HAVING FAITH Chapter One - Drowning

I believe the watch made the lady a liar. She vanished into the Southern Californian surf attired in a modest one piece green bathing suit and cap.  She miraculously  reappeared five hundred miles away, dry as a bone. She said she had been kidnapped. But in the intervening five weeks the lady had acquired shoes, a dress and a corset...and her own wrist watch. Now, why would a kidnapper provide their hostage with her own wrist watch? To me that is proof to me the popular evangelical radio minister Aimee Semple McPherson (above) had not been kidnapped. But that remains just my personal opinion, because in 1926 the Los Angeles County Prosecutor was a major league sleaze ball.

“Through green-white breakers swift I leap,

Sun-sparkled seas by body keep;
Bearer of Gospel-Glory I
With singing angels in my sky...”

At just about 3:30 in the afternoon of Tuesday, 18 May, 1926,  a rather plainly dressed middle aged woman, wearing no makeup walked up to the front desk of the Ocean View Hotel, in Santa Monica, California. She gave her name as Miss Emma Shaffer (above), and explained to the deskman that she was the  private secretary to Sister Aimee Semple Mcpherson.  Sister Aimee had earlier rented a room, where she changed into her modest bathing suits. Unknown to Miss Shaffer, Aimee also left her wrist watch on the dresser before they exited the hotel. 

After crossing the Venice Boardwalk, the two women settled on a large towel under a rented umbrella. Sister Aimee had immediately gone into the ocean for a swim, while Miss Shaffer remained onshore.  When Aimee returned, she dried herself, sat on the sand and begun to dictate to Emma notes for her next sermon  Then, just before three,  she sent Miss Shaffer into the Ocean View  to phone Sister Aimee's Church of the Four Square Gospel to see if there were any urgent matters which required her attention.  

There were none, but when the Emma returned to their umbrella on the crowded beach, Sister Aimee was gone. Assuming her employer was taking another swim, Emma waited perhaps twenty minutes, before running into hotel and asking for help.

“The cripples to my temple crowd,

I heal them, and they shout aloud.
A thousand miles my raptures go
Upon my magic radio.”

Hotel staff searched the beach and the surf,  but there was no sign of Sister Aimee. The police were called. A tracking dog had no trouble finding the missing evangelist’s towel, but only Aimee's scent remained on the sand.  One of the most famous women in Los Angeles was missing.

It was too late to make the evening editions of the battling daily newspapers. But overnight The Los Angeles Times, and William Randolph Hearst's  Herald American assigned dozens of reporters to the "beat".  Within 24 hours 500 reporters from across the nation would be chasing this story.  The morning headlines back east shouted, “Evangelist Feared Drown.”

“What's this? A terror-spasm grips

My heart-strings, and my reason slips.
Oh, God, it cannot be that I,
The bearer of Thy Word, should die!...”

It is hard to overstate Aimee Semple's influence in 1926. One in ten of Los Angeles' one million citizens claimed to be a member of her evangelical Pentecostal Church of the Four Square Gospel (above), with perhaps three quarters of a million adherents nationwide, thanks to her nation wide radio broadcasts.

That Tuesday evening Aimee's mother, Mrs Mildred Kennedy (known as Sister Minnie), preached in Aimee's stead at the Temple on Glendale Avenue (above), delivering the same muscular vibrant faith healing fundamentalist theology, but without the theatrical flair the faithful had come to expect from Aimee. And the first public acknowledgment of Sister Aimee's absence came at the end of the service, when Sister Minnie told the congregation that “'Sister went swimming this afternoon at 20 minutes to three, and she has not come back. Sister is gone. We know she is with Jesus.”

“My daughter's voice, my mother's kiss!

My pulpit-notes on Genesis!
Oh, count the souls I saved for Thee,
My Savior-wilt Thou not save me?”

The next morning, two air planes crisscrossed the stretch of sand (above), a half dozen life boats scoured the waters. A Coast Guard Cutter even sent down divers. By noon the worried crowd was reported at fifty thousand.  The Los Angeles Times reported in its Wednesday evening edition that overnight, “To the hundreds of men and women who wait in a huddled and silent mass beneath the open sky...Through the fog-bound, chilling night and then through the weary scorching hours of the day, the followers of the evangelist have kept their places on the sand..."She can't be dead. She can't be dead....God wouldn't let her die. She was too noble. Her work was too great. Her mission was not ended. She can't be dead."...

“Ten thousand to my aid would run,

Bring me my magic microphone!
Send me an angel, or a boat…

The senseless waters fill her throat.”

“In some manner word was spread about,” reported the Times, “that promptly at 2:30 p.m. Mrs. McPherson (above) would arise from the sea and speak to her followers. The appointed time came and many arose to look further out to sea. But it passed without the miracle... At noon, search of the sea was halted as hopeless. The long seine nets stretched from boat to boat which had dragged the ocean floor since Tuesday night were taken in.

