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THINGS I WOULD DO IF I COULD CHANGE HISTORY [1]

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Date: 2023-04-11  

You ask a good many people, “What would you do if you could travel through time and change things,” and they give you the obvious answers: whack Hitler or Stalin, find out who really shot John F. Kennedy, or attend the world premiere of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

I’d like to change a bunch of things that seem little on the surface, but mean a lot to me, and would have a good impact.

Here they are, in no particular order:

Get British atomic scientist Harry Moseley out of the firing line at Gallipoli. He was one of the world’s brightest scientific minds, and he followed many young Britons filled with the same patriotism and loyalty to the Crown that I share, and volunteered to serve in the 29th Infantry Division up the line at Gallipoli. He was killed there. His sacrifice was a vast waste for science and the world. Therefore, I would deny his request to serve in the British Army at the front and post him back to Oxford or Cambridge to work on the scientific side of the war.

Build a good opera house for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, where he could conduct his own compositions. He would alternate between grand opera, the vaudeville, and other material (concertos, symphonies, and so on), earning at least half receipts. After paying staff and crew, I’d pocket the rest to pay off construction, mortgage, and other future time-travel programs. That way, he would have no money trouble, and would be too busy to drink heavily.

Buy a chunk of the New York Giants baseball team in the mid-1910s, and trade their crooked third baseman Henry “Heinie” Zimmerman in a straight-up deal to the Chicago White Sox for their third sacker, George “Buck” Weaver. That way, Zimmerman can help dump the 1919 World Series and get caught for it and Weaver doesn’t get caught in it, thus ultimately gaining a deserved plaque in Cooperstown. In real life, Zimmerman, “The Great Zim,” despite winning a Triple Crown in 1912 with the Chicago Cubs, was as crooked as they come, trying to get his teammates on the Cubs and Giants to throw games he was betting on. Zim was no loss. A great competitor and hitter, Weaver was a big loss when he was suspended for life after not actually dumping the 1919 World Series.

While I was at it, I’d use more modern marketing techniques to heat up the rivalry between the three New York baseball teams. Who knows? Maybe New York could still have three baseball teams today.

Prevent Jack Ruby from shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. Maybe if Oswald got properly jailed and tried, we’d get some answers as to his bizarre life, if nothing else. Personally, I agree with Vincent Bugliosi and his massively-researched book – Oswald did it alone. That guy was such a nutball, I can’t imagine anyone trusting him as a shooter or using him as a patsy or decoy for the “real” assassination attempt.

Ensure that “Star Trek: The Original Series” got three things it desperately needed: a better time slot, a bigger budget, and better writing. NBC didn’t know what it had on its hands when they shoved that show in the “coffin slot” on Friday nights at 10 p.m. It should have been on Sunday nights at 8 p.m., leading into the Sunday night movie. The props should have been better quality, and most importantly, some of those stories were ridiculous. The only things Lt. Uhura said was, “Hailing frequencies open,” and “Captain, I’m scared.” No wonder she wanted to leave the show. Women were “girls.” The final episode saw a nutball woman try to swap her body with Kirk’s and take command of the Enterprise. She was unraveled in her efforts because she acted like a high-strung soap opera monster, and ordered Spock, McCoy, and Scotty all executed on the hangar deck. Real strong stand for women’s equality there.

Provide Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with two critically important people: the first would be a supportive editor at The Strand magazine, who would ensure that the great author could alternate in each issue between Sherlock Holmes and his “real work” on other stuff. The editor would work to impress upon Doyle how the whole world was riveted to this detective, and was hungering for quality stories. The other person would be an ultimate “Sherlockian,” who would be a repository of both forensic and other crime solution techniques and Sherlock Holmes trivia. That person’s job would be to make sure that Holmes followed the “Canon,” and was consistent in everything from Watson’s first name (It’s “James” or “John” depending on the story), his wounds (shoulder or leg), and methods of solving crimes (real bicyclists challenged Doyle on “The Solitary Cyclist” and Doyle had to admit he was wrong). Don’t chuckle too hard. CBS/Paramount has a “Trekker” on the payroll to make sure that their new “Star Trek” shows don’t have Vulcans breaking into a Broadway song-and-dance (unless they have been infected somehow) or Jim Kirk revealing that he’s actually an Andorian. J.K. Rowling doesn’t have a “Harry Potter” fan on her payroll, but she’s admitted that she has reached out to her biggest fans to check with them and their websites to make sure she follows the world she’s built.

