Convention Grants Eleven Days for the Details

WordPress has added this nifty new feature to our suite of tools.  It’s a world map, and it allows me to see the countries from where all of you come to visit.  This morning, I see there are folks from the United States, and Poland, and some other places.  It’s kind of cool to see the various countries and continents represented.

I don’t know where you are specifically, but where I am, it’s been downright hot.  We topped out at 106°F yesterday (which is a staggering number for central Iowa), and it’s been over 100° for what seems like a month.  I look outside the window, and the yards stare back with deep-fried goodness.  Fortunately, our break has arrived.  Storms rolled through last night, bringing our first real rainfall in a month, and this morning the winds had a northern component to them.  It’s still really humid, but it actually feels cool!

The summer of 1787 was pretty hot as well.  Early-American Philadelphia roasted in a hot, humid, hazy sunshine that made a good many people sick, a lot more people very short-tempered, and everyone wish someone would just invent shorts and t-shirts already.

For the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, it was time for a break as well, and not just from the temperatures, which had conveniently moderated a bit ten days prior.  Two months of debate, two months of disagreement, and two months of discussion were all beginning to wear them down.  But a tremendous amount of progress had been made in that two months.  The basic shape of the new government had been worked, including that most sticky of issues:  how a bicameral legislature would be represented.

It was time to start collecting the various parts, what the delegates called “resolves” (and twenty-three had been passed to this point), along with other proposals and amendments, into some kind of order.  George Washington, who would have rather been riding the countryside, following the rivers and thinking about a canal system, penned in his diary that they needed to “draw into method and form the several matters which had been agreed to by the Convention as a Constitution for the United States.”

So on July 26, 1787, the Convention created the Committee of Detail.  The job of this committee was not to create a finished product, but simply to get things organized.  Then the delegates could look over their work, have some more debate, and make corrections and further changes.  The Committee was Detail was made up of five members, including Virginia’s Edmund Randolph (who, as we know, ultimately did not sign the finished product), James Wilson from Pennsylvania, Nathaniel Gorham from Massachusetts, Connecticut’s Oliver Ellsworth, and John Rutledge from South Carolina.  They were given eleven days (until August 6) to knock together a “Report”.

And the rest of the delegates to an eleven-day sabbatical.  The delegates themselves didn’t talk about the proceedings in “mixed” company, fearing the spread of rumor and outright falsehoods.  But many wrote letters home to family and friends, since flying or driving home was, in 1787, out of the question.  There was much “wagging of tongues” around Philly, as bystanders and newspapers speculated on what might be taking place.

General Washington went trout fishing.

Recommended Reading:  Decision in Philadelphia – Another account of the Convention I’m reading right now, and it’s pretty good.

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James Callender: Dirt-Digger Dies in the Mud

James Callender.  The name probably means little to you.  The name meant nothing to me until I started reading about this country’s Founding Fathers a few years back.  But you would certainly know the type of man he was if I gave you just a one-word description.  That word, first used by Theodore Roosevelt in the early 20th century (as I learned on Jeopardy a few days ago), is “muck-raker”.  Wait, is that two words?  One word?

Whatever, James Callender was a muck-raker.  In his biography of Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow describes him as a “hack writer“, an “ugly, misshapen little man who made a career of spewing venom.”   He spent most of his life doing it and, as we’ll soon see, his life ended in muck.  That’s the kind of guy he was.

He arrived in the United States, having left Scotland, in the early 1790s.  Well, “left” is something of a euphemism…”got out of town in a hurry” is more apt, fleeing the country to escape a sedition rap from the British government.  It didn’t take him long to anger folks on this side of the pond, either.

He got in with Republican interests early on, landing a job with Benjamin Franklin Bache’s newspaper, the Aurora.  Firing darts at Federalists like Washington, Adams, and Hamilton made him really good friends with Republicans like Jefferson.  In fact, our third President called Callender “a man of genius” and “a man of science fled from persecution.”

