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Dartmouth Starts a Campus Navy in World War II

Eighteen-year-old George Berkowitz, wearing his brand-new Marine uniform, lined up in military order with his Dartmouth College classmates and awaited his orders.

The drill instructor shouted, “Right face!” Berkowitz turned left face. The drill instructor came over to scrutinize him, read his nametag and said, “Berkowitz!”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Youʼre the dumbest sonofabitch I ever saw,” replied the drill instructor.

Aerial view of Dartmouth’s East Campus.

Berkowitz still remembered that insult years later, after he had founded the Legal Seafood restaurant chain. He believed the drill instructor for a week. “It was an indoctrination into the Marine Corps,” he said. “It’s a very fast way to gain maturity.”

Berkowitz belonged to a staggering number of young men who grew up fast in the military during World War II. In 1940, fewer than 500,000 served. The next year, nearly 2 million men put on uniform. The military gobbled up more than double that number over each of the next two years. By war’s end, the United States had 12,209,238 soldiers, sailors, marines and Coast Guardsmen, a 3,550 percent increase in six years.

Dartmouth Looks Into the Abyss

On Nov. 11, 1942, more than two years after instituting the draft, Congress lowered the draft age to 18. About 20 million young men were newly eligible, but half were rejected the first year. Some had health problems, and 20 percent who registered couldn’t read.

Edward Stettinus and Ernest Hopkins

Dartmouth President Ernest Martin Hopkins realized the lower draft age could mean bankruptcy for his college. Formerly assistant secretary of the U.S. War Department during the first world war, he knew how many young men would get drafted in the second. He also knew very few of them could enroll in college, much less earn a degree. Dartmouth faced a crippling shortage of students.

Hopkins also knew the U.S. military desperately needed college-educated commissioned officers. It needed all sorts of expertise – engineers, navigators, quartermasters, metallurgists, radiomen, aerial photographers.

The solution was obvious: bring military training to campus on a massive scale.

And so the military and academia combined college education with military service. They did it through three major programs: the Naval Indoctrination Training School, the V-12 Naval Training Program and the Army Specialized Training Program.

The Navy V-12 Program

On July 1, 1943, the first day of the summer semester, the Navy V-12 program began on 131 college campuses across the nation. It had more than 125,000 students. In New England, 11 colleges hosted the V-12 program. Brown in Rhode Island. Bates in Maine. Middlebury in Vermont. Dartmouth in New Hampshire. In Connecticut, Yale, Trinity and Wesleyan University. Holy Cross, Harvard, Williams and MIT in Massachusetts.

Bobby Kennedy (second from left) at Bates. Muskie Archives and Special Collections LIbrary.

Hopkins called on his friendship with Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox to make sure Dartmouth had a viable V-12 program. He had tremendous success. Dartmouth College hosted the largest V-12 program in the country, with 2,000 enlisted men and an officer staff. Dartmouth had 10 times as many military recruits as civilian students, who were either 4-F or pre-med. The military recruits so overwhelmed the civilians that some enlistees didn’t remember any civilians at all at Dartmouth.

Hopkins himself served in the War Department’s Office of Production and Management. It wasn’t unusual for academics to join the war effort. The presidents of Harvard and MIT, James Bryant Conan and Karl Compton joined the National Defense Research Committee. Harvard Law School Dean James Landis directed the Office of Civilian Defense.

Pearl Harbor

Across New England’s campuses, boys had a hard time studying or making plans after graduation. They knew they might get called up. Campus newspapers reported on the war in Europe. Nazi troops occupied the Rhineland, advanced into Czechoslovakia and then invaded Poland. Nations fell like dominos as the Nazis conquered Denmark, then Norway, then the Netherlands and then Belgium.

As commencement exercises took place in the spring of 1940, the Nazis invaded France. The fall of the French government was one of the most shocking defeats of the war. Soon afterward, Hitler’s advance guards swung north to the English Channel, where they threatened to trap British, French and Belgian forces along the coast. The Allies quickly organized a fleet of hundreds of boats to evacuate the troops from the beaches of Dunkirk. Over eight days, 338,226 were heroically ferried across the English Channel to Dover in everything from destroyers to small fishing boats to pleasure craft.

Tom Braden was then a 23-year-old Dartmouth senior who later became a well-known columnist. He also wrote Eight Is Enough, a book adapted into a popular television series. He was galvanized by the fall of France and the Battle of Dunkirk.

Tom Braden. He survived the war and died in 2009.

Braden and his friend Ted Ellsworth wanted to join the fight, and decided to join an army already fighting – the British Army. They were selected for the Royal Americans, an elite unit in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps comprised of a dozen American graduates of Dartmouth, Yale and Harvard.

Braden made it through the war. Ellsworth survived, though he was captured and imprisoned in Oflag 64 at Schubin, Poland. Another Dartmouth graduate, Charles Bolte, lost his leg at the hip in Egypt at the Battle of El Alamein.

Making Up for Lost Tuition

In the days before the United States entered the war, young men anxious to see action joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, the British RAF, the British Royal Navy or the American Field Service as ambulance drivers.

Colleges developed courses to train students for the still-undeclared war. Starting in September 1941, for example, Bowdoin College lent its facilities for Naval Radio School training for more than 300 recruits living on campus.

The University of Vermont, struggling financially, brought U.S. Air Force training units to campus. Special six-to-eight-week courses were offered to help make up for lost tuition revenues.

New Curriculum

Harry Hampton, Dartmouth Class of ’45, was in his dorm room studying with his roommate on Dec. 7, 1941. Suddenly they heard someone yelling in the corridors that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Everyone grabbed their radios and listened to the news from the Dartmouth Broadcasting System.

“Everybody had the feeling, well, when will I be—or had an awareness that we were all going to be ripe for pickings by one of the military services,” Hampton said.

Like most colleges, Dartmouth telescoped four years of education into two years and several months so students could graduate before they went to war. High school students like George Berkowitz were allowed to graduate early once they’d been accepted into a college. Students often graduated high school in March and started college in June.

Schools altered their curriculum. They redirected physics, math and sciences courses to the needs of men in the armed forces. Popular courses in foreign languages included Russian, Chinese and Japanese. Courses were given in air photography, camouflage and mapping – Sometimes teachers with no training taught photography, camouflage and mapping.

Samuel Florman, a V-12 from the class of 1946, remembers correcting a Dartmouth geology teacher making mistakes in his aerial photography course.

