On September 29, the nation’s roster of English-language newspapers increased by one as the Chicago Tribune abandoned its use of “simplified” spelling, a quixotic experiment that for more than four decades had left Chicagoans puzzling out oddities like thruout and thorofare over their morning coffee. The policy had been adopted in January 1934 by Col. Robert McCormick, the paper’s colorful owner, in reaction against standard English orthography, which the paper called an “unspeakable offense to common sense.” (As early as the 1870s, in fact, at the instigation of McCormick’s grandfather Joseph Medill, the Tribune had tried out such spellings as favorit, but the effort was abandoned.) The changes McCormick instituted ran from the sensible (tranquility for tranquillity) to the pointless (hocky for hockey) to the arcane (apolog for apologue) to the deranged (aile for aisle).
Some of the changes were prompted by an understandable preference for Midwestern pronunciation, including drouth for drought, a choice that inspired some controversy. The wife of Rufus C. Dawes, a utility magnate and president of the Chicago World’s Fair, wrote: “There are people who say ‘droughth’ and who also say ‘heighth,’ but they have fallen into a careless habit in doing so. Both words end in ‘t’ and are pronounced ‘drout’ and ‘hite.’” In defense of its decision, the Tribune cited passages from Swinburne and Browning as well as the testimony of Paul Potter, the paper’s agricultural editor, that “In Iowa, my native state, the usual pronunciation was and is ‘drouth.’” For similar reasons, advertisment was adopted for advertisement so that “even the untutored will be more likely to place the stress on the second sylabl.” Genuinely yielded to genuinly, a spelling that “not only saves a letter but helps foreigners to avoid the mispronunciation gen-u-ineIy—the ine as in whine.”
McCormick hoped that his changes would spark a nationwide movement. As years went by, however, it became clear that waiting for Americans to adopt Tribune spelling was like waiting for the Cubs to win the World Series. In August 1955, a few months after McCormick’s death, the Tribune abandoned some of its more egregious reforms, such as frate for freight and sodder for solder. Two more decades would pass before the Tribune gave up on altho, thro (for through), and various other enduring idiosyncrasies.
1925Seventy-five Years Ago
The Wreck of the Shenandoah
On September 3, the airship Shenandoah, the showpiece of American naval aviation, broke apart in a storm and fell to earth near Ava, Ohio. Crowds assembled at the crash site almost immediately and began looting everything of value, including the ship’s structural girders, pieces of its outer fabric, canned goods from the galley, logbooks and instruments, and personal effects of the crew members. The owner of the farm where the main section had landed charged 25 cents per person to view the wreck, or a dollar for automobiles, with water available at 10 cents a glass. Within a day a souvenir stand had been set up.
The Shenandoah was a rigid airship, one of a class of behemoths that sailed majestically and, all too often, tragically through the skies from the dawn of aviation into the late 1930s. Unlike nonrigid airships, or blimps, which are essentially cigar-shaped balloons a few hundred feet long, rigid airships had aluminum skeletons that held multiple, independent gasbags. This allowed them to reach enormous proportions. At 680 feet long and with two million cubic feet of helium, the Shenandoah was actually on the small side.
After World War I, using captured German designs, the U.S. Navy experimented with rigid airships as attack and reconnaissance vehicles. Their ability to hover and to stay aloft for days were pluses, but their low speed and unwieldiness greatly limited their possible uses. Even while the Shenandoah was being built, many in the Navy came to see rigid airships as a solution in search of a problem. As often happens in such situations, the Shenandoah’s main activity turned out to be justifying its own existence.
One thing large airships were definitely good for was drawing crowds, especially in inland states whose congressmen needed convincing to support naval appropriations. So after its launch in September 1923, the Shenandoah spent most of its time crisscrossing the country to arouse public enthusiasm for the airship program. The ship’s crew dismissed these publicity missions as “hand wavers.”
The day before the crash, the Shenandoah took off from the naval air station at Lakehurst, New Jersey, on her fifty-ninth mission. After midnight, over southeastern Ohio, she encountered severe atmospheric turbulence. While an airplane might have been able to dash through the bad weather or steer around it, the bulky Shenandoah was hard to maneuver and could make little or no progress against strong headwinds. When turbulence hit, there was not much she could do except try to ride it out.
