Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (92 page)

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

G
ERRY
S
PENCE,
attorney for Randy Weaver,
in
From Freedom to Slavery
(1995):

These are dangerous times. When we are afraid, we want to be protected, and since we cannot protect ourselves against such horrors as mass murder by bombers, we are tempted to run to the government, a government that is always willing to trade the promise of protection for our freedom, which left, as always, the question: How much freedom are we willing to relinquish for such a bald promise?

Written in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, Spence’s words were eerily prescient. Seven years later, in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the scenario Spence described in discussing the Oklahoma City bombing would also be the Bush administration’s reaction to the new terrorist threat.

America in 2000: A Statistical Snapshot

The U.S. Constitution requires a census to be taken every ten years for the purpose of apportioning seats in Congress. The first U.S. census was taken in 1790, shortly after Washington became president. It took eighteen months to complete and counted 3.9 million people.

As the nation grew, so did the scope of the census. Questions about the economy—factories, agriculture, mining, and fisheries—were added over the decades. In 1850, census takers asked the first questions about social issues. In 1940, the Census Bureau began using statistical sampling techniques. Computers came along in 1950.

Census 2000 showed that the resident population of the United States on April 1, 2000, was 281,421,906, an increase of 13.2 percent over 1990. Women held a slight advantage over men (143,368,000 women to 138,054,000 men). This increase of 32.7 million people was the largest total census-to-census population increase in U.S. history, exceeding even the “baby boom” jump of 28 million between 1950 and 1960. The fastest-growing region in the U.S. was the West; the fastest-growing states were Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, and Idaho. The largest state, California, recorded the largest numeric increase, with 4.1 million people added to the state’s population. Reflecting the movements west and south, the nation’s population center, a statistical measurement of where the “middle” of the country is, moved 12.1 miles south and 32.5 miles west, to a point near Edgar Springs, Missouri.

The Census Bureau also keeps a running estimate of the U.S. population. Taking the 2000 census as a starting point, the clock assumed one birth every 8 seconds; one death every 14 seconds; a net gain of one international immigrant every 34 seconds and one returning U.S. citizen every 3,202 seconds. That results in an overall net gain of
one person every 11 seconds.

In political terms, the 2000 census meant changes in the makeup of Congress as 12 of the 435 House seats were reallocated to account for the population shifts, with most of the new House seats moving to the South and West from the North and Midwest.

Winners (State and number of new House seats): Arizona 2; California 1; Colorado 1; Florida 2; Georgia 2; Nevada 1; North Carolina 1; Texas 2.

Losers: Connecticut 1; Illinois 1; Indiana 1; Michigan 1; Mississippi 1; New York 2; Ohio 1; Oklahoma 1; Pennsylvania 2; Wisconsin 1.

Since the Electoral College is based on the number of seats in Congress, these changes would also affect the 2004 presidential race.

The American dream had also changed. The well-packaged and expertly marketed 1950s vision of Dad, Mom, two kids, dog, house, and two-car garage was a thing of the past—a romantic notion that barely ever existed in America. The new American household was smaller. Married-couple households declined to just a little over half of all households. People living alone, the second most common living arrangement, rose to more than a quarter of all households.

Single-mother households remained at 12 percent of all households while unmarried men increased to 4 percent. And 5 percent of all households were unmarried-partner households.
Leave It to Beaver
was on its way to becoming an endangered species in America.

The nation was also getting older. The median age in the U.S. in 2000 was 35.3 years, the highest it has ever been. That increase reflected the aging of the baby boom generation, those born between 1946 and 1964.

Although people thought of the 1990s as the decade of economic prosperity, eleven states experienced increased poverty. In terms of weekly wages, census data showed that most gains were made by those already earning the most, with the lower wage earners making much smaller gains. In other words, the rising tide lifted all the boats, but some boats were lifted a little higher. Or as one of the pigs in George Orwell’s
Animal Farm
, put it, “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

Most shocking of all was the fact that child poverty remains one of America’s most stunning failures. Overall, the nation’s official child poverty rate fell to 16 percent, which is still above the lows of the late 1960s and 1970s when it was around 14 percent. Even with reduced childhood poverty, the United States lags behind most other wealthy nations. America’s poorest children have a lower standard of living than those in the bottom 10 percent of any other nation except Britain.

And in a country whose political leadership routinely says, “No child will be left behind,” American infant mortality rates ranked 33rd in the world, only slightly better than Cuba’s. Eighteen percent of women in America received no prenatal care. Fourteen percent of children had no medical care. The vaunted Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which promised to move people from “welfare to work,” succeeded largely in putting people in jobs that left them officially poor or close to the poverty line. And just to be clear on what the government considers poverty, in 1999, the threshold for a family of four was $16,954, approximately what an average Wal-Mart employee receives annually for a forty-hour workweek.

The 2000 census depicted a more racially diverse America. For the first time, respondents were allowed to select one or more race categories, and nearly 7 million people (2.4 percent) took advantage of the opportunity. Of the other 275 million who reported only one race, 75.1 percent reported white; 12.3 percent black or African American; 0.9 percent American Indian or Alaska native; 3.6 percent Asian. A separate question collected information on Hispanic or Latino origins. Hispanics, who may be of any race, totaled 35.3 million, or about 13 percent of the total population.

Yet widespread patterns of segregation of whites and minorities continue in America, in spite of the improvements in income and education for minority Americans. And home ownership remained a sore point with minorities, who are much less likely to own their homes—generally considered the golden ticket to the American dream.

