence of your young readers. It is very much a book for our time.”

—Sam Wineburg,  Margaret Jacks Professor of Education & History, Stanford University, author of Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone).

“Strongman is a book that is both deeply researched and deeply felt, both an alarming warning and a galvanizing call to action, both daunting and necessary to read and discuss.”

—Cynthia Levinson, author of Fault Lines in the Constitution: The Framers, Their Fights, and the Flaws That Affect Us Today

  “A wake-up call to democracies like ours: we are not immune to despots . . . Strongman demonstrates that democracy is not permanent, unless it is collectively upheld. This book shakes that immortality narrative.”

—Jessica Ellison, President of the Minnesota Council for the Social Studies; Teacher Education Specialist, Minnesota Historical Society

Rarely does a history book take such an unflinching look at our common future, where the very presence of democracy is less than certain; even rarer is a history book in which the author’s moral convictions incite young readers to civic engagement; rarest of all, a history book as urgent, as impassioned, and as timely as Kenneth C. Davis’ Strongman.    

—Eugene Yelchin, author of the Newbery Honor book Breaking Stalin’s Nose.

 

 

 

Watch for more news about STRONGMAN here in the coming months.

Who is “An Enemy of the People?”

We have reached our Dr. Stockman moment.

Henrik Ibsen by Gustava Borgen (public Domain via Wikimedia)

 

In Ibsen’s classic drama, An Enemy of the People, Dr. Thomas Stockman has discovered that the waters in his town’s famed spa are poisoning the guests. He pleads with his brother, the Mayor, to close the lucrative attraction. But Mayor Peter Stockman refuses to shut down and repair the toxic baths.

“Have you taken the trouble to consider what your proposed alterations would cost?” the Mayor asks his brother. “And do you suppose anyone would come near the place after it had got about that the water was dangerous?”[1]

And there it is. Ibsen brings us to that place where economic health trumps public health.

Sound familiar? It should. Because we face a similar conflict today. A president and his administration are pushing to “reopen” the economy despite express warnings from medical experts about the perils of premature action.[2]

We have been down this road before. This is not the first time that the common good and the bottom line have faced off. In the midst of one pandemic, we need only look to the history of the 1918 pandemic, a story told in my book More Deadly Than War.

What was later called the Spanish flu emerged in March 1918, blossoming into an epidemic on army bases where young Americans were training for Europe’s trenches. After slacking in summertime, the outbreak returned in a second wave, even more swift and lethal, hitting American ports like Boston in September 1918. Striking down soldiers and sailors by the thousands, it jumped from the military to the civilian population. Seeing “bodies stacked like cordwood,” army doctors wondered if they were witnessing a new plague. The Spanish flu was carried to other ports and military bases, including those near Philadelphia.

But to Philadelphia’s civil authorities, it was “just the flu.” And Philadelphia was planning a parade – a grandiose show of patriotism and pride to promote the sale of Liberty Loans. These war bonds were marketed through an intense nationwide propaganda campaign that made buying these bonds an act of allegiance. Woe to those “slackers” who didn’t “do their part.”

Read Philadelphia Threw a WWI Parade That Gave Thousands of Onlookers the Flu

As Philadelphia planned its spectacle, the city’s director of public health knew better. A gynecologist, and an appointee loyal to Philadelphia’s notoriously corrupt political machine, Dr. Wilmer Krusen was warned to cancel the parade. But Dr. Krusen allowed the show to go on. He assured the public that recent military deaths were from “old-fashioned influenza or grip.”[3] His words were a harbinger of the president’s in January. “It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”[4]

It wasn’t. As the parade got underway on September 28, 1918, some 200,000 people jammed Philadelphia’s main street, packed eight deep on the sidewalks. Within seventy-two hours of that parade, every bed in Philadelphia’s hospitals was filled.[5]

On October 3, most public spaces –schools, churches, theaters, and pool halls –were officially closed.[6] The delayed lockdown to “flatten the curve” was too little, too late for many in the City of Brotherly Love. Within weeks, more than 12,000 people died in Philadelphia before the epidemic crested there.

Dr. Krusen was aware of the risks posed when he allowed the parade to step off. But he was answering to political and economic concerns, much like the Mayor in Ibsen’s play, and so many economists and administration officials echoing the president’s call to reopen the economy.

History is replete with Dr. Krusen’s counterparts—those scientists and other people who dared challenge authority. Take Giordano Bruno for example. Born in 1548, Bruno became a priest and a learned mathematician. But he was also a free thinker and, in 1584, published his concept that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of Creation.

Bruno was arrested and tried for this and other heresies during the Inquisition. Refusing to recant, the rebellious priest was sentenced as an impenitent heretic on papal orders. In February 1600, he was taken to the Campo de’ Fiori, an open market in Rome, his tongue in a gag, and burned alive.