“The faculty was being asked to do all sorts of cock-eyed stuff that they werenʼt trained for,” Florman said. “You had a chemistry teacher teaching, you know, Italian or whatever and that was because of the faculty themselves had enlisted or had been called up. So that they were scrambling to cover the courses that needed to be taught.”

Dartmouth Starts a Navy

At Dartmouth, fraternities closed, Winter Carnival was cancelled, the Daily Dartmouth ceased publication and food and fuel were rationed. The college operated like a naval base during the rest of the war, run on military time, with reveille at 0600 and Taps at 2200.

The school called dormitories the “Navy Ships of Dartmouth.” Dorm rooms meant for two single beds had two sets of bunk beds. Every day the V-12 students woke at 6 a.m. to a recording of “Oh What A Beautiful Morning.” Every day they had room inspection. Then ty did calisthenics, formed in a line and marched to their meals. They were reviewed on Saturday. The commander came down and inspected them from their haircuts to their shoes.

“When you were in the Navy here, you really were in the Navy,” said Alan Epstein, a V-12 recruit from the class of 1947.

Cadets undergo water and obstacle course training at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Once they got their uniforms, students had liberty from noon Saturday until Sunday night. Few had cars. Some joined the Outing Club and went camping. Others went home, taking the train or hitchhiking – a man in uniform quickly got a ride.

Some visited girls’ colleges nearby. Dartmouth’s Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital was training nurses for the military. They wore uniforms too. Since there were so few women on campus, the nurses had a lot of choices about who to date.

Once a month they had strength testing in the gym. If they didn’t keep up, they were shipped out to boot camp. Each student had to do a certain number of sit-ups and push-ups and shimmy up a rope.

Parris Island

On the Way to Parris Island

Dartmouth had a pool with a platform 30 feet or so above the water. Trainees practiced jumping off a sinking ship from it. They learned survival swimming, how to sweep their arms along the surface of the water if it burned. They had to leap off the platform, take off their trousers and blow them up over their heads to make floating wings and float around for a half hour.

Berkowitz remembers the courses as demanding, but the students were motivated. If they didn’t pass, they were sent off to war.

At Dartmouth, Chinese professor Wing Tsit-Chan had a reputation for never flunking anyone. “Everybody was trying to get into his class,” remembered Berkowitz, who took Chinese from him for one semester. Because of that course, he ended up in China. There he repatriated Japanese military and civilians from North China and Korea — a plum duty. “The best thing that ever happened to me was taking his course in Chinese,” Berkowitz said.

Paul Glover, class of 1945, didn’t buckle down to his studies – at first.

“I cut the classes and went to the ski meets and all that. And the professor was a guy named B.H. Brown, whose son had been in my class in Hanover High School. And of course I knew the old bastard. And he called me in, he said, “Glover, if you donʼt pass this exam pretty well, youʼre on your way to Parris Island.” In those days you were out to take a train the next day, and then you were a private. You werenʼt any officer candidate. And a lot of people flunked out that way.”

Broken Promises

Though promised they could finish school if they maintained their grades, some groups of students, such as the engineers, suddenly received orders to go to basic training.

“The next thing you knew they were in the Battle of the Bulge,” said Peter Beck, a medical school student in the Army Specialized Training Program. “They took quite a lot of casualties there thinking they were going to avoid the war completely by staying in a classroom.

An American GI captures a German soldier during the Battle of the Bulge.

Decades after the war, Florman remembered the broken promises:

…representatives from the various services started showing up on campus and giving presentations. And it was like going to the movies. You went…this evening the Army is telling you how wonderful the Army is and what wonderful chances, opportunities you will have if you will only sign up with them. Theyʼll leave you in college. Then when you do go into the Army, youʼre going to be a four-star general before you know it. Then there were people…I know we didnʼt have an air force in those days. But there were special programs if you wanted to fly for the Army or if you wanted to fly for the Navy.

Florman called it “a salesmanship evening.”

…And a lot of my classmates—and I guess maybe even those in the class ahead—would sign up. And maybe one semester, two semesters later, as the war required, all the promises were forgotten, and suddenly dozens of classmates were swept off to boot camp and were in the middle of battle before anybody really knew what had happened.

From Dartmouth to Boot Camp to the Grave

Florman remembered a boy sent to boot camp because he had a soft voice.

They marched on the Green. And this is how you march. This is how you turn. As a matter of fact, this brings to mind: You were expected to take turns and after a while shout out the orders and lead the group and show leadership qualities. And if you didnʼt—and there was one; I donʼt know if he was our classmate, but he was down at Thayer School, Joe Vitalini, a wonderful fellow with a quiet voice. And he didnʼt satisfy the drillmaster. And next thing we knew, he was on his way to boot camp.

The drillmaster so frightened Florman he pulled his braces off his teeth during a drill, That earned the respect of his drillmaster and saved his naval career. The drillmaster selected another boy, Gene Cafiero, to lead his unit in close order drill. He later served as president of Chrysler Corp.

Many were not so lucky.

Memorials at Dartmouth College

Over 300 of the 11,091 Dartmouth men who served in World War II died. The Class of 1942 alone lost 34 members. Twenty-three young Dartmouth men died in 1943, then another 23 in 1944, and still another 24 in 1945.

George Berkowitz survived the war and died in February 2022 at the age of 97.

End Notes

With thanks to the Rauner Library Oral History project, World War Two at Dartmouth.

Images: Ernest Hopkins United States Office For Emergency Management, Lee, R., photographer. (1941) Edward R Stettinius, Jr., former director, Priorities Division, Office of Production Management OPM, and currently September 2,lend-lease Administrator. Dr. Ernest M. Hopkins, Minerals and Metals Executive of the Priorities Division. President of Dartmouth College. United States, 1941. Sept. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2017689452/. Bobby Kennedy at Bates By Unknown, Courtesy of the Bates College Historic Photographs Collection – The Edmund Muskie Archives and Special Collection, Lewiston, Maine, Bates College, 1940s, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45202568. Tom Braden By http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKbraden.htm, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48798732. East campus By Kane5187 – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2949909.

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The New London Race Riots of 1919 Follow a Pandemic

The New London race riots broke out in 1919, a season of violence throughout the United States known as the Red Summer. White mobs killed somewhere between 180 and 300 black people during riots in just three places: Elaine, Ark., Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Elsewhere during the Red Summer, whites killed blacks by stoning, hanging and burning them alive.

