100 Mistakes That Changed History (31 page)

A quality problem lay beyond the increase in consumption. Alcohol became more frequently adulterated by toxic substances. If you make something illegal, you can’t protect the public from harmful forms of it. In addition, alcoholic beverages became substantially more potent; estimates suggest alcohol products on average contained 50 percent more alcohol than before Prohibition. Moonshine, white mule whiskey, and other dangerous beverages became common. A consequence of this was that the death rate from alcohol poisoning nearly quadrupled during the Prohibition era. While some Prohibitionists disregarded the effect on alcoholics and instead expressed hope that they were reaching out to younger populations through education, the average age of individuals dying from alcoholism fell by six months during Prohibition. Moreover, Prohibition encouraged the use of drugs, such as opium, marijuana, and cocaine as a substitute for alcohol. These are substances that many people would have never come in contact with until Prohibition.

The cumulative effect of Prohibition’s numerous failings was a shift in public opinion in favor of repealing the amendment. Repeal was particularly popular in cities. Despite Senator Morris Sheppard’s famous assertion that “there is as much chance of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment as there is for a humming-bird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail,” opposition became heated during the Roaring Twenties and at the start of the Great Depression. Eventually Franklin Roosevelt was forced to moderate the federal position on alcohol; he allowed the brewing of certain beers and light wines. This paved the way for full-fledged repeal in December 1933 with the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment. Roosevelt famously quipped, “I think this would be a good time for a beer.” The decision to prohibit alcohol was restored to individual state legislatures.

After the repeal of Prohibition, many of the problems it created were reversed. While many state and local dry laws stayed intact through the era of federal regulation, others were gone forever with the obvious failure of Prohibition. Crime syndicates and all of their related evils remained. The widespread use of illegal drugs continued to stay an increasing problem that has yet to find a solution.

The Noble Experiment of Prohibition was a mistake completely self-inflicted on the country by the federal government. It had consequences that still reverberate throughout American society. Prohibition was one of the largest domestic mistakes in American legislative history, and it negatively changed the United States forever.

62

MEANINGLESS GESTURE

When the United States
Invaded Russia
1918

Y
ou will never hear about it in the United States, but be assured anytime you discuss relations between the two countries with a Russian, the American army’s invasion of Russia will come up. Yep, that is correct, the time that the United States really did invade Russia. We landed, occupied a major city, and stayed for months. The entire fiasco started in 1918 during the last months of World War I.

In 1917, the new Bolshevik government basically surrendered to Germany and dropped out of the war. This upset the Allies as it potentially freed about seventy divisions of German troops that could be moved to the Western Front. President Woodrow Wilson decided that he needed to do something about this, preferably replacing the Bolsheviks with someone who would rejoin the war effort. Things were very unstable in all of Russia with the White Army fighting the Red and private armies fighting everyone. So it was decided to send a military force to Russia.

The expedition would consist of 9,000 soldiers commanded by a rather confused and soon frustrated Major General William Graves. General Graves’ previous position had been protecting San Francisco from German attack. This was not a job that prepared him for the task, but his appointment was convenient as the ships would sail from that city. Normally, sending thousands of troops halfway across the world involves meticulous planning and detailed orders. What Graves got was a short note. Vague and without specific orders, the note listed goals like “overthrow the Russian government” and instructions to avoid conflict when possible. Graves’ final orders came from the secretary of war, given in a Kansas train station and consisting of only “God bless you and goodbye.” With that, Graves rode to San Francisco, gathered up 9,000 men, most of whom had been garrison troops, and with virtually no heavy artillery sailed for Russia.

The purported excuse for the United States sending in the army was that they were there to assist in the evacuation of 30,000 anti-German Czech soldiers who had become unemployed when Russia dropped out of the war. They were known as the Czech Legion and were Austrian deserters who had been willing to fight against Germany and Austria for Russia. The men of the Legion were known to be making their way along the Trans-Siberian railway west toward its terminus at the city of Vladivostok on the Kamchatka Peninsula.

When General Graves and the doughboys arrived in Vladivostok, they discovered that there were just over a thousand British and another thousand French soldiers already there for the same purpose. There were also nearby about 72,000 Japanese soldiers who weren’t even faking a good reason. They were admittedly on the peninsula for the purpose of grabbing large tracts of Siberia for Japan. Japan in World War I was allied to Britain, France, and the United States. Also among the many groups running around with lots of guns was a Cossack army of more than 15,000 horsemen and a fluctuating number of other White Russian troops of widely varying quality.

The Czech Legion was there as well, but it hardly needed anyone’s help. The legion was not only firmly in control of the city of Vladivostok itself, but it had units occupying most of the stations and cities that the Trans-Siberian Railroad passed through. They were effectively running and maintaining the railroad and protecting it from everyone else. Made up of highly competent and well-armed veterans, no one wanted to antagonize the Czechs. This arrangement suited everyone as it meant the trains kept running and remained effectively neutral. However, it did enrage Trotsky, who issued an unenforceable order for the legion to surrender its weapons. The few times Red units had attacked the Czech Legion, they had suffered heavy losses and accomplished nothing. Once the legion had moved west along the railroad, there was little Moscow could do to them. So the last thing the Czechs wanted was help from the Americans. They had things completely under control and even provided the police who patrolled Vladivostok.