Get notarized statements from the Founding Fathers who wrote the Second Amendment to DEFINE WHAT THE HECK THEY MEANT. Either they wanted us armed to the teeth or they wanted our well-disciplined militia armed to the teeth. Not both. And nobody can tell me that the Proud Boys and Three Percenters are “well-disciplined.” When they faced judges, they admitted they’d been sucked into a deep hole by Alex Jones and QAnon, often had convictions for such non-political offenses as domestic violence and weapons possession or both, and suffered from a variety of psychiatric disorders that made them utterly unfit to dictate how this nation should be run. Great way to avoid personal responsibility and accountability, guys.

Force the City of New York to stick a crowbar in its wallet and FINISH the Second Avenue Subway when it was first discussed in 1916. They had no trouble demolishing the Third Avenue Elevated in 1955 to remove the Bowery drunks then and flophouses later and open the thoroughfare to expensive real estate development, but the Lexington Avenue Subway is jammed tighter than a sardine can. Ride it. I have.

Get the British Parliament to approve of their plan to create their version of Bismarck’s “Zollverein,” which would have put the entire Empire in a single Customs Union and act as a united economic force to better compete with their European rivals. Doing so would also spread prosperity to all of the Empire’s citizens, across the map.

Also get the British Parliament to pass legislation to address some of – if not all – of the most horrific social ills befalling the British working class of the Victorian Era. Their kids went to the mines at age 14, had little schooling, were barely literate, ate at just above the starvation level, and suffered in housing blocks that had one tap for the whole street.

And then do the same thing in America at the same time. The only people living in a “Gilded” style in the “Gilded Age” were the very rich.

Get Ulysses S. Grant some help with his issues with alcohol, for his own benefit. It would also prevent his slow public image slide of going from the hero who saved the Union to drunken incompetent general, corrupt president, and national joke. He was none of the latter three.

Snip apart the legendary “conjoined twins” Chang and Eng Bunker back in the 1840s. They were held together by a piece of skin, which had it been cut, would have done no damage. Instead, they lived an unpleasant life as walking freaks and circus exhibitions. They did earn enough to buy a plantation and own slaves, but the Civil War wiped out both. Chang died of a cerebral blood clot caused by a stroke, and a shocked Eng died two hours later, supposedly of “fright,” but mostly because his circulatory system ran into trouble in coping with having a dead brother connected to it.

Treat Ludwig von Beethoven for his deafness, so that he could hear the music he was writing and the applause of delighted audiences when it was finished with being performed.

This one’s deeply personal. In 1996, the Boston Red Sox decreed that Roger Clemens was no longer fit to pitch for them after a sub-par season. My favorite team, the Yankees, felt the same. So the Rocket went to the Toronto Blue Jays and won the Cy Young Award in 1997 and 1998. However, in early 1999, the Blue Jays decided they could not afford him and Yankee owner George M. Steinbrenner III realized his mistake, and Clemens came to New York in a trade for David Wells, Graeme Lloyd, and Homer Bush. My change would be to have the Yankees sign Rocket after 1996, put him in Pinstripes, and that would turn the 1997 Yankees into a pennant-winning team, the 1998 Yankees into an even greater team, and keep both Wells and Clemens happy.

Provide Johannes Kepler with a solar-powered calculator, so that he could take the observation tables of his mentor, Tycho Brahe, and develop his Three Laws in a more efficient manner. He even had to write out Pi to 20 digits to realize what it was. A calculator would do the job in seconds.

While I was at it, I’d get him a good lawyer to help bail his mother out of German prison. She was accused of witchcraft. She suffered immensely at the hands of official sadism.

Build 30-foot-high cast-iron lampposts in New York to meet later Department of Transportation requirements, so that more than 70 examples of these pieces of fine street furniture survive into the 21st century. The originals New York pedestrians see on their streets are only 18 feet tall. That height was rendered obsolete by massive traffic and trucks that are even more massive. Numerous cast-iron poles met unhappy fates at the hands of city officials determined to replace them with Donald Deskey’s modern tubular designs. He was a great designer, but the ornate cast-iron lampposts remain iconic New York images. They speak to the city’s history and traditions…standing guard over Broadway theaters and nightclubs…in the center of V-E and V-J Day celebrations in Times Square…providing Woody Allen and Diane Keaton with both a romantic scene backdrop and a movie poster in the film Manhattan…and lined up along 5th Avenue amid parades. The worst loss was the midget bishop’s crook at Hanover Square, which was small enough to stand under a Third Avenue El station. The best survivor is a baronial doubleheader where Hamilton Place meets Amsterdam Avenue near Hamilton Grange and CCNY. Check it out before an errant 18-wheeler smashes it.

Take measures in the Houses of Parliament to address the Potato Famine in an extremely humane manner in the style of the New Deal. Ireland and England are the right and left eyes of the British Isles. Much of the hostility that the Irish have towards the English is because the English botched up their response to the famine.

Get Gus Grissom, Ted White, and Roger Chaffee out of the Apollo 1 spacecraft before it exploded on the pad. The vital safety lessons would be learned, and Gus would gain his deserved place as the first man to walk on the Moon.