Today, there is a statue honoring Giordano Bruno in the Campo de’ Fiori. There are no statues of Dr. Krusen. In modern parlance, Bruno was an “Upstander,” Dr. Krusen a “Collaborator.”

Close up of the statue of Giordano Bruno in the Camp de Fiori, Rome (Public Domain Wikipedia Commons)

Giordano Bruno would not serve a master who demanded that he deny the science that contradicted faith. He served the truth. Dr. Stockman refused to serve a master who placed profits over life and was ultimately branded “an enemy of the people.” Dr. Krusen chose instead to answer to his political masters.

This is the essential question now facing both American leadership and every individual. If we are to survive the current coronavirus, we need to carefully choose and serve a worthy master.

 

TEACHERS: If you would like a virtual visit to discuss this topic or any of my work,  please get in touch with me. Here’s the link: Contact page.

[1]  Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, Act II.

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...

[3] John M. Barry, The Great Influenza, p. 204

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/15/op...

[5]  Gina Kolata, Flu, p. 20.

[6]  Barry, p. 220.

Don’t Know Much About® George Washington’s Fashion Statement

(Original post of 2014 updated 4/30/2020)

The American Presidency began 231 years ago when George Washington took the oath of office on April 30, 1789.

For the occasion, Washington wore a suit made in Connecticut. He hoped it would become “unfashionable for a gentleman to appear in any other dress” than one of American manufacture.

 

(Excerpted from Don’t Know Much About® the American Presidents)

He took the oath of office on April 30, 1789, a cool, clear Thursday morning. One similarity to modern inaugurations was the big crowd. A large throng of New Yorkers filled the streets of what is now the city’s financial district, then the center of a city that was much smaller than modern Manhattan.

Washington arrived by carriage to what had previously been New York’s City Hall, given a “face-lift” by Pierre L’Enfant, future designer of the nation’s capital city. The entire government operated out of this single building, renamed Federal Hall. Washington managed more people on his Mount Vernon plantation than worked for the new national government.

For the inauguration he was dressed in a brown suit, white silk stockings, and shoes with silver buckles, and he carried a sword. The suit cloth was made in a mill in Hartford, Connecticut, and Washington had said that he hoped it would soon be “unfashionable for a gentleman to appear in any other dress” than one of American manufacture.

Standing on the second- floor balcony, the “Father of Our Country” took the oath of office on a Masonic Bible. Legend has it that he kissed the Bible and said, “So help me God”— words not required by the Constitution.

But there is no contemporary report of Washington saying those words. On the contrary, one eyewitness account, by the French minister, Comte de Moustier, recounts the full text of the oath without mentioning the Bible kiss or the “So help me God” line. Washington’s use of the words was not reported until late in the nineteenth century. (The demythologizing of this piece of presidential history occasioned a suit by notable atheist Michael Newdow, who sued unsuccessfully in 2009 to keep all mention of God out of the inauguration of Barack Obama.)

What followed was the first Inaugural Address, written by James Madison. Here Washington spoke freely of “the propitious smiles of Heaven”— a divine hand in guiding the nation’s fate. These heavenly references raise the perennial question of faith in the early republic. But, as Ron Chernow writes in Washington, “Washington refrained from endorsing any particular form of religion.”

Here is the transcript of Washington’s first inaugural address from the National Archives. The site of the first inauguration is Federal Hall National Memorial.

 

Read more about Washington, his life and his presidency in Don’t Know Much About® the American Presidents and Don’t Know Much About® History.

 

 

Who Said It? (4/25/20)

Abraham Lincoln

 

Abraham Lincoln (November 1863) Photo by Alexander Gardner

Address Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

September 30, 1859

 

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! — how consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.” And yet let us hope it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.

Source: Abraham Lincoln Online

Join me for an online Event-April 28

 

On Tuesday, April 28th at 5pm we’re thrilled to present a special Northshire Live with guest author Kenneth C. Davis in conversation with fellow children’s non fiction author Steve Sheinkin.

Kenneth C. Davis is the New York Times bestselling author of Don’t Know Much About® History, which gave rise to the Don’t Know Much About® series of books for adults and children.

Davis will join us to discuss More Deadly Than War: The Hidden History of The Spanish Flu and the First World War.  A Washington Post Best Children’s Book of the Month, More Deadly Than War is a riveting and timely exploration of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.

“Davis deftly juggles compelling storytelling, gruesome details, and historical context. More Deadly Than War reads like a terrifying dystopian novel—that happens to be true.” —Steve Sheinkin, author of Bomb and Undefeated 

To join this event, get comfy at home with your computer (with webcam activated), smartphone, or tablet. Register here

“The American Contradiction: Conceived in Liberty, Born in Shackles”

My article in the March/April issue of Social Education,  the journal of the National Council for the Social Studies, discusses how we must teach and talk about enslavement in American History. It starts with the fact that

•Enslaved people were in America before the Mayflower Pilgrims.