It was all tea and crumpets when James Callender released History of 1796, a pamphlet which exposed to the public a scandal involving “the prime mover of the federal party.”  He enticed his audience by writing that “we shall presently see this great master of morality, although himself the father of a family, confessing that he had an illicit correspondence with another man’s wife.”  He then went on to publish all the papers concerning Alexander Hamilton’s affair with Maria Reynolds.  These were the accounts Hamilton had given to James Monroe, Frederick Muhlenberg, and Abraham Venable.

As we remember, these three men approached Hamilton because they believed the Treasury Secretary was involved in some sort of financial corruption with James Reynolds.  When he buried them with the details of the affair and the extortion, the men left knowing that Hamilton, while acting immorally, was not acting illegally.  Of course, Callender paid no attention to niceties like the truth, and published the corruption stuff anyways.

But Callender was an equal-opportunity muck-raker.  In 1802, he broke another story, this one about the relationship between President Jefferson and one of his slaves, Sally Hemings.  It was probably at this time that Jefferson’s opinion of James Callender changed from that of a man of science to “hypochondriac, drunken, penniless, and unprincipled.”

And then there was the court case in 1803.  The People vs. Croswell involved Harry Croswell, a publisher charged with libel who claimed that Thomas Jefferson had paid Callender to defame President George Washington.  Of course, that meant that James Callender would likely be called to the witness stand.  He never made it.

On July 17, 1803, his body was found in the James River.  Apparently, he was in a drunken stupor and drowned in three feet of water…or did he?  History is unclear.

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Rain, Rain, Go Away!!!

I enjoy riding my bike to and from work, so in my world, it’s always best when the early morning hours (4:00-7:00am) are dry.  The same holds true for the ride home (2:00pm-5:00pm).  It doesn’t actually take me three hours to make each ride.  In fact, 45-50 minutes is usually enough.  It’s just that, for the trails to be mostly dry, rain needs to stop about two hours before I ride.

Of late, however, central Iowa has been starved for rain.  We had rain on Friday, but it amounted to a measly two-tenths of an inch.  Other than that, we’ve had no serious rainfall in nearly a month.  And our exceptionally mild winter and spring meant less rain as well.  So while us cyclists have been living it up, farmers are starting to worry.  We drove an hour north earlier today and visited my folks and grandmother.  When we left, it was raining in sheets and the storm was heading straight south.  We raced home to close windows, only to have the storms fizzle to nothing.

So I continue to put water on the lawn every couple of days (and water is really expensive here) and pray for rain in the meantime.  Even if it meant I couldn’t ride my bike to work a morning or two, I’d welcome the precipitation.  Two or three days of steady rain would simply be awesome…even a one- or two-inch deluge would be better than nothing.

Speaking of that, Montreal knows a thing about deluges.

On July 14, 1987, the residents of the Island of Montreal awoke to weather more typical of Iowa.  Warm, moist air and hazy sunshine promised yet another in a string of unseasonably hot and humid days.  But as us midwesterners know all too well, high heat and high humidity are two key ingredients needed to spawn thunderstorms.  The other is some form of “destabilizer”, which usually takes the form of cooler air above.  Since heat rises, it displaces the cooler air, causing the turbulence necessary to roughen the weather up a bit.

Or, in the case of Montreal that day, roughen it up quite a bit.  Starting around lunchtime, a series of four severe thunderstorms made their way across the area.  And by the time the mid-afternoon doldrums hit at 3:00pm, the storms were over.  But in their wake…

In the two hours the storms trained across Montreal, they dumped nearly four inches of rain, with some areas reporting higher amounts.  The sewer system, which wasn’t designed to handle these kinds of downpours, was overwhelmed.  In addition, widespread power outages from lightning strikes took down the sewer pumping systems.

Flooding became a serious problem, particularly for lower lying roads.  Thousands of people became stranded in their cars, as the waters quickly rose. The Décarie Expressway (shown above) became a car-clogged river, with motorists scrambling for rescue as the waters inundated their vehicles.

I have the distinct feeling that, had I been in Montreal at the time, even the two-hour gap between the storms and my commute wouldn’t have allowed me to ride my bike home.  Of course, one of my co-workers has a boat…

Send some of that rain our way!!

