Unreleased Tracks: Melancholy Cranberry

The last of my 3 unreleased pieces for The Daily; this one's kind of elegiac. It's about cranberry sauce.

On the night of November 27, 1864, as the chill of winter crept over Union and Confederate troops in southeastern Virginia, Heyward Glover Emmell, a 22-year old from New Jersey, ate well for once.  Emmell, serving in the Union ambulance corps, was sitting in his tent, “wishing that I was home to eat a good dinner, when Brother George came in with a fine turkey, cranberry sauce, celery &.”  The meal was familiar, but the components immediately recognizable today as Thanksgiving necessities – turkey, stuffing, and the all-important cranberry relish – would not have seemed as archetypal to Emmell and his brothers-in-arms, delighted though they were. America’s definitive national meal was still in formation. Public goodwill, one woman’s campaign to nationalize a New England tradition, and the practicalities of wartime came together on the bloody fields outside Petersburg to set the menu and assure the inclusion of the sweet cranberry sauce that Americans ignore 364 days a year but cannot do without on one.

The cranberry carries a rich history in the cuisine of both Native Americans and later Pilgrim settlers. However, while it may have been eaten in various forms at harvest festivals in the early 1600s, cranberry sauce was probably not part of these meals: cranberry sauce requires sugar (heaps of it) and in Colonial times sugar was a scarce, expensive commodity. By the mid-17^th century, traveler’s accounts of New England begin to mention a distinctive, sweet sauce made of boiled cranberries. But there was no inextricable connection between this dressing and the meal served to Hewyard Emmell, in part because there was no universal definition of the meal itself.

Until Sara Josepha Hale came along, that is. Hale was no particular friend to the cranberry, but she was a great lover of capital-T Thanksgiving, and it was largely through her efforts that a loose tradition became a national institution into which these tart, red berries could be incorporated. A poet, novelist, and editor of the hugely influential lifestyle magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, Hale conducted an indefatigable, decades-long campaign to turn New England’s secularized feast of “thanksgiving” into a formal national holiday. She also clearly articulated its blueprint in her successful novel Northwood: or, Life North and South. Hale describes a “true Yankee Thanksgiving” in detail, complete with stuffed Turkey and pumpkin pie. She makes no mention of cranberry sauce, however – despite having already singled it out as a favorite of her protagonist’s.

The popular story that brings Hale’s mission and cranberry sauce together is this: General Ulysses S. Grant considered Thanksgiving so important and the cranberry sauce so integral to it that he ordered the provision of said sauce with the meal to all of his enlisted men. Whatever Grant’s feelings, a slightly messier narrative seems more probable.

The Union army was six months into a bloody campaign to take over Richmond by knocking out supply lines running through Petersburg and the rest of the region and it had become bogged down in stalemated trench warfare that would ultimately last through the cold winter of 1864-1865. The conflict was grinding and brutal; “We remained under a terrible fire all night and at the present moment 3 P.M. we are in line for another charge I think,” Alex Patten, a young soldier in the 109th New York wrote in his diary, “I walked over the field of yesterday and found our boys and had them buried. There is but three of us in Co. today. 66 men is the entire strength of the Regt. I cannot write no more.” Mounting casualties became a source of public lament in the north, and citizens banded together to support the beleaguered troops by sending seasonal care packages, resulting in 120,000 turkey and chicken dinners being distributed to the wet and cold soldiers. The inclusion of cranberry sauce in these meals may have been practical: a seasonally appropriate relish, cranberries are a robust foodstuff high in benzoic acid, a natural preservative, and more importantly were known for their nutritional properties, particularly their value in staving off scurvy. To the extent that Grant and other military brass were concerned with the bill of fare, these functional arguments obviate the need for any sentimental attachment to a relish.

This 1864 thanksgiving, however, was the one that could create just such an attachment. Weeks before it, Sarah Hale finally won out: on October 20^th, Abraham Lincoln did “hereby appoint and set apart the last Thursday in November next as a day which I desire to be observed by all my fellow-citizens, wherever they may be then, as a day of thanksgiving…” While Lincoln only mandated a one-off, by November 1865 the North had won the war and a desire to commemorate the Union victory and affirm national unity contributed to increasing observance of the Thanksgiving tradition, now with a new set of associations sprung from the meal enjoyed by young soldiers fighting in that gruesome, pivotal, final campaign in Virginia.

