A Villain of American History - 02 March 2001

I don't suppose the name Elbridge Gerry strikes a resounding chord.

Governor of Massachusetts? No? No need to blush. I doubt the name means a thing to one American in a thousand.

There's just been a national poll published with a frankly shocking result. The simple question was posed: Name the four greatest presidents in American history.

There've been 41 of them. The 42nd is just come up to bat. So even an American no older than, say, 30 should be able to make a plausible guess.

Two years ago 30 prominent historians picked their four. They were: Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, George Washington, Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt.

Like any other expert list it's disputable but a pretty impressive quartet, not really requiring a vast knowledge of American history.

Well, listen to the result of today's national poll:

1. Ronald Reagan

2. John F Kennedy

3. President Bush the First

4. Bill Clinton.

What does this tell us? Possibly that very little American history is taught in the schools or not much listened to.

More probably that for the past generation or two books and study - yes, even on the internet - have left a far lighter impression on the public mind than television and Hollywood dramatisations of the lives and works of the presidents.

More than ever, I think, nations will live and draw their ideals - their standards of behaviour - from the dramatisation of famous myths.

I read the other night that when Churchill was writing his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, the historians who were helping him with the research were dismayed when he overruled their suggestion that he cut out the tale of King Alfred burning the housewife's cakes.

"No, no," he said, "it must stay. Myths are important, if not more than important than facts in the memory of a people."

I must say, on second thought, he has 4,000 years of history on his side. The plays of the ancient Greeks, through Shakespeare's histories, on to Oliver Stone's grotesque account of Kennedy's assassination may be pulsating drama but are mostly terrible history.

Still it hurts to know that most Americans' judgement of great presidents is that they resemble movie stars and are to be admired most for fighting a war or emerging unscathed from scrapes or scandals.

So back to Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts - a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a decent - notably conscientious - politician of the late 18th Century.

Nevertheless by the entirely innocent association of his name with a shady political practice he's been called an enduring "villain of American history".

This is how it came about. Since the invention of the American Republic a number of congressmen any state could send to Washington was directly related to the population - one congressman for one congressional district.

And a district was drawn on every map so as to enclose, as truly as possible, approximately the same number of people.

So you can see that from the beginning states were eager to increase their population and then claim that they would have to have two districts, so they'd have two congressmen instead of one.

It's easy to see how much ingenuity, cunning and plain fraud could be exercised in "re-districting", as it's called.

Well in 1811 a bill came before Governor Gerry - people pronounced it that way, "Jerry" - which rather drastically redrew the congressional districts of Massachusetts to favour the Democrats and rob the opposition of a seat or two.

The next election made the losers feel and sound like the Florida Democrats who recently howled that they'd been robbed of the presidency. It became a national scandal.

A drawing of the most shamelessly expanded congressional district was circulated as an emblem of crookery. It was a very odd shape.

The new district appeared, to the famous painter Gilbert Stuart, like some animal - a lizard perhaps. He looked at the map, he sketched in a few telling lines with a pencil and what he produced was the drawing of a salamander.

He shouted to the editor of a Boston paper who promptly said: "Salamander? No, no, no. Let's call it a Gerrymander."

The governor didn't really approve of the bill but reluctantly signed it, setting up that example of a "Gerrymander" as a new congressional district.

Ever since, and to this day, gerrymandering the size and outline of a congressional district in order to have one more congressman or woman is one of the most ardently practised of political exercises, especially after a national census.

Last year's census has just told us that we're now 280 millions. It also tells us where we live, what we do, how many religionists - as we say - how many heathens, loads of statistics on everything from the extent of divorce and the relative popularity rating of various sports - basketball way ahead as number one.

Whereas, to my deep dismay, it turns out only six Americans in a hundred have ever played golf, watched golf or read about golf.

I don't know what's going to be done about this. I see no proposal in President Bush's grand plan, which he unfolded the other night, for our emerging Utopia.

But the Bureau of the Census has many more fascinating statistics. Which group has the largest voting lobby? The steelworkers or the hairstylists? The hairstylists by an easy lap.

The most striking figure to come out of the report that follows on this 10-year census and one that would seem finally to doom the illusion of the United States as basically an Anglo-Saxon culture is the about the most populous state in the union: California.

It used to be, at the turn of the last century, in fact and then in song and story that the ethnic influence to deliver the first body blow to the dominance in society and government of the English and North Europeans, that invasion came from southern and eastern Europe - introducing into a land settled mainly by English, Dutch, Germans, Irish, Scandinavians, immigrants from Italy and Russia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania.

Many of them, an actual majority, being Jews fleeing pogroms, compulsory military service or the unremitting ordeal of ghetto exclusion and poverty.

It's only now - a century later - that Californians can begin to feel as the long-resident New Yorkers felt when 10 millions of central and southern Europeans descended on Ellis Island.

Now the startling statistic is about the West Coast and the continuing invasion of immigrants in the past 30 years, since - I suppose the main cause must be - since Communism took over China and successfully threatened Korea and Vietnam and Hong Kong.

It used to be New York City that beckoned the downtrodden European with its mythical promise of streets paved with gold.

Now it's California that to desperate or enslaved Asians, and poor South and Central Americans, California is, as the old Gold Rush song had it, the promised land.

In short the report of the census bureau reveals that since the 1990 census the population of California alone has increased by 10%, by more than three million.

Certainly not only is it the state closest to Asia and Central America but it has something for everybody.

Eight hundred miles long, an average of 150-200 miles wide, five climates - everything from cold, dank lumber country to burning desert, to perpetually snow-capped mountains, vast forest, millions of acres for every conceivable temperate and sub-tropical crop - and since the Second War a steel and other industries and it has become the centre of computer manufacture.

The projection of the census bureau is that by the end of this year California will be the first state with the majority of the population - 51% - non-white. The new majority is made up of Asians, Mexicans, Colombians, other Central and Southern Americans and of course blacks.

The eventual political and social effects of this stunning figure can only be guessed at. Not by me.

But I can guess, ominously, about another matter of high seriousness arising from the fact that you need for an 18-hole golf course about 120-130 acres.

Another figure in the census bureau report is that among the Western industrial countries the United States is the most fertile, just about doubling its population in 50 years.

The Californian population bulged so alarmingly about 35 years ago that the state thought of exercising the doctrine of "eminent domain" - of buying private golf courses for what is known as "best possible use" - providing, for instance, for poor children of the inner cities to desport themselves instead of confining them to weedy plots in the slums.

The day may come when America will have to make up its mind whether it wants golf for the few and planned parenthood or overturn the abortion law, have lots of babies and the heck with golf and the spotted owl.

Why this sudden devotion of mine to the public interest over self-service? Oh I forgot to tell you. Recently I wrote a letter to the president and secretary of my own, beautiful San Francisco golf club.

It said: "On the passage of my 92nd birthday a strange feeling of peace has come over me.

"It is the peace, the Reverend PG Wodehouse tells us, that 'passeth all understanding. It is the peace of a man who has given up golf.' "

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