American Scraps

Nationalization of the Railroads

2020-04-10T17:00:00-07:00

For three years a century ago, we—you, me, all of us—owned all the trains, all the track, all the stations, all the routes in the United States. And it was fantastic.

By the time World War I broke out, American railroads were a mess. Over a quarter-million miles of track were divided among 441 separate companies. The trains themselves were all of differing standards, their workers were underpaid, and they couldn't even get to the Atlantic port cities to offload the $3 billion worth of munitions we were selling to the European war powers.

You consider a situation like that—redundant, tangled, inefficient, ungainly expensive, but relied-upon by every American—and you begin to wonder how much better it would be if we simply owned all of it, like we do with the Post Office or the TVA. Not 441 separate owners, but one, and you’re part of it. Woodrow Wilson had that same idea, and so, the-day-after-Christmas in 1917, he declared it. Just like that, the United States railroad industry—christened under the new name The United States Railroad Administration—was nationalized.

The advantages came swiftly. Section workers’ pay doubled, and their contracts enforced. Tourism was made better, cheaper, and more accessible to ordinary people. Better-designed, standardized, new trains were ordered—over 100,000 of them—and those USRA designs became the standard for the next three decades, long after nationalization ended.

We don’t nationalize much here in the United States. That makes us unique among the developed countries; health insurance (for those under 65), hospitals, airlines, freight trains, banking, energy companies, telecommunications, utilities—we leave that up to be executed-by and owned-by private firms. But as the USRA briefly showed us, there’s nothing unique about America that divorces us from the many, many benefits that come from democratic ownership.

(Special thanks to Arsenal of Democracy for their illuminating episode on the USRA.)

Instructional Films Dep’t Demonstrative Inking Session #2

2020-04-09T17:00:00-07:00

Join along as we ink—and talk about—those three freewheeling years in the early 20th century when all of us, together, owned the entire United States rail system. Click here to see the finished comic, and read more about this exciting experiment in economic efficiency!

Instructional Films Dep’t Demonstrative Inking Session #1

2017-09-27T17:00:00-07:00

Ppresenting the latest opus from the American Scraps Instructional Films Department: our first Live Inking Demonstrative Video, showcasing the sausage-making process behind this month’s strip about Lyndon Johnson giving his eponymous treatment to Vance Hartke. Be sure to stick around to the end, where I catch up with extraordinary illustrator and extraordinary human Josh Lynch, and talk about his stellar work illustrating a new book about the presidents.

Also: If you have questions or art that you’d like answered or shown-off in our next installment, send them in via Twitter or email!

Telephone Conversation Between Lyndon Johnson and Vance Hartke

2017-09-03T17:00:00-07:00

Lyndon Johnson wanted to do it all. Health care for the aged, the poor, the young. Schools. Highways. The environment. Cancer itself. Despite the awfulness of the tragedy that made him President, once he was in there was no time to lose. And his first order of business was to pass the Civil Rights bill that John Kennedy couldn’t. John Kennedy hadn’t been Senate Majority Leader.

Owing to parliamentary and political maneuvering, though, he couldn't get the Civil Rights Bill on the floor until the Revenue Act of 1964—a tax-cut bill— got out of Congress first. Which meant it had to be unstuck from the finance committee in-which it had remained stuck during Kennedy's term. Getting it unstuck would be complicated.

Why it was complicated—excitedly explained by the incomparable Robert Caro (skip to 31:00)—was because Johnson had to negotiate with his own side. Specifically, three Democratic senators, who were holding up the bill over an excise tax stipulation.

So Johnson grabbed the phone. Each senator would need to be swayed to the larger vision of why voting with the party here mattered: that it wasn’t really about excise taxes or tax cuts—it was about barreling forward to get to the Civil Rights Bill. Besides, this kind of cajoling was old hat for Johnson.

Except when it came to Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana. Cajoling him would mean hearing—as today's audio scrap colorfully records—his particular protestation about the excise tax: that it would affect Elkhorn, Indiana. Why? Because Elkhorn, Indiana was the nation’s capital of band instruments.

As Hartke was about to find out, the Johnson Treatment extended just as easily to phone.

Letter From James Buchanan to Abraham Lincoln Regarding Books

2017-02-19T16:00:00-08:00

Abraham Lincoln loved Edward Dickinson Baker. Mary Todd Lincoln loved Baker. (Their second son was named after Baker.) Baker’s fellow senators loved Baker, as did the people of the brand-new state of Oregon who’d just elected Baker. The troops who served alongside and under Baker loved Baker. Everyone loved Baker. It was hard not to.

All of which lends us a glimpse into how much his death must have affected Lincoln. You can sense it, secondhand, in the compassionate notes, poetry, and art that people who knew both-Baker-and-Lincoln sent him in his grief.

Senator (and Major General) Baker was killed in the Battle of Ball’s Bluff on October 21, 1861. He was-and-is, still to this day, the only sitting senator to be killed in battle. That battle, of course, was happening in the middle of a Civil War that—by autumn of 1861—was still revealing its worst, most violent, most awful scenes. It was only 6 months old, and would still take another 3½ nightmarish, blood-soaked years to end.

If you were looking for a person to singularly blame for the outbreak of that War—remember that the first states seceded before Lincoln took office—you could do worse than blaming his bumbling, indecisive, immediate predecessor, President James Buchanan.

Lincoln had every right to blame him. But what he couldn’t do was avoid him, as on the day of his beloved friend Edward Dickinson Baker’s death, when Buchanan wrote to Lincoln. It seems Buchanan had forgotten some books in the White House, and could they be delivered to him soon, thanks in advance.

Let us never forget that James Buchanan was a terrible post-president, too.

(Credit and special thanks to Robert Strauss, in whose very entertaining recent book this letter was brought to my attention.)

Elliot Richardson’s Resignation as Attorney General

2017-02-08T16:00:00-08:00

Last week, the President fired his Attorney General. While President Trump’s young administration has certainly been full of historical firsts (oldest president, “healthiest” president, steakiest president, etc.), this particular event—abruptly canning your own AG—wasn’t one of them. Last time it happened, the year was 1973, and the president was Richard Nixon.

By autumn, the investigation into Watergate was closing in on Nixon. It’d be another almost-year before he finally buckled, but one of big turning points in that process—and of the public’s impression of Nixon—happened as a result of October 20th’s “Saturday Night Massacre.”

Nixon, tired of special prosecutor Archibald Cox breathing down his neck, came up with a simple workaround: firing Archibald Cox. He ordered his Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, to do the job; Richardson refused, and Nixon demanded his resignation. Richardson’s deputy also refused, and was fired. (Third-in-line—a man called Bork who’d become relevant in the next decade—did the deed.) And, just to tie up any loose ends now that Cox, Richardson, and Ruckelshaus were all gone, Nixon ordered his FBI to seal their offices. And all of this happened, naturally, while Nixon was under investigation by the other two branches of government. The man was on a roll.

It was, in other words, a Constitutional crisis. The Constitution is a living, malleable document, sure, but it also assumes a series of norms that—bless its heart—aren’t always there in human nature.

Ultimately, Nixon lost his battle, but the war of expanding executive-branch authority would go on to succeed beyond his wildest—if posthumous—dreams in the years after the millennium.

(Oh, and the obsession with pineapple was real.)