Reasons given for the outbreak of violence vary. Historian Jan Voogd argues for two. One, the Great Northern Migration of poor black people to better-paying jobs in the defense industry. Northerners got competition from black workers and Southerners lost cheap labor on their plantations.

Two, World War I. Black soldiers and sailors not only had weapons, but they received better treatment in France than they did in the United States. They came home emboldened, and they fought back against their white persecutors. President Woodrow Wilson expressed his concern that black veterans would demand equal rights when he said “the American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America.”

A Pandemic and Anarchy

Somehow, summer race riots and pandemics seem to go together. In 1919, the flu pandemic wound down, after wiping out as much as 20 percent of the young adult population.

Geoff Ward, a professor of African and African American studies at Washington University, explained how a pandemic inspires rioting: “These are moments of extreme precariousness, where people are suddenly uncertain about their fate, economic prospects and the social order,” he said.

White men looking for African Americans during the Chicago race riot of 1919.

Other factors led to the season of violence in New England. Two anarchist bombs went off in Boston on May Day, and in September the Boston Police went on strike. Immigrants from Europe and African Americans took the blame for the labor strikes and anarchist bombings that added to the turmoil.

Not every race riot that erupted in the summer of 1919 appeared in a newspaper. But Voogd believes at least 50 took place. One happened in Maine. The New London race riots numbered at least two.

An Attack in Orono, Maine

The Ku Klux Klan had all but disappeared in Maine in 1919, but within five years it would rise again. An ugly incident during the Red Summer foreshadowed the KKK’s regeneration.

Hamlin Hall

A Continental Press story reported on May 22, 1919, that a hazing party at the University of Maine turned into an angry mob. Roger and Samuel Cortney, the “only students of dark skin” attending the university, fought back against white intimidation.

It started when three freshmen tried to break into their room in Hamlin Hall while a student mob waited outside. The brothers knocked the freshmen unconscious. When the three young men didn’t return, the mob went to the Cortneys’ room, where they found them unconscious. The Cortney brothers had escaped.

The student mob divided into three groups to search for them, according to the paper. Some went off campus in Orono, some went to Oldtown, a Penobscot reservation. They found the Cortney brothers at Oldtown. The white students then brought them back to campus and formed a ring around them. First they made them explain why they attacked the freshmen. Then the mob forced the brothers to pour two jugs of molasses on each other and threw feathers on them, according to the news report. The Cortneys, it said, had been “exceedingly popular” among the students up until then.

Returning Home From War

New London, Conn., has always had a large military presence, and it led to trouble in 1919. Fort Trumbull, which dates to the American Revolution, hosted a Coast Guard installation. The U.S. Navy had a submarine base on the Thames River, with offices and housing in New London. The Groton shipyard lay just across the river and military fortifications dotted Long Island Sound.

African-American soldiers in World War I. Images courtesy Library of Congress.

Black and white sailors, home from World War I, mixed uneasily on the streets of New London. African-American servicemen had experienced a much different treatment in France than they had in the United States. They could move freely throughout French society, wrote Voogd. They could go to any business and associate with anyone they wanted, including white women.

African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that, when the black servicemen returned, the reaction of white people in 1919 was ‘almost unbelievable.’

“During that year 77 Negroes were lynched, of whom one was a woman and eleven were soldiers; of these, fourteen were publicly burned, eleven of them being burned alive…That year there were race riots large and small in 26 American cities.”

Du Bois probably counted only half the number of incidents and missed the New London race riots.

New London Race Riots

According to a local newspaper report, bad blood had existed between black and white seamen for some time. The story, typically, blames the African Americans for the trouble. Ward has argued the news media’s complicity in blaming the victim prolonged the summer of violence.

Fort Trumbull

On May 29, the headline screamed, “Negro Sailors Attack White at New London. Worst Riot in Years–U.S. Marines, with Loaded Rifles, Press Crowd Back.”

“Between 15 and 20 sailors and soldiers connected with the New London naval base were arrested by local police,” the newspaper reported. Police called it the ‘worst riot in years. ‘

“The trouble began when negro sailors went into the Coast Guard Academy and attacked white sailors,” according to the story. Six or seven colored sailors went to the Coast Guard Academy at Fort Trumbull and beat a white sailor, the newspaper reported.

Bank Street today

A number of white sailors pursued them through Bank Street, and they took refuge in the Hotel Bristol. The riot call sounded on the fire department whistle. Five thousand civilians “watched” the melee, and the marines came to quell the riot.

The Hotel Bristol

But other versions of the story found in the Visualizing the Red Summer archive tell a more sordid tale.

Twelve days after the riot, the Associated Negro Press reported black sailors complained white sailors attacked them. The white seamen charged the black sailors lay in wait for them at night when they walked over Long Cove Bridge. Then, police arrested two white sailors for fighting. That arrest inspired their white friends to raid the Hotel Bristol, a popular spot for African-American sailors. The whites grabbed the blacks, threw them into the street and beat them severely.

The U.S. Coast Guard Academy

Sailors on both sides, as many as 5,000, then showed up on Bank Street and fought for several hours. The police and fire departments armed with hoses couldn’t stop the melee, so armed marines rushed to the scene. In the end they arrested 15 people, though the news reports don’t identify them by skin color.

According to another news story, “much property was damaged and dozens of negroes were mobbed and severely beaten.”

And Yet Another

But Voogd said another New London race riot went largely unreported. That suggests even more violence occurred in New London, though the military suppressed the information.

A Navy memo revealed that marine guards from the base answered another riot call on June 29. A truck full of marines sped down Smith Street and hit a fire hydrant. The city billed the Navy for the fire hydrant, and the disagreement over that supplied the only paper trail of the incident.

No Riots Here

Meanwhile in Hartford on August 4, “colored clergy yesterday deplored the race riots in Washington and Chicago,” while Hartford police assured the public “there was no likelihood of a dispute between white and colored residents here.” News of a disturbance in Windsor reached police, who dismissed it as ‘phoney.’

With thanks to Race Riots and Resistance: The Red Summer of 1919 by Jan Voogd and Visualizing the Red Summer archive by Karen Sieber.

Images: Hamlin Hall CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1405898. Fort Trumbull By JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26599988. Bank Street By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34773845. This story was updated in 2023.

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The War of 1812 and How To Win When Outnumbered: Perspective

The past is a foreign country. Once upon a time I drove up through Maine and across the border into the wilds of Canada to take part in a bicentennial War of 1812 conference at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John. The event was great fun, in part because it was surreal to hear people who mainly look and talk like you refer to you as The Other, a once and—perhaps—future foe.

