Bizarre History (16 page)

Millions of schoolchildren in the United States start the day off with a half-hearted rendition of “The Pledge of Allegiance.” It’s an oath of loyalty to flag, country, and principles (such as states’ rights, small government, low taxes, etc.), but it was penned by a devout socialist. Francis Bellamy was a Baptist minister (who once delivered a sermon called “Jesus Was a Socialist”), Christian socialist, and cousin of socialist utopian novelist Edward Bellamy. The poem appeared in a popular children’s magazine in 1892 as a way to sell flags to public schools and boost the magazine’s circulation. Now
there’s
an American ideal we can all pledge to!

SIDE NOTE:
The original hand instructions for the pledge called for the right hand to be removed from the heart at the mention of the word “flag” and extended outward toward the flag. This ended during World War II because it looked too much like a Nazi salute.

Abner Doubleday wasn’t the biggest name to come out of the Civil War, but he was involved in many key battles as a Union officer. He is, however, one of the biggest names in baseball—known far and wide as the inventor of the game. Too bad he had nothing whatsoever to do with its invention.

A committee was formed in the early twentieth century to determine the origins of baseball. Instead of attempting to find the truth, the committee wanted a feel-good story that proved baseball was a red-blooded American sport. The report stated, “The first scheme for playing baseball, according to the best evidence obtainable to date, was devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839.” Their evidence was a single letter from a man named Abner Graves, a mentally unstable man who later killed his wife. A prolific writer, Doubleday left no notes or mention of even playing baseball. Also, he was at West Point in 1839, as his family had moved from Cooperstown the previous year.

In 1953, Congress set out to correct this inaccuracy by officially crediting the invention of modern-day baseball to Alexander Joy Cartwright, a volunteer firefighter and member of the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. He supposedly was the first to draw a diagram of a baseball diamond and write down the rules on which baseball is based. Legend has it he also taught the game to people he met while traveling to California during the Gold Rush. Though he did play for the Knickerbockers, there is written proof that the rules for the game already existed and that Cartwright’s descendants simply exaggerated his role.

So who invented baseball? Nobody. It evolved over time from a children’s stick and ball game played in England for centuries.

Now it’s no big stretch to say that a popular schoolyard chant is historically inaccurate, but since it’s all most people know about Lizzie Borden, it’s probably a good exercise to clear up the facts here. First off, Lizzie’s stepmother was the one murdered, and she only received eighteen or so whacks from an axe. Her father received only eleven. Also, though Lizzie was indeed accused of these murders, she was acquitted—mostly because police refused to use a newfangled crime prevention tool: fingerprinting.

On December 28, 1917, journalist H. L. Mencken published a fictitious history of the bathtub in the
New York Evening Mail.
In it, he wrote that the bathtub was introduced into the United States in the 1800s and that Americans didn’t take to bathtubs until President Millard Fillmore had one installed in the White House. He wrote it to “have some harmless fun in war days”; however, he soon began to find his “preposterous ‘facts’” in other newspapers, medical literature, and reference books. Mencken wrote years later: “The success of this idle hoax … vastly astonished me. It had, of course no truth in it whatsoever, and I more than once confessed publicly that it was only a jocosity … Scarcely a month goes by that I do not find the substance of it reprinted, not as foolishness but as fact, and not only in newspapers but in official documents and other works of the highest pretensions.”

Some historians think Mencken was up to more than some harmless fun. They believe that he was out to prove that Americans would believe any nonsense as long as it appealed to their imagination or emotions. Whatever his motives, this “fact” is still in circulation to this day.

Manuel Elizalde, Jr., a Philippine government minister, announced to the world in 1971 that he had discovered a Stone Age tribe that had had no contact with the outside world. The tribe, called the Tasadays, lived in caves, wore leaves for clothing, used stone tools, and didn’t have a word for “enemy.” The tribe was featured on the cover of
National Geographic
and received worldwide attention. After scientists started asking questions, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos declared the tribe off-limits. In 1986, after Marcos was deposed, a Swiss anthropologist and two journalists searched for the Tasadays and found members of a local tribe who said they pretended to be a Stone Age tribe at Elizalde’s instructions. However, in a different interview, two Tasaday members who had originally claimed they were bribed by Elizalde admitted they had also been bribed by journalists with “cigarettes, candy, anything we wanted—if we would say what he told us to.” So what’s the truth? No one truly knows.

In 1683, as one hundred thousand Ottoman Turks besieged the city of Vienna, the bakers of the city, who had to be up early in the morning to make the bread, heard what sounded like digging. Indeed, the Turks were attempting to tunnel under the city’s walls. The bakers raised the alarm and the Turks were unable to take Vienna before King John III of Poland showed up and drove them away. Legend has it that the bakers celebrated the end of the siege by creating a commemorative pastry in the shape of the Turks’ flag—a crescent moon. It was called a
kipfel,
which is German for
crescent
… now commonly known as the croissant. Meanwhile, the bakers, unable to contain their excitement, also created a new roll in the shape of a stirrup to honor King John. The Austrian word for stirrup is
bugel
—which is where we could have gotten the word
bagel.
Unfortunately, neither story is true.

There is no William Tell, and he didn’t shoot an apple off his son’s head.

Richard III, King of England from 1483–1485, was not a hunchback. Paintings of him were touched up after his death to make it look like he was. He also didn’t murder his brother, his son, or his wife. He can thank Tudor slander and a hack named Shakespeare for turning him into such a villain.

Here are two shockers: Vikings didn’t wear helmets with horns attached to them, and pirates didn’t make people walk the plank.

Most people in the 1490s knew the world was round. Columbus didn’t have to convince anyone. Also, the first European to discover America was Bjarni Herjolfsson in the late 900s.

Lady Godiva didn’t ride through the streets of Coventry naked.

“Ring Around the Rosie” does not refer to the Great Plague.