In a related note, have NASA and Morton Thiokol prevent the fatal Challenger Space Shuttle launch that day in 1986.

Save the two aircraft carriers USS Enterprise (from 1961 scrapping) and USS Hornet (from 1942 sinking at Santa Cruz and presumably later scrapping), so that these two distinguished American warships be preserved as museum ships. The first had a glittering war record and the second launched the “Doolittle Raiders.”

In a related note, do a better construction job on the 1930s carrier HMS Ark Royal, so that it wouldn’t get sunk in October 1941, continue to fight World War II, and…

…preserve her after the war as a museum ship at Portsmouth, near HMS Victory.

And yet another fabled warship…HMS Hood. Her major refit to receive armor on her upper decks was delayed three times. Yes, three times. She was supposedly needed in 1940 campaigns. Some of the delays were due to the military spending cuts of the 1930s. Yet she swung at her mooring buoy for most of that time. If she’d got the armor plate, that long-range salvo from the German dreadnought Bismarck may have damaged her heavily, but not sunk her. There are two Royal Navy battleships that should be sitting at Portsmouth (or Devonport, or some other harbor), as museums to honor every Jack Tar. Hood is one of them. The other is HMS Warspite, which set every endurance record for a battleship – shots fired, miles sailed, battles slugged, until USS New Jersey replaced her. However, Warspite has a record that New Jersey will never surpass: she was a flagship at the surrenders of not one but TWO enemy fleets: the German High Seas Fleet in 1918 in Scotland and the Italian Regia Marina in 1943 in Malta.

Find out precisely what happened on the bridge of RMS Californian on the night of April 14-15, 1912, with its slack and incompetent watch, and the weird behavior of its skipper, Capt. Stanley Lord, while RMS Titanic was sinking 10 miles away, firing off distress rockets, and sending SOS radio messages.

Put a greater media spotlight on the inconsistency, hypocrisy, and racism of American white men who rage and fume about “miscegenation” when a white woman and a black man are a couple, but seem to have no problem with the historic white male sexual exploitation of black women. This would extend from Ol’ Massa impregnating his entire slave row (all in one night, or so he tells his buddies at the saloon) to Strom Thurmond and other racist white bigshots fathering out-of-wedlock “mulatto” children and treating them like – well, not really dirt, just the “higher level” of slave or servant. They could work in the big house instead of hoeing in the fields, cooking dinner instead of harvesting it. Incidentally, I’m still caustically amused by one aspect of neo-Nazi Frazier Glenn Miller’s ghastly wasted life of racism, violence, hatred, and murder: he got arrested in a car while in flagrante delicto with a black male transvestite hooker. Miller claimed he was beating the heck out of the professional. Yeah, right. I think Miller had more issues than Time magazine.

In a related note, I’m aware that Thomas Jefferson suffered from Asperger’s and was therefore unable to make proper human connections in his life. I know all about Asperger’s, having written about it here. When you have Asperger’s, you have NO EMPATHY. Period. That probably prevented him from saying, “Well, Sally, I love you very much, we’re raising our kids together, I wrote a stirring document that says all men are created equal, and you look like a darker and smokin’ hotter version of my late wife, mostly because you’re her half-sister. Will you marry me?” I’d MAKE Tom MARRY Sally. (“When Tommy married Sally…” starring Sam Worthington and Zoe Kravitz) That would do more to end racism in America than Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey.

In yet another related note, I’d do my bit to end slavery by using the money I’d be earning now from all these profitable changes to purchase a good-sized plantation. First thing I’d do: turn the slaves into free employees, with salaries, health benefits, unionization, and education programs for adults and children (kids would not go into the fields to do work). I’d convert the plantation to rotational farming, to avoid cotton wrecking the land. I’d replace overseers with agronomists. Most importantly, I’d work to re-unite families that had been split up in sales, and convert the slave row into a clean and habitable “company town,” without the concomitant evils. We would have a modern-style company store, which would sell company coffee mugs. Employees would be paid in cash or checks. Other plantation owners would look at our clean, well-run, anti-racist, profitable, enterprise, and say, “Hmm, there are some good ideas over there.”

Solve the D.B. Cooper incident and Lindbergh kidnapping. I’m sick to death of the speculation and the stupid mysteries around them.

Speaking of speculation, put an end to the “Roswell Area 51” nonsense. It wasn’t visited by UFOs, it was where the Air Force tested Stealth bombers and fighters.

Prevent the shooting of John Lennon, mostly by “tripping over” that killer, so that he would be distracted, and unable to do it.

Introduce an ad campaign for a major “chocolate frosted sugar bombs” cereal that honors scientists, particularly Nobel Laureates, so that kids regard them as role models, instead of the Kardashian sisters.