Old Ironsides

It’s hard to imagine what happened back then. For example, British Loyalists who fled the United States after the Revolution stormed back across the border to sack Bangor, Maine. U.S. Army forces burned York, which is now Toronto. Britain’s Royal Navy blockaded the East Coast, shutting down crucial seaports like Boston and Newport. Redcoats landed in the Chesapeake Bay and burned the executive mansion, which we now know as the White House.

In our lifetimes the United States has always been top dog in the world. Canada has always been a close friend. And we have always enjoyed a “special relationship” with Great Britain. But it wasn’t always that way.

War of 1812 Redux

I encountered the War of 1812 again in 2015, when I had the privilege to deliver bicentennial remarks at the Charlestown Navy Yard to commemorate the last battle of USS Constitution, when our nation’s most venerated sail frigate defeated two British warships, HMS Cyane and Levant. The story of Constitution’s 1815 “dual victory” is an inspiring one. It shows that ship crews can overcome certain timeless difficulties of naval war through seamanship, gunnery, and sheer entrepreneurship. To the extent that we remember the War of 1812, we tend to remember it as a victory. That’s because the U.S. Navy won a series of one-on-one victories over the Royal Navy during the early going.

Visit Constitution today and the tour guides will tell you the vessel is Boston’s only undefeated sports team, at 33-0! In fact, Royal Navy ships took to cruising in squadrons to avoid being outgunned by 44-gun frigates like Constitution and their excellent crews.

The capture of the Cyane and Levant.

Constitution skipper Capt. Charles Stewart defeated Cyane and Levant one by one rather than blast away at them at the same time. Defeating one fraction of an enemy force, then turning to defeat the other fraction, is a timeless way to prevail when you’re outnumbered. Captain Stewart maneuvered his ship skillfully while taking advantage of a U.S. Navy technical advantage. Namely, American guns had longer range than the British navy’s. British captains liked to get close and blaze away—much as we saw Captain Jack Aubrey, a.k.a. Russell Crowe, do in Master and Commander, the wonderful naval epic that appeared in 2003. Stewart capitalized on that British preference and was able to hurt the British ships at a distance.

Top Gun

Stewart was able to maneuver Constitution to avoid being raked across the bow and stern, where wooden warships were most vulnerable. Instead he crossed ahead of and behind his opponents, raking them from ahead and astern. In one instance he ordered Constitution’s topsails taken aback—taking all way off the ship in a hurry so he could prevent Levant from crossing astern and engage from a position of advantage. The maneuver was reminiscent of Top Gun, when Maverick and Goose hit the brakes so the Soviet MiG will “fly right by” and appear in Mav’s gunsight. The contestant that does something unexpected and unorthodox gains a tactical advantage.

Being nimble and adaptive helps as well. Constitution suffered damage to her mainmast while pursuing the foe, compelling Stewart to order makeshift repairs and change up his tactics on the fly. He improvised and overcame. Both enemy ships struck their colors after a couple of hours of battle.

Theodore Roosevelt

That’s a rousing story, but the bigger picture is not so uplifting. In fact, both Theodore Roosevelt, a one-time assistant secretary of the navy and later a great navy president, and Alfred Thayer Mahan, the second president of the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., and probably the most influential naval historian ever, wrote histories of the War of 1812 precisely to debunk the popular legend that a plucky young United States had thrashed the preeminent sea power of the age. When remembering the War of 1812, no one should wave the foamy We’re Number One finger the way New England fans do in good years.

TR’s ‘Naval War of 1812’

TR wrote his history of the Naval War of 1812 while a senior at Harvard during the 1880s. It remains in print to this day. Mahan followed up with his own chronicle in 1905. For them the War of 1812 wasn’t a parable showing what America ought to do when facing a war at sea; it was a parable about what not to do. They pointed out that the U.S. Navy had success in the early going because the Royal Navy and British Army were fighting Napoleon in Europe. Britain could spare only a small fraction of its military and naval power for a sideshow here in the New World.

Battle of San Domingo, 1806 naval engagement in the Napoleonic Wars

By 1814, when the Napoleonic Wars were winding down, it could send much more of the Royal Navy’s fleet. After that the United States saw its navy and its merchant fleet—and thus most of its economy—shut down by an overpowering British blockade. American frigates like Constitution had a hard time even getting out to sea. The United States had unwisely failed to build a battle fleet in peacetime. Americans improvised a navy at the outbreak of war and talked themselves into believing they had won, on the cheap, with that makeshift navy.

No More Blockades

Not so, said Roosevelt and Mahan. They implored Congress, presidential administrations, and the American people to construct a modern battle fleet in peacetime so that no hostile power could again blockade U.S. shores in wartime. The U.S. Navy didn’t need to be a “navy second to none”—that came much later, during World War I—but it did need to be big and strong enough to be the master of the western Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean Sea.

A modest fleet of 74-gun capital ships—the aircraft carriers or battleships of their day—could control waters here in the Western Hemisphere, American home turf. The United States didn’t need to outbuild Great Britain or anyone else. Britain presided over an empire on which the sun never set, and had lots of demands on its navy. All the United States needed was enough to handle whatever the British were likely to send to the New World.

A Pick-up Navy Won’t Do

So the two historians concluded that America didn’t need to bankrupt itself maintaining a navy—but it did need to invest enough to safeguard its coastlines, and thus the maritime trade that flowed through seaports like Boston and Newport. A pick-up navy will not suffice.

Lord Palmerston

Some good news comes out of the War of 1812 to go with the bad. British prime minister Lord Palmerston once declared that nations have no permanent allies, only permanent interests. That may be true, but the former members of the British Empire—the United States, Canada, Australia, India, and Britain itself—come awfully close to being permanent friends and allies. English-speaking alliances certainly date to World War II, seventy-five years ago. They arguably date to 1917, when the United States joined the Allied Powers to beat imperial Germany in World War I.

John Quincy Adams by George Peter Alexander Healy

And these nations have been able to work together on matters of common purpose for even longer than that. Animosity lingered for awhile after the War of 1812, but not for long. For instance, President James Monroe’s 1823 message to Congress—the same document that announced the Monroe Doctrine, demanding that Europeans keep their hands off Latin American republics that had won their independence—also reported that the U.S. Navy and Royal Navy were jointly patrolling the Caribbean Sea to quash the slave trade. (The Monroe Doctrine was really the handiwork of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, another eminent New Englander.) Monroe’s message came just eight years after the Peace of Ghent, which brought the War of 1812 to a close.

Lady Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher, one of Britain’s longest-serving prime ministers, spoke at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., in 1997. Lady Thatcher rued the “rough patch” Britain went through during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Fortunately, the erstwhile combatants soon smoothed out that rough patch.

Margaret Thatcher visiting the Kennedy Space Center in 2001.

The past may be a foreign country, but exploring it shows that peoples need not remain captive to old enmities.

The author of this story, James Holmes, Ph.D., is the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He is the author of two books, Maritime Strategy and Red Star Over the Pacific. You can read his blog, The Naval Diplomat, here. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Story of Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner, Narragansett Bay Aviators

In 2018 the U.S. Navy commissioned the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Hudner in Boston. The ship’s name pays tribute to two naval aviators’ incredible tale of gallantry, self-sacrifice and friendship in the Korean War. And the story of Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner started on Narragansett Bay in the late 1940s.

Traces of this story are still visible nearby. On board the battleship USS Massachusetts in Fall River, Mass., a small memorial just aft of the officers’ wardroom depicts a navy-blue F4U Corsair, a propeller-driven fighter built to duel the Imperial Japanese Navy from island airstrips and the wooden decks of aircraft carriers. The Corsair is the gull-winged plane flown by Pappy Boyington’s Black Sheep Squadron in the Pacific, familiar from the 1970s TV program Baa Baa Black Sheep.

Devotion.

But this is more than your average sentimental aviation painting. Rather than soaring above the clouds, the Corsair in the foreground is about to crash on a bleak mountainside. Snow swirls around it, churned up by its prop and wings. Another F4U has already fallen to earth in the background. It smolders. Other fighters swoop around overhead. Inset into the painting’s frame are the photos of two young naval aviators, one black and one white, along with a set of Wings of Gold. Officers who graduate from flight school earn their wings and wear them throughout their careers in uniform. The title of the painting is “Devotion.”

Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner

It’s an apt title. The crashed and about-to-be-crashed aviators are Ensign Jesse Brown and Lieutenant j.g. Thomas Hudner. Jesse was born into an African-American sharecropper family in Depression-era Mississippi and grew up dirt poor. He fell in love with aviation after one of the locals buzzed him in a field and resolved to become an airman himself. Them Jesse moved to Hattiesburg to attend an elite high school, studied at Ohio State for two years, joined the Navy, got married and had a baby girl. He completed flight training in 1948 and became America’s first black naval aviator.

Jesse Brown was a badass. An anecdote from his carrier flight qualifications in the F4U during the spring of 1950 makes the point. Aircraft don’t land on carriers, strictly speaking; they crash aboard in a controlled way. To land a plane on the flight deck, an aviator drops the aircraft’s tailhook to snag one of several arresting wires stretched across the deck, perpendicular to the incoming plane’s flight path. The wire reels out and brings the plane to a halt. In those days carrier crews rigged a barricade just beyond the arresting wires, in case the pilot missed all of them. Otherwise the plane would plow into aircraft parked up forward on the ship’s bow and cause havoc.

Ensign Jesse Brown in the cockpit of an F4U-4.

To qualify an airman had to complete six landings aboard the light aircraft carrier USS Wright, a flattop based at Quonset Point, on the Narragansett Bay’s western shores. Jesse had qualified on a different airframe and had a hard time adjusting to the F4U, a warplane new to him and to his squadron in the spring of 1950. The Corsair had a massive engine that blocked his view of the flight deck on final descent. He had to trust the landing signals officer on the ship to bring him in, motioning with paddles to tell him to come left or right, add or cut power, or what have you.

DNKUA

Doing it blind demanded a leap of faith Jesse found hard to make. He managed five landings but was at risk of failing to make a sixth. On his very last try he bounced his plane on deck, missed the wires . . . and then gunned his engine, jumping the Corsair over the barricade and back into the air! He managed to “trap” after that. Aviators love to grade each other. His supervisor assigned him the grade of DNKUA—Damn Near Killed Us All—but he qualified for sea duty.

LT.j.g. Tom Hudner, 1950

Tom was a native of Fall River. He was of Irish descent and enjoyed a country-club upbringing. His father operated a chain of grocery stores, Hudner’s Markets. Tom turned down admission to Harvard to attend the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, did a brief stint in the cruiser Helena in the Pacific, and applied for flight school, basically on a dare from his shipmates.

Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner became friends while serving in the Narragansett Bay. They flew together as wingmen in VF-32—Fighter Squadron 32, nicknamed Fighting 32 or the “Fighting Swordsmen,” embarked aboard the aircraft carrier USS Leyte. Jesse loved to buzz his cottage in Warwick, delighting his wife Daisy and especially their daughter Pam. Tom buzzed his old man on the golf course in Fall River.

Close Air Support

The navy reclassified Fighting 32 as a “close air support” squadron in early 1950. The F4U excelled in air-to-air combat during World War II, but faced obsolescence with the onset of jet fighters. But it could haul a load of ordnance for striking targets on the surface, including hostile forces in close contact with friendly forces. Close-air-support planes go out hunting for targets of opportunity, or they loiter overhead awaiting calls for fire support from troops beneath.

Close air support weakens hostile armies and hampers their maneuvers on the battlefield while protecting friendly troops and giving them a firepower advantage—or, in the case of the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir, where this story culminates, correcting a firepower mismatch so that ten thousand U.S. and U.N. soldiers could stand against one hundred thousand or more Chinese infantrymen who came against them.

Battle of Chosin Reservoir

By November 1950 some 300,000 Chinese People’s Volunteer Army soldiers had infiltrated across the Sino-Korean frontier undetected. Gen. Douglas MacArthur had brought his force north of the 38th parallel, the dividing line between North and South Korea, and Communist China resolved to repel the invaders. The Chinese host slammed into the U.S./U.N. army in darkness on November 1. Writes Adam Makos, who chronicles these events in his book Devotion, the Chinese descended on the U.S. Army’s First Cavalry Division “like the hordes of Genghis Khan,” slaughtering a 600-man battalion in a night.

And that was just the beginning. MacArthur sounded retreat lest he lose his army. That was a real possibility. By early December the Chinese Ninth Army had encircled the First Marine Division, which was accompanied by some army troops and British commandos, at the Chosin Reservoir in northeastern North Korea. U.N. forces faced annihilation unless they could fight their way out of the trap the Chinese People’s Volunteers had sprung.