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Operation Ladbrooke Gets Broke

Operation Ladbrooke was designed as a fairly straightforward mission, but failed miserably even in its success.  The goal was simple:  fly 1,700 soldiers to the Ponte Grande bridge.  That bridge, which spanned the Anapo River, was located just south of Syracuse, a city on the southeast side of the island of Sicily.  It was July 9, 1943, not quite two months since Allied forces had driven the German army from North Africa.  And now, the opening salvos of the battle for “the soft underbelly of Europe” were being fired.  Ladbrooke was just one small piece of the Allied invasion of Sicily, code-named Operation Husky.

The soldiers of Ladbrooke were to capture their target before it could be demolished, and hold it against German and Italian counterattacks.  Having done that, they would move into Syracuse and secure its docks, providing a key point of disembarkation for the Eighth Army.  Unfortunately for those soldiers, the results were an unmitigated disaster.  In his book The Day of Battle, Rick Atkinson writes that Ladbrooke “bore the signature traits of so many airborne operations in the Second World War:  poor judgment, dauntless valor, and a nonchalant disregard of men’s lives.”

The soldiers would be transported in Horsa gliders which were pulled by aircraft using a 350-foot rope.  And that’s about all the good one could say about the mission.  It was flown at night by pilots who had very little night experience and almost no experience pulling gliders.  The area near Ponte Grande were rocky and full of stone walls, which made terrible (to say nothing of dangerous) landing zones for unpowered, wooden gliders.  Naysayers of the plan were many…naysayers that actually spoke up were few, as the plan had originated in General Montgomery’s headquarters, and speaking out carried with it career risks.

Glider pilots with any experience at all had never flown in anything but sunshine and calm conditions, a far cry from what they encountered that windswept Friday night.  But off they went, all 144 gliders from a half-dozen airfields in Tunisia.  And from that point (before the bullets even started coming), the plan was shot.

Some pilots had poor navigation maps, some had none at all.  The strong winds buffeted the planes and gliders badly, and numerous pilots became disoriented, flying far off course.  Some soldiers landed on Malta, while others were dropped back in Tunisia.  And while that’s pretty bad, those soldiers were the fortunate ones.  Winds caused additional strain and broke the tow-ropes on some gliders, which then landed in the Mediterranean, with all occupants drowned.

And while the majority of the gliders made it to where they could see Sicily, some pilots released their gliders too early, which again meant a swim and, on many occasions, death by drowning.  Only 54 gliders actually made to land belonging to Sicily and, even then, results were pretty awful.  Enemy anti-aircraft fire shot down a number, while others crashed heavily on landing, killing most (or all) of their passengers.

Rather than the five hundred men expected to take the bridge, a mere platoon seized Ponte Grande.  By morning the force had grown to nearly 100, but they were shelled heavily by Italian mortars and machine guns, and forced to surrender.  The bridge was later recaptured by Royal Scot Fusiliers.

So yeah, the bridge was captured intact, but the price was terrible.  The glider forces sustained more than 600 casualties, and more than half of them drowned without ever firing a shot.  While the mission of Ladbrooke was accomplished, the failure of the plan was seen over the ensuing weeks, as bodies washed up on shore with daily regularity.  Atkinson summarizes, “If the courage of those flying to Sicily that night is unquestioned, the same cannot be said for the judgment of their superiors in concocting and approving such a witless plan.”

Recommended Reading:  The Day of Battle

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Two Enemies, One Island – Guadalcanal

For the Japanese military, 1942 was a study in contrasts.  The first half of the year was filled with heady exhilaration, as victory after victory was achieved with stunning speed.  One by one, each objective was marked off the list.  It started at Pearl Harbor and was quickly followed by the Philippines, Burma, Singapore, and Malaysia.  All over the central and south Pacific, Japanese forces pushed their American, British, and Australian counterparts back.  As May rolled around, Australia looked ripe for the picking.

It was then that things begin to change.  The Americans fought the Japanese to a draw in the waters of the Coral Sea.  A month later, Admiral Spruance’s forces shocked a vastly superior Japanese force at Midway, taking down four Japanese carriers and halting Japan’s advance in the central Pacific.

