Made In America (13 page)

United States of Columbia
was a somewhat unexpected choice, since for most of the previous 250 years Christopher Columbus had been virtually forgotten in America. His Spanish associations had made him suspect to the British, who preferred to see the glory of North American discovery go to John Cabot. Not until after the Revolutionary War, when Americans began casting around for heroes unconnected with the British monarchy, was the name
Columbus
resurrected, generally in the more elegant Latinized form
Columbia,
and his memory generously imbued with a spirit of grit and independent fortitude that wasn’t altogether merited.

The semi-deification of Columbus began with a few references in epic poems, but soon communities and institutions
were falling over themselves to create new names in his honour. In 1784 King’s College in New York became Columbia College and two years later South Carolina chose Columbia as the name for its capital. In 1791 an American captain on a ship named
Columbia
claimed a vast tract of the north-west for the young country and dubbed it Columbia. (It later became the states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho, though the original name lives on north of the border in British Columbia.) Journals, dubs and institutes (among them the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of the Arts and Sciences, better known today as the Smithsonian Institution
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) were named for the great explorer. The song ‘Hail Columbia’ dates from 1798.
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After this encouraging start, Columbus’s life was given a kick into the higher realms of myth by Washington Irving’s ambitious, if resplendently inaccurate,
History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus,
which came out in 1828 and was a phenomenal best-seller in America, Europe and Latin America throughout the nineteenth century.

Irving later wrote a life of George Washington that was just as successful and no less indebted to his fictive powers. But it is Mason Locke Weems – or Parson Weems as history knows him – to whom we must turn for many of the most treasured misconceptions about the Father of the Country. His hugely successful
Life of George Washington: With Curious Anecdotes, Equally Honourable to Himself and Exemplary to His Young Countrymen,
first printed in book form in 1806, proved Weems to be not just a fictionalizer of rare gifts but a consummate liar.

Even for the time, the style of the book was more than a
little saccharine. Consider the well-known story of Washington cutting down the cherry tree. We join the action at the point where George’s father has asked him if by any chance he can explain how a productive fruit tree has come to be horizontal, and whether the hatchet in his hand might have something to do with it.

Weems of course made the whole thing up. Almost everything in the book beyond the hero’s name and place of residence was made up or lavishly embellished. Even the title-page included a brazen falsehood. Weems advertised himself as the former ‘Rector of Mount-Vernon Parish’. There was no such parish and never had been. None the less, the work went through some twenty editions and was the greatest seller of its age.

Washington was in fact more flawed and human than Weems or many subsequent chroniclers would have us believe. He was moody, remote and vain (he encouraged his fellow officers in the Revolutionary War to address him as ‘Your Excellency’), he detested being touched by strangers and had an embarrassing proclivity to weep like a babe in public – for instance, when things weren’t going well during the Revolution or when parting from his officers at the war’s conclusion. He was not a gifted military commander. Far from being a hero of the French and Indian War, as Weems and others have suggested, he actually helped to provoke it. In 1754, while an inexperienced lieutenant-colonel with the
Virginia Regiment, he led an unnecessary and essentially irrational attack on a party of Frenchman encamped in the Ohio valley, killing ten of them. This and other such incidents so outraged the French that they went to war with the British. To compound his haplessness, Washington shortly after was routed in battle and naively signed a document in which he apologized for the ‘assassination’ of the Frenchmen, thereby outraging his own masters.
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But there was about him an unquestionable greatness. He was brave, resolute and absolutely incorruptible. No one gave more time or endured greater risks or hardships to secure America’s independence and democracy. For eight years he doggedly prosecuted a war in which neither the Continental Congress nor the people gave him anything like the support his valour deserved. During one long march across New Jersey, he watched in dismay as his army evaporated from 30,000 men to barely 3,400. To add to his problems, he often discovered he was being served by traitors. Benedict Arnold is the best-known example, but there were others, such as Major General Charles Lee, who while serving as one of Washington’s aides-de-camp was simultaneously supplying the British with advice on how to beat the Americans.
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It is no wonder that Washington sometimes wept.

He genuinely and nobly wanted only what was best for his country. Such was the hysteria that greeted his triumph over the British that he could have had any tribute he cared to ask for – a kingship, a lavish life pension, his own Blenheim Palace on the Potomac. He asked only to be allowed to return to a quiet life at Mount Vernon. When elected President he requested Congress not to pay him a salary, but only to meet his expenses – a position all the more honourable when you consider that he was chronically hard up. ‘My estate for the last 11 years has not been able to make both ends meet,’ he wrote in despair to his cousin shortly before becoming President, and when he made the trip from Mount Vernon to
New York to be sworn in, he had to borrow £100 to pay his costs.
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(Financial hardship was a common problem for Virginia planters. Jefferson was so chronically pressed for money that in 1815 he sold his beloved private library to Congress for a much needed $23,950, though he rather undid this achievement by almost immediately beginning to acquire another just as splendid. By the time of his death, he was over $100,000 in debt, and most of the contents of Monticello had to be auctioned off.)

Congress refused to heed Washington’s request and insisted he take a salary of $25,000 a year. It also did him the honour of allowing him to choose the site of the nation’s permanent capital – not so much out of altruism but more because it couldn’t decide on a location itself. At least forty sites had been considered and argued over, from Germantown, Pennsylvania, to Kingston, New York, before Washington was authorized to make his choice. He selected a ten-mile square alongside the Potomac River’s head of navigation. (In 1846 Virginia reclaimed the portion on its side of the river, which explains why the modern Washington has ruler-straight boundaries on three sides but an irregular wriggle on the fourth.) In 1791 the city-to-be was named
Washington;
the 6,100-acre tract within which it was situated was called the
Territory of Columbia
(eventually of course changed to
District of Columbia),
thus neatly enshrining in one place the two great mythic names of the age.