"A boat containing life guards continued the search alone for a little while longer and then also gave up. The tide was left to do its own work....Only an occasional swimmer ventured into the water near the spot where Mrs. McPherson is supposed to have been drowned during the day. The place seemed to be shunned by bathers...”

“Ten million tons of waters hide

A woman's form, her Faith deride;
While thousands weep upon the shore,
And searchlights seek…and breakers roar…”

That Wednesday, a teenage girl saw Sister Aimee struggling in the waves, and raced into the surf to her rescue. But there was no Aimee, and the girl drown. After that the desperate amateurs were replaced by professional hard hat divers, who walked the sea bed from the Santa Monica Pier to the north, to Ballona Creek, three miles to the south. One of the frantic hard hats, a diver named Ed Harrison, succumbed to exhaustion and died, but still the search continued and no body was found.

By the first of June, the desperate Minnie (above, left) had calculated the exact location of her daughter's remains, and in defiance of California  Fish and Game regulations, set off four dynamite charges, hoping to free Sister Aimee's body from the bottom sands. Nothing floated to the surface except a few sacrificial fish. The faithful lined the bay for weeks, spaced a hundred yards apart, walking back and forth, waiting for the sea to give up her dead. 

And then, 33 days later, Aimee's body reappeared five hundred miles away, in the middle of the Sonora desert. And as was to be expected, miraculously, she was alive.

“Oh, gallant souls that grope for light

Through matter's blind and lonely night!
Oh, pity our minds that seek to know
That which is so—
And piteously have forgot
That which is not! “

Upton Sinclair, “An Evangelist Drowns”

The New Republic, June 30, 1926

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APRIL FOOLS

 

I don’t approve of practical jokes. I see nothing humorous in having my shoes set afire while I am  wearing them. And dribble glasses are not only not practical they are also not funny - especially on “April Fools Day”, when every glass is a dribble glass and every shoe is a potential combustion chamber. 

It turns out that this celebration of sociopathic behavior was invented by the French, a nation without humorous inclinations since Moliere slipped on a banana peel in 1673. The calendar in use at the time had been  invented by Julius Caesar - and we know how he was repaid for that creation. But the story of April Fool’s Day began when in 1564 King Charles IX decided to follow Pope Gregory’s suggestion and begin the Julian calendar on January rather than April. Why the French originally celebrated New Years Day on April 1st, I have no idea. But I think it had something to do with a hibernation habits of snails.

Now, in the 16th century, France had only one road. It came out of Paris, turned left, looped all the way around the city and re-entered on the other side of town. This tragic design error,(the world’s first Traffic Circle) made communication with the majority of the nation difficult (and introduced the phrase “Out-of-the-Loop”), and when combined with the French telephone system - which was in no better shape in the 16th century than it is today - meant that a lot of peasants never got the King’s memo concerning the calendar adjustment.

So as they had every year, thousands of these ill-informed peasants journeyed to Paris during the last week of March and on what they thought was New Year’s Eve, gathered in Bastille Square to say bonjour to 1565 and watch the guillotine drop on 1566. In unison they gleefully chanted, “Cing, quartre, trios, deux, un” and…No guillotine. No satisfying plop of a head into the basket. No Champagne corks popping. No red faced Anderson Cooper.  Instead of cheers and shouts of glee, mass ennui broke out among the masses. Now anyone who has experienced the Parisian version of “good manners” can imagine what came next; the locals mocked the bewildered peasants and made them feel like complete Americans,…ah, I mean, fools. But the way they did it makes the word “odd” seem inadequate.

For reasons beyond understanding the Parisians snuck up behind their confused country cousins, surreptitiously stuck a paper fish to the bumpkin’s backs and then shouted in a loud voice, “Poisson d’Avril!”, which translates as “April Fish!”, and then collapsed in raucous laughter and shouts of “tres bien.”

Why would they shout “April Fish!”? I have no idea. But, perhaps the first Parisian to label his victim an "April Fool” immediately received a mouth full of fist, while calling the victim an "April Fish” confused him just long enough so that the prankster could escape.

I have long thought that this uncharacteristic outbreak of French “humor” was actually inspired by Charles’ Italian Queen, Catherine de Medici, who was already famous throughout Europe for her gastronomical gags,  such as her duck a la cyanide with a hemlock sauce. Only a Medici could see the humor in humiliating the people who handled your food.

But however it started, the Parisians knew a good time when they saw it and they sent peasants on “fool’s errands”, and tricked peasants with “fool’s tales”, until every April first France reverberated with gales of laughter and shouts of “Poisson d’Avril!”  Ah, good times. But eventually the Parisian bullies grew bored with taunting the unresponsive peasants and in 1572 they shifted their attentions to the Huguenots. But by then the tradition of humiliating people for your own amusement on the first day of April had become generally popular. And like Disco music and Special Federal Prosecutors, once invented such institutions have proven impossible to dis-invent.

