One-Night Stands with American History

by Richard Shenkman

  But not one speeder was ever apprehended. Eventually the Secret Service persuaded Wilson that it would be inappropriate for a president of the United States personally to try the cases of speeding drivers.

  SOURCE: Gene Smith, When the Cheering Stopped (New York: William Morrow, 1964), pp. 146–47.

  HUMOR BY WOODROW WILSON

  Woodrow Wilson had a subtle sense of humor. On July 1, 1912, Wilson passed Champ Clark in the voting for the presidential nomination for the Democratic party. It was the thirtieth ballot. A reporter interrupted Wilson in a conversation with his family to ask the New Jersey governor for a statement. Wilson, emotionless concerning the good news, continued telling his family a favorite limerick:

  There was a young lady from Niger

  Who smiled as she rode on a tiger

  They came back from the ride

  With the lady inside

  And the smile on the face of the tiger.

  The reporter, not satisfied with the front runner’s comment, begged the future president for a more direct, “excited” statement.

  “You might put it in the paper,” Wilson said with a quiet smile, “that Governor Wilson received the news that Champ Clark had dropped to second place in a riot of silence.”

  SOURCE: Arthur Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), XXIV, 516.

  A KLUNKER FOR A KLANSMAN

  On June 26, 1916, Joseph Simmons, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, issued the following “Imperial Decree” from his “Aulic in the Imperial Palace in the Imperial City of Atlanta”: “The Kloran is the book of the Invisible Empire and is therefore a sacred book with our citizens, and its contents must be rigidly safeguarded. The book or any part of it must not be kept or carried where any person of the ‘alien’ world may chance to become acquainted with its sacred contents as such. In warning: A penalty sufficient will speedily be enforced for disregarding the decree in the profanation of the Kloran.”

  Six months later Simmons decided that a book as important as the Kloran should be officially recognized, so he applied to Washington for a copyright. Like any author, he forwarded one dollar and two copies of the book to the Register of Copyrights. And from that time forth The Book of the Invisible Empire was available to anyone who asked for it at the Library of Congress.

  SOURCE: Laurence Greene, The Era of Wonderful Nonsense (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1939), pp. 86–87.

  V. I. LENIN AND AN AMERICAN ROMEO

  Late in the afternoon of April 11, 1917, V. I. Lenin made a telephone call to the American legation at Berne, Switzerland. Just a few days earlier the Bolsheviks had overthrown the czar. Now Lenin, a key leader of the revolutionaries, was trying to deliver an important message to the Americans concerning World War I. Lenin liked Woodrow Wilson and wanted to help the United States.

  Over the telephone Lenin gave his name and explained that he would be arriving in Berne late in the day and would have to speak with someone at the legation. He had extremely significant news. Lenin was asked if he could not wait until the next day and come during official hours. No, he answered emphatically, “tomorrow will be too late. I must talk to someone this afternoon. It is most important. I must see someone.”

  But Lenin would see no one. His thick German accent marked him as just another émigré, maybe even a crank. His purported news? Well, it could surely wait until the following day. In any case, the man at the other end of the line, the duty officer at the legation, did not want to wait. He had a date with a pretty woman, a woman who had scorned him until recently as too young. He certainly could not break his evening engagement with her. So Lenin was told: “I’m sorry, it will have to be tomorrow. Ten o’clock tomorrow, when the office opens.”

  Six days later V. I. Lenin, the insignificant émigré, announced to the world the message he had wanted to tell the United States: Russia was taking itself out of the Great War. Peace negotiations with Germany were to begin promptly.

  The name of the duty officer who refused to meet with Lenin because of his date was Allen Dulles, then a green intelligence man, later head of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  SOURCE: Leonard Mosley, Dulles (New York: Dial Press/James Wade, 1978), pp. 46–48.

  MILLARD FILLMORE AND THE BATHTUB

  On December 28, 1917, H. L. Mencken published in the New York Evening Mail a startling account of the history of the bathtub in America. The history was a complete fabrication from beginning to end, and contained utterly fantastic claims, but people across the country believed it entirely. The story began to show up in other newspapers, and eventually creeped into works of scholarship. To this day it can be found in respected histories of the United States.

