A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  11. Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed (New York: Grossman, 1965).

  12. B. Bruce Briggs, The War Against the Automobile (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977), 83.

  13. Tindall and Shi, America, 2:1594.

  14. Gene Smiley, The American Economy in the Twentieth Century (Cincinnati, OH: College Division, South-Western Publishing Company, 1994), 381.

  15. Robert Crandall, Why Is the Cost of Environmental Regulation So High? (St. Louis: Center for the Study of American Business, Washington University, February 1992), 3.

  16. Brookes, Economy in Mind, 111.

  17. Schweikart, Entrepreneurial Adventure, chap. 11.

  18. Ibid., 415.

  19. Burton H. Klein, Dynamic Economics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977).

  20. Schweikart, Entrepreneurial Adventure, passim.

  21. Paul Ingrassia and Joseph B. White, Comeback: The Fall and Rise of the American Automobile Industry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); Lee Iaccoca with William Novak, Iaccoca: A Biography (New York: Bantam, 1984).

  22. Derks, Working Class Americans, passim.

  23. Derks, ed., The Value of a Dollar, 1860–1899, passim.

  24. Kenneth Warren, Big Steel: The First Century of the United States Steel Corporation, 1901–2001 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001).

  25. John P. Hoerr, And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988); Hans G. Mueller, “The Steel Industry,” in J. Michael Finger and Thomas D. Willett, eds., The Internationalization of the American Economy, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 460, March 1982, 73–82.

  26. Goldfield et al., American Journey, 987.

  27. Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, “On the Pill: Changing the Course of Women’s Education,” Milken Institute Review, Spring Quarter 2001, 12–21.

  28. Thomas C. Reeves, Twentieth-Century America: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 193.

  29. Stephen W. Tweedie, “Viewing the Bible Belt,” Journal of Popular Culture, 11, 1978, 865–76.

  30. Ibid., 875–76.

  31. Thomas C. Reeves, The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Christianity (New York: Free Press, 1996), 126.

  32. Laurence R. Innaccone, Roger Finke, and Rodney Stark, “Deregulating Religion: The Economics of Church and State,” Economic Inquiry, 35, April 1997, 350–64.

  33. Ibid., 361.

  34. Reeves, Empty Church, 146.

  35. “Ecumenical War over Abortion,” Time, January 29, 1979, 62–63.

  36. David Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (New York: Macmillan, 1994).

  37. Erica Scharrer, “From Wise to Foolish: The Portrayal of the Sitcom Father, 1950s–1990s,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 45, Winter 2001, 23–40.

  38. Robert Locke, “Why No-Fault Divorce Is the Key to Abortion,” Front Page Magazine, March 26, 2001, at frontpagemag.com/archives/feminism/locke03–26–01p.htm.

  39. Barbara DaFoe Whitehead, “Dan Qualye Was Right,” The Atlantic, April 1993, and more broadly explained in her book The Divorce Culture (New York: Random House, 1996).

  40. George Gilder, Men and Marriage (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 1986).

  41. Barbara Gordon, Jennifer Fever: Older Men/Younger Women (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).

  42. “Day Care Linked to Aggression in Kids,” CBS News, April 19, 2001, citing a large study (1,300 children) by Martha Cox of the University of North Carolina.

  43. Andrew and Mitrokhin, Sword and the Shield, 204.

  44. Ibid., 206.

  45. Richard L. Tedrow and Thomas Tedrow, Death at Chappaquiddick (Ottawa: Green Hill Publishers, 1976), is typical of most of the books looking at the incident.

  46. Martin Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century: 1952–1999 vol. 3 (New York: William Morrow, 1999), 3:544.

  47. Cited in Garry Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (Boston: Little, Brown 1982), 195.

  48. Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 228.

  49. Matthew Dallek, The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics (New York: Free Press, 2000).

  50. Kiron K. Skinner, Martin Anderson, and Annelise Anderson, eds. Reagan, In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America (New York: Free Press, 2001).

  51. Derks, Value of a Dollar, 405–11.

  52. Tindall and Shi, America, 2:1610.

  53. Goldfield, et al., American Journey, 1011, photo.

  54. Thomas A. Bailey, et al., The American Pageant, 11th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 2:993.

  55. George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1981).

  56. Kenneth S. Baer, Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2000), passim.

  57. Johnson, History of the American People, 921.

  58. Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Pocket Books, 1990), 259–63.

  59. Schweikart, Entrepreneurial Adventure, 338–40, 542–46.

  60. Warren Brookes, “The Silent Boom,” The American Spectator, August 1988, 16–19, and his “The Media vs. the Economy,” in the Detroit News, December 29, 1988.

  61. Reagan, An American Life, 315–17.

  62. Thomas K. McCraw, Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, Alfred E. Kahn (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1984).