This holiday for the humor-impaired spread around the globe with the new calendar like a fungus, infecting and evolving a little in each newly afflicted nation. The Germans added the “Kick Me” sign, and a second day which they called “Taily Day”, to further enjoy the frivolity of bruised buttocks. Ahh, those Germans.

In Portugal, today’s innocent victim is hit with flour, sometimes while it is still in the bag - the flour not the victim.  In Scotland the target is humiliatingly referred to as an “April Gawk” (?!), in England as a “Noodle” and in Canada as an “American.”  I would have expected mental health professionals to call for a stop to this public insanity but evidently they are too busy setting their patients’ shoes on fire.

Not even a war could snap the world out of this cruel insanity. In fact, in what may have been the first time a practical joke qualified as a war crime, on April 1, 1915 a French pilot buzzed the German trenches and dropped a huge bomb. Which bounced. 

Four years later the citizens of Venice awoke on April 1, to discover their sidewalks littered with cow manure, the "gag" of a visiting Englishman, Horace de Vere Cole, with too much time on his hands and too much money in his pockets. But then what can you expect from a man who would honeymoon on April Fool's day? 

Bad humor moved into the electronic age in 1957 when BBC Television News broadcast a report about that year's successful and bountiful Swiss harvest of spaghetti.  On April Fool's Day in 1992, National Public Radio in the United States, broadcast the announcement that Richard Nixon was coming out of retirement to run again for President, under the slogan, "I didn't do anything wrong and I won't do it again."

Some years later the Australian Broadcasting Company, carried a report that the nation was about to switch to "Metric Time". The next morning would begin at midnight, but each minute would be made up of 100 milidays, each hour of 100 centedays, and each day would consist of 20 decadays. 

It is alleged that  the following morning nobody in Australia showed up for work on time, but it is unclear if that was because the April Fools joke worked, or merely because everybody in Australia still had a hangover, mate  

Admit it; there is no defense against April Fool tomfoolery, except a preemptive strike. So button up your top button, zip up your pants, tie your shoes and look out for that cat. Load up your water gun, warm up your fart cushion and repeat after me; “Poison d’Avril, sucker!”

Funny, huh?

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GETTYSBURG Chapter Six

I think the smartest thing Daniel Tyler did that June – and he did a lot of very smart things the last 2 weeks of that month - was to not assert his authority on arriving in Martinsburg, Virginia. He was a Brigadier General and under orders to take command of the town 30 miles north of Winchester.

But when he stepped off the Baltimore and Ohio train from Harpers Ferry at 8:00 that Sunday morning, 14 June, 1863, the 62 year old Tyler found Colonel B.F. Smith just leading the 1,200 man Martinsburg garrison out to face a rebel threat. Rather than create confusion on the eve of battle, Tyler sized up Smith in a glance, judged him competent, wished him good luck, offered to supply advice if asked, and concentrated on evacuating a final train load of supplies out of town.

An hour later a rider appeared in front of the Federal lines with a note from soulful rebel Brigadier General Albert “Grumble” Jenkins (above), addressed to the “Commanding Officer U.S. Forces near Martinsburg”. The note demanded the immediate surrender of the town or threatened its destruction. The post script added: “An immediate reply is necessary.” 

Technically, the Federal Commander at Martinsburg (above) was Tyler. But the Mexican War veteran never hinted, then or later, that he should have answered. Colonel Smith did - after delaying for an hour to buy time. Smith's reply told Jenkins, “ You may commence shelling as soon as you choose.”

It was now closing in on 11:00 a.m., and the old man who had spent a sleepless night on an express train out of Baltimore, still found the energy to supervise the loading of ammunition and food, and dispatching it to safety, while at the same time laying out a line of retreat for Smith and his soldiers. It is a testament to Tyler's cool competence that he marched into Harper's Ferry (above)  the next morning, Monday, 15 June at the head of all Colonel Smith's men. Tyler's reward for this display of cool professionalism was to be saddled with defending yet another place the legendary “Stonewall” Jackson himself considered indefensible.

Since 1761, when Robert Harper began operating his ferry where the Potomac River cut through the quartzite crests of the once towering Appalachian mountains, at its junction with the Shenandoah River had been a magnet for power hungry people. 

Between 1801 when it opened, and 1861, when retreating federals burned most of it, the “U.S. Musket Factory” at Harpers Ferry built half a million weapons. But even after the factory's destruction and looting in 1861, the site lost very little of its strategic importance. If you wanted to enter the fertile Shenandoah Valley from the north, you had to start at Harpers Ferry. And the fastest way to get there was on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

At the start of the Civil War the B & O ran 380 miles of iron rails, beginning in Baltimore and running first to Fredrick, Maryland, where it touched the north shore of the Potomac River. Turning west for 12 miles the railroad squeezed around the base of the 300 foot tall Maryland Heights, before crossing to the southern shore at Harpers Ferry. 

