Seven Events That Made America America

by Larry Schweikart

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1. - MARTIN VAN BUREN HAS A NIGHTMARE AND BIG GOVERNMENT IS BORN . . . ...

  Chapter 2. - THE DRED SCOTT DECISION WRECKS AN ECONOMY AND HASTENS A WAR

  Chapter 3. - JOHNSTOWN FIGHTS A FLOOD AND DEMONSTRATES THE POWER OF PRIVATE COMPASSION

  Chapter 4. - IKE HAS A HEART ATTACK, TRIGGERING DIETARY NANNYISM

  Chapter 5. - A STEEL GUITAR ROCKS THE IRON CURTAIN

  Chapter 6. - RONALD REAGAN TRIES TO KEEP THE PEACE . . . AND MAKES HIS BIGGEST MISTAKE

  Chapter 7. - BARRY MAKES A SPEECH . . . AND THE MEDIA GETS CHILLS UP ITS LEG

  CONCLUSION

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  INDEX

  ALSO BY LARRY SCHWEIKART

  48 Liberal Lies About American History

  America’s Victories

  A Patriot’s History of the United States

  SENTINEL

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  First published in 2010 by Sentinel,

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  Copyright © Larry Schweikart, 2010 All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Schweikart, Larry.

  Seven events that made America America : and proved that the founding fathers were right all along /

  Larry Schweikart.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-43302-7

  1. United States—History—Miscellanea. 2. National characteristics, American—Miscellanea. I. Title.

  E179.S353 2010

  973—dc22

  2010003098

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  To rock and rollers, here and abroad, now and then.

  INTRODUCTION

  You don’t have to be an American history expert to identify certain critical events in our past that shaped our country. Pearl Harbor, the D-Day invasion, 9/11, the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy, the Great Depression, important court decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education—these are just a few of the milestones in our nation’s history that likely spring to most people’s memory. On the other hand, not all important changes in our past have unfolded in a single day, but rather were the results of profound unresolved issues (slavery and the Civil War), a slow change in culture (the status of women in the twentieth century), or the response to long-standing international tensions (the Cold War). No one can point to a particular “where were you?” moment with such transformations, as they reflected slow, but important, incremental changes.

  The most difficult—and interesting—parts of history to understand are those that spark deep and significant changes but are not necessarily obvious. That is the purpose of this book—to explore and explain some of these forgotten or unheralded moments in an effort to show the profound way in which they influence our history. Yet there is a second purpose in this book, namely, to examine the seven events I have chosen in light of the Founders’ vision for America. How would George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and other Founders have interpreted these events? Did the event confirm the vision of the Founders or constitute a departure from their hopes? In short, would the Founders have approved or disapproved of the actions that followed from the event itself? Most important, what can we learn from these events of our past to help build a better future and a stronger America?

  For example, Madison wrote with mixed emotions about “factions,” or partisan strife, disdaining it (as did Washington), yet acknowledging it as unavoidable and inherent in human nature. “Ambition should counter ambition,” he observed. However, he likely would have been appalled at Martin Van Buren’s invention of a new, national party machinery, which evoked loyalty by rewarding supporters with jobs in both the party and the government. The result was something none of the Founders desired—an ever-growing federal government. Nor would Madison, having drafted many of the sections of the Constitution relating to a federal judiciary, have dreamed that the United States Supreme Court would seek to make itself the arbiter of personhood itself. It would not have surprised Madison to see that, by wading into such a morass in the case of the slave Dred Scott, the Supreme Court not only mucked up the central object of the case itself but managed to unintentionally start a financial panic as well.

  On the other hand, the events following the Johnstown Flood, wherein ordinary private citizens took it upon themselves to provide aid and disaster relief and did so with heroism and efficiency, would have surprised none of the Founding Fathers. Indeed, they would have expected no less from the people, and would not have been surprised at the ineptitude and folly seen in Hurricane Katrina, during which the ill-prepared and ill-equipped federal government stepped in to “help.” Of course, even the Founding Fathers might have supported federal disaster relief in a matter of national security, but no logical rationale could justify the government’s policing of Americans’ diets. Nonetheless, this is exactly what happened after President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack, and the government, in a misguided campaign against heart disease, began advising Americans on what to eat. But this was only the beginning, with the “war on meat” soon to evolve into a war on sugar, salt, fats, and virtually any other food the government deemed “unhealthy.” To say the Founders would have been appalled is an understatement: their (and our) Revolution began when the British tried to dictate what tea we could drink!

