The Unpopular History of the United States by Uncle Sam Himself/Chapter 1
I
UNCLE SAM GETS STARTED
Now, my son—Uncle Sam rolled up his sleeves and started—sit down and plug away on that typewriter while I talk. Make your machine rattle the same as chickens picking corn off a tin roof. I'm a right tolerable long-winded windmill, and sizzling with things that must be got out of my system.
The woods are full of folks—and the cities, too—full of good folks who don't realize that we are having a war, a strictly business war that will spare no home in the land. They must realize it, and realize it right now. I’ve got a job for every man, woman and child in America, a job to be learned and done—efficiently.
They don’t see it yet. They have got the notion that nobody dares tackle them, that we are some punkins in a scrap, and can whip both sets of allies in our spare time, say, between breakfast and dinner, which makes a fellow strut and feel good, but lays him liable to a jolt.
Our folks have been thinking it was not necessary for us to do anything, and of course Congress trailed along behind. That is why nothing had been done up to a year ago. But the people are waking up, and putting alarm clocks under Congress. Mind you I am not blaming anybody in particular. I am just saying what’s what.
Our people don’t know because they have not been told at all, or been told wrong, and that’s the main trouble. School books teach our children that we have won all of our wars, just as easy as falling off a log, and if a foreign army invaded America, grandfather would reach around, get his scythe blade, and clean ’em up.
One time I knew a justice of the peace to be elected on the platform that he could take a lightning bug, on the end of a corn cob, and bluff the machine-made armies of Europe into the Atlantic Ocean. Maybe he could. But machine-made armies won’t fight with corn cobs and lightning bugs. Rules have changed.
Plenty of grown men believe that still. It is part of public opinion, and helps to shape the policy of this nation.
Some of these days I am going to jump on those “popular school histories” and put them out of business. Publishers print ’em to make money, and folks won’t pay good money for medicine that tastes bad. Just call this the “Unpopular History,” and maybe we can’t give it away. But I want to tell the truth to every fifteen-year-old boy in the United States, want to make every member of Congress read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it.
Listen, my son, listen to a plain talk, straight from the shoulder.
We Americans love bunk. I know what I am talking about. We do love bunk. We just nationally eat it up—a stuff that’s not too bright or good for Yankee nature’s daily food. Of all the bunk that we are fed upon, none is grabbed more greedily than the 4th of July oration about our fighting citizenship, and a rush to arms. We are the fighting citizenship; we are the patriotic rushers. We are the original patentees, progenitors, and extemporaneous guardians of freedom! We are it!
Nothing tickles our American vanity so much as being patted on the back for natural born warriors who can lick the world just for pastime. The perspiring 4th of July orator pumps us full of heroic hot air, which pleasingly distends our hides with manhood, and we elect the orator to Congress. He goes to Congress on that platform, and sticks by it—which is good politics. Poets sing of triumphant liberty and school books teach of tyrants trembling before the musketry of embattled farmers. Thereupon the spectacled historian comes along to clinch these patriotic fakes with unassailable statistics. All of which is strictly for home consumption. Exported bunk does not pass at par. Soldiers beyond the seas know a darn sight better, and they’ll show us better if we don’t wake up.