Tag Archives: Steuben County Historical Society Winter Lecture

Life as a World War I Doughboy

America has always lived a lot of its life by wishful thinking. When we got into World War I, in 1917, the war had already been going on for almost three years. And we weren’t the slightest bit ready.

*Out navy was in adequate shape, thanks in part to Franklin D. Roosevelt, our energetic young assistant secretary of that department. But our army was small and ill-equipped, and horribly unprepared. General Pershing was the only officer who had commanded anything larger than a regiment in the field.

*We beat the recruiting drum to expand our army rapidly, and we started a draft. But even once we got men into the boot camps and induction centers, we often couldn’t give them weapons, or even uniforms. Once our men got to France, many of them would be using British or French rifles, helmets, and artillery.

*American women were in uniform for the first time, mostly as nurses, and in that area we WERE fairly well prepared. Jane Delano of Watkins Glen headed up Red Cross nursing AND army nursing. She had foreseen a large war on the horizon, and worked to prepare both programs.

*The government commissioned Red Cross and similar agencies to provide care and support for the troops overseas. To finance this, those agencies were given the exclusive right to sell cigarettes to the soldiers, and even men in hospital deathbeds went without smokes unless they ponied up the price of a pack.

*By the way, prewar Americans considered cigarettes an affectation of gigolos and lounge lizards. REAL men smoked cigars or pipes. The war changed all that.

*Likewise men in the prewar carried pocket watches; wrist watches were for women. But in the midst of combat the pocket watch was clearly impractical, and wrist watches became standard wear.

*Assuming he got American equipment, the infantry soldier was probably using a 1903 Springfield rifle, bolt-action and clip-fed, with a five-round magazine. Khaki and olive drab had been adopted in ’03, so at least our men were wearing reasonable colors for modern combat. They got the “Smoky Bear” hat in 1911, but in action mostly wore the British soupbowl “tin hat” or the more substantial French helmet. They also wore puttees, a “mummy wrap” around the lower leg, theoretically serving to keep mud off the uniform.

*Thousands of local fellows served in the war, and scores died. At 4 PM on Friday, April 5, Dave Clark will attend a Steuben County Historical Society presentation in uniform as his great-uncle, PFC Steven Smith, giving us a “first-hand” account of life in the trenches. The free event is at Centenary Methodist Church in Bath. We hope you’ll join us.

Free Love and Silverware — the Oneida Community

Many of us remember the 1960s and 70s, with the explosive proliferation of communes and intentional communities, many set in or around California. Most were short-lived, and some were flat-out toxic. But they were counter-culture, and to many observers they were downright un-American.

*In reality, though, they were as American as apple pie. We often miss the fact that the English colonies in America started out as experimental utopian societies: the Pilgrims with their communism and commitment to the simple life; Massachusetts and the other Puritan colonies, with their austerity and a commitment to self-examination and self-criticism that would make Chairman Mao cheer; Rhode Island, with its commitment to anarchy; the Pennsylvania Quakers, with their pacifism and their mysticism; the pacifist anabaptist sects, with their semi-closed communities; Georgia, where the rulers imported misfits and criminals so as to reprogram them after isolating them in the wilderness.

*Our pioneer settlers were the lunatic fringe, and when they sailed away, folks back in Europe were delighted to wave goodbye.

*We got another burst of utopian communities in the middle of the 19th century, as the world was turning toward the modern age, away from lifestyles that had endured for a thousand years. Celibate Shaker communes spread from Maine to Kentucky. Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in a utopian community, and so did Louisa May Alcott. So did John Roebling, who designed the Brooklyn Bridge. John Brown tried to start a bi-racial community near Lake Placid.

*While dozens of such communities speckled the American landscape, they lay especially thick in a band then ran from Boston to Buffalo. One of the most successful, and longest enduring, was the Oneida Community.

*The hundreds of members practiced hard work, economic communalism, religious perfectionism, gender equality, and complex marriage… all the members were considered married to all the other members. Needless to say, they were highly controversial.

*John Humphrey Noyes founded the Community (at Oneida, NY) in 1848 – a year that saw revolutions all over Europe and in South America, publication of the “Communist Manifesto,” the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, a cholera epidemic that killed 5000 New Yorkers… a tumultuous moment.

*For the next several decades local diaries and letters are sprinkled with scandalized reports that so-and-so, or such-and-such a family, had decamped (often secretly) and joined “the Oneidas.”

