Recently discovered documents have revealed that during the period between the two world wars America was seriously considering the possibility of a major war with Great Britain and her dominions.
A year ago, Lawrence Larsen of the University of Missouri-Kansas City found in the Kansas City Federal Archives and Records Center a report entitled “United States’ Army 1919 Contingency Plan to Defend North Dakota Against an Unspecified Invader From Canada.” The plan was drawn up by R. T. Ward, the Kansas City district head of the Army Corps of Engineers, who, familiar with the old saw about the best defense, recommended the invasion of Canada by American troops jumping off from Sweet Grass, Montana, and Northgate, North Dakota.
Ward’s study was launched in a straightforward way: he had a general in the War Department write Canadian officials asking for maps of their country. Canada’s chief geographer, having no idea how the maps were to be used, supplied them with “great pleasure.” In the meantime, a junior officer from Ward’s office was analyzing the Canadian border, and he eventually came up with the dazzling strategic information that the amount of rainfall was a major factor in the wet and dry seasons, that muddy fields dried most quickly under hot sunlight, and that, in those limitless flatlands, there were no railroad tunnels.
Ward also developed a contingency plan for dealing with military reverses that called for a retreat to south of the Missouri River, which involved yielding to the “unspecified invader” an area of well over fifty thousand square miles.
A more aggressive example of our Anglophobia was declassified in November, 1975, by the Pentagon, over the protests of the State Department, which called it a “very embarrassing item diplomatically.” The embarrassing item was a set of secret plans for the American invasion of Britain that had been drafted in Washington’s war plans division in 1928-29.
At that time the general staff believed that American inroads on British foreign trade might trigger a war between the two countries. According to the plan, whose color-keyed maps labeled Britain as “red” and Canada as “crimson,” American forces would “Destroy red armed forces in North America and the western North Atlantic, including the Caribbean and West Indian waters; isolate crimson from red; deny red the use of bases in the western hemisphere; occupy such territory in crimson and other red possessions as may be necessary and gain and exercise such control of sea communications as will contribute towards red’s economic exhaustion.”
Finally, an invasion of the British mainland—the first since William the Conqueror’s—would be launched from Ireland with the aid of “irreconcilable elements in the Irish Free State.”
And how would the war go? The planners looked back a decade to the dogged courage British troops had displayed during the butcheries in Passchendaele and on the Somme, and concluded that we would have a stiff fight on our hands: “The red [British] race is essentially homogeneous, more or less phlegmatic, but determined and persistent when once committed to a policy, and is noted for its ability to fight to a finish.”
Despite this, America “possesses an anti-red tradition … and the only considerable minority group, the American negro, has no political or racial ties with any other nation and is resistant to foreign propaganda.”
Bizarre as all this may seem, similar thinking was occurring on the other side of the Atlantic. The same year we were planning our third war with England, Austen Chamberlain, the foreign secretary, told the Committee of Imperial Defence that, while “war with Germany, Italy and Japan was inconceivable,” war with America was a possibility. And in a cabinet paper delivered a few months earlier, the foreign secretary had said that the United States would no longer tolerate the sort of blockade Britain had imposed during World War i, and “Any attempt by us to enforce our [belligerent rights] in a future war when the United States is neutral as we enforced them in the late war, would make war between us probable.”
“THE WHISTLES STARTED GETTING TO ME …”
H. Barber of New Port, Oregon, an honest-to-God old hobo and one of the last of a great breed, saw Clark Spence’s “Knights of the Fast Freight” in our August issue: I am from Southern 111. Had the Cotton Belt & Missouri Pacific for a play ground plus the Mississippi River, not many kids are that lucky. The whistles started getting to me at a very early age. Any way folded my books & decided to explore the places I’d read about in the geography & History books, have never been sorry for one minute of my decision. Learned more from the first six months on the road than my seven yrs. in school.
Guess my first trip from St. Louis to Denver was by far the most interesting, rode #79, a hot shot out. Was at 9:05 in the night, was shot at, it made me think about going back home but decided to make it to Denver one way or another. The trip was worth the danger when I saw those snow capped mts. for the first time.
There were plenty of hostile R.R. bulls left in my day, like Denver Bob of Amarillo, Father Son & Holy Ghost of Hannibal, Broadway out of Dupo 111. to mention a few. The only silver dollar division I encountered was on the Colorado & Southern, from Pueblo to Trinidad. It was shell out or get knocked off.
I rode a stock train from Durango to Alamosa in Nov. of 1927. It was 30 degrees below going over the hump. At that time there was a line from Durango to Farmington New Mexico, made a run on it, also from Durango to Silverton & on up to Ophir. Think Ophir was as near to the end of the world as one could get without falling off.
Remember when a freight leaving Mears Junction lost its air, and jumped the tracks it was quite a wreck, killed 9 Hoboes. Was lucky not to be on that one, was working in Salida at the time.
