The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [57]
Later that year McCarthy was severely censured by the Senate—a signal humiliation. He died three years later in disgrace. But the fact is that had he been just a tiny bit smarter or more likable, he might well have become president. In any case, McCarthy’s downfall didn’t slow the assault on Communism. As late as 1959, the New York office of the FBI still had four hundred agents working full time on rooting out Communists in American life, according to Kenneth O’Reilly in Hoover and the Un-Americans.
Thanks to our overweening preoccupation with Communism at home and abroad America became the first nation in modern history to build a war economy in peacetime. Defense spending in the fifties ranged between $40 billion and $53 billion a year—or more than total government spending on everything at the dawn of the decade. Altogether the United States would lay out $350 billion on defense during the eight years of the Eisenhower presidency. More than this, 90 percent of our foreign aid was for military expenditures. We didn’t just want to arm ourselves; we wanted to make sure that everybody else was armed, too.
Often, all that was necessary to earn America’s enmity, and land yourself in a lot of trouble, was to get in the way of our economic interests. In 1950, Guatemala elected a reformist government—“the most democratic Guatemala ever had,” according to the historian Howard Zinn—under Jacobo Arbenz, an educated landowner of good intentions. Arbenz’s election was a blow for the American company United Fruit, which had run Guatemala as a private fiefdom since the nineteenth century. The company owned nearly everything of importance in the country—the ports, the railroads, the communications networks, banks, stores, and some 550,000 acres of farmland—paid little taxes, and could count confidently on the support of a string of repressive dictators.
Some 85 percent of United Fruit’s land was left more or less permanently idle. This kept fruit prices high, but Guatemalans poor. Arbenz, who was the son of Swiss immigrants and something of an idealist, thought this was unfair and decided to remake the country along more democratic lines. He established free elections, ended racial discrimination, encouraged a free press, introduced a forty-hour work week, legalized unions, and ended government corruption.
Needless to say, most people loved him. In an attempt to reduce poverty, he devised a plan to nationalize, at a fair price, much of the idle farmland—including 1,700 acres of his own—and redistribute it in the form of small farms to a hundred thousand landless peasants. To that end Arbenz’s government expropriated 400,000 acres of land from United Fruit, and offered as compensation the sum that the company had claimed the land was worth for tax purposes—$1,185,000.
United Fruit now decided the land was worth $16 million actually—a sum the Guatemalan government couldn’t afford to pay. When Arbenz turned down United Fruit’s demand for the higher level of compensation, the company complained to the United States government, which responded by underwriting a coup.
Arbenz fled his homeland in 1954 and a new, more compliant leader named Carlos Castillo Armas was installed. To help him on his way, the CIA gave him a list of seventy thousand “questionable individuals”—teachers, doctors, government employees, union organizers, priests—who had supported the reforms in the belief that democracy in Guatemala was a good thing. Thousands of them were never seen again.
And on that sobering note, let us return to Kid World, where the denizens may be small and often immensely stupid, but are at least comparatively civilized.
Chapter 8
SCHOOL DAYS
In Pasadena, California, student Edward Mulrooney was arrested after he tossed a bomb at his psychology teacher’s house and left a note that said: “If you don’t want your home bombed or your windows shot out, then grade fairly and