*Members subjected themselves to community criticism and evaluation, as well as self-criticism. Sex was not a free-for-all… it had to be consensual, and birth control was practiced. Pregnancy had to be planned and approved, though of course “accidents” happened. Child-rearing was communal. It’s probably too much to say that women were completely equal, but they were a whale of a lot closer to it than women in the outside world. Short hair and trouser suits were the norm.

*Older members of the Community introduced younger members to sex, which near the end of the Community’s history led to threats of statutory rape charges, though in fact they probably wouldn’t have applied under New York law at the time.

*Future presidential assassin Charles Guiteau lived in the community for about five years, but members (not unreasonably) considered him insane and held him at arm’s length. He left the community, and sued Noyes, some six years before killing Garfield.

*An elderly Noyes left the country in 1878, urging the end of complex marriage. Members agreed the following year and in1881 voted to close the Community, creating in its place a joint-stock corporation that endures to this day, making the famed Oneida silverware.

*The Oneida Community Mansion House is now a museum and historic site. This Friday (Mar. 2, at 4 PM) Dr. Molly Jessup, the museum’s curator of education, will tell us the Community’s story at a Steuben County Historical Society Winter Lecture in Bath Fire Hall – free and open to all. Hope to see you there!

World War I in the Air

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Glenn Curtiss had war on his mind practically from the first time he took his seat in an airplane. He practiced dropping mock bombs onto a mock battleship on Keuka Lake. He flew an army officer who sat on the wing and fired his Springfield rifle at a ground target, despite fears that the recoil might throw the airplane out of control. As cadets cheered when he flew over West Point in 1910, he was brooding on how easy it would be to bomb the place.

*There had been crude uses of airplanes in battle before the Great War. At least three American pilots, flying airplanes from three manufacturers, had contracts to fly and drop bombs for various factions in Mexico. On one of our many invasions of Mexico, a Curtiss seaplane took minor damage from ground fire near Vera Cruz, for the first combat flight in U.S. history.

*Our Curtiss Jennys searched for Pancho Villa in Mexico. They never found him, and they all broke down. Their open cockpits flooded in thunderstorms, and they told horror stories about carving new propellers with a jackknife. (Just tall tales… you can’t do that.)

*Still, for most militaries, the only real use they could think of was scouting. In maneuvers off Cuba, Curtiss seaplanes spotted an approaching enemy fleet, giving their own fleet enough warning to meet the mock attack. Future admiral John Towers in an airplane spotted a submerged submarine commanded by future admiral Chester Nimitz, kicking off decades of very cranky relations between the two.

*In 1903, Wright brothers made first airplane flight. In 1906, Santos-Dumont made the first flight in Europe. In 1908, Curtiss and his associates made their first flights.

*But by 1909, when Curtiss flew spectacularly in the Grande Semaine d’Aviation in Reims, he was the only American pilot, and he had the only American-built airplane. How and why had the Europeans advanced so rapidly in just three years?

*Although some would argue otherwise, and although their effect may be overstated, I think that the Wright patent suits had some chilling effect on American research and development. But more important than what we DIDN’T do is what the Europeans DID do, and what circumstances drove them.

*Simply put, military aviation posed no threat to America. Neither Mexico nor Canada was likely to send swarms of warplanes across the border, and if they had they’d only have been threatening El Paso or Bar Harbor.

*All the strong European nations, on the other hand, had OTHER strong European nations right on their borders. They had to know what the guy on the other side of the hill was doing, and preferably they had to stay one jump ahead of him.

*This urgency only deepened, of course, once war actually got under way. So Europeans had an incentive, even a desperation, to innovate in their military aviation, where America did not. Even once Europe was at war, we still took a lackadaisical approach, with the result that with one exception, no American-designed airplanes were used in World War I combat, because none of them were equal to World War I combat. Our pilots flew British and French designs, such as SPADs.

*Besides airplanes, Europeans, especially Germans, were also ahead in airSHIPS… lighter-than-air craft, most famously the Zeppelins.
But what the powers were still lacking was a doctrine for the use of aircraft – a set of ideas as to how they were best employed. When doctrine was developed, it often embodied wooly thinking about this perplexing new invention. (Remember that almost all the top political and military leadership were born BEFORE the Civil War.)

*Even so, the First WORLD War was the first AIR war. And that’s the topic of the free presentation I’ll be giving for the next Steuben County Historical Society Winter Lecture, 4 PM Friday March 4 at Bath Fire Hall. Hope you’ll join us!