Part 30 (1/2)

Historians still argue about how effective FDR's New Deal programs were. But it's undeniable that they cheered people up, enough that they reelected Roosevelt in 1936, and gave him unprecedented third and fourth terms in 1940 and 1944.While trying to right the economy, Roosevelt and Congress also strove during the 1930s to keep the United States out of the looming conflicts in Asia and Europe. By 1940, however, it had become apparent to FDR that American involvement was inevitable. Somewhat reluctantly, he prodded Congress into approving a peacetime draft, doubling the size of the navy, and okaying the sale of military hardware to countries whose interests seemed aligned with those of the United States.After Pearl Harbor, U.S. industry began to flex its muscle. In 1942, for example, Roosevelt called for the production of fifty thousand planes a year. By 1944, Americans were building ninety-six thousand annually. Wartime production, in turn, heated up the economy, providing jobs and boosting wages.The economic good times continued after the war. Buffered by the vastness of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the United States suffered the least of all the major combatants during the war. There were plenty of jobs for returning servicemen, and $13 billion worth of educational and investment capital available to them through the GI Bill. From 1946 to 1960, the gross national product jumped from $200 billion to $500 billion a year.The GNP wasn't the only thing jumping. The two s.e.xes, largely separated during the war, overcompensated somewhat after the war was over. The U.S. population grew from 150 million to 180 million during the 1950s, and the ”Baby Boom” generation would have social and economic impacts on the country for the rest of the century (and beyond).All this prosperity was accompanied by an unhealthy dose of paranoia, brought on by both the hot war in Korea and the cold war in Europe. Anticommunist feelings flourished, fueled in large part by an alcoholic U.S. senator from Wisconsin named Joe McCarthy. The demagogic senator wildly charged that Communists had infiltrated nearly every level of American life, from the government and military to cla.s.srooms and the entertainment industry.While McCarthy was eventually discredited and shunned, the anticommunist feelings lingered. They were heightened on October 16, 1962, when U.S. intelligence services reported to President Kennedy that Soviet missile-launching sites were under construction in Cuba, less than one hundred miles from the Florida coast.

It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.-President John F. Kennedy, in a nationwide address on October 22, 1962

For the next eleven days, the world teetered as close as it had ever come to nuclear war between the two superpowers. On October 22, Kennedy publicly revealed the presence of the sites, ordered a U.S. naval blockade of Cuba, and stepped up intense one-to-one negotiations with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.

FIRST AMONG FIRST LADIES.

Her mother thought she was ugly, her maiden name was the same as her married name, and she was six feet tall. It's a bit of an understatement to say that Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was in many ways an extraordinary woman.She was born in 1884 in New York, the niece of Theodore Roosevelt. Both of her parents died before she was ten-but not before her mother had time to ridicule her publicly for her plain appearance.In 1905, she married Franklin D. Roosevelt, a very distant cousin. The couple had six children. It was an often painful marriage for Eleanor. FDR had a long and not very well concealed affair with Eleanor's social secretary. In 1921, he was stricken with polio, and Eleanor became his legs, making political trips for him when he couldn't travel.When Franklin won the presidency in 1932, Eleanor threw herself into the role of First Lady with zeal heretofore unseen. She held regular press conferences, but for women correspondents only. News organizations that had never hired female reporters were thus pushed into doing so. She also wrote a syndicated newspaper column that recounted life in the White House, and doled out advice.Eleanor toured the country extensively, reporting directly to FDR about Depression-era conditions. And she was an outspoken champion of civil rights and women's issues. Although her activism earned her praise, it also made her the target of often vicious and personal criticism.After FDR's death, President Truman appointed her a delegate to the United Nations. At the UN, she served as chairman of the Commission on Human Rights. She was also active in national Democratic politics.Eleanor died at the age of seventy-eight from a rare form of tuberculosis. Four former, current, and future presidents attended her funeral, including Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson.”She was,” Truman said, ”the First Lady of the world.”