Save Glenn Miller from his accidental death in World War II. The world needed him after it was over. A Korean War veteran observed on his return home from that conflict: “We left listening to Glenn Miller. We came home to Elvis Presley.” He – and the world – deserved to listen to both.

Get Hattie McDaniel a front-row seat for the premiere of “Gone With the Wind.”

Pull Boston Corbett out of the firing area at that farm in Virginia, so that John Wilkes Booth be taken into custody and face the court-martial he so richly deserved for that act of high treason…his whole family were abolitionists, by the way.

Put up better plaques at the Polo Grounds Housing Project to mark the site of that historic ballpark. They would honor some forgotten Giants of the 1900s: Christy Mathewson, John McGraw, Ross Youngs, Mel Ott, Bill Terry, and Carl Hubbell. I’d get kids to paint appropriate murals as well. If anyone wants to know why I want to honor these Giants, look up their names in Wikipedia or any of a dozen web sites, and be ready to let out a whistle as to where they stood on various major league record poles when they retired. Mel Ott’s 511 home runs made him first place in the National League when he retired in 1945, for example. Yes, today that’s pretty common. But in the 1930s, his bat dominated the National League.

In a related note, nearby stand the “Francis X. Bushman Steps.” Not even the New York Parks Department knows who he is. I’d make sure he got known better. Anyone who gets a stair-street named for him deserves to be honored.

Send an extremely intelligent Roman officer, not a stupid bully, to bring Archimedes to the Roman commander. The order was for Archimedes to be treated well. Instead some Roman legionary went there with orders to bring him in. The jerk thought it was “dead-or-alive,” not “alive and well-treated.” Archimedes was too busy solving some problem, so the legionary, angry at being “diss-ed,” killed the great mathematician. Immense loss. Archimedes proved the world was round.

Speaking of that, gently nudge Washington Irving to leave out that idea about Christopher Columbus “proving the world was round” from his book, “Father Knickerbocker’s History of New York.” Yes, most of the book was comedy and satire. But teachers are still spouting Irving’s drivel long after its expiration date. It should never have been launched.

Help the very Aspergian Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein to enable him to “play well with others.” In truth, his coldness came from the death of his wife due to a poisonous insect sting – if she had been treated properly, and lived, he would have been a warmer and nicer man. His other real problem were screwing up his press conference after stopping the Germans cold on the northern flank of the Battle of the Bulge and writing (“entirely in pencil in my own hand”) memoirs that infuriated his wartime American colleagues and readers. All that did was make Americans think – to this day – that the British were the real enemy in World War II, not Hitler.

Dr. Charles Drew invented blood plasma and transfusions. He died in an accident. Bled to death. No white hospital would treat him. I would get him in that ER and properly treated, even if I had to do it at gunpoint.

Resolve the big dispute between George Westinghouse and Thomas Alva Edison so that both would be right, at peace, and be widely recognized for their joint and separate achievements.

Fund Nikola Tesla’s laboratory in full. “Here’s the money, Nikola. Show me what you can do. And please don’t talk to pigeons in Bryant Park.”

Get Smokey Joe Wood of the Boston Red Sox proper (modern) treatment for his broken thumb in February 1913. I know, he was a member of the Red Sox, but he may have been the best pitcher in baseball history. Besides, he was pitching at a time when the Sox were winning the World Series anyway. If could have continued to pitch well, he would have gone to the Yankees in that big 1918-1920 fire sale Harry Frazee did that brought Herb Pennock, Carl Mays, and that fella named Ruth to New York.

Do the same for Herb Score. Gil McDougald’s liner hit Score in the face, ending the pitcher’s career, and devastating Gil’s psyche. Only losers there.

Transfer Christy Mathewson out of the Chemical Warfare Service during the Great War and assign him to that conflict’s version of “Special Services.” That would ensure that he would not get accidentally gassed and die of tuberculosis long before what should have been his expiration date.

Save his son’s life, too. There are no living direct descendants of Christy Mathewson, “The Master of Them All.”

A number of Shakespeare’s plays are lost to humanity because nobody transcribed them (they did only the ones we have). I would assign a skilled stenographer to take down EVERY SINGLE Shakespeare play, and have a team of typists provide us with clean copy.

Do something to address humanity’s fear of reptiles in general and snakes in particular. They are a pure good. If you don’t bother an alligator, a rattlesnake, or a cobra, they will LEAVE YOU ALONE. The rest will happily zap flies, eat annoying mice, snooze on warm wood or rocks, or stand or lie around and do a fatuous job of looking fierce. They make very peaceful pets. My Ball Python, named “Babe,” liked to wrap himself around my eyeglasses and sit there, keeping warm.

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