Spaceship Perisphere

After reading “What Went Wrong With Disney’s World’s Fair” by Elting E. Morison (December 1983), I cannot help but compare it with the New York World’s Fair of 1939 and 1940. Epcot’s Spaceship Earth sphere is more than just reminiscent of the sparkling white Perisphere, the fifteen-story sphere that housed “Democracity” (the ideal planned community of tomorrow), and served with the seven-hundred-foot Trylon as the theme center of the fair. In addition, the very layout of Epcot is similar to the planned environment envisioned by the Board of Design of the 1939 exposition, with broad, tree-lined avenues and promenades radiating from the theme center. The designers in New York arranged all pavilions into zones determined by the nature of the exhibit and even attempted to organize all pavilions with a rainbow color scheme beginning with the pure white Trylon and Perisphere and progressing with more vivid colors in avenues of concentric rings surrounding the theme center.

Finally, it can be stated that the dynamic showmanship and exuberance of the General Motors Futurama, Ford’s Road of Tomorrow, and the Westinghouse time capsule provided impressions fairgoers would carry with them for the rest of their lives.

While Epcot may offer itself in recent advertising as the “new world of tomorrow,” its roots seem firmly entrenched in the memory ofthat wonderful New York fair which proudly proclaimed to a Depression-weary America the “dawn of a new day” with its theme of “building the world of tomorrow. ”

James S. Flanagan
St. James, Md.

Fifty Years

Only one upset Oberlin alumna has called us to task for our typographical error—Oberlin opened in 1833, not 1883, and was coeducational from the start. Graduates of other coeducational schools have pointed out that women were accepted by Waynesburg College of Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, in 1849 (one letter); Antioch College in 1852 (one letter); St. Lawrence University of Canton, New York, in 1856 (two letters); Swarthmore College in 1864 (three letters); and North Georgia College in 1873 when it admitted one woman, the daughter of the college president (one letter).

A Few Words on Behalf of Uncle Abner

Victor Salvatore’s article about baseball and Abner Doubleday (June/July 1983 issue) did not get all the facts correct. If he is going to kill a myth, he should do it properly. If he is going to shoot Santa Claus, he should shoot him dead!

I grew up with Abner Doubleday. My interest in him came about naturally; it was genetic. My mother used to call him “Uncle.” So did her five sisters and two brothers, and all of her maternal cousins. In 19601 began gathering all the material I could about “Uncle Abner” for a biography of the man.

Two characteristics soon emerged. Abner Doubleday was primarily a military man—outspoken, verbose and critical, and an intense nationalist; he was also very much a family man and visited relatives whenever the opportunity presented itself (though he was not always welcome, as one relative testified who thought him “an SOB” and proceeded to spend the whole course of Abner’s visit in the outhouse!).

The basis of the claim that Doubleday “invented” baseball was the letter submitted by Abner Graves to the Spalding Commission in which he stated that “the game of baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, N. Y. either the spring prior to, or following the ‘Log Cabin and Hard Cider’ campaign of General Harrison for President. ” The selection of the year 1839 was arbitrarily made by A. G. Mills, who drafted the commission’s report. In fact, the campaign took place in 1840, the year that Abner Doubleday was granted a two-plus month leave from West Point. Without doubt, he would have gone to Scipio, New York, where his father had taken up farming. It is inconceivable that Abner would have by-passed Cooperstown, where he still had many cousins.

The existence of order No. 30, dated June 18, 1840, granting Abner Doubleday a leave of absence from West Point, gives credence to the thought that he was in Cooperstown during the “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” campaign. And Doubleday’s West Point training would be an ideal background for estimating the fine points of the first baseball diamond.

Abner Doubleday’s wartime accomplishments were remarkable, but he seems to have been denied credit for many of them and suffered intense frustration as a result. The prime example was his treatment by Gen. George Gordon Meade after the Battle of Gettysburg. Doubleday performed brilliantly on July 1, 1863, the first day of the fighting. With nine thousand men against an attacking Confederate force of thirty thousand he managed to capture his old classmate James Archer’s brigade and held on until forced to retreat. It was Doubleday’s command that repulsed Pickett’s charge two days later, “thereby saving the battle and the Union.” Afterward, Meade, for some inexplicable reason, assigned Doubleday to the command of a warehouse in Buffalo, New York. President Lincoln rescinded Meade’s order by assigning Doubleday to the command of a military commission with primary operations in Washington, D.C.

Abner never forgave Meade for this incomprehensible action, nor for a subsequent rebuff. When Doubleday appeared before a board of officers for promotion to major general, who should be presiding but Major General Meade! The promotion was denied. Doubleday’s brevet rank of major general, an honor awarded him twice for bravery in the field, carried a real rank of precedence but no increase in pay. His regular army rank was that of colonel, and it was with that rank and on that pay that he retired in 1873.

A good deal of his retirement was spent in correspondence and writing, trying to have others understand matters that he could hardly understand himself and which, perhaps, are not understandable. His concerns were with the military. His memoirs omitted not only mention of baseball but many significant occurrences in his career. He barely mentions experiences at West Point: his boyhood is passed over with a shrug.