On October 28, Khrushchev blinked. The Soviet missiles would be removed and the sites dismantled. In return, the United States promised not to invade Cuba, and eventually removed American missiles from sites in Turkey.Coupled with Soviet advances in s.p.a.ce and military technology, however, the Cuban missile crisis fed into a new feeling among many Americans: Maybe those oceans weren't going be enough to protect the country in the next world war.WHO'S UP, WHO'S DOWN The Subcontinent: UP UP [image]

It took decades of sit-ins, boycotts, and turning the other cheek-along with more than a few violent confrontations-but the Indian subcontinent bore two new nations after World War II.India had been under the thrall of Great Britain since the eighteenth century, and not surprisingly, the natives weren't happy about it. In 1919, after a British ma.s.sacre of Indian demonstrators, the Indians took a different tack: civil disobedience, coupled with nonviolent resistance.Leading the effort was a British-educated lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi. When the British inst.i.tuted a new tax on salt in 1930, for example, Gandhi led thousands of Indians on a 250-mile march to the sea to gather salt for themselves. The Brits responded by jailing 60,000 Indians, including Gandhi.

Nonviolence and truth are inseparable and presuppose one another. There is no G.o.d higher than truth.-Mohandas Gandhi, 1939

After a few years of on-again-off-again tactics like this, the British agreed in 1935 to allow Indian provinces to govern themselves on matters within the provinces, but the country itself remained under British control. It was a half-a-loaf approach that pleased almost no one. When World War II began, the Indian leaders refused to take part or encourage Indians to help, because they hadn't been consulted about the Allies' decision to declare war on the Axis powers.

THE GANDHI MAN CAN.

One of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's early report cards rated him ”good at English, fair in arithmetic and weak in geography.” He turned out to be pretty good at political science, too.Born in 1869 near Bombay, Gandhi studied law in England and became an attorney. In 1893, he signed a one-year contract to practice law in South Africa. The country's segregated policies helped transform him from a mild-mannered lawyer into a mild-mannered but determined civil rights leader. He became the guiding light of a two-decade-long, partially successful struggle to win legal and political rights for Indians and ”people of color” in South Africa.Equipped with political tools such as civil disobedience and pa.s.sive resistance, Gandhi returned to India in 1914 to take up the fight for independence from the British Empire. He organized boycotts of British goods and businesses, and advocated avoidance of the empire's legal system. In 1930, he led a much-heralded 250-mile march to protest a tax on salt, which resulted in one of his several prison stretches.By 1931, Gandhi was Time Time magazine's ”Man of the Year” and had earned the nickname Mahatma, or ”Great Soul.” In his personal life, Gandhi was a stirring example of humility. He was a strict vegetarian, wove his own clothes, and lived as simply as a national leader could. magazine's ”Man of the Year” and had earned the nickname Mahatma, or ”Great Soul.” In his personal life, Gandhi was a stirring example of humility. He was a strict vegetarian, wove his own clothes, and lived as simply as a national leader could.By the time India finally won its independence in 1947, Gandhi's primary mission had s.h.i.+fted to trying to quell the b.l.o.o.d.y violence between Hindus and Muslims on the subcontinent.On January 30, 1948, while on his nightly stroll, Gandhi was shot and killed by a Hindu fanatic who was furious at the Mahatma's efforts to reach an accord with Muslims. His October 2 birthday has become a national holiday in India.

