Most
Overrated Event in This Century: My first choice would be
something of a nonevent: the failure of the United States to join
the League of Nations following World War II. Despite the popular
mythology associated with this decision, it is unlikely that its
reversal could have blocked the road to the Second World War.
Joining the League would not per se have prodded America out of
its traditional isolationism. Without a considerably larger army
and navy, the United States could not have done much to deter
the expansionism of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial
Japan. There is little to indicate that joining the League would
have altered the American people's traditional sense of their
historical role, and the immense problems of the Great Depression
would have turned even the most worldly administration inward.
And even if the United States had been ready, willing, and able
to confront the Axis powers, it is doubtful that Great Britain
or France would have countenanced any such American attempt to
lead in Europe. In the 1930s both nations were still world powers,
and the politics and technology of the time would have made any
effort to bypass them all but impossible. As a close second for
the most overrated event, I would pick the Yalta Conference. The
received history of this event is mostly the product of a partisan
attempt to smear the memory of Franklin Roosevelt. It is useful
to remember that no territory was "surrendered" at Yalta that
was not already under the occupation of the Red Army. Indeed,
the agreements reached there stipulated free elections for the
prostrate nations of Eastern Europe, and Stalin's creation of
the Eastern bloc was in willful disregard of what he had promised
at Yalta. It is difficult to see how Roosevelt or anyone else
could have prevented such an event, short of at least the threat
of war and it would have been a perilously empty threat, to push
a weary nation on into more years of slaughter for the sake of
liberating a group of small Eastern European states that had never
known much beyond oppressive dictatorship. This is not to minimize
the suffering in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania,
and the Baltic states during the Cold War, but merely to point
out that it was all but inevitable until circumstances changed.
Most
Underrated Event in This Century: To remain with U.S. foreign
policy, I am tempted to name either the signing of the Five-Power
Naval Treaty in 1922 or the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The
way in which the Five-Power Naval Treaty distributed capital-ship
strength among the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy,
and the empire of Japan went a long way toward ensuring that there
would be a war in the Pacific. By limiting the United States and
Britain to a capital-ship strength of 525,000 tons, France and
Italy to 175,000 tons, and Japan to 315,000, the signers ensured
Japan naval superiority in the East and simultaneously enflamed
resentment there against a West that would keep it a second-rate
power. By focusing solely on battleships, the treaty also determined
how the next war would be fought, giving a new impetus to the
development of submarines, cruisers, destroyers, and that brand-new
species the aircraft carrier. Scientific estimates differ greatly,
but the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty may well have saved thousands
if not millions of individuals from premature death by significantly
limiting the amount of radioactive material that would have otherwise
been released into the Earth's atmosphere.
If
I were to depart from the foreign policy theme, though, and choose
an underrated event that is scarcely one event at all, so much
as a series of events and policies, I would choose the passage
of the Great Society acts. No other government program in the
American century has done so much for so little and been so maligned.
Contrary to all the propaganda, the combined initiatives of the
Great Society cost a relative pittance; the national budget was
still balanced when Lyndon Johnson left office in 1969. In return
the Great Society was one factor that helped cut real poverty
in half in the United States, from 22 percent in 1959 to 11 percent
in 1978. Medicare provided health care for the elderly, and Medicaid
provided it for the poor. Head Start and other educational spending
enabled thousands to get to college; the Job Corps, a higher minimum
wage, and food stamps helped the working poor to get by. The first
significant national environmental standards and cultural grants
gave us something beyond what dollars could measure. Even Johnson's
much-criticized community-action programs provided new employment
in some of America's poorest neighborhoods.
Overlooked
today is the fact that not one of the benefits provided under
the Great Society was what is generally thought of as "welfare"
by the public. That is, not one was a "dole" of money handed out
to able-bodied, unemployed people in lieu of earned income. All
of it went for health, education, job training, or works programs.
Perhaps most important, though, were the civil rights aspects
of the Great Society, embodied by the Civil Rights Act (1964),
Voting Rights Act (1965), and generally forgotten Federal Fair
Housing Act (1968). They set the federal government squarely against
racial prejudice and discrimination for the first time and prevented
untold racial animosity, rancor, and even bloodshed in the supercharged
atmosphere of the late sixties and early seventies.
© Copyright Forbes Inc. 1999