Around 5:00 A.M., a sudden updraft shot the airship skyward at more than 1,000 feet per minute. Capt. Zachary Lansdowne and his crew did everything they could to hold her down, but nothing worked. Then, at 6,000 feet, a cold-air mass hit, sending her hurtling back downward at 1,500 feet per minute. Girders tore apart, wires snapped, and engines failed. The Shenandoah went into a spin and then broke into pieces.
The control cabin, which had been suspended from the ship’s underside, broke off and dropped like a rock. All 8 of its occupants, including Lansdowne, were killed. The bow section, buoyant but powerless, continued to float for an hour before coming to rest at Sharon, 12 miles away. Its 7 occupants all survived. The remaining portion of the ship broke in two again and fell to earth. Thanks to the helium that remained in the unruptured cells, the impact was gentle enough that only 6 of its 28 crewmen died, all of them in the smaller amidships section.
Despite the loss of the Shenandoah—which followed by four years the more deadly crash of the experimental ZR-2—the Navy continued its misadventure with rigid airships for another decade. After losing the Akron in 1933 and the Macon in 1935, it finally abandoned the program, though it did not give up on airships entirely. During World War II a fleet of more than 150 blimps, much smaller and cheaper than rigid airships, rendered valuable service in patrol, rescue, and antisubmarine warfare over the Atlantic. America’s last military airships, used as part of the early-warning system against airborne enemy attack, were retired in 1962.
Coed Confidential
In September, college students returning to campus found their sex lives to be the subject of intense nationwide scrutiny. For the last several years, novels and stories from F. Scott Fitzgerald and a host of cruder imitators had depicted American college students as a group of abandoned thrill seekers with little regard for traditional morality. Smoking, drinking (which was illegal, of course), dancing, slang, cosmetics, and various extremes of attire elicited much comment in the press, but to no one’s surprise, the greatest attention was devoted to the habits of the new breed of coeds, particularly their fondness for “petting” and “necking.”
The journalist Eleanor Rowland Wembridge found distressingly lax moral standards among the women she spoke with. “One pleasant college Amazon, a total stranger,” she reported, ”…asked if I saw any harm in her kissing a man whom she liked, but whom she did not wish to marry. ‘It’s terribly exciting. We get such a thrill. I think it is natural to want nice men to kiss you, so why not do what is natural?’” Another coed panted: “When I have had a few nights without dates I nearly go crazy. I tell my mother she must expect me to go out on a fearful necking party.”
The reporter Ernest Mandeville told of drinking parties where “together with the boys, before the evening is out [coeds] have reached the ‘I don’t care’ stage. ‘Dirty’ stories are reveled in by both sexes, and the whole show can only be described by the word ‘rotten.’” Chaperons were of little use; even the most conscientious could do little more than knock periodically on the doors of dimly lit rooms. At the other extreme was one “lady chaperon” at a Pennsylvania college who, according to Mandeville, “had shown considerable capacity as a drinker herself, and told blandly of affairs with several of the undergraduates.”
Not all college women were libertines. Some exercised a demure selfrestraint, like the one who said, “As a matter of fact, there are lots of fellows I don’t kiss.” But at Trinity College (later Duke University), a student editor declared, “There are only two kinds of coeds, those who have been kissed and those who are sorry they haven’t been kissed.” A semester later the same editor, evidently something of an expert, said, “Although a girl will not always let you kiss her when you ask her, she usually appreciates your asking her, often so much that she has to tell her friends.”