In 1946, a rebellion in the Royal Indian Navy set off widespread violence, and the British government, weary after years of war, decided that enough was enough. Prime Minister Clement Atlee announced in March that the empire would agree to full Indian independence.Gandhi and nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru (who would become India's first prime minister) wanted to preserve the subcontinent as a unified nation, with equal rights for the country's Hindu and Muslim populations. But Indian Muslims, led by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, wanted their own piece of real estate. The result was a series of violent clashes between the two religious groups.On August 15, 1947, Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan became separate nations. The fighting, however, intensified as members of the two religions moved to and from the two states. More than five hundred thousand people died as Muslims fled west and Hindus moved east. A full-fledged, albeit brief, war broke out between the two fledgling states over who would have authority over the region of Kashmir. It was settled, at least temporarily, by a United Nations mandate. But the fight would prove to be only the first of several wars between the two nations separated at birth.Jews: DOWN, BUT NEVER OUT DOWN, BUT NEVER OUT Anxious to keep Russia fighting during World War I, British officials came up with a strategy to encourage Russia's Jews to support the Allied effort: promise them a Jewish homeland in Palestine after the war. After the war, the League of Nations picked up the idea, proclaiming that Jews had a right to immigrate to the Middle Eastern region then controlled by Great Britain.But nothing much came of it. And through the 1920s and 1930s, Europe's Jews became the primary target of Adolf Hitler's n.a.z.ism as. .h.i.tler gradually gained power in Germany. The Jews, he charged, were conspiring with the Communists to stamp out Hitler's mythical Aryan race.”There is no such thing as coming to an understanding with the Jews,” he wrote in his book Mein Kampf Mein Kampf. ”It must be the hard-and-fast 'either-or.'”Formal persecution of Jews in Germany began almost as soon as. .h.i.tler a.s.sumed control. In April 1933, Jews were banned from all civil service and teaching positions. By the end of 1935, they had lost their German citizens.h.i.+p and virtually all other rights. Hitler initially wanted to expel Jews from the Continent, but the outbreak of the war thwarted his plan. Then he attempted to isolate them in ghettoes, where they could be used as a source of labor. But by late 1941, a ”Final Solution” had been formed. Eight major extermination camps were set up. An estimated 6.0 million Jews were systematically murdered, 1.5 million of them children.The end of the war and the Holocaust did not end persecution of Jews in Europe; more than a thousand were murdered in 1946 in Poland alone. So it wasn't surprising that many European Jews wanted to go elsewhere. Many of them did-to the Palestinian ”homeland” the British had dangled before them in 1917.But Great Britain, facing economic troubles at home, wanted nothing to do with sorting out differences between Jews and Muslim Arabs in Palestine. More than fifty thousand European Jews were intercepted by the Brits and placed in camps on the island of Cyprus. Finally, Britain lobbed the issue to the fledgling United Nations. On November 29, 1947, the UN narrowly voted to part.i.tion Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.

A FACE IN THE CROWD.

Annelies Marie ”Anne” Frank was born in Frankfurt in 1929. Her father, Otto, had been a decorated German officer in World War I. But he was also a Jew.Fearful of what the n.a.z.i ascension to power portended for Jews, Frank moved the family to Amsterdam when Anne was four. An energetic girl who yearned to be a published writer, Anne had what seemed like a bright future. In May 1940, however, Germany invaded the Netherlands.In the summer of 1942, the Franks went into hiding, in rooms at the back of Otto Frank's office building. Friends supplied the family with food and other necessities. In an autograph book she had been given for her birthday, Anne began keeping a diary. Her entries varied from schoolgirl observations to abstract thoughts about G.o.d and somber reflections on her family's plight.”In spite of everything,” she wrote in one entry, ”I still believe that people are really good at heart.”In August 1944, German security police raided the Franks' hiding place, apparently having been tipped off by an informant. The family was sent first to the Auschwitz concentration camp, then to Bergen-Belsen. There Anne died, apparently of typhus, a few weeks before the camp was liberated by British troops.After the war, Anne's father, the only family member to survive, recovered her diary from friends who had found it in the hiding place. He had it published, first in Dutch in 1947, then in English in 1952.Since then, the diary has been published in more than fifty languages, become the subject of plays and movies, and been widely praised for bringing to life the individual horrors of the Holocaust in a way that mind-numbing statistics might not.

