What Were They Thinking? New & Revised: Really Bad Ideas Throughout History (1 of 3 free samples)

---

COPYRIGHT
What Were They Thinking? New & Revised: Really Bad Ideas Throughout History by Bruce Felton. Copyright 2003, 2007 by Bruce Felton
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

---

Next

What Were They Thinking? New & Revised: Really Bad Ideas Throughout History

by Bruce Felton

For Judy, Judith & Ben

INTRODUCTION

What could Tommy Dorsey have been thinking in 1940 when he installed his orchestra in the Monkey House of the Philadelphia Zoo to perform a concert for the apes?

Could artist Rudy Giacomo have been serious when he proposed building a 39-mile manicotti around Manhattan Island?

Was the Nobel Prize Committee on drugs when they conferred the 1949 prize in Medicine on the man who perfected the lobotomy?

Such are the questions that arise whenever we contemplate a truly ghastly idea. Depending on their nature, scope, and impact, bad ideas amuse, horrify, and surprise us. But most striking is their power to bewilder: What could possibly have prompted Plennie Wingo to walk backwards from Fort Worth to Istanbul? Why in God's name would baseball great Ted Williams have agreed to let his son store his earthly remains in the high-tech equivalent of an Amana freezer?

Admittedly, What Were They Thinking? is short on answers. Within these pages, my aim has not been to probe the motives behind bad ideas, but simply to recount and, above all, revel in them.

First, of course, they had to be identified. No problem there: Bad ideas are everywhere--they're the tile grout of history, the crabgrass of civilization, poking up through every crack in our thinking. According to government statistics, they outnumber good ideas 600 to 1. Indeed, for every bad idea lovingly recorded in these pages, there are dozens, equally worthy, that simply had to be excluded. Biosphere, Tonya Harding, the designated-hitter rule, the color-coding of terrorist threat levels, telemarketing, the Crusades, the butterfly ballot, Prohibition, the attack on Fort Sumter, Ishtar, Adam's apple fixation, the 1975 Metric Conversion Act, the O. J. acquittal, genetically engineered foods, the hiring of the Hell's Angels as security guards at Altamont. . . . The harsh reality is that it's only encyclopedia editors who are immune from the tyranny of word counts and allowed to cover the waterfront; compendium writers are faced with Solomonic decisions at every turn.

Still, I've tried to cram several hundred harebrained schemes, fool notions, and misguided obsessions both grandiose and mundane into What Were They Thinking? In these pages you'll read about one man's effort to market a board game based on the Lebanese civil war . . . an Iowa State University professor's proposal to blow up the moon . . . and Senator Victor Biaka-Boda's ill-considered campaign trip to the Ivory Coast hinterlands. (Not only did he lose the election, his constituents ate him.)

Astute readers will note that, with apologies to Tolstoy, every unsound idea is unsound in its own way. At one extreme there are carefully premeditated lapses in common sense and good judgment, such as the public display of a human being in the Monkey House of the Bronx Zoo in 1904. At the other extreme are spur-of-the-moment, acting-on-impulse bad ideas, such as Floyd Malacek's attempt to jump Minnesota's 40-foot-wide Lacque Park River on a power lawn mower while thousands watched. (He missed by 35 feet.)

Another way to categorize bad ideas is by how long it takes for their impact to register. Some bad ideas look, sound, and smell bad right from the get-go--the grassroots push to make Sicily the forty-ninth American state, or Cecil Rhodes' lifelong campaign to make the entire world a British colony, for example. Others take their time flowering--anywhere from a few minutes to several years. At first glance Cleveland mayor Ralph J. Perk's decision to make a goodwill appearance at an industrial trade show seemed a perfectly legitimate idea--that is, until someone handed him a welding torch and he accidentally set his head on fire with it.

And sculptor Horatio Greenough was no doubt all smiles and self-congratulation when he envisioned a larger-than-life statue of George Washington, only to watch in dismay as the marble monstrosity sank through the floorboards of the U.S. Capitol.

Today you can see Greenough's magnum opus displayed prominently in--where else?--Washington, D.C., cradle of liberty, and incubator of some of the most gloriously bad ideas ever to spring forth from the human mind. It was here that the Bureau of the Mint approved the designs for the Susan B. Anthony dollar, America's most reviled and useless coin . . . intelligence operatives hatched a plan to make Hitler's mustache fall out by covertly seasoning his food with estrogen . . . and a sitting president was reelected despite his unremitting refusal to learn how to pronounce "nuclear."
It is no surprise that, in the four years since the original publication of What Were They Thinking?, humankind has picked up the pace in its march toward oblivion. For this new and revised edition, we've again trolled for material in the dustbins of history. But you'll also find a number of stories drawn from contemporary news accounts: a country that issued new currency notes with the word "bank" misspelled . . . a suburban school superintendent who suspended a student for threatening a teacher with a cookie . . . and a man who failed in his one hundredth suicide attempt.

What could they possibly have been thinking?

Next