MU.S. Marines on the firing line at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir.

Back to Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner. Close air support is the great equalizer for a weaker force. Because Korea is a peninsula jutting out of continental Asia, much of it is accessible to sea power, carrier aviation in particular. Leyte had supported the initial fight against the North Koreans. But in October the flattop withdrew to Sasebo, Japan, for some R&R. The war seemed to be over. North Korea seemed beaten. Jesse had written Daisy that they might be coming home.

Iroquois Flight

Then came the Chinese intervention, and back they went to the Sea of Japan, joining Task Force 77 off the Korean east coast. On December 4, Ensign Brown and Lt. j.g. Hudner were part of Iroquois Flight, a six-plane contingent launched from 100 miles offshore on a three-hour mission. The planes cruised as low as 700 feet, hunting for Chinese formations to target.

During the sweep Jesse’s aircraft, Iroquois 13, was nicked by small-arms fire from Chinese “White Jackets,” troops so named for the white uniforms they wore for camouflage in the snow. A Chinese bullet punctured an oil line. This was a mortal wound, leaving Jesse too little fuel to get back to his ship. His engine seized up, compelling him to crash-land on a mountainside during the coldest winter on record, and 17 miles behind enemy lines.

A restored F4U Corsair

This need not have been the end. With any luck a search-and-rescue helicopter could have picked him up. Fortune deserted the airmen, though. Jesse’s Corsair broke up on impact. He survived, but twisted metal pinioned his leg within the cockpit. He couldn’t extricate himself. Worse, a fire started in the wreckage, threatening to ignite its fuel tanks. That’s when Tom deliberately crash-landed his F4U nearby while the remaining Iroquois Flight pilots patrolled the sky to fend off Chinese soldiers from the downed airmen.

Devotion

This is the scene portrayed in the painting on board USS Massachusetts. It commemorates the devotion of one aviator to another, of one American to another, and of one human being to another. This is an uplifting story, but it does not end well. Tom was unable to free Jesse from his crashed plane. Nor could Lt. Charlie Ward, another friend of Jesse’s. (He was from south Alabama, so Jesse called him “Alabama” and Charlie called Jesse “Mississippi.”)

Charlie piloted a helicopter into the mountains at great personal risk to bring rescue equipment and retrieve the airmen. But Jesse lost consciousness intermittently, and perished before they could pull him out. The rescuers had to withdraw at nightfall because helicopters couldn’t operate in darkness in those days.

Jesse Brown fell at the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir, known to U.S. Marines as the “frozen Chosin.” He was posthumously decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross for gallantry, and had a frigate named after him during the 1970s.

Daisy Brown congratulating Tom Hudner after President Truman awarded him the Medal of Honor.

Aftermath

Tom made a career in the Navy, retiring as a captain in the 1970s. In 2017 he passed away in Concord, Mass., at the age of 93.

Funeral procession with the casket of Capt. Tom Hudner in Concord, Mass.

He now rests at Arlington National Cemetery. Tom received the Medal of Honor for his selfless act. After the Korean War he and Daisy went on the road together from time to time to spread Jesse’s story and promote the cause of racial integration in the United States Navy and fellow armed services.

Jesse fell along with a thousand of his brothers-in-arms and over 9,000 missing or wounded. But the First Marine Division lived, in part because of the U.S. naval aviators’ skill and bravery. The results of Chosin could have been far worse.

These were lives well lived—and it all started in the Narragansett Bay.

The author of this story about Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner, James Holmes, Ph.D., is the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He is the author of two books, Maritime Strategy and Red Star Over the Pacific. You can read his blog, The Naval Diplomat, here.

Image of restored Corsair By Gerry Metzler – https://www.flickr.com/photos/flyguy71/7427977930/sizes/l/in/photostream/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20571543. This story was updated in 2023.

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Rhode Island’s Little Annapolis: The PT Boat Training Center at Melville

During World War II, Rhode Island residents could hear the roar of PT boat engines from Narragansett Bay all day and see tracer bullets fired over the ocean at night.

They could watch the PT boats racing around either in formation or practicing maneuvers. Perhaps Richard Nixon saw them from the Quonset Point Naval air station while he trained there in 1942. Perhaps George H.W. Bush had an aerial view of the little boats while training at the Charlestown Naval Air Station. And maybe they caught a glimpse of John F. Kennedy racing around the bay, leaving a rooster tail in his wake.

Birth of the PT Boat

The Navy had recognized early in the war that it needed small, high-speed, heavily armed gunboats to use among the hundreds of small islands in the Pacific. From that insight came the Patrol Torpedo boat, known as the PT boat. You may have seen PT boats in motion pictures such as They Were Expendable and PT 109 or the comedy TV show, McHale’s Navy.

Nearly all of the 14,000 PT boat officers and men trained at the small navy base on Narragansett Bay in the village of Melville, a part of Portsmouth, R.I. The Navy didn’t just train its men there, but developed PT boat policies and tactics as well.

Not many histories of these small bases have been written. Melville, however, graduated a disproportionate number of extremely successful men. In addition to a president of the Unite States, Melville graduated a U.S. Supreme Court justice, three movie stars, five U.S. ambassadors, four NFL coaches, six top corporate executives and a U.S. attorney general – to name a few.

This is their story.

Devil Boats

Leo Caisse, the author of this story about the 1916 U-boat visit, has published 10 historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. He has a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lives in East Providence, R.I.

PT boat logo

The base was formally known as the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadrons Training Center (MTBSTC). The Japanese called them Devil Boats, and the Navy fondly called them the Mosquito Fleet, after their logo. The Secretary of the Navy signed an order establishing the PT boat fleet on Feb. 17, 1942.

In the beginning, a Massachusetts firm began construction on the small base. But then the Navy largely turned it over to the Rhode Island companies of Gilbane, Coleman and Collins. When all was said and done, there would be 59 buildings and 150 Quonset Huts (a Rhode Island invention). These buildings and huts would house classrooms, mess halls, warehouses, machine shops, living quarters and more — everything you’d find in a large Navy base.

The builders literally built a boat basin for the PT boats out of a swamp. It was staffed full time by 57 officers and 280 enlisted men. Motorists could see it from the Mt. Hope Bridge, which connects Bristol and Portsmouth.