  Mencken’s story began with the patently improbable claim that the bathtub was unknown in America until 1842, when Adam Thompson, a Cincinnati cotton and grain dealer, recently back from a trip to Europe, where he had laid eyes on a bathtub for the first time, introduced it amid much fanfare. Unfortunately, the celebration did not last long. Thompson, the hick from Cincinnati, could not persuade people in the cosmopolitan East of the bathtub’s usefulness. Instead, the city slickers decided that the bathtub was Public Enemy Number One. Eminent physicians expressed the opinion that bathing posed a serious danger to health, while legislators in the nation’s two most advanced cities—Philadelphia and Boston—passed laws against it. The Boston town fathers decreed that no one could take a bath without the advice and consent of a doctor.

  According to the story, opposition to the bathtub remained strong until 1851, when Millard Fillmore—described as “intrepid”—ordered one installed in the White House. After that bathing became fashionable.

  For ten years Mencken watched in silent disbelief as his ridiculous story passed the lips of millions of gullible Americans. Finally, in May 1926, he revealed that the whole purported history was a pack of lies that he had fabricated in 1917 “to sublimate and so make bearable the intolerable libido of the war for democracy.” He had not expected, he wrote, that anyone outside of a few raving idiots would believe it.

  About thirty newspapers, reaching almost 250 million people, printed Mencken’s confession of the bathtub hoax. But to his astonishment the story would not die down. That June the Boston Herald, which had published Mencken’s disclosure three weeks before under the title “The American People Will Swallow Anything,” published the original story as a news item.

  Again Mencken wrote that the whole thing was a fake, but to no avail. A few months later Scribner’s Magazine printed the old story as fact. In the 1930s someone wrote a whole book based on Mencken’s spoof, and in the early 1970s a prize-winning historian related the discredited facts in his widely acclaimed trilogy on the American experience. In the middle 1970s the story made its way into the comprehensive multivolume Dictionary of American History.

  SOURCE: James T. Farrell, ed., H. L. Mencken: Prejudices (New York: Vintage, 1955), pp. 242–47.

  WHEN AMERICANS CELEBRATED THE END OF WORLD WAR I

  On the afternoon of November 7, 1918, Americans across the country learned that the “war to end all wars” had ended. Instantly offices and factories closed and people poured into the streets to celebrate. A sign at Rogers Peet Company read: “Who can work on a day like this? Gone to celebrate. Open tomorrow.” Dozens of other stores blazoned the same message across their tightly shut doors. New York City hosted one of the largest ticker-tape parades in its history. For the first time since 1914 the world was at peace.

  Or so the newspapers reported. Actually, heavy fighting was continuing along all fronts. There had been no armistice. Only in the United States and in Brest, France, did people believe that the war had come to a close.

  On the afternoon of November 7, Admiral Henry B. Wilson, director of naval operations in French waters, received at his headquarters in Brest a message from Paris that the war had ended. The message, perhaps the work of German spies, was completely false. But Wilson believed it. He had little rea
son not to. Everyone knew that the war was almost over.

  At a four-o’clock appointment with Roy Howard, president of United Press, Wilson casually revealed the message and told Howard he was free to use it. Howard, of course, leaped at the opportunity. He would be the first person to send the news of peace to the United States. The story would make his reputation.

  It was only by chance that Howard was in Brest that afternoon. He had arrived in the city early that morning from Paris to catch a ship leaving immediately for the United States. But a friend had told him about another ship which would reach the United States sooner, though it would not leave until the next day. Howard had decided to take the later ship. That afternoon, having nothing to do, he had gone to see Wilson, who happened to be the kind of person who liked talking with reporters.

  After Howard received the news of peace, he immediately had the message typed up at Brest’s daily newspaper, La Dépêche. Then he raced over to the French cable office to send the news on to the United States.