The line then wound west through 11 tunnels and over 113 bridges to Piedmont and Grafton, Virginia before reaching the Ohio River at Wheeling, Virginia.  Branch lines drew in the produce from the rich farms of the Shenandoah Valley, and coal from the mines of western Virginia and Pennsylvania – 1/3 of the railroad's profits in 1861 came from transporting coal to northern factories. And even though northern military commanders were slow to realize the advantages of the B&O for moving troops, their political masters were always sensitive to threats to corporate property.

However, the Rebels occupying Harpers Ferry found Federal artillery glowering down from Maryland Heights (above, red arrow), which forced them to evacuate the town within months of it's capture. But they captured it again during Lee's 1862 invasion of Maryland. They returned it after the failure at Antietam, but many assumed the rebels would be back this year, 1863. And after General Milroy's disastrous stand at Winchester, the new commander of Harper's Ferry, General Taylor, lacked the manpower to even be certain of holding the Heights.

Daniel Tyler (above) knew Harpers Ferry well. After graduating from West Point in 1819, the Connecticut native had specialized in ordinance, and in 1832 he was made "Superintendent of the Inspectors of Contract Arms." The next year he rejected every musket offered by private industry. His integrity so angered the industrialists that the following year, when Tyler was recommended for promotion to Chief of Ordinance, President Andrew Jackson appointed a business friendly southerner instead. In his letter of resignation, Tyler complained, “I have lost all ambition to be connected with the service where... the fact that a man was not born in the South was a bar to promotion."

But Daniel Tyler's brains and patriotism were never in doubt. As a civil engineer, he got rich saving 3 failing railroads from bankruptcy, the last being the Macon and Western, which paid 8% dividends under his direction. In 1849, when asked to explain why he unexpectedly resigned, he told the board of directors, “Gentlemen...You are educating your young men to hate the Union and despise the North, and the result will be a conflict within ten years, and in that event I mean to be with my family north of Mason and Dixon Line.” And he was, growing richer over the decade serving on 4 more northern railroads before the outbreak of war in December of 1860.

General Tyler (above) served with distinction at Bull Run, but a year of service during 1862  outside Cornith, Mississippi, under the indecisive and untrustworthy General Henry Halleck broke his health and spirit. But the old man came back in the spring of 1863 when he was dispatched to rescue the disaster in the Shenandoah Valley.  At 7:00 p.m. on the Monday he took command at Harpers Ferry, Tyler telegraphed that the remnants of General Milroy's mismanagement had arrived. “I am sending everybody over to Maryland Heights... Our effective force here...is not over 4,000 men.”

His cool head at Harpers Ferry soon showed it's value. At midday, Tuesday, 16 June, Tyler told his boss in Baltimore, Major General Robert Shenck, “...rebel cavalry this side of Halltown (3 miles to the south west), (are) endeavoring to flank our pickets.” But by 9:40 that night he could reassure his superior, “We have not been attacked at Harpers Ferry. We have been threatened from the direction of Charlestown (6 miles to the southwest), but no rebel columns have advanced nearer...” Then, at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, 17 June, General Tyler was forced to telegraph his boss, “I am requested by Major General Hooker to (send) our infantry...(to) Noland and Haulings Fords. This is out of my command. Will you attend to it?”

It was a simple matter of chain of command. Brigadier General Daniel Tyler at Harper's Ferry, reported to Major General Robert Shenck (above) who commanded the VIII Corps headquartered 70 miles away in Baltimore. Tyler's logistics – his supplies, his reinforcements and his orders - all came from Baltimore. 

And from Baltimore, Major General Shenck reported to now General-of-the-Army Henry Halleck (above) in Washington, D.C..

Major General "Fighting Joe" Hooker (above) commanded the Army of the Potomac, which usually operated south of Washington, D.C.  But as the mercurial Hooker belatedly followed the Army of Northern Virginia north of the Potomac river, he was a lot closer to Harpers Ferry than Shenck was in Baltimore. And the increasingly panicky Hooker seemed determined not to understand he had no authority to issue orders to General Tyler. 

Nor did the commander of 80,000 Federal infantry, artillery and cavalry (above) seem willing to understand why Tyler's 4,000 men could not simply abandon Maryland Heights, to provide screening troops to benefit Hooker.  Fighting Joe's  inability to order about Tyler's paltry command became an obsession, to the point that the Major General Hooker went a little nuts – never a good thing in a field commander.

I am tempted here to remind you once again of what General Omar Bradly said – so I will. “Amateurs study strategy. Professionals study logistics.”

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