In response to these trends, the mayor of a Midwestern college town launched a “fall publicity campaign against necking parties.” The University of California sought to keep its coeds under control by banning “too generous use of rouge and lipstick” and “hose rolled below the knee.” The University of Chicago, intellectual as always, had a different solution: It offered a class in social ethics. The teacher was James Hayden Tufts, a distinguished philosopher and the dean of the faculties. Close observation had revealed to Tufts that college students “think and talk a great deal about sex,” though fortunately “this speculation is honest and decent and with no intention to disturb the virtues.” Under the influence of his class, he said, “their study in college leads them back to the same answers to moral questions which they had in the beginning”— this time, however, with a firm grounding in instrumentalist philosophy. Unfortunately, a student at another Midwestern university revealed a difficulty with this approach—the pesky problem of academic freedom: “The Professor of Psychology tells me that chastity is only a secondary motive from the idea of property, so it doesn’t seem much worth thinking about, does it?”
In the end, commentators agreed, the decline in college women’s morals could be traced to the source of most other troubles in American life: democracy, and specifically the opening of colleges to all social classes. As Wembridge sadly noted, “The sex manners of the large majority of uncultivated and uncritical people have become the manners for all.”
1850One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago
What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?
On September 28, an act of Congress outlawed one of the U.S. Navy’s oldest and most barbaric traditions, flogging as a means of punishment. The ban, which squeaked through the Senate on a 26-24 vote, applied to merchant vessels as well. The movement to outlaw flogging had been aroused by two very popular books that unflinchingly detailed the practice’s brutality: Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana (1840), and White-Jacket, by Herman Melville (1850). Within the Navy, however, opposition to the change was strong.
Since Revolutionary days, flogging had been a commonplace part of life on naval vessels. As a seaman on the USS Fairfield from 1828 to 1831, William McNaIIy wrote, he witnessed at least one flogging every day. A decade later the frigate United States saw 163 floggings in a 14-month cruise, an average of 2 or 3 per week. Treating a sailor’s lacerated back was a routine task for Navy doctors.
Flogging could be administered at the captain’s discretion for virtually any offense, from stealing to fighting to the catch-all “neglect of duty.” But most violations that were punished with flogging—four-fifths of them, by one estimate—were for drunkenness, liquor smuggling, or other acts traceable in one way or another to alcohol. These figures called into question the wisdom of the Navy’s twicedaily ration of grog (diluted whiskey).
Sailors knew a flogging was about to take place when they heard the boatswain’s mate shout, “All hands muster to witness punishment!” The miscreant was stripped to the waist and had his hands tied to a grating, and then the boatswain’s mate laid into him with a cat-o’-nine-tails. Although an 1800 law limited floggings to 12 strokes, captains could get around it by citing a sailor for several different offenses and giving him a dozen for each. Fifty or a hundred lashes or more were not unheard of, sometimes spaced out over a few weeks and sometimes not. In extreme cases, though regulations forbade it, a sailor could be “flogged through the fleet”—taken to each of a fleet’s ships in turn and flogged before its crew.
Many naval officers saw flogging as an indispensable tool for keeping their men in line. By and large Navy crews were recruited from the dregs of society, sometimes with the aid of “crimps” who lured men into dockside lodgings, drugged them, and bundled them onto shipboard. Experienced sailors preferred to sign on board a merchantman, where the pay was better, discipline was less severe, and the tour of duty was a single cruise instead of a three-year enlistment.
Stingy appropriations from Congress created a vicious circle in the Navy: Only the worst and least motivated sailors volunteered, which made harsh methods necessary, which made it even harder to attract good men. Since captains were trained to remain aloof and their first lieutenants were often rich young wastrels appointed for political reasons, there was little opportunity for officers to build discipline through mutual respect.
After the ban on flogging was passed, old-timers predicted that naval discipline would collapse without the salutary example of the lash. Yet alternatives to the cat-o’-nine-tails still existed. A man could be hanged from a bulkhead so that his feet barely touched the deck, or have his hands chained behind him to a gun carriage and be left to the mercy of a rolling sea. On steam vessels a wrongdoer could be locked up next to the boilers in a “sweatbox” six feet high and three feet wide. And of course, there was always confinement to the brig on a diet of bread and water. In time, however—especially after abolition of the grog ration in 1862—the vicious circle was reversed, as improved shipboard conditions attracted a better class of sailor. By the time Congress virtually abolished confinement in irons, in 1909, corporal punishment had already become a rarity.