  Ordinarily, nothing would be sent out of the cable office without first being approved by French censors. But Howard’s message had been typed on the La Dépêche machine that was used to receive wires from Paris—wires approved by the Paris censors and thus never questioned by the Brest cable operators. In addition, the cable was signed “Howard-Simms.” Simms was the UP reporter whose name usually appeared on the Paris dispatches. Howard had cosigned the cable with the reporter’s name to give Simms some of the credit for the greatest scoop of the century. So Howard’s message was reported out of Brest completely uncensored.

  When the cable arrived in the United States, there was no reason to disbelieve it. The story had to be true for it to have got past the French censors. It was immediately sent out across the entire country.

  That night Howard learned, while sitting in a bar in Brest, that his scoop was completely false. At first Wilson encouraged him to believe that the story was simply “premature.” But as the night lengthened, it became clear that the story was plainly incorrect. The scoop of the century had become the hoax of the century.

  The next morning news of Howard’s mistake was splashed across the front pages of every paper in America. Wilson took responsibility for the mistake, but everyone blamed Howard—blamed him for disappointing millions of people and for needlessly causing the nation’s offices and factories to close down. One New York paper argued that Howard should be forced to pay for cleaning up the ticker tape that cluttered every street.

  Three days later it was officially declared that the war was over. Howard had been wrong by only a few days.

  SOURCE: Arthur Hornblow Jr., “The Amazing Armistice,” Century Magazine, CIII (November 1921–April 1922), pp. 90–99.

  WOODROW WILSON’S BARBER

  After his stroke President Wilson grew a long beard, which his doctors sometimes considered shaving. On one occasion, standing by Wilson’s bed, they were discussing the matter when one of them suggested that a doctor could shave off the beard. “You know,” the man said, “in the olden days the doctors were barbers. Doctors were really barbers in those days.” There was a cry from the bed: “They are barbarous yet.”

  SOURCE: Gene Smith, When the Cheering Stopped (New York: William Morrow, 1964), p. 109.

  VICE PRESIDENTS ARE HELPLESS

  Thomas R. Marshall, vice president under Woodrow Wilson: “The Vice President of the United States is like a man in a cataleptic state: he cannot speak; he cannot move; he suffers no pain; and yet he is perfectly conscious of everything that is going on about him.”

  Marshall also believed that the vice president was like an animal in a cage. When visitors to the Capitol peered at him in his office, Marshall would sometimes blurt out, “If you don’t come in, throw me a peanut.”

  SOURCES: Holman Hamilton, White House Images and Realities (Gainesville, Fla.: University of Florida Press, 1958), pp. 4–5; Henry Graff, “A Heartbeat Away,” American Heritage, August 1964, p. 86.

  RELEASED FROM HIS CATALEPTIC STATE

  On November 23, 1919, Vice President Marshall was in Atlanta speaking in the civic auditorium when a policeman suddenly rushed up to the podium and began talking in hushed tones to a local official. Marshall was then interrupted and given the terrifying news: according to a phone call just received, the President had died. Marshall staggered a few feet, then took hold of himself firmly. He announced to the audience: “I cannot continue my speech. I must leave at once to take up my duties as Chief Executive of this great nation.” He asked for the people’s prayers. Then, surrounded by a police escort, he left for his hotel.

  “A most cruel hoax,” was the way the Vice President described the incident when he discovered that Wilson was very much alive. Marshall had been “president” for barely an hour. Instantly the embarrassed Vice President slipped back into the comfortable anonymity to which he had grown accustomed. A short time later he left Atlanta by train, unescorted, and cheered only by the shrieking wheels of the locomotive.

  SOURCE: Gene Smith, When the Cheering Stopped (New York: William Morrow, 1964), pp. 127–28.

  WILSON’S BID FOR A THIRD TERM

  At the end of his second term Woodrow Wilson was a broken man. The victim of a stroke that paralyzed much of his left side, he could barely move. He had, it is true, improved. Immediately after his stroke he was unable to move at all and could barely utter a single word. Now, at least, he had spasms of articulateness, lasting anywhere from a week to ten days. But Wilson was still very feeble. He could hold only brief conversations, often fell into deathlike sleep at the movies, and showed signs of creeping ludicrousness. He was so weak that he never held cabinet meetings, never entertained, and only once mustered enough strength to see a Republican senator.

