Roosevelt was a Man of Action, not words. The public loved the way he took on the businessmen who ran the big monopolies, or “trusts.” Roosevelt would invite these men to the White House and speak very softly, forcing them to lean forward, straining to hear, whereupon Roosevelt would hammer them over the heads with a big stick (Nicknamed “Betsy.”) that he always carried. This was just one of his famous mannerisms, another one being that he often referred to the presidency as a “bully pulpit.” Nobody knew what on earth he meant by this, but nobody asked him, either, because of the stick. Of all Roosevelt’s achievements, however, the most significant, as measured by total gallonage, was:

In those days, there was no easy way for ships to get from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The usual procedure was for a ship to start picking up a head of steam as it went past Cuba, so it would be going full speed when it rammed into the Isthmus of Panama, sometimes getting eight or even ten feet into the jungle before shuddering to a halt. Clearly the United States needed to build a canal. The problem was that Panama technically belonged to Colombia which refused to sign a treaty leasing it to the United States. So Roosevelt sent a gunboat filled with marines down to Panama, on the off chance that a revolution might suddenly break out, and darned if one didn’t, two days later. Not only that, but the leaders of the new nation of Panama—talk about lucky breaks!—were absolutely thrilled to have the United States build a canal there. “Really, it’s our pleasure,” they told the marines, adding, “Don’t shoot.”

Over the next few years the marines in their role as Heavily Armed Ambassadors of Friendship and Fun, were to meet with similar outpourings of cheerful cooperation in Nicaragua, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and other Latin American countries that the United States decided to befriend as complete diplomatic equals in a spirit of mutual respect and without regard for the fact that we could squash them like dung beetles under a cement truck. We were a Happy Hemisphere indeed. It was time to think about branching out.

1. You know what really ticks us off? The way the Boston Celtics bitch and moan whenever a foul is called against them.

2. What does “all in all” mean, anyway?

3. How about: “by and large”?

The year 1908 saw the election of the first U.S. president to successfully weigh more than three hundred pounds, William Howard Taft, who ran on a platform of reinforced concrete and who, in a stirring inauguration speech, called for “a bacon cheeseburger and a side order of fries.” Another important occurrence in the Taft administration was the famous BallingerPinchot Affair, which is truly one of the most fascinating and bizarre episodes in the nation’s history, although it is quite frankly none of your business (Especially the part about the dwarf goat.).

After that not much happened until approximately 1912, when Teddy Roosevelt, who had gone over to Africa to unwind from the pressures of the presidency by attempting to kill every animal on the entire continent larger than a wristwatch, decided he wanted to be president again. So he came barging back and formed a new party, which was called the Bull Moose party so as to evoke the inspirational image of an enormous animal eating ferns and pooping all over the landscape. Despite this concept, Teddy lost, which is a real tragedy because a Bull Moose victory might have started a whole new trend of giving comical animal names to political parties, and today we might be seeing election battles between the Small Hairless Nocturnal Rodent party and the Stench-Emitting Ox party, and this country would be a lot more fun.

The winner in the 1912 election was Woodrow Wilson, known to his close friends as “Woodrow Wilson,” who garnered many votes with the popular slogan “Wilson: He’ll Eventually Get Us into World War I.” The appeal of this concept was so strong that Wilson was easily swept into office despite widespread allegations of vote-garnering.

Meanwhile, out on the streets, there was a lot of movement by “suffragettes,” a term meaning “girl suffrages.” The suffragettes, led by Susan B. Anthony Dollar, believed that women should be given the right to vote on the grounds that they Could not possibly screw things up worse than men already had. They ultimately achieved their goal by marching around in public, wearing hats the size of elementary schools, a tactic later adopted, for reasons that are still unclear, by Queen Elizabeth.

Another major social development of the time was the Temperance Movement, led by Carrie Nation, who headed an organization called Scary-Looking Women with Hatchets. They would swoop down upon saloons and smash all the whiskey bottles, then go back to their headquarters, fire up reefers as big as Roman candles, and laugh until dawn. This resulted in so much social turmoil that in 1918 Congress decided to have a total prohibition on alcohol, which was approved early on a Saturday morning by a vote of 9-2, with 416 members unable to attend because of severe headaches. Thus began the nation’s “Noble Experiment,” which was eventually judged to be a noble failure and replaced by the current sensible and coherent alcohol policy of showing public-service TV announcements wherein professional sports figures urge people not to drink, interspersed with TV commercials wherein professional Sports figures urge people to drink.

But all of this paled by comparison with international tension, which was—get ready for a bulletin here—mounting.

The major cause of international tension was Europe, which in those days was made up of the Five (or possibly Six) Major Powers: Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, the Ottomans, the Barca-Loungers, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an alliance between Australia and Hungary that was not really all that major a power but was allowed to participate in international tension anyway because it had some pretty good restaurants. These powers had spent roughly the past thousand years trying to see who could set the land speed record for breaking treaties with each other, and they had been involved in so many complex alliances and double crosses that in 1903, in one of the more hilarious moments in international diplomacy, France accidentally declared war on itself (And lost.). By 1914 Europe was, in the words of the bad writer Elrod Stooble, “a tinderbox with a hair trigger just waiting for the other foot to drop.”

And thus the entire continent was extremely tense and irritable, just generally in a bad mood, that fateful summer day, October 8, when a young archduke named Franz Ferdinand chanced to pass by the fateful spot where a young anarchist named Gavrilo Princip happened to be standing in a fateful manner, and, through an unfortunate quirk of fate, got into an argument over who had the silliest name. Not surprisingly, this caused Austro-Hungary to declare war on Serbia, only to be ridiculed by France, Great Britain, and Russia when it was discovered that there actually was no such place as “Serbia.” This discovery, needless to say, caused Germany to invade Belgium (one key lesson of history is that virtually anything, including afternoon or evening thundershowers, causes Germany to invade Belgium). Soon all of Europe was at war.

In America , the prevailing mood was that this was a truly dumb war and we should stay the hell out of it. Just about everybody agreed on this: the public, the press, barnyard animals, even leading political figures. Anybody who even talked about the possibility of the United States getting into this war was considered to be a cretin. In the presidential election campaign of 1916 (Often referred to by historians as “The Election Where Both Candidates’ Names Could Be Read in Either Direction.”), both President Woodrow Wilson and the Republican nominee, Charles Evans Hughes, went around stating in loud, emotion-choked voices that they were definitely by God not going to get the country into the war. So it was clear that the United States had no choice but to get into the war, which, in 1917, it did. And a darned good thing, too, because the official title of the war turned out to be: