January 2011

Each year, most of West Point’s three million visitors enter the U.S. Military Academy through the Thayer Gate. They drive past the cluttered main street of Highland Falls, which the historian Samuel Huntington described as a town of a sort “familiar to everyone … a motley, disconnected collection of frames coincidentally adjoining each other, lacking common unity and purpose.” A moment later, the visitors are in, as Huntington put it, “a different world of ordered serenity…. Beauty and utility are merged in gray stone” in “a bit of Sparta in the midst of Babylon.”

For Huntington, writing in 1957, this contrast dramatized the inescapable conflict between the military mind, with its devotion to order and singleness of purpose, and the wayward, often self-indulgent spirit of civilian America. Today, Highland Falls remains a model of small-town clutter, although the names on many of the storefronts have changed. But contemporary West Point has aspects that might give Professor Huntington—and certainly would give a Spartan—pause.

The yearning to travel—from place to place as well as in time—impelled us to devote last April’s issue to the subject. I asked Senior Editor Carla Davidson, who was in charge of the major components of that issue, as well as this one, to tell me how she went about her work:

West Point, located fifty miles north of New York City along the Hudson, is always open to the public. No permission is required for entry, and no admission is charged to enter, attend parades, or visit the museum and chapels. The museum is open from ten-thirty to four-fifteen daily except on Christmas and New Year’s Day. A Visitors Information Center, located near the Thayer Gate in Highland Falls, has displays on cadet life, gift shops, a theater showing movies about West Point, and maps and brochures; it is open eight-thirty to four-fifteen daily, except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. Call 914-938-2638 for any information about visiting West Point. The Hotel Thayer inside West Point offers meals and lodging for the public: call 914-446-4731. West Point Tours (914-446-4724) and Bosch & Sons, Inc. (914-446-4520), both of Highland Falls, provide commercial tours of West Point.

Behind my grandparents’ house, the house in which I was born, rose a high pasture, little used in my boyhood and then only for grazing a few head of cattle. Crowned by tall weeds and scarred by runoff gullies, it was my first prairie, the one that still drifts behind all my images and notions of that phenomenon even though it was only 40 or 50 acres bounded by timber and bean fields. Perhaps, technically, this Missouri pasture was not a prairie at all, but its vegetation reached nearly shoulder-high during my crossings to and from school, and its abundant life—bumblebees, bull snakes, blue racers, meadowlarks, quail, foxes, rabbits, groundhogs—brought color and excitement to my daily journey. And, too, it provided an ideal vantage point from which to watch the green-stained violence of a thunderstorm or the gray-white curtain of advancing snowfall.

The Sirius steamed into New York Harbor early in the morning of April 23. Later that day thousands of curious onlookers thronged the Battery to see the British steamer that had dropped anchor near Castle Garden. Her epochal seventeen-day journey from Cork had halved the typical duration of Atlantic crossings. The era of transatlantic steam service had begun.

Six years before, a London-based American merchant by the name of Junius Smith had endured a monotonous fifty-four-day crossing from London to New York. When he returned to London, he tried to interest backers in the applications of steam power to sea voyages, with little initial success.

Although coastal and inland steam navigation was well established by the 1830s, many experts gravely doubted the practicability of ocean crossings by steam. On the high seas boilers rapidly became encrusted with salt and had to be scoured regularly to prevent corrosion. Oceangoing steam vessels could make only sparing use of their engines and had to rely mostly on their sails.

The burdens of war sent food prices soaring in Richmond, Virginia. In early 1863 bacon sold for $1.25 per pound, peaches for as much as twenty cents apiece, and flour was priced at a staggering $28 a barrel, four times its pre-war cost.

On April 5 hundreds of hungry protesters marched down Main Street, shouting, “Bread! Bread!” The demonstration erupted into a full-scale riot, with window smashing and looting.

Suddenly the Confederate president Jefferson Davis appeared. Standing atop a dray, he tossed coins to the crowd.

“You say you are hungry, and have no money. Here is all I have.” The militia arrived as Davis addressed the looters. “We do not desire to injure anyone, but this lawlessness must stop.” The president consulted his pocket watch. “I will give you five minutes to disperse. Otherwise you will be fired on.”

Coney Island’s eroding shoreline threatened one of its principal attractions, the famed Brighton Beach Hotel. “During the past two years,” noted Harper’s Weekly , “the ocean has been dashing wildly under the hotel itself, a large part of which perilously rested upon piles.”

The Brighton Beach Company decided upon a novel solution: move the entire hotel several hundred feet north, toward Sheepshead Bay. Workers jacked the four-thousand-ton structure onto flatcars on two dozen parallel sets of railroad tracks. An elaborate system of blocks and hawsers evenly distributed the pulling force of six steam locomotives across the hotel’s four-hundred-foot width.

Woodrow Wilson broke more than a century of custom by appearing before a joint session of Congress on April 8. Thomas Jefferson had abandoned the practice of addressing Congress in person because it smacked of monarchy, and succeeding administrations had followed his example.

Congress bridled at Wilson’s departure from precedent. “I am sorry to see revived the old Federalistic custom of speeches from the throne,” said Sen. John Sharp Williams of Tennessee. “I regret all this cheap and tawdry imitation of English royalty.”

“I am very glad indeed,” said Wilson in his opening remarks, “to have this opportunity to address the two houses directly and to verify for myself the impression that the President of the United States is a person, not a mere department of the Government hailing Congress from some isolated island of jealous power.”

The United States Mint unveiled its design for the new Thomas Jefferson five-cent piece on April 21. Felix Schlag’s winning entry, depicting Jefferson in profile on one side and Monticello on the other, replaced the twenty-year-old Indian-head nickel. Except for minor modifications, the coin’s design remains unchanged to this day.

From 1942 to 1945 the nickel contained no nickel, as a result of a wartime metals shortage. The U.S. Mint substituted a mixture of copper, silver, and manganese for the traditional copper-nickel alloy that had jingled in America’s pockets since 1866.

The Navy suffered its worst peacetime disaster on April 9, when the nuclear attack submarine Thresher sank off the New Hampshire coast during routine sea trials. Diving to a thousand feet, the sub developed a small leak in her hull. The leak triggered a short circuit, shutting down the submarine’s nuclear reactor. Powerless and unable to blow her ballast tanks, the Thresher plunged into an eighty-four-hundred-foot ocean abyss called the Wilkenson Deep. Mounting pressure crushed her hull, killing all 129 crew members.