On May 14, 1948, the last British troops pulled out of the region. About ten minutes after the withdrawal-literally-the United States formally recognized the new nation of Israel. The Soviet Union quickly followed suit. And the new nation's Arab neighbors promptly attacked. A year-long war ensued before the Arab nations grudgingly-and only temporarily-gave up the fight. More than six hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs fled Israeli territory to refugee camps in Jordan, Egypt-controlled Gaza, and Syria.The Jews had a homeland-and a whole new set of problems in the decades to come.Communists: UP AND ALL OVER UP AND ALL OVER On March 5, 1946, British leader Winston Churchill gave a speech in Fulton, Missouri. ”From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” he said, ”an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” Churchill's reference to the postwar spread of communism marked what many historians cite as the formal beginning of the cold war.Prior to World War II, the apostles of the Communist political philosophy had either been stymied by nationalist and/or fascist governments, or had confined themselves to consolidating power within the Soviet Union. But even before the war ended, Soviet troops were already positioning Communists into power in Poland and Romania. After the war, the Soviets, and eventually China's Communist government, began to seek to expand their influence even farther into countries that had been freed of j.a.panese and German authority.Some of the expansion was internal. In China, for instance, the Communist Party's members.h.i.+p grew from 4.5 million in 1949 to 17.5 million in 1961. But most of the expansion was directed outward. By 1961, Communist governments controlled not only the Soviet Union and China, but also most of Eastern Europe and much of Southeast Asia.Naturally, the capitalist West, led by the United States, took umbrage. The threat of the use of nuclear weapons by one side or the other-or both-made the cold war potentially the most deadly and horrific of all of mankind's conflicts. But the very threat of a nuclear ”hot” war reined in both Communist and capitalist interests from pus.h.i.+ng the other side too far or too hard.Instead of face-to-face confrontations, the two sides more often used proxies, backing factions in various third world countries, particularly in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Both sides plied the nonaligned nations with economic, military, and technological aid. Somehow, the third world countries rarely seemed to profit from all this attention.Soviets: WAAAY UP WAAAY UP One of the hottest fronts in the cold war was the compet.i.tion between the USSR and the United States to conquer s.p.a.ce. In 1957, the Soviets had jumped in the lead by successfully launching Sputnik, an unmanned orbital satellite. And on April 12, 1961, they decisively won the first-man-in-s.p.a.ce leg of the race.At 9:07 a.m., Moscow time, a 4.75-ton s.p.a.cecraft called Voltok 1 was launched from a field in Kazakhstan. In it was a twenty-seven-year-old Russian Air Force second lieutenant named Yuri A. Gagarin.Born on a collective farm, this son of a carpenter was selected for the flight in part because at five feet, two inches tall, he was a good fit for the tiny capsule. Another reason was his outgoing personality. During the flight, he whistled a Russian tune called ”The Motherland Knows,” the lyrics of which include ”the Motherland knows where her son flies in the sky.”By the time the capsule landed 108 minutes later, Gagarin had been promoted to major, a rank Soviet leaders thought more befitting the first human to fly into s.p.a.ce and come back alive.Gagarin's feat not only sped up the s.p.a.ce race, but also made him a Soviet hero and a worldwide celebrity. Monuments were raised in his honor, and streets-and eventually his hometown-were renamed after him.The Soviet success, while an inspiration to much of mankind, was unquestionably a black eye to the United States in its quest to win the hearts and minds of third world nations. ”America must wake up completely to the challenge,” declared U.S. senator Hubert Humphrey on the day of Gagarin's flight.

ANOTHER RACE TO THE TOP.

When the Tibetan government granted access to the tallest Himalayan peaks to the outside world in 1921, the climbers came calling. By 1953, seven expeditions had tried and failed to reach the tip of Mount Everest.In 1951, a British reconnaissance team found what looked like a promising route to the top, up the south face of the summit. Two years later, under the leaders.h.i.+p of a masterful organizer named Colonel John Hunt, a team of British climbers and Sherpa guides prepared to try the route.After establis.h.i.+ng nine camps along the way, the first two-man a.s.sault team gave it a try, using a closed-circuit breathing system that circulated pure oxygen. But the system apparently leaked, and they came up short.Two days later, on May 28, 1953, a team consisting of Edmund Hillary, a beekeeper from New Zealand, and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa guide, began a final push from a camp at 27,900 feet. Unlike the previous team, they used an open-circuit breathing system, which was much lighter.At 11:30 a.m., on May 29, Hillary and Norgay reached the summit. They shook hands, embraced, ate some sweets, left a food offering for the G.o.ds, and started down again after fifteen minutes.When they reached the base camp, according to expedition member George Lowe, the first thing Hillary said was ”Well, George, we've finally knocked the b.a.s.t.a.r.d off!”As of mid-2007, more than two thousand people from around the world had followed in their footsteps up Mount Everest.