  But Woodrow Wilson wanted a third term. A third term would vindicate the Versailles Treaty, the League of Nations, and Wilson himself. Most of his advisers said he should send a note to the Democratic convention meeting in San Francisco announcing that he was not a candidate. But Wilson argued that the convention might deadlock and turn to him out of necessity. In any case, one doesn’t refuse an offer that hasn’t been made.

  There were people crazy enough to encourage Wilson’s dreams. One of these crazy people was the secretary of state, Bainbridge Colby, who at one point during the convention wired the White House, “The outstanding characteristic of the convention is the unanimity and fervor of feeling for you. . . . I propose, unless otherwise definitely instructed, to take advantage of first moment to move suspension of rules and place your name in nomination.”

  The convention deadlocked, but Wilson’s name was not put forth by Colby or anyone else. A small group of the President’s friends had convinced the secretary of state that it was ridiculous to think even for a moment that Wilson could or should be elected to a third term. Finally, a compromise candidate, Governor James Cox, was chosen. At the White House an old man listened grimly to the news and then spewed forth a startling array of unbecoming and uncharacteristic obscenities. Woodrow Wilson had really hoped to become the first president to be elected to three terms.

  SOURCE: Gene Smith, When the Cheering Stopped (New York: William Morrow, 1964), pp. 155–60.

  Era of the Pumpkin Coach

  “Let’s keep what we’ve got: prosperity didn’t just happen.”

  ’hERBERT hOOVER cAMPAIGN sLOGAN IN 1928

  SCRAPBOOK OF THE TIMES

  • Six thousand corpses of American soldiers arrived from Europe on a single day in May 1921.

  • In 1921 a bankrupt H. L. Hunt won his first oil well in a game of five-card stud in Arkansas.

  • For no apparent reason Texas congressman Lindsay Blanton, a Presbyterian Sunday-school teacher and prohibitionist, inserted dirty words into the Congressional Record in 1921. He was censured by his colleagues, 293 to 0.

  • Among the most popular books of 1924 was advertising executive Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows, a book about Jesus as the quintessential businessman.
Barton followed up this book with another a year later called The Book Nobody Knows, a work about the Bible.

  • In 1924 the Sears catalogue carried for the last time an advertisement for “White Duck Emigrant Wagon Covers.”

  • Woodrow Wilson finally died in 1924, a year after his supposedly more vigorous successor, Warren Harding.

  • Babe Ruth, who achieved fame first as a pitcher and only later as a hitter, earned a salary of $52,000 in 1925. Half a decade later his annual salary was up to $80,000.

  • By answering an advertisement placed in a Tennessee newspaper by the American Civil Liberties Union in 1925, John T. Scopes became the center of a national controversy. The advertisement asked for a teacher who would volunteer to teach the theory of evolution in the public schools.

  • The yo-yo was imported to America in the 1920s from the Philippines.

  • By promising 50 percent interest on cash deposited for three months, Charles Ponzi, a lowly Boston clerk, quickly accumulated a fortune. For months he was able to operate successfully because practically no one withdrew their money. Finally the long lines outside his office shrank to nothing when he was proved to be a fraud. Ponzi then went to jail.

  • Architects twice revised the blueprints of the Empire State Building to make the structure, originally planned for eighty stories, taller than the Chrysler Tower, which designers kept increasing in size in hopes of making it the highest skyscraper in the world. When finally completed, the Empire State Building reached 1,472 feet in the air, to a total of 102 stories.

  • One of the pastimes of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s was to ride on the rooftops of taxis in New York City. They also enjoyed bathing fully clothed in the fountains around the city.

  • Scott Fitzgerald worried that his penis was small. One day he called Hemingway into a closet for an opinion. Hemingway reassured Scott that his penis was normal, and then took him on a tour of nude statues at a local museum to prove it.

  • For appearing in a racy play called Sex, which she had written, Mae West, who was born with the improbable name Mary Jane, was sent to jail for ten days. Her only comment upon being released was that the prison underwear was awful.