Riding the rails gets in your blood and stays there. One thing I know, except for the sound of my mother’s voice after crawling off a freight after 2 or three yrs. the most beautiful sound to me is a lonesome whistle in the night & the train wheels clicking on the coupling joints. There are no rails here, suppose it’s just as well, for at 65 its a little harder to catch em on the fly.
CYCLONE
Among the paintings of American cities that ran last April was one showing a cyclone reaching down over the rooftops of St. Paul, Minnesota. Thanks to the Minnesota Historical Society, we have learned that this view was not a work of imagination by the artist Julius Holm, but a literal copy—right down to the twin spires and the grain elevator—of a dramatic photograph of the Lake Gervais cyclone.
Toward the end of the sultry afternoon of Sunday, July 13, 1890, the sky clouded over and a lashing rain fell on St. Paul while, a few miles to the north, the cyclone struck Lake McCarron. It spun along for more than five miles, devastating the communities of Little Canada and Lake Gervais, and killing five people and injuring fifty more before it blew itself out.
THE EDISON OF GREASE
Last year, three and a half billion pounds of potatoes were processed by the American potato chip industry. This year the Potato Chip/Snack Food Association erected a memorial plaque to the man who started it all. He was an Adirondack Indian named George Crum, and he invented the potato chip in a fit of rage. Crum (his real name was Speck, but he changed it, he said, because a crumb is larger) was the chef at Moon’s Lake House, a fashionable Saratoga Springs resort. Sometime during the 1853 season he received a complaint from a customer who haughtily demanded “properly thin french fries.” Furious, Crum retaliated by shaving the thinnest slices he could off some potatoes and frying them to a crisp. To his astonishment, the customer was delighted by the result. Soon “Saratoga Chips,” as they came to be called, were popular throughout the East. Crum left the Lake House and set up his own restaurant nearby, where people like Commodore Vanderbilt and Jay Gould waited in line to sample the famous chips. Moon’s Lake House is long gone, so the memorial plaque has been placed by a road two hundred feet from the site. Above is the father of the potato chip; the box, bearing a picture of the Lake House, held some of the first chips sold commercially.
THAT HONORED HAND
In our June, 1976, Postscripts we told of a Captain Jonathan Walker who had the letters SS—for Slave Stealer—branded on the palm of his right hand in 1844 for trying to help some slaves escape to the West Indies from Florida. From Mr. Jonathan Eyler, sports editor of the Muskegon, Michigan, Chronicle, comes this further information:
Captain Walker moved to Muskegon near the end of the Civil War and quietly lived out the remainder of his life operating a small fruit farm in a suburban area called Lake Harbor.
He died on April 30, 1878, at the age of eighty and was buried in Evergreen Cemetery. On August i of the same year thousands gathered for the dedication of a granite shaft [see picture] purchased and shipped to Muskegon by the Greek missionary Photius Fisk, who later became a famous chaplain in the U.S. Navy.
Parker Pillsbury, a noted abolitionist, delivered the address, saying: “Slave Savior” is the interpretation of that branded hand now silently moldering in the dust at our feet.
Time may mow down that granite and trample out even the inscription of the hieroglyphed hand. But the memory of the act it records shall last when the foundations of this earth are moved and then the heavens above them are no more.
T. R. AND THE TROLLEY
Last August we ran a short feature comparing President Ford’s 1975 automobile collision with a 1902 accident in which Teddy Roosevelt’s carriage was rammed by a streetcar. We said that “Roosevelt’s minor abrasions soon disappeared,” but Robert C. Kimberly, a Baltimore physician, disagrees:
Mr. Roosevelt was thrown some thirty feet, receiving an injury to his left leg and bruises to his face. He cut short his tour and returned at once to Oyster Bay. The bruises about his face healed rapidly, but the injury to his leg did not. Osteomyelitis developed, requiring an operation at Indianapolis on September 23rd and a second operation a few days later in Washington to drain a sub-periosteal abscess. Roosevelt had to conduct the coal strike negotiations from a wheel chair the second week of October and, while he was able to go bear hunting in Mississippi in November, the old Rough Rider was unable to mount a horse until six months after the accident.
In the pre-antibiotic days osteomyelitis could be an implacable enemy, and it made no exception in the case of our twenty-sixth president. Already weakened by a recurrence of malaria in the Brazilian jungle in 1913, Colonel Roosevelt nearly died of it.
The enemy was subdued but not conquered, and it struck again in 1918. Roosevelt spent a good part of the late . summer and fall in the hospital with recurring abscesses, finally developing phlebitis in the left leg. He returned to Oyster Bay just before Christmas, but it was an embolus from a vein in the left leg which brought on his death on January 8, 1919, at the age of sixty.