The sauce, in short, was in.

All of which was probably irrelevant to Heyward Emmell as he ate his turkey and cranberry sauce, mashing the sweet of the berry with the salt of the meat. The men knew they weren’t going home soon. “The weather is getting very much like winter; we keep a fire in our little air-tight stove all night when we can get enough wood… Here comes another fellow with a log, we are all right for tonight,” Emmell wrote. He made it home to Morristown, but over half-a-million Americans he fought with and against did not. On that night, however, each army in its way observed the holiday that would become hardwired into the American calendar: as the Union soldiers enjoyed their unexpected repast, the Confederate fighters, entrenched yards away, held fire out of respect. 150 years later the meal is an essential part of the American experience, the sweet cranberry relish now indispensable to families coming together – many still with an empty chair at the table, a loved one much further afield than Virginia, but all still sharing in a meal to give thanks, in Lincoln’s words, for “the inestimable blessings of peace, union, and harmony throughout the land… assign[ed] as a dwelling-place for ourselves and for our posterity throughout all generations.”

Unreleased Tracks: U.S.O., 1644

Here's the 2nd of 3 of these: another piece that I wrote for The Daily but that never ran.

It wasn’t shocking when Captain Jonathan Chaddock’s ship blew up - wood, flesh and smoking mainsail settling into the waters near the earthen platforms and cannons of Castle Island, Boston. After all, Chaddock was “a loose profligate man,” according to lay historian Thomas Hutchinson, with “a crew like himself.” They had arrived in Boston Harbor that spring of 1643, a band of unruly privateers, and fallen straight to buccaneering and loutishness: the Captain himself was brought before the magistrate and fined 20 pounds after drawing his sword and threatening to murder his own first mate in a bar. Three of their company had already drowned in a previous harbor accident.

So, when two powder kegs on Chaddock’s 30-ton pinnace “took fire and blew her up” as his crew worked that 2^nd of November, no-one was especially astonished. Particularly since – according to the contemporary account of John Winthrop, then governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony – the cause may have been one of them recklessly sparking pistols. Five men were immediately “destroyed”; three remaining survived with bad burns.

Far more alarming than the accident was the haunting that followed.

First: light. Two points arising from the Harbor, “in form like a man,” Winthrop tells us, traveling over the water’s surface and then subsiding back into the deep. This came sixteen days after the Chaddock explosion and was witnessed by only a few midnight sailors. A week later, the governor describes an even more extraordinary vision: two shards “like the moon” arose from the northeastern harbor and joined together, “closed in one, and then parted, and closed and parted divers times, and so they went over the hill in the island and vanished. Sometimes they shot out flames and sometimes sparkles. This was about eight of the clock in the evening, and was seen by many.” 

Then: voices. “Divers godly persons” further south, near the waters between Boston and the rural town of Dorchester, heard a voice calling out “in a most dreadful manner, boy boy come away away; and it suddenly shifted from one place to another a great distance, about 20 times.” This sonic apparition reappeared a fortnight later, near Noddle’s Island (close to where Logan Airport sits today).

Governor Winthrop is really our only source on this. Historians of subsequent decades – Thomas Hutchinson (also a successor of Winthrop’s as colonial governor) and clergyman William Hubbard -- faithfully recount his version (very faithfully, as one who hasn’t studied might “faithfully recount” a friend’s exam). There is no real reason, however, to doubt the long-serving Winthrop. He is credulous throughout his journals, recording what he is told without judgment, but there is no evidence that he himself is a fabulist.

Perhaps the incidents can be attributed to natural, physical phenomena? Probably not. St. Elmo’s Fire requires an object – optimally a pointed one – to focus electrical fields into its distinctive blue flame. Will-o’-wisps are a terrestrial enchantment, gases from decaying plant matter oxidizing. What the sightings sound most like is ball lightning, a phenomenon that “resembles a glowing sphere” and “does not obey the whims of wind or the laws of gravity,” according to National Geographic’s summary of numerous first-person accounts. Unhelpfully, this turns out to be basically the same as calling the prodigies “lights on the harbor that sure look like ghosts”: ball lightning is something of an umbrella term for stories like this, and science has yet to provide a clear explanation for what it could be.