On May 5, the United States sent navy commander Alan Shepard into s.p.a.ce, albeit for only 15 minutes and 115 miles. And on May 25, President John F. Kennedy announced that America would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade.The Soviets followed their satellite and s.p.a.ceman successes on March 17, 1965, with the first s.p.a.cewalk, when cosmonaut Alexei Leonov spent ten minutes outside his s.p.a.cecraft.In 1968, Gagarin was killed when his plane crashed during a routine training flight while he was re-qualifying as a fighter pilot. The following year, his outer s.p.a.ce accomplishment was eclipsed somewhat when the United States successfully landed men on the moon.Still, first is first, and Gagarin was first. Plus he was well named for his feat: Gagarin Gagarin is derived from the Russian word for ”wild duck.” is derived from the Russian word for ”wild duck.”International Teamwork: UP(ISH) UP(ISH) While the League of Nations had been largely a failure (mostly because it lacked any way to enforce sanctions or crack down on rogue countries), the anti-Axis states decided to give a nation co-op another try.As the war wound down, representatives from fifty nations met in San Francisco in April 1945. The conference hammered out a charter for a multinational group and called it the United Nations Organization (UNO). Apparently that acronym didn't work for the member nations, and it became known simply as the UN.The organization's formal birthday was October 24, 1945, after its charter was ratified by the Security Council, which was composed of the five big winners of the war: the Republic of China, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and the United States.

THE LAST WORD.

The United Nations has been the scene of some pretty memorable rhetoric over the years, but few have had as much wit and drama as this October 25, 1962, exchange between U.S. amba.s.sador Adlai Stevenson and Soviet amba.s.sador Valerian Zorin:”Do you, Amba.s.sador Zorin, deny that the U.S.S.R. has placed and is placing medium- and intermediate-range missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no-don't wait for the translation-yes or no?””I am not in an American courtroom, and therefore I do not wish to answer. In due course, sir, you will have your reply.””You are in the courtroom of world opinion right now, and you can answer yes or no.””You will have your answer in due course.””I am prepared to wait for my answer until h.e.l.l freezes over.”

”The charter of the United Nations which you have just signed,” U.S. president Harry Truman told the a.s.sembled delegates, ”is a solid structure upon which we can build a better world.”How accurate Truman was is of course in the eye of the beholder. There's no question the UN has been far more effective than the League of Nations. For one thing there hasn't been a major worldwide conflict since World War II. On the other hand, the UN has failed to stop several genocides and more than a few regionalized wars.The number of UN Member States has grown from 51 to 192, but not without controversy. In 1971, for example, the United States finally gave in to pressure and agreed to admit the People's Republic of China and throw out Nationalist China (Taiwan), which had been an original member of the Security Council.Polio: DOWN DOWN Give a University of Pittsburgh doctor some monkey kidneys, and you just might start stamping out a nasty contagious disease that particularly stalks children.Of course there are a few steps in between. The disease in question is polio, a viral illness that in about 98 percent of cases produces either no or only mild symptoms. In the other 2 percent, however, the disease can permanently cripple and kill.Although the disease dates back at least to ancient Egypt, its most extensive outbreaks occurred-unexpectedly enough-in industrialized countries during the twentieth century. The theory is that since it is most readily spread through contact with fecal matter, generations of hand-was.h.i.+ng kids didn't get exposed to it at an early age, when symptoms were likely to be less severe.The result was that by the early 1950s, there was a very big population susceptible to polio. In 1952, there were sixty thousand cases in the United States alone, with three thousand deaths. Millions of dollars in research funds were invested, and by 1955, an injectable vaccine developed by University of Pittsburgh scientist Jonas Salk was licensed for use.Salk's vaccine, grown in kidney tissue from rhesus monkeys, was used in ma.s.s immunization campaigns. By 1957, the annual number of polio cases in the United States had dropped to 5,600.In 1961, an oral vaccine developed by Dr. Albert Sabin was introduced. Worldwide vaccination campaigns through the World Health Organization have almost eradicated polio around the globe. In 1988, 355,000 cases in 125 countries were reported. By 2006, the total had dropped to fewer than 2,000, and was endemic in only 6 countries.SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE...