Alongside the PT boat training unit was the Motor Torpedo Boat Repair Training Unit (MTBRTU). This unit had a staff of 30 officers and 950 enlisted men. Here they trained on maintaining the three 1500-horsepower Packard engines on a PT boat either in dock or the field. On the other side of the base was the Naval Fuel and Net Depot – a good location because those Packard engines gobbled up huge amounts of high-octane fuel.

Melville also had the advantage of having the Navy’s Newport Torpedo Station on Goat Island down the road from it. The torpedo station could provide training duds, sometimes live, for the torpedo boats to practice with. It also supplied experimental torpedoes to try out and a seven-mile torpedo range running north from the torpedo station up Narragansett Bay toward Prudence Island.

Mount Hope Bridge

Specht Tech

The Navy organized the PT boats into 44 squadrons, generally comprised of 12 boats. All told, the Navy commissioned over 650 PT boats by the end of the war.

The men nicknamed the squadrons ‘RON’, from the last three letters of ‘squadron,’ and added their number. RON 4 began operations at the Newport Navy Base on Jan. 13, 1942. It later moved to the crowded Melville base and remained in operation for the duration of the war. RON 4 patrolled the Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts coastline. Thus Narragansett Bay provided a safe haven for training and experimentation.

Lt. William C. Specht, soon promoted to lieutenant commander, was tapped to serve as Melville’s first commander in March 1942. He also ran the repair and fuel depots. Specht oversaw the construction of the base as well as the development of its curriculum. Navy men assigned to the course at Melville joked they attended “Specht Tech.”

Lt. jg. John F. Kennedy in PT 109

Plenty Tough

The PT boats were built mostly by the Higgins Company in New Orleans and the ELCO Company, a division of Electric Boat, the submarine builder. They had to measure at least 77 feet long in order to carry and launch Mark 8 torpedoes. They also carried twin 50-caliber machine guns. Some of the PT boats had 20 mm cannons.

The crewmen did their gunnery training at the Anti-Aircraft Center at Price’s Neck on Newport’s Ocean Drive. George Donovan, now 92, remembers them practicing at night. Along with his brother and cousins, he watched from his grandmother’s bedroom window, which faced Ocean Drive. They were fascinated and mesmerized watching countless tracer bullets fired out over the ocean at practice targets towed by small airplanes. These trainees used live ammunition, and occasionally they strayed off target and accidently shot down the tow plane.

The men trained in their PT boats on Narragansett Bay and in the ocean between Block Island and Martha’s Vineyard, 10 miles south of Newport. People said the rooster tail and the roar of the engines was most impressive the first time you heard and saw them. These boats could travel between 40-45 miles an hour at full throttle and were physically demanding to operate. So demanding they sometimes said that “PT” meant the men had to be ‘plenty tough.’

A PT boat underway near Midway

Accidents Happen

Occasionally, things went wrong.

Whenever the torpedo station was going to launch a test torpedo along its seven-mile range off Gould Island, it blew a very loud warning whistle. But one day in 1942 the commander of PT 122 did not hear the whistle, understandable over the roar of three Packard engines. He strayed into the test range and was nearly sunk by a test torpedo.

On another occasion that same year, PT 59 launched a torpedo in error. It traveled an estimated seven miles and struck the cargo ship USS Capella, anchored off Jamestown, and it began to sink. The quick-thinking skipper used his powerful engines to push the Capella to shallow water and thus save her from sinking. She was later repaired and put back into service. However, the entire incident was kept secret until the 1970’s.

Then in 1943, another PT boat launched a torpedo that went off course and sank a freighter anchored off the Quonset Point Naval Air Station.

And while patrolling Rhode Island coastal waters, PT 200 struck an unknown submerged object and sank.

Melville Today

Soon after the end of World War II, the Navy decommissioned the Melville Training Center and dismantled it. All that remains today are a couple of buildings and a plaque to commemorate what once was there. A busy marina operates in the PT boat cove.

When I was a youngster in the early 1960s, my friends and I used to play on an abandoned PT boat, which had been stripped of its armament and beached on the shore of what is now Hanley’s Beach, on Jacobs Point along the river in Warren, R.I. It had apparently crashed into something submerged because it had a large hole in its hull. We could enter the PT boat through the hole and play around, imagining what once might have taken place aboard her.

According to the Warren Preservation Society, what remained of the PT boat burned to the ground about 1970. All that’s left is some iron from what once must have been her engines.

Today there are precious few PT boats remaining, perhaps 10 in the world. Two fully restored boats can be seen on display at Battleship Cove in Fall River, Mass. If you want to experience what they were really like, take a trip to New Orleans and the National WW II Museum where they have fully restored the PT 305 to fully operating condition. You can even take a 45-minute ride on it in Lake Ponchartrain.

As noted previously, about 14,000 people went through the Melville Training Station out of about 12 million men and women who served in the armed forces during the war. What seems to me remarkable, and far out of proportion to its size, is the number notable men who served there.

The PT boat in Battleship Cove

Melville Alumni

Here is an incomplete listing:

Anthony Akers, U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand

Paul Austin, Chairman of the Board, Coca Cola

Howard Baker, U.S. Senator from Tennessee, chief of staff to President Reagan, U.S. Ambassador to Japan

William C. Battle, President of Field Crest Mills, U.S. Ambassador to Australia

Charles A. Black, husband of Shirley Temple and aquaculture pioneer

John D. Bulkeley, Navy Vice Admiral and one of the most decorated men in military history, including the Medal of Honor; skippered PT boat that took Gen. Douglas MacArthur out of the Philippines

Michael Burke, CBS Sports executive and President of the New York Yankees

John Clagett, author of 19 books

Bernard A. Crimmins, All-American football player, Notre Dame 1941; college football coach`

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., part of the invasion of Southern France, organized the Beach Jumpers, movie actor

Paul B. (Red) Fay, Undersecretary of the Navy, author

John Harllee, Chairman, Federal Maritime Commission

Michael J. Holovak, All-American football player, Boston College, 1942; college football coach and NFL team executive

John F. Kennedy, U.S. President

Joe Kuharich, college football coach and head coach NFL teams

Elgar Laux, Vice Chairman, Chrysler Corp.

Walter Lemm, head coach Houston Oilers and St. Louis Cardinals

Henry Loeb, Mayor of Memphis, Tenn.

Carl Maddox, Athletic Director, Louisiana State University

Clinton McClain, player, New York Giants

Torbert MacDonald, U.S. Representative from Massachusetts

John N. Mitchell, U.S. Attorney General

Robert Montgomery, actor, President of the Screen Actors Guild

James Madden Newberry, founder of PT Boats, Inc.