Of course, a defeat at Midway didn’t cause the Japanese Navy to simply roll over or run away.  In fact, the Japanese, despite their losses, were still in a much better position than the Americans, who still could only boast a single aircraft carrier to cover the entire Pacific.

At this point, the Japanese started looking for ways to strengthen their perimeter.  As early as mid-May, they had been scouting the Solomon Islands, and before a month had passed, the decision was made to build an airfield on the largest of the islands – Guadalcanal.  The second week of June, even as final plans were still being made, the first Japanese soldiers arrived, with the task of building a wharf. Before too long, heavy smoke hung in the air as large areas of grass were burned on the Lunga Plain.

And on July 6, 1942, the first serious forces arrived on Guadalcanal.  A twelve-ship convoy landed, disembarking 2,500 men of the 11th and 13th Construction Units.  Their job was to build an airfield.

Not a single one of these 2,500 men could have possibly known that, just the day before, the American military (through its knowledge of Japanese codes) had discovered Japan’s interest in Guadalcanal.  Suddenly, Admirals King and Nimitz were also interested in owning this piece of real estate as well.

And thus was set in motion the single most pivotal land campaign in all the Pacific War…the Battle of Guadalcanal.

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Richard Proenneke Discovers the Bear Necessities

We watched a comedian some time ago on television and he joked about his fear of bears.  Before his first visit to Alaska, he discussed his concerns with a friend.  His friend told him not to worry, because “the bear is more afraid of you than you are of it.”  The comedian responded by saying, “I’m pretty sure the bear is wrong.”

And based on the tale that Richard Proenneke tells, I would have to agree with the comedian.

For Proenneke, July 2, 1969 was a day of celebration.  He had lost his axe the previous day, and that was a terrible loss.  He would write in his diary, “After all the miles we had traveled together, building everything, I hated the thought of losing it.  A man could no more afford to lose his axe out here than he could his wallet full of folding money in a strange city.”  All plans for the day were scrapped and the search was on.  He scoured the cabin, he retraced his steps over the last several days, which meant walking trails and digging through the brush.  His relentless search paid dividends, as he finally found the axe on the third search of his cabin.

As you may recall, Proenneke had come to Twin Lakes, Alaska the year before and carved out his own little existence, building his own cabin in the midst of fantastic surroundings and almost complete solitude.  Over time, he had augmented his in-ground cool-box with a stilted cache, where he put things out of the reach of the local wildlife, particularly bears, which rambled around his home in search of food.

Today he would see another bear, though not at all in the manner he desired.

Proenneke decided his celebration would be spent in the high country.  He left his camera and his rifle at home, not wanting the extra weight on what promised to be a day of strenuous exercise.  He paddled across the lake with just his binoculars and his sixty-power eyepiece and tripod.

He climbed up high, past the pesky insects, and watched bighorn sheep, moose, and even a brown bear with her cubs in the distance.  As the temperatures began to drop, he headed back down.  He had just broken out of the willows when he heard a crashing the trees to his right.

Richard turned, expecting to see a moose, but instead saw a huge brown bear charging at him just fifty feet away.  When yelling and waving his hands failed to stop the bear’s charge, he turned and fled, only to trip and fall on his back.  He penned in his diary, “…I started kicking at the great broad head as it burst through the willow leaves.  And then as he loomed over me, a strange thing happened.  The air whooshed out of him as he switched ends.  Off he went up the slope, bunching his huge bulk, climbing hard, and showering stones.  Not once did he look back.”

Proenneke believed the bear, at the last moment, caught the strange scent of human.  The bear probably saw Proenneke’s movement from a distance and charged, thinking it was dinner.  Just in time, the bear relented and left.  Richard continued his trip home, unable to think of anything but those few deadly seconds, and unable to stop shaking.  From now on, his rifle would be an automatic accessory for travel.

When he finally went to bed, he wrote, “I lay awake for a long time.  My mind kept returning to the bear.”

Recommended Reading:  One Man’s Wilderness

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