  63. Ibid., 268; David Field, “Big Airlines Pack in Passengers, Profit,” USA Today, April 1, 1997; Larry Schweikart interview with Tonya Wagner, Federal Aviation Administration, July 5, 1995.

  64. Schweikart, Entrepreneurial Adventure, 439–40.

  65. Paul Teske, Samuel Best, and Michael Mintrom, Deregulating Freight Transportation: Delivering the Goods (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1995); James Bovard, “The Great Truck Robbery,” Wall Street Journal, November 3, 1993; Glenn Yago, “The Regulatory Reign of Terror,”Wall Street Journal, March 4, 1992.

  66. Typical of this approach is Tindall and Shi, America, 2:1612: “Reaganomics departed from the Coolidge record mainly in the mounting deficits of the 1980s and in their major cause—growing expenditures for the armed forces.” There is simply no evidence that the military budget grew in total dollars relative to the expenditures on “social spending” that accounted for the deficit.

  67. Peter Sperry, “The Real Reagan Economic Record: Responsible and Successful Fiscal Policy,” Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, #1414, March 1, 2001, chart 1, “Federal Revenues and Expenditures, 1980–1993,” 3.

  68. Gilder, Wealth and Poverty, passim, and his Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1992); W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm, Myths of Rich & Poor: Why We’re Better Off Than We Think (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

  69. Bruce Bartlett, “Tariffs and Alloy of Errors,” Washington Times, April 1, 2002.

  70. Steven F. Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order (Boseville, CA: Prima Publishing, 2001).

  71. Bernard Schafer, “The US Air Raid on Libya in April 1986: A Confidential Soviet Account from the Stasi Archives,” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Cold War International History Project, 2001.

  72. Reagan, An American Life, 466.

  73. Ibid., 556.

  74. Michael Moritz, The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1984).

  75. Schweikart, Entrepreneurial Adventure, 435.

  76. Joel Kotkin and Ross C. DeVol, “Knowledge-Value Cities in the Digital Age,” research paper from the Milken Institute, February 13, 2001, 2, available at http://www.milkeninst.org.

  77. William T. Youngs, “Bill Gates and Microsoft,” in Youngs, ed., American Realities: Historical Episodes, From Reconstruction to the Present, vol. 2, 3d ed. (New
York: HarperCollins, 1993); James Wallace and Jim Erickson, Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire (New York: Wiley, 1992).

  78. See Adam D. Thierer, “How Free Computers are Filling the Digital Divide,” Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, #1361, April 20, 2000.

  79. Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon, “The Greatest Century that Ever Was: 25 Miraculous Trends of the Past 100 Years,” CATO Institute Policy Analysis, #364, December 15, 1999, Fig. 21, “Patents Granted by the United States,” 23.

  80. Andrew and Mitrokhin, Sword and the Shield, 243.

  81. Jacques Gansler, Affording Defense (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989); Fens Osler Hampson, Unguided Missiles: How America Buys Its Weapons (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989); Thomas McNaugher, New Weapons, Old Politics: America’s Military Procurement Muddle (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1989); Michael E. Brown, Flying Blind (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); Jacob Goodwin, Brotherhood of Arms: Geneva Dynamics and the Business of Defending America (New York: Times Books, 1985).

  82. Matthew Evangelista, Innovation and the Arms Race (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 27–28; Peter J. Katzenstein, “International Relations and Domestic Structures: Foreign Economic Policies of Advanced Industrial States,” International Organization, 30, Winter 1976, 1–45.

  83. Gilbert, History of the Twentieth Century, 596, but the entire “evil empire” speech appears in An American Life, 369–70.

  84. Paul Hollander, Political Will and Personal Belief: The Decline and Fall of Soviet Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 11.

  85. Lou Cannon, “Reagan’s Big Idea—How the Gipper Conceived Star Wars,” National Review, February 22, 1999, 40–42, quotation on 40.

  86. Ibid.

  87. For typical college-level textbook assessments of Star Wars, see Bailey, et al., American Pageant, 998 (“Those who did not dismiss it as ludicrous feared that [it] might be ruinously costly, ultimately unworkable, and fatally destabilizing….”); Brinkley, et al., American History, II:966, which emphasizes the Soviet reaction (“The Soviet Union reacted with anger and alarm and insisted the new program would elevate the arms race to new and more dangerous levels.”); Goldfield, et al., American Journey, 1017, which questioned the feasibility of the technology, while still stressing the “destabilization” aspects (“All of the technologies were untested [which was completely untrue—they had almost all been tested for years, both in the U.S. and the USSR, and tested successfully]; some existed only in the imagination. Few scientists thought that SDI could work.”) Other texts had similar comments. Davidson, et al., Nation of Nations, 1177, said, “Most scientists contended that the project was as fantastic as the movie [ Star Wars ].” Faragher, et al., Out of Many, 953, stated Reagan “claimed, though few scientists agreed, that satellites and lasers could create an impregnable shield—” (in fact, Reagan claimed no such thing). Surprisingly, one of the most otherwise liberal texts, Jordan and Litwack’s United States, is fairly objective in its treatment—less than twenty words for the most important weapons proposal, arguably, in American history. What is astounding is how the technological questions and the destabilization questions, even when contained in the same paragraph, never raised the most obvious question by any of the authors: if the technology for Star Wars could not work, how could it possibly be destabilizing?