The Mighty Pen [image]

For dozens of years, mankind had searched for a reliable writing tool that used a quick-drying ink, didn't have to be refilled all the time, and wasn't too messy.Enter Lazlo Biro. In 1938, Biro was a thirty-nine-year-old Hungarian newspaper editor who had observed that newspaper ink dried fast but wouldn't work well in a fountain pen. Working with his chemist brother Georg, Biro came up with a pen featuring a tip with a freely revolving ball, and ink in a cartridge. They patented the idea in Paris in 1938.In 1940, the brothers, who were Jewish, fled Europe to Argentina, where they opened a ballpoint pen factory. A few years later, a vacationing American named Milton Reynolds saw the Biro brothers' pen and decided to bring it back to the United States-albeit without their permission. On October 29, 1949, the Reynolds pen went on sale at Gimbels department store in New York. It was a smash hit, with 10,000 pens sold in a single day-at $12.50 each.But the unreliability and expense of the pens cried out for further innovation. In 1949, two guys named Patrick Frawley, Jr., and Fran Seech came up with a pen that used no-smear ink and had a retractable tip. They called it the Papermate. In 1952, a French guy named Marcel b.i.+.c.h came up with a smooth-writing pen in a clear plastic barrel, dropped the last letter of his last name, and gave birth to the Bic.But the Biro brothers were not forgotten. In many countries, ball-point pens are still called biros, and September 29-Lazlo's birthday-is celebrated in Argentina as Inventors' Day.A Famous Formula He had the most ill.u.s.trious brain of the twentieth century-so maybe it was fitting that when he died, they took it out of his head to study it. In fact, it's just what Albert Einstein wanted.Einstein was born in 1879 in Germany. As a boy, he later recalled, his future course in science was set by two events. One was being mystified at the age of five by a compa.s.s. The other was an encounter-and subsequent fascination-with a geometry book at the age of twelve.After a circuitous education that saw him fail to finish high school but eventually allowed him to graduate from a Swiss university, Einstein tried and failed to get a job as a teacher or a.s.sistant to a scientist. He finally took a job as a clerk in a Swiss patent office.In 1905, while still working for the patent office, Einstein earned a doctorate from the University of Zurich. He also published four astonis.h.i.+ng papers on physics that year. Among other things, he posited that time slows down for an object at high speeds relative to a fixed point on earth, and that ma.s.s is just energy in another form, and energy is equal to ma.s.s times the speed of light squared...or E = mc2. (Remember what that stands for, and you'll be a hit at c.o.c.ktail parties.)Einstein eventually returned to his native Germany. In 1921, winning the n.o.bel Prize in Physics enhanced his worldwide fame. But Einstein was Jewish, and after Hitler came to power, the physicist and mathematician was certainly smart enough to know that his days in Germany were numbered. He accepted a job at Princeton University in New Jersey in 1933, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen.Although Einstein urged President Roosevelt as early as 1939 to develop a nuclear weapon-as a defense against the possibility Germany would develop a similar weapon-he was an ardent opponent of war. ”I do not know how the Third World War will be fought,” he once said, ”but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth-rocks.”

ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR WATSON.

In 1953, British physicist Francis Crick and U.S. biochemist James Watson used beads, wire, and cardboard to build their famous three-dimensional model of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.