Was there any good news for America? Well, the 2000 census showed that Americans who relied on outhouses and bathtubs in the kitchen had fallen below the one million mark for the first time in American history.

More significantly, ten years after the Los Angeles rioting that followed the acquittal of four white policemen in the savage beating of a black man named Rodney King—resulting in one of the worst racially motivated riots in American history—the progress is worth noting. Under the George W. Bush administration, the two highest-ranking members of the American foreign policy team were black. Perhaps even more astonishing, they were black Republicans! One of them, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, is a black woman. The other, Colin Powell, is the child of Jamaican immigrants who, having benefited from affirmative action policies, as he is quick to point out, rose through the ranks of the American military to become the highest-ranking officer in the Pentagon under George Bush and then the first black secretary of state. There is no doubt that Colin Powell would have been a credible presidential candidate had he chosen—or if he ever chooses—to run. The institution that cultivated Colin Powell, the American military, is generally credited with being the most successfully integrated institution in American society.

Also among the growing number of black corporate leaders, the heads of American Express and AOL Time Warner, the world’s largest media company, are black men. The daughter of sharecroppers was named to head Brown University, one of the most prestigious jobs in the academic world. The most powerful, influential, and widely admired woman in American media—and perhaps in all America—is Oprah Winfrey. At the 2002 Academy Awards, history was made when two black performers, Denzel Washington and Halle Berry, received Oscars. Two more of the most widely admired Americans are athletes who need only be mentioned as Tiger and Michael. In other words, America has moved beyond tokenism in some very visible and meaningful ways.

Of course, social mobility, corporate power, sports and entertainment achievements, and political office are only part of the story. Much of America still resides in very separate black and white worlds. Poverty and unemployment still affect minorities in much greater numbers than in white America. The question of how those disparities can be addressed is still a troubling one for America. Affirmative action policies, which have been used to address the inequities of the past, have come under increasing fire for being unfair “quotas” that solve past discrimination by discriminating against deserving whites, in either college admissions or business practices. At another end of the spectrum, there are serious black scholars who feel that the United States should still pay “reparations” to the descendants of American slaves, just as Japanese Americans imprisoned during World War II by the government were reimbursed, and families of Holocaust victims have received reparation payments.

Native Americans also lay claim to deserving more from the government for the treatment their people received over the centuries.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

Bin Laden Preparing to Hijack U.S. Aircraft and Other Attacks.

—Presidential daily briefing provided to President Clinton in 1998.

Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.

—Headline of a presidential daily briefing provided to George W. Bush on August 6, 2001.

At 8:46 on the morning of September 11, 2001, the United States became a nation transformed.

—“Executive Summary,” The 9/11 Report (June 2004).

9/11: What really happened?

In the spring of 2010, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former mayor of Teheran, who was elected president of Iran in 2005 and whose animosity toward America and the Western world in general has been well documented, announced on Iranian state television that “September 11 was a big lie and a pretext for the war on terror and a prelude to invading Afghanistan.” Over the years, President Ahmadinejad had also called the Holocaust a “lie,” and many of his Iranian compatriots as well as other Muslims believed him.

But in the case of 9/11, there are a surprising number of Americans who agreed with the Iranian leader. As the ninth anniversary of the terror strikes aimed against the United States approached, many Americans continued to believe that they didn’t
really
know what took place on 9/11.

Almost since the day they happened, the events of 9/11 have spawned a wide range of conspiracy theories, spread through books and on the Internet. Some of the most extreme conspiracy theorists suggested that the United States government, perhaps in collusion with the owner of the “Twin Towers” of the World Trade Center, staged the 9/11 attacks. For a variety of suggested reasons, they contend Americans were behind the awful destruction of September 11, 2001, one of the most significant events in recent American history, a disaster that directly led America into two wars and into an era of fighting global terrorism that profoundly affected life and politics in America as well as the rest of the world.

A national commission, established by Congress only after intense pressure from the families of September 11 victims, attempted to answer many of the questions that Americans had about the attacks: about Al Qaeda, the organization that had planned and carried them out; about the response of the government and especially the intelligence community to the threat of terror; and, finally, about the aftermath of the most deadly attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor.

The coordinated attacks came on the morning of September 11, 2001, when a group of nineteen hijackers, all of them Arab men, seized four commercial airliners and crashed two of them into the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan (site of an earlier Islamic terrorist bombing in 1993), and a third into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. The fourth plane was presumed to be heading toward another target in Washington, D.C., possibly the White House, when the passengers and crew attempted to retake the plane and it crashed into a field near Shanksville, in rural Pennsylvania, killing all on board. The total number of victims in the attacks is officially listed as 2,973, with others claiming that a number of rescue workers at the World Trade Center site have died from ailments that came as a result of their work at the site—in essence, “collateral damage” from the hijackings.

Within minutes of the hijackings and crashes, the FBI opened what would become the largest criminal investigation in American history. Within seventy-two hours, the identities of the hijackers were known. All were from Arab nations: Saudi Arabia (eleven of the men were Saudis), United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, and Egypt. The specific planning of the attacks was attributed to a man well known to American intelligence, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who grew up in Kuwait, attended college in the United States—where he had earned a degree in mechanical engineering in 1986—and eventually entered the anti-Soviet jihad (“holy war”) in Afghanistan. (KSM was captured in Pakistan, transferred to the controversial “detainee” American prison built in Guantánamo, Cuba, and at this writing was awaiting trial. He has, according to official accounts, confessed to planning the 9/11 attacks along with a number of terrorist acts that were either foiled or carried out.)