Winthrop’s own opinion is simple. “It is also to be observed,” he notes, that two ships – Chaddock’s and another – had recently blown up in Boston Harbor, and that both were full of men “such as despised us and the ordinance of God amongst us.” This “It is to be observed” is a signal phrase of Winthrop’s religious disapproval: it was also “to be observed”, for example, that it was “on the Lord’s day” that a lecherous Dutchman was slain, or that three fisherman drowned while drinking.

The governor also dutifully reports another theory, based on an entirely different set of supernatural covenants. One of Chaddock’s slain crewmen, his name lost to history, was reportedly a necromancer, suspected of murdering his master in Virginia and having done “some strange things in his way…hither.” This man’s remains, alone amongst those killed in the blast and unusually for sailors lost in the Harbor, were never found. Perhaps his shade, the rumors suggested, summoned fellow apparitions in its unburied disquiet.

This focus on the man’s body is intriguing. The Puritans did not imbue the fallen human form with any inherent sanctity. Funerals and headstones were simple and austere, and the dead were not buried on Church grounds. A Puritan ghost would never hang about, demanding a proper burial.

Clearly, a different set of rules applied to a sorcerer’s shade – just as different rules applied to Chaddock and all such “proud and intemperate men” who chose to live outside the rules that so bounded Boston’s new arrivals. These rough men, indeed, were just one kind of “other” assailing the Puritans’ purity: the Quakers, forced to worship in secret on Noddle’s Island because the Puritan authorities found them so alarming; the Pequot, Narragansett, and Mohegan tribes, whom the colony’s leaders viewed with a mix of missionary and competitive zeal. The Pilgrims lived in wary compromise between their own strict codes and what must have often seemed the brutal, ongoing insanity of the new world into which they had ventured.

In this we may find, then, one root of this beguiling story. As Thomas Hutchinson wrote over a century later (in his own words, for once): “They had an ocean, a thousand leagues in extent, between them and all the delights of life which they had once enjoyed. On their backs they had a wilderness without limits. As soon as it was dark, their ears were filled with the roaring of wolves and other savage beafts, or which was much worse, the yells of savage men. Where there was any gloom upon the mind, such a scene must tend to increase it.” The strangeness of Chaddock and the rest of his godless crew may have been, to the Puritan mind, too much for even gunpowder to erase – their shades left dancing on the Harbor, like the threat of an encroaching human wilderness.

Unreleased Tracks: Project Excelsior

I had the good fortune to write a bunch of pieces for The Daily's "History Page" -- an elegant little corner of that rather eclectic paper, which presented 1000-word vignettes of American history. On three occasions, pieces I wrote didn't run. I'm posting them here for the baying masses who watch this site constantly for updates.

In light of Felix Baumgartner's extraordinary jump, I'm starting with a piece on the record Baumgartner broke.

At an altitude of 90,000 feet, freefalling at 615 miles per hour, United States Air Force captain Joseph Kittinger began to slow down. His translucent mylar helium balloon was long gone, drifting away like an airborne jellyfish; otherwise it was hard for him to gauge his speed by sight. “When you’re 20 miles above the earth, there are no visual cues,” he’d later say – just the azure-white bend of the clouded earth, the blackness of space, and a dark blue horizon line as one bled into the other.

It was 10:12 a.m. EDT on the morning of August 16, 1960, and Kittinger was executing the culminating experiment of a military program that combined sheer gutsiness and pragmatic research to serve a rising nation’s flight into the future.

The name of the program was Project Excelsior, and it took place in the years between the USSR’s launch of Sputnik in 1957 and President Kennedy’s 1961 vow to develop a focused national space program. America was dedicating significant resources to expanding its technological and military capabilities, and programs like Excelsior -- Latin for “higher” -- were focal points of both strategic interest and national myth-building.

Excelsior’s primary objective was straightforward. Jet engines meant that new aircraft went really high and really fast, and a new system was needed to assure that pilots bailing out in the earth’s hostile upper atmosphere survived. The secondary purpose was to test how a human being wearing only protective suiting could survive and function above “Armstrong’s Line” (around 65,000 feet), where low atmospheric pressure and temperature would incapacitate and kill anyone inadequately shielded.