  Ironically, when it comes to something as foreign (or so it seems) to the Founding Fathers as rock and roll, a much different story unfolds. In the early 1960s, American rock was languishing, circling in the water until the Beatles arrived on Ed Sullivan’s stage. Suddenly, thousands of American musicians found their dreams
anew, taking the music of the “British Invasion” and blasting out new, original, and—as it turned out—world-changing sounds. America’s new rock rolled through the Iron Curtain—despite several attempts to stop it—and, in the process, helped defeat communism. It did so without a dime of public support, reaffirming the Founders’ commitment to ensuring that individuals, not government, remain the source of artistic expression.

  Of course, the man most credited with bringing down the Evil Empire, Ronald Reagan, certainly agreed with that principle. But Reagan’s role in the demise of communism—his greatest and enduring achievement—was marred by a significant misjudgment, namely, the deployment of marines as “peacekeepers” in Lebanon. When, months later, a terrorist truck bomb killed more than two hundred of the marines, Reagan withdrew them, but this was not enough to stop a new worldwide threat that was only beginning to be understood: radical Islamic jihad. Though the Founders might not have perceived this threat any quicker than the Gipper, they would have warned Reagan about the futility of “peacekeeping” missions.

  Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson would have been more familiar with another modern phenomenon—bias in the news. But, unlike the media conglomerates of today, the newspapers and broadsides that the Founders read were relatively impotent, and almost always countered by a rival paper that took up the other side of any issue. By 2008, however, the mainstream national media had become almost entirely partisan and Democratic, so much so that if it were acting as a government-run propaganda machine, it would espouse almost the identical viewpoints. The pliant and malleable television and print coverage of candidate-turned-president Barack Obama has made a mockery out of “objective” news coverage. What did the Founders see as the role of a free press? Why were they so insistent about protecting political speech in the First Amendment?

  These seven events allow us to look at oft-overlooked points in our history not only from the perspective of their significance, but also from the standpoint of their conformity to the Founders’ visions, hopes, and dreams for this nation. In each case, I think it is clear that it is not always the declaration of war, inspirational speech, famous piece of legislation, or other well-known event we learned about in history class that has had the most long-lasting impact on our lives.

  Larry Schweikart

  Centerville, Ohio

  1.

  MARTIN VAN BUREN HAS A NIGHTMARE AND BIG GOVERNMENT IS BORN . . . IN THE 1820S!

  The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.

  THOMAS JEFFERSON TO EDWARD CARRINGTON, MAY 27, 1788

  When New York state senator Martin Van Buren, a leader of the “Bucktail” group of Jeffersonian Republicans, heard about the impending statehood bill for Missouri in 1819, he had a nightmare. Not a literal interruption of sleep—legend has it that, in fact, it was Thomas Jefferson who said the news of the subsequent Missouri Compromise, which admitted Missouri into the Union, awoke him like a “fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.”1 Van Buren’s nightmare involved matters closer to New York, namely, the battle with the forces of De Witt Clinton over control of that state’s political machine. But even at that early point in his career, Van Buren feared that the opponents of slavery in Missouri would “bring the politics of the slave states and . . . their supporters in the free states into disrepute through inflammatory assaults on the institution of slavery.”2 The admission of Missouri, a slave state, would threaten to disrupt the volatile harmony the Union had achieved over the issue of slavery. Though sharply divided on the issue, the nation had, it seemed, learned to live with the “peculiar institution,” but tipping the balance of power in favor of one side could potentially rend asunder the young Republic. One way or another, the territorial expansion resulting from the vast land acquired during the Louisiana Purchase would elevate one side or the other—pro-slave or anti-slave—to a dominant position in the government, and the loser in that struggle would not accept the verdict.