Perhaps Col. A. G. Mills, Abner’s longtime friend on the Spalding Commission, saw in the Graves letters an opportunity to redress a grievance for his old companion. He may have used the Spalding Report to correct what he saw as a historical injustice and to give Abner Doubleday the national recognition he so richly deserved.

Now, lest I be accused of nit-picking about Victor Salvatore’s article on an issue so frequently rehashed, an observation by Bruce Catton that appeared in this magazine in April/May 1977 seems appropriate: “General Doubleday is the Santa Claus of baseball. He actually existed…but his actual connection with the game of baseball is somewhat like Santa Claus’s connection with Christmas, indecipherable but unbreakable. … Skeptics have spent years trying to prove that the whole story is a myth, but that makes no difference; by this time baseball is General Doubleday’s game and that is that.”

Stephen D. Rockstroh
Colonel, U.S. Air Force (Ret.)
Port Charlotte, Fla.

Normandie Postscripts

In the Normandie poster (December 1983, page 60) the ship is not clearing the harbor as it says in your picture caption. She is making no steam or smoke except the amount necessary for support of internal heat and electricity, and it is easy to see that her port bow anchor is down. Craft of this size seldom try to move with their anchors down. Also, even in her day, it was most uncommon for a large vessel to proceed through the harbor without tugs along.

Daniel S. Hoy
Lancaster, Penna.

Colt .45 Emendations

In “The Gun the Army Can’t Kill” (August/September 1983,) Mr. Andrews is thoroughly in error by opening the .38 versus .45 debate by stating that “ever since the 184Os the standard Army sidearm had been the .45-caliber single-action pistol.” This is not so. In the 184Os the standard Army sidearm was a muzzle-loading cap-and-ball, single-shot pistol of caliber .54. This big-caliber, black-powder percussion pistol was the standard sidearm of the U.S. Army from 1842 until the Civil War, when the Union ordnance certified no fewer than ten makes of sidearms, all of them blackpowder, cap-and-ball revolvers of .36 or .44 caliber.

A .45-caliber single-action pistol did not become a standard Army sidearm until 1873, when the U.S. ordnance placed a trial order of eight thousand Colts for cavalry use. These handsome revolvers were continuously produced by Colt until 1941 and were later reinstated after popular outcry. This particular weapon was the gunfighter’s gun, of which we have seen so much in the movies.

It is true that the service pistol initially used in the Philippine insurrection was a .38 (double-action) Army-issue revolver. It was found insufficient, and an appeal was sent back home to retrieve the old single-action .45s. The problem was not so much “stopping power” as it was the complicated double-action mechanism and weak mainspring of the .38, compared with the simpler, stronger mechanism of the single-action .45.

John Browning, who had already perfected a .38 automatic, quickly perceived from the Philippine experience that the U.S. Army would standardize on a .45 automatic rather than on his .38, then being tested. He hastened to strike a deal with the Colt factory for undertaking manufacture of the bigger caliber. The prototype .45 was produced as the 1905 Colt Model, and the U.S. ordnance ordered four hundred for testing in 1907. This model evolved very slightly to become the 1911.

Your article also states that for the change from the .38 service revolver to the .45 automatic Colt, “the work at hand was to bowl a man over in his tracks at a distance of only a few yards. ” No slug from a sidearm, .38 or .45, will bowl a man over. The stopping power or striking force of the slug can have no more impact than the recoil; otherwise the one pulling the trigger would be bowled over, because every action is accompanied by a reaction of equal force in the opposite direction, as most high school seniors know. The striking force of a .44 Magnum, even today, throwing a 240-grain ball (muzzle velocity 1,470 feet per second, almost twice that of the Model 1911 .45 Colt automatic) would strike a stationary two-hundred-pound man at arm’s length with one-twentieth the force of another man walking into him.

I remember watching a Stalingrad battle scene (1942), filmed inside a factory where Soviets with a machine gun were defending a room against a squad of Germans, approaching from the next room. The Soviet photographer, in as much peril as his buddies, managed to frame the barrel of the Russian machine gun on the left, with the doorway to the adjacent room framed at the right of the film sequence. The German squad leader came slowly through the doorway, nearly upright, cautiously holding his rifle at a slanted, ready position. He was caught full force by the blast of the machine gun, perhaps ten slugs. He crumpled like a puppet having all the suspending strings severed at once. He was not bowled over. He didn’t even fall forward; he buckled, knock-kneed, and collapsed with no motion except straight down in a heap.

It is not meant by these comments to disparage in any way the Colt 1911 automatic . 45 as an effective sidearm with the longest service life of any automatic, nor to belittle the eyewitness accounts of its performance given by Mr. Andrews. After all, what somebody thinks is so is another matter, for if the combat finger on the Colt trigger believes the hefty half-inch slug has the knockover power of a bowling ball, and if the other soldier looking at the muzzle end of the Colt believes it too, we have a Sgt. Alvin York and a Congressional Medal of Honor. This is the way it was in the Argonne on October 8, 1918, with a hundred or so prisoners warily eyeing the motions of York’s Model 1911 caliber .45. The prisoner count has been variously given, which is understandable in light of York’s parting remark to the surprised staff: “Lieutenant, there wasn’t time to count ‘em.”

James B. Kinzer
Evanston, Ill.