Success meant navigating between two contradictory imperatives. Earlier tests had confirmed that a bailing pilot could not deploy a parachute in the stratosphere. Terminal velocity through the thin air was too high, and the environment too killing: a 1943 test-pilot had nearly died when the 40-g shock of releasing a chute at 40,000 feet had knocked him unconscious at a freezing, suffocating altitude. The jumper needed to freefall into the lower atmosphere before pulling the cord. This, however, introduced the “deathspin” problem. Testing had demonstrated that humans would spin upon reaching terminal velocity, and fast: up to 200 revolutions per minute, at which rate centrifugal force would overpower the heart’s ability to pump blood away from the extremities. Project Excelsior had to perfect a system that allowed a falling body to drop to safe atmosphere quickly, without inducing a fatal spin.

The falling body who’d be testing the system was Joseph Kittinger, a thin, red-haired Floridian with thick, amiable features. He’d been a test-pilot on projects dedicated to flying faster and higher since 1954. The team included a flight surgeon, veteran parachute packers, pressure suit experts, and Francis Beaupre, the designer of the parachute system that (the Air Force hoped) solved the spin conundrum.  The key element of Beaupre’s system was a small, stabilizing parachute that deployed shortly after the jumper began descent, not to slow the fall but to lift center of gravity and thus avoid deadspin.

Excelsior’s development process was iterative and incremental -- endless brainstorming what-if sessions, establishing fail-safes for all imaginable contingencies. Some of those increments, of course, involved Kittinger leaping out of gondolas tens of thousands of feet above the earth. The August 1960 jump, actually the project’s third, was aimed at testing the systems from over 100,000 feet. In footage of the morning’s preparations, Kittinger’s eyes peek out watchful and still, marking the team latching and double-checking his gear: the bulky pressure suit and helmet that would allow him to survive temperatures of minus-104 degrees Fahrenheit and air pressure so low that the moisture in his lungs and mouth would boil if exposed; Beaupre’s multi-parachute system; the bright orange instrument panel strapped to his rear-end. It took two team members, arms hooked under his, to hoist Kittinger up into the balloon’s gondola.

Ninety-one minutes later, the captain stood 102,800 feet -- about 20 miles -- above the surface of the earth. A small yellow sign, affixed with red duct tape to the gondola’s edge, confirmed: “THIS IS THE HIGHEST STEP IN THE WORLD. “I said a silent prayer, and I jumped,” Kittinger later recalled. “The most beautiful view came in the first few seconds … It was very quiet, very still … It seemed that the balloon was drifting up, away from me into a very dark blue sky.” Kittinger accelerated rapidly through frigid darkness, and his stabilizing chute deployed successfully after about 15 seconds. He freefell for four-and-a-half minutes, his only frame of reference the cloud layer that eventually rose up to envelop him, obscuring the canopy of space. Finally, his main parachute deployed at around 20,000 feet, and after nine minutes of conventional descent he landed on a brushy patch of New Mexico desert near the village of Tularosa. His instrument box did not disengage as intended, and bruised his leg badly. This was the only injury he sustained.       

“Space” officially begins 62 miles above us. Kittinger never made it there: News coverage of his record-breaking jump mooted him as a possible astronaut, but he wound up serving at lower altitudes as an air commander in Vietnam, where he was shot down during a voluntary third tour and spent nearly a year as a POW. He made it safely home, and in 1984 completed the first solo balloon flight across the Atlantic. Beaupre’s system, validated by the last two Excelsior jumps, was widely influential on designs still used today to save pilots ejecting from high-altitude aircraft. And inevitably, daredevils are still trying to break the Excelsior records for highest parachute jump, longest freefall (with a stabilizing chute), and highest human velocity through the atmosphere. Kittinger has advised some such efforts, such as Austrian Felix Baumgartner’s ongoing project to make a 120,000 foot, sound-barrier breaking leap.

Kittinger and his team weren’t out to set records, however. “We did it to gather information,” he later said. “My job was to discover things while falling.” And footage from the 35-mm motor-driven camera affixed to the bottom of his gondola shows just that: a man in grey jumpsuit and white helmet, dark against the contoured cloud background below, feet pedaling slightly as he plummets to earth, strapped tight into the ingenuity that will see him safely home.