  Compromise had been part of the American fabric from the beginning, and not only because of the slavery issue. As the result of the Constitutional Convention, two titanic compromises shaped the nation from the outset. First, the famed “Connecticut Compromise,” which addressed the issue of state representation in the federal government, balanced the concerns of the “big states” and “small states” by providing for a House of Representatives elected by the people of their districts, and a Senate, whose members were (at the time) elected by the state legislatures. All legislation had to pass both houses to become law. A second great compromise at the Convention involved slavery (and representation, too, in a different manner). Southern states wanted to count slaves for purposes of representation, but not for federal taxation; northern states wanted to count slaves for taxation, but not representation. The Convention agreed to count a slave as “three-fifths of a person” for both representation and taxation, over time providing a surprisingly dramatic advantage for the South. Federal taxation as envisioned never materialized, while the South benefited from about a 4 percent increase in their number of House seats.3

  Where the “three-fifths compromise” endowed the South with a permanent (though shrinking, due to slower population growth than their neighbors to the North) representative advantage, the Missouri Compromise threatened to do just the opposite. Under the agreement, two territories, Maine (free) and Missouri (slave), would become states. A balance in the Senate was maintained, and while no one could predict the eventual populations of either, the change in the House would likely be negligible. Trouble began when Congress established an imaginary line from the southern tip of Missouri all the way through the Louisiana Purchase, located at the 36 degree-30 minute line of latitude. Under the Compromise, from that point forward, slavery would be prohibited in any Louisiana Purchase territories above the line when they became states, while below the line (“Arkansas Territory,” an area that amounted to modern-day Arkansas and most of Oklahoma) slavery would be permitted but was not automatic. Free-soil territory encompassed most of modern-day Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and part of Minnesota. No one at the time knew exactly how many states would eventually be carved out of these lands, but Northerners and Southerners alike could anticipate perhaps a dozen free-soil senators and at least twice as many congressmen coming from states that emerged from that land. That possibility threatened to establish a powerful northern majority that at some future date could attempt to legislate slavery out of existence—a consequence the South could not entertain. Ultimately, it threatened disunion and war.

  Van Buren’s response to this nightmare was to begin shaping a new political structure, first in New York and eventually throughout the nation. As pro- and anti-Clinton newspapers arrayed over the Missouri issue (with Van Buren’s Bucktails, so called because of the deer tails they wore on their hats, accused of supporting slavery), Van Buren was more concerned with the politics of sectionalism than with the morality of this so-called peculiar institution. As early as 1819 Van Buren straddled the slavery issue—during one key meeting on his party’s response to the Missouri issue he was conveniently out of town—and as state senator he avoided having to take a position when a resolution against slavery passed without a recorded vote. The notion that such a divisive issue could be skirted, perhaps permanently, germinated within the Dutchman. But it required some mechanism to ensure that slavery did not overtake the politics of the nation. The answer, it seemed, was to apply what Van Buren learned in New York to the country as a whole.

  Working with other Bucktails, Van Buren became instrumental in creating what was termed the “Albany Regency,” which created a new political machine and introduced a new theory of political parties, thereby revolutionizing American politics. Many of the Founders had warned against partisanship—yet none had a reasonable alternative. George Washington, in particular, clung to an unrealistic view of America in which a spirit of national unity and harmo
ny would prevail, warning about the “baneful effects of the Spirit of Party” in his Farewell Address.4 Interestingly, however, Washington qualified his admonition “with particular reference to the founding of [parties] on geographical discriminations.” What was particularly destructive, he saw, were sectional parties oriented around the issue of slavery.

  Madison also expressed concerns about the dangerous effects of faction, which he defined as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Yet he admitted that the only way to eliminate factions was to either abuse liberty, which he found unacceptable, or give “to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.”5 That, too, was utterly unacceptable. Federalist No. 51, written by either Madison or Alexander Hamilton, concluded that parties were probably necessary: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

  The Albany Regency developed a much different political theory, though not entirely out of line with Federalist No. 51, and in Van Buren’s words, “political parties are inseparable from free governments.”6 As his party’s newspaper, the Argus, put it, parties checked “the passions, the ambition, and the usurpations of individuals.”7 Neither Hamilton nor Madison would have said it any differently. As early as 1821, Van Buren (by then also known as the “Red Fox of Kinderhook”) had begun employing the “rule” of “to the victor belong the spoils,” the spoils in this case being political patronage. The practice of giving jobs to the election winner’s friends constituted a tool in the politician’s arsenal by which he could reward supporters. Given the small size of the federal government and most state governments at the time, patronage was usually limited to a few customs positions, a handful of law enforcement jobs, and, in the case of the U.S. government, a growing number of post office appointments. Beyond that, aspiring political leaders had little to promise those who helped elect them.