Thomas Jefferson’s Grave Marker at Monticello

 

America was conceived in liberty and born in shackles. This is the Great Contradiction at the heart of our nation’s story.

When the United States of America was founded in 1776, the Founding Fathers declared the lofty ideal of “all Men are created equal.” The Framers of the Constitution later set out to form a “more perfect Union” to secure “the Blessings of Liberty.”

–The American Contradiction: Conceived in Liberty, Born in Shackle” Social Education (March/April 2020)

My article in the March/April issue of Social Education, ...

My article in the March/April issue of Social Education,  the journal of the National Council for the Social Studies, discusses how we must teach and talk about enslavement in American History. It starts with the fact that

•Enslaved people were in America before the Mayflower Pilgrims.

Thomas Jefferson’s Grave Marker at Monticello

 

America was conceived in liberty and born in shackles. This is the Great Contradiction at the heart of our nation’s story.

When the United States of America was founded in 1776, the Founding Fathers declared the lofty ideal of “all Men are created equal.” The Framers of the Constitution later set out to form a “more perfect Union” to secure “the Blessings of Liberty.”

–The American Contradiction: Conceived in Liberty, Born in Shackle” Social Education (March/April 2020)

Where is Herbert Hoover When We Need Him?

Why are we throwing away food when people are hungry?

That is the question raised by two stories dominating the front pages. There are “staggering food bank lines” across the country. The pandemic lockdown has outed the shameful truth of America’s food insecurity.

“These Photos Show Staggering Food Bank Lines Across America” (Mother Jones)

At the same time, farmers are dumping milk and plowing fields because their main customers –the commercial and institutional food service business – have essentially been shut down.

  Dumped Milk, Smashed Eggs, Plowed Vegetables (New York Times)

A tractor mulches green beans at an R.C. Hatton farm in Florida. “It’s heartbreaking,” an owner of the farm said.Credit…Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York Times

So here’s the challenge. Why can’t we put food that is being produced and destroyed on the dinner tables of the hungry?

Herbert Hoover, 31st President, official portrait (Library of Congress)

Sounds like a job for Herbert Hoover.

Yes, that Herbert Hoover, the president who is usually associated with the tragic images of America’s Great Depression when homeless camps spread across the country were called “Hoovervilles.”

But it was Herbert Hoover who was credited with saving millions of lives during World War I. Orphaned as a child, Hoover was a self-made success in the field of mining and engineering. He had become a financier and began a career in philanthropy. In 1917, before the United States entered the war, Hoover was tasked with getting food into the mouths of starving people in a war zone. With agreements from combatants, Hoover organized a massive program of locating food surpluses and transporting them to Europe as the trench wars continued.

According to the Herbert Hoover Presidental Museum and Library, Hoover was named to head the U.S. Food Administration, which guided the effort to conserve resources and supplies and to feed America’s European allies.

“Hoover became a household name—‘to Hooverize’ meant to economize on food. Americans began observing ‘Meatless Mondays’ and ‘Wheatless Wednesdays’ and planting War Gardens.”

 

National Archives https://catalog.archives.gov/id/512516

 

He got money from governments and charity, sailed his own fleet which flew his flags, took over railways, set up a telegraph network, issued his own passports, made treaties with governments, negotiated safe passages through war zones on land and sea and saved countless lives.

It was not a charity he ran. It was an industry. It was almost a state.

A British diplomat remarked that Hoover had set up a ‘piratical state organised for benevolence.’

Source: BBC- “History’s other great relief effort”

After the Armistice was signed in November 1918, President Wilson appointed Hoover to head the European Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. The situation in post-war Europe was dire. But Hoover was up to the job. Marshaling the needed resources, he channeled 34 million tons of American food, clothing, and supplies to war-torn Europe.

He then performed a miraculous job of feeding Russians in aftermath of the Russian Revolution that gave Lenin’s Bolsheviks control of the future Soviet Union.

Surely today, a nation that can deliver groceries overnight and summon a stranger in a car to pick us up on a street corner can figure out the logistics. Pay the farmers for their crops. Get the milk and produce into the hands of the people who can prepare it. That means jobs and income for some, and a decent meal for others.

The high priest of “Rugged Individualism,” Herbert Hoover was no Socialist or friend of Communism. But he was a man of honor who would not allow millions to starve to death. And the United States had the will.

He did it. We can do it.

Who Said it (4/13/20)

Thomas Jefferson, in 1820, discussing the fate of the Missouri Compromise –legislation which was supposed to resolve the question of the future of slavery’s extension in America.

Read more about Jefferson in this post.

Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States.Official portrait by Rembrandt Peale. http://www.whitehouseresearch.org/ass...

 

“But as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”

Jefferson discussing the Missouri question and slavery to John Holmes April 22, 1820. Ford, Paul Leicester, ed. The Works of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 12. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1905, p. 159.

Source: Monticello