That all rather begged the question of what 9,000 American soldiers were doing in a city 5,000 miles from Moscow. To get any farther away from the capital while still being in Russia, the Americans would have had to have been treading water in the Pacific. Worse yet, the Yanks were under vague orders to overthrow the Bolshevik government, but the Bolsheviks didn’t control any territory within a thousand miles of them. But it was just as well since they weren’t supposed to shoot at anyone while overthrowing the government of a nation spanning nine time zones with a population of more than 20 million. So for months, Graves and his troopers did nothing. Well, they actually did a lot, but it all involved bars and brothels.

Eventually, some U.S. troops did assist in patrolling some of the railroad line and even had a few tense scenes with the local Cossack warlords. Finally, months after World War I had ended, the Czech Legion all gathered in Vladivostok and boarded ships sent by the French to transport them home. This left Graves and his Americans in charge of the city. But with the war over, their secret mission of regime change was meaningless. But the Americans hung on until they had been there for more than a year. Finally in November 1919, following the example of the British and French, Graves and his invasion force boarded boats and returned to the States. Casualties had been 137 dead in action, mostly from Cossack snipers and outright bandits, and 216 from other causes. These included accidents, illness, and a range of sexually transmitted diseases.

There never was a clear purpose to sending over thousands of doughboys and even less of a reason for keeping them in Russia for more than a year after the Great War had ended. All that Graves’ expedition accomplished was to enrich Vladivostok’s red-light district and antagonize the Bolsheviks by rubbing in their faces that they could do nothing about the foreign occupation of their largest Pacific port. What the expedition did accomplish was to cement a permanent distrust of all Western governments toward communist ideology.

63

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Lamarckism
1920

E
ven after Charles Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
was published, there was a good deal to be discovered about how animals evolved over time. Along with Darwin’s approach, which stated that nature favored variations that helped the individual survive long enough to reproduce, there was also Lamarck’s theory. He believed something that was subtly, but significantly, different. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck believed that animals inherited traits that were acquired by their parents. What he believed was that if an animal changed due to its environment, its children would inherit that change. This was no slow process of natural selection over millions of years, but one that could take place in a fraction of that period. For example, Lamarckism says that if you cut the tail off a lizard, that lizard’s offspring will have slightly shorter tails. If you cut the tails off that generation, the next generation of lizards would have tails that were even shorter. Eventually, if you cut off enough tails, the baby lizards will be born without one. This contrasts with how Darwin explained the giraffe’s long neck by stating that the giraffe’s longer necks gave them an edge in eating, and so they were healthier and had more babies who shared their long neck characteristic. Lamarck said that because the parents stretched their necks by trying to eat leaves high on a tree, their offspring were born with longer necks.

Almost every real scientist rejected Lamarckism because it simply does not test out in the laboratory: The tails stay long. Changing the body of an animal or the attitudes of one person does not change his or her genes. But the theory found acceptance in one nation in the 1920s. This was Soviet Russia. Lenin was aware of it and favored it. Lamarckism underlay his theories of how a state evolved and how communism could bring about a paradise on earth. In the 1920s, another leader decided that Lamarckism, no matter how scientifically bad, was correct. That made all the difference because that one man was Joseph Stalin. Why Stalin preferred Lamarck’s theory is obvious. Communism intended to change humanity and make it into something better. Under Lamarckism, all the horrors of the Stalin era were acceptable if they changed the next generation to be more communist, to be more aware and group-minded. And the generation after that would be even more communist thinking because their parents were forced to be. And in just a few generations everyone would be born good, selfless communists, and the need for the state would go away. If millions died being shipped to Siberia so that their farms could be collectivized, that was okay because in a few generations the descendants of those who remained would be perfect collective thinkers. This theory justified any action, because if you stressed or pushed humans in the right way, you could quickly change their very nature. The end justified the means.

By the 1940s, Lamarckism was the only acceptable view of evolution and genetics allowed in the Soviet Union. Pushed by a poorly educated animal breeder named Lysenko, any scientist who disagreed with the theory or attempted to use any other theory in their laboratories was fired or even sent to a gulag, where most died. With Lysenko in charge, politics, not science, was the basis of all scientific papers and teaching. Real genetics was effectively banned and ideology replaced experimentation. Another destructive result Lamarckism had on Russia came from its having been the basis of the techniques used to improve crops and in animal husbandry. This invalid basis guaranteed failures, which had to have added to the food shortages that recurred throughout the Stalin era. It was not until a full decade after Stalin died, in 1965, that Lamarckism was finally condemned publicly by scientists in Russia. The theory of Lamarckism was known to be just bad science by 1900, but its theories suited Stalin and justified his murdering millions of humans.

64

AIDING THE ENEMY

Irony
1926

T
he Treaty of Versailles severely limited the size and nature of the German army. The intention was to make sure that Germany was never able to again attack its neighbors. In this, the treaty failed miserably. The main reason was Germany quickly found a way to circumvent the restrictions. The irony of how they did this is that Germany and Russia both gained and lost terribly by cooperating. Not to mention the tragedy their actions later thrust on the rest of the world.

Within a few years of being forced to sign the Versailles Treaty, the German army chafed unbearably under its restrictions. Soon, they began to find a way around virtually every clause. The real breakthrough for the Wehrmacht was the Treaty of Rapallo signed in 1922 between Russia and Germany. The inspiration for the treaty was that both nations were being treated like pariahs by the rest of Europe. The Germans were maligned due to World War I, and Russia was hated for being communist. This new treaty called on both Russia and Germany to “co-operate in a spirit of mutual goodwill in meeting the economic needs of both countries.” While the treaty was publicly signed on April 16, 1922, the important part was the secret annex to that treaty signed the following July 29.