Jack B. Olson, Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas

Paul T. Rennell, Vice President, Pan American World Airways

Don Rickles, actor and comedian

Raymond P. Shafer, Governor of Pennsylvania

Preston L. Sutphen, Sr., President of Electric Boat, builder of PT boats

Harold Thorkilsen, President and CEO, Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc.

Malcolm Troon, U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Israel and the Soviet Union

Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, millionaire

George Vanderbilt, millionaire

Byron White, U.S. Supreme Court Justice

End Notes

Leo Caisse, the author of this story about the 1916 U-boat visit, passed away in 2020. He published 10 historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. He earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lived in East Providence, R.I.

Images: PT Boat at Battleship Cove By Wikimaster97commons – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3846572; John F. Kennedy in PT 109 courtesy the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. This story was updated in 2023.

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Seven Fun Facts About New England Taxes

There isn’t much that’s fun about taxes, but we thought we’d try to find something. So we found seven fun — well, maybe just fun-ish — fact about taxes.

We do think it’s at least interesting that Rhode Islanders didn’t have to pay taxes for 40 years. And it’s fun to find out what kind of a job Sam Adams did as tax collector, or what Mainers did when the federal government actually returned money to them.

Here, then, are seven fun facts about taxes.

1. When Printing Money Meant No Taxes

Rhode Island enjoyed a 40-year holiday from taxes starting in 1710 when the General Assembly cranked out money on the printing press.

Here’s how it worked: The colony had a number of land banks, which loaned paper money for mortgages on land. The loans generated interest, which the colony’s government used to pay for its operations.

The value of the paper money often declined, which made it easier for landholders to repay their debts. Rhode Island’s supply of paper money also gave the colonists a medium of exchange. The arrangement made practically everyone happy – except for merchants in London, who had to accept the colonists’ depreciated money to pay off their debts.

When the merchants weren’t happy, Parliament wasn’t happy. In 1751, Parliament passed the Currency Act, making it illegal for Rhode Island’s General Assembly to issue any more bills of credit not backed by taxes. By the middle of 1754, Rhode Island neared insolvency, and Rhode Island towns began collecting taxes.

2. Sam Adams, Tax Collector?

Sam Adams had a job as tax collector, and he was lousy at it. Adams had inherited his father’s malt business, but it failed. In 1756 he ran for and won the post of Boston’s tax collector to support his family. But Bostonians didn’t really want to pay their taxes, and Sam Adams didn’t really want to collect them.

Sam Adams

Then a smallpox epidemic broke out in 1764, forcing many people in Boston to close their businesses. Sam Adams was inclined to overlook tax payments from people who suffered financial reverses. His laxity made him popular among Boston’s working class, but caused him trouble. As tax collector, he was liable for uncollected taxes.

By 1765, Sam Adams owed £8,000, and Boston came close to bankruptcy. Adams sued people for nonpayment of taxes, but still came up short. His friends ended up paying most of the deficit, and Boston Town Meeting made up the rest.

3. ‘Less Real and more Ideal’

In order to pay off its Revolutionary War debt, Massachusetts raised taxes to a level four times that before the war. The people of Greenwich, Mass., complained, “Our Grievances Were Less Real and more Ideal then they are Now.“

Greenwich, Mass.

Greenwich would actually have more to complain about in 1938, when the commonwealth flooded it for the Quabbin Reservoir.

4. High Hopes for a Tax Refund

In a once exciting but now forgotten episode in U.S. tax history, the federal government ran a surplus of about $30 million in 1836. Revolutionary War debt had been paid off by the sale of public lands in 1836. What to do with the money generated fierce arguments, of course, but in the end Congress decided to give most of the money back to the states. Each state could do with it what it wanted.

As state lawmakers debated about what to do with their share, ‘high hopes were awakened in all children who were out of pocket-money.

Maine, a state for only 17 years, decided to give the money back to the taxpayers. Every resident – including children — received about $2 from the state of Maine. A Deer Isle farmer’s wife named Salome Sellers decided to buy a pair of candlesticks with her money. She lived to be 108 years old, and was the last person born in the 18th century to die in the 19th. Her house is now a museum and displays the candlesticks.

Salome Sellers and one of her candlesticks

5. A Literary Solution to Taxes

New Hampshire in 1821 tried to raise money for a public university by taxing the capital stock of banks. Seven years later the state abandoned the plan as the tax didn’t raise nearly enough money.

Instead, New Hampshire established the Literary Fund, which it divided every year among the towns. The money was to be spent for the
“support and maintenance of common free schools or other purposes of education.” The Town of Peterborough decided to spend it on a municipal library.

Taxes on banks helped pay for Peterborough’s library.

6. Vermont Declares War To Raise Taxes

Vermont declared war on Germany three months before the United States did so it could give its GIs a raise. In anticipation of hostilities, the United States had reinstituted the draft in 1940. Over the course of the war, 50,000 Vermonters were drafted or enlisted, close to 14 percent of the state’s population. Enlisted men earned an average base pay of about $70 a month, which put a financial strain on many young military families.

On Sept. 16, 1941, Vermont’s lawmakers voted a $10-a-month bonus to the draftees and enlisted men.

Montpelier

But under Vermont’s constitution, they would have had to vote for a new tax in peacetime in order to appropriate the funds. They could vote a bonus, however, during a time of armed conflict.

Fortunately for Vermont draftees and their families, President Roosevelt had on Sept. 11, 1941 ordered the U.S. Navy to shoot first if it encountered German warships entering U.S. waters. Vermont’s lawmakers used that as an excuse to declare war on Nazi Germany – and give a bonus to Vermonters in the military.

7. Connecticut’s 42-Day Income Tax

Connecticut had an income tax for 42 days, and then it didn’t. In 1971, the state had accumulated a debt of a quarter of a billion dollars. Lawmakers struggled with how to get back into the black. Since Connecticut had the highest per-capita income in the country, the General Assembly decided on an income tax – in a late-night budget session at the end of June. The income tax was to take effect in October.

Connecticut State Capitol

The public reacted fast and furiously, though. So a special session of the General Assembly repealed the income tax on Aug. 12, 42 days after passing it. Instead, they increased sales taxes and raised tuition at the University of Connecticut.

Twenty years later, the General Assembly approved another income tax, which survives to this day.

This story was updated in 2022. Image of state capitol: By jglazer75 – Connecticut State Capitol, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2574147

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