  88. Johnson, History of the American People, 927.

  89. Cannon, “Reagan’s Big Idea,” 40–42.

  90. Hollander, Personal Will, 5.

  91. Ibid., 100.

  92. Ibid., 98.

  93. Seweryn Bailer, “The Soviet Union and the West: Security and Foreign Policy,” in Seweryn Bailer, et al., eds., Gorbachev’s Russia and American Foreign Policy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988), 457–91, especially 458.

  94. Andrew and Mitrokhin, Sword and the Shield, 484.

  95. Ibid., 220; Barbara von der Heydt, Candles Behind the Wall: Heroes of the Peaceful Revolution That Shattered Communism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993), 124.

  96. Von der Heydt, Candles Behind the Wall, 124.

  97. Reagan, An American Life, 11–15.

  98. “Study Reveals ‘Politicization’ of Intelligence,” Washington Times, October 9, 2000.

  99. Reagan, An American Life, 606.

  100. Ibid., 402.

  Chapter 21. The Moral Crossroads, 1989–2000

  1. John Robert Greene, The Presidency of George Bush (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2000); George Bush, All the Best: My Life in Letters and Other Writings (New York: Scribner, 1999); George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Knopf, 1998).

  2. Kenneth S. Baer, Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Clinton to Reagan (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2000), 12.

  3. Steven M. Gillon and Cathy D. Matson, The American Experiment, 1265.

  4. Paul Hollander, Political Will and Personal Belief: The Decline and Fall of Soviet Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 22.

  5. Ibid., 3.

  6. Ibid., 7.

  7. Andrew and Mitrokhin, Sword and the Shield, 548.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Curtis Peebles, Dark Eagles (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1995), 183.

  11. Williamson Murray, Air War in the Persian Gulf (Baltimore: Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1995), 26.

  12. Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993); Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, The General’s War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995); Tom Clancy and Chuck Horner, Every Man a Tiger (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1999); Frank N. Schubert and Theresa L. Kraus, eds., The Whirlwind War: The United States Army in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1994).

  13. Tom Keaney and Eliot Cohen, Revolution in Warfare? (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995); Richard Reynolds, Heart of the Storm: The Genesis of the Air Power in the Persian Gulf Air Campaign Against Iraq (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1995).

  14. Benjamin S. Lambeth, The Transformation of American Air Power (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 112.; Jeffrey Record, Hollow Victory (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1993).

  15. Peebles, Dark Eagles, 188.

  16. Majors Michael J. Bodner and William W. Bruner III, “Tank Plinking,” Air Force Magazine, October 1993, 31; Lambeth, Transformation, 123.

  17. Tony Cappacio, “Air Force’s Eyes in the Sky Alerted Marines at Khafji, Targeted Convoys,” Defense Week, March 18, 1991, 7.

  18. Barry D. Watts, letter to the editor, Foreign Affairs, November/December 1997, 180.

  19. Keaney and Cohen, Revolution in Warfare?, 91–92.

  20. Lambeth, Transformation, 128.

  21. Atkinson, Crusade, 342.

  22. Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 364–65.

  23. Jonathan Rauch, “Why Bush (Senior) Didn’t Blow It in the Gulf War,” Jewish World Review (online edition), November 5, 2001.

  24. Gillon and Matson, American Experience, 1270.

  25. Gerald Posner, Citizen Perot: His Life and Times (New York: Random House, 1996).

  26. George Stephanopoulos, All Too Human: A Political Education (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999), 82.

  27. Rhodes Cook, “Arkansan Travels Well Nationally as Campaign Heads for Test,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, January 11, 1992.

  28. David Maraniss, First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).

  29. Murrin, et al., Liberty, Equality, Power, 1103.

  30. Woodward, The Agenda (New York: Pocket Books, 1995), 122.

  31. Gillon and Matson, American Experience, 1275; Brinkley, Unfinished Nation, 1014. The phrase used most by textbook authors is that the plan “pleased…virtually no one” (Murrin, et al., Liberty, Equality, Power, 1104)
. A similar phrase appears in Goldfield et al., American Journey, 1001, “something for everyone to dislike.” This implied that it was a solid concept so cutting-edge that it would offend because of its revolutionary nature. None of these sources come close to delineating the vast aggrandizement of power in the federal government that the plan represented, or the intrusion into personal liberties as basic as choosing one’s own doctor and pursuing the profession of one’s choice. They are not even considered as possible sources of the widespread opposition.