Two years later, Washington laid the cornerstone for the Capitol, and in 1800 the city of Washington opened for business. America was on its way.

Bombardments in the early nineteenth century provided a spectacle that must have been quite thrilling to anyone not on the receiving end. The art of the matter was to cut fuses to just the right length so that they would detonate at or near the moment of impact. In practice, they went off all over the place. Hence the ‘bombs bursting in air' of the American national anthem. As most people know, the words to the anthem were inspired by the bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbour during the War of 1812. Francis Scott Key, a young lawyer, had been sent to try to negotiate the release of an American prisoner, and found himself detained aboard a British man-of-war.

Through the night Key watched as the British fleet ranged round the harbour threw a colourful fusillade of explosives at the embattled fort. When dawn broke and Key saw the American flag still flying, tattered but defiant, he was sufficiently moved to dash off a poem. The poem was frankly terrible, but it bore an emotional impact easily forgotten at this remove. Published under the title ‘Defence of Fort M'Henry', and set to the decidedly funereal tune of an English song called ‘To Anacreon in Heaven' (the beat has since been considerably enlivened), it became a sensation. Soon almost everyone had forgotten its original title and was
calling it ‘The Star-Spangled Banner', by which name it has been known ever since.

The flag that Key saw flying over Fort McHenry had fifteen stars and fifteen stripes. In the early years of independence, the custom was to add a star and a stripe to the flag each time a state joined the Union. By 1818 Congress was flying a flag with no fewer than eighteen stripes and it was becoming evident that the practice would soon become unsustainable. Congress decided that enough was enough and officially decreed that henceforth flags should have thirteen stripes (one for each of the original colonies) and as many stars as there were states.

The War of 1812 also saw the rise of another American icon: Uncle Sam. He appears to have arisen in 1813 in Troy, New York, but little more than that is known.
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Previously America had been personified by a character of obscure origins called Brother Jonathan, who usually appeared in apposition to the English John Bull. The inspiration for Uncle Sam is sometimes traced to one Samuel Wilson, an army inspector of Troy, but it seems more probable that the name was merely inspired by the initials
US.
The top-hatted, striped-trousered figure that we associate with the name came much later. It was popularized in the 1860s in the cartoons of Thomas Nast, and later reinforced by the famous I
WANT
YOU
recruiting posters of the artist James Montgomery Flagg, in which Uncle Sam lost his genial sparkle and took on a severe, almost demonic look, which he has generally kept to this day.

Thus by the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century America had a national anthem (though it would not be officially recognized as such until 1931), a more or less fixed flag and a national symbol in the form of Uncle Sam. It was, in short, beginning to accumulate the rudiments of a national identity.

But in other ways America remained a collection of disparate parts, each following its own course. This was most arrestingly seen in the absence of uniform times. Until as late as 1883, there were no fixed times in America. When it was midnight in New York, it was 11.47 in Washington, and 11.55 in Philadelphia. In 1869, when Leland Stanford struck the golden spike that marked the completion of America's first transcontinental railway (in fact he couldn't manage to drive the spike in; the work had to be completed by someone more adept with a manual implement), the news was instantly telegraphed to a breathlessly waiting nation. In Promontory, Utah, the great event happened at 12.45, but in nearby Virginia City it was deemed to be 12.30. In San Francisco it was 11.46 or 11.44, depending on which authority you believed in, and in Pittsburgh the information was simultaneously received at six places and logged in at six different official times.

In an age when most information arrived by horseback, a few minutes here and there hardly mattered. But as the world became more technologically sophisticated, the problem of variable timekeeping did begin to matter. It was a particular headache for the railways and those who travelled on them. In an effort to arrive at some measure of conformity, most railway companies synchronized the clocks along their own lines, but often these bore no relationship to the times used either locally or by competing railways. Stations would often have a multiplicity of clocks – one showing the station time, another the local time and the rest showing the times on each of the lines serving that station. Passengers unfamiliar with local discrepancies would often arrive to catch a train only to find that it had recently departed. Making connections in a place like Chicago, where fifteen lines met, required the careful study of fat books of algorithms showing all the possible permutations.

Clearly something needed to be done. The first person to
push for uniform time throughout the country was the rather unlikely figure of Charles F. Dowd, head of the Temple Grove Ladies' Seminary in Saratoga Springs, New York. In 1869, the year of Leland Stanford and the golden spike, Dowd began agitating for the adoption of four time zones very much along the lines of those used today. The idea met with surprisingly heated objections. Many thought it somehow ungodly to tinker with something as elemental as time, ignoring the consideration that clocks are not a divine concept. Some communities saw it as an impudence to expect them to change their clocks for the benefit of commercial interests like the railways and telegraph companies. Almost everyone found the entire notion strange and puzzling, particularly those who lived on or near the prospective time zone borders. People in a place like North Platte, Nebraska, couldn't for the life of them understand why their neighbours down the road in Ogallala should get to rise an hour later than they each day. The objections extended even to groups of the greatest eminence. The British Association for the Advancement of Science for one dismissed the idea as ‘too utopian'.
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Finally in November 1883, after a meeting called the National Railway Time Convention, it was agreed to introduce time zones and synchronize clocks. The date 18 November, dubbed ‘the day of two noons,' was set for its inception. For two weeks, people everywhere fretted and fussed as if the country were about to be struck by an outsize meteor. Farmers worried that their hens would stop laying or that their cows would go dry. Workers in Chicago, suspecting they were to be compelled to work an extra nine minutes on the big day, threatened to strike. By the dawn of the appointed day, the nation was in a fever of uncertainty. Just before noon people everywhere began silently gathering by town halls and court-houses to watch the clocks change.