The older you will get...: I Read Books and Tour Old Forts...

I think I'll write book reports as a 2023 New Years thing. A good idea that will help me keep up with what I read and it will probably be fun until I read something totally trashy, escapist and embarrassing that I don't want you to know about. The first book is one I picked up in the museum store at Fort Pickens while on our recent travel trailer trip. It's called The War Lovers.

I like to tour the old forts that ring the coasts of the USA and I've also seen one in Puerto Rico. It's generally either free or I they waive all fees if you have a parks pass. Most of the forts began construction after the War of 1812 when we decided we did not want the British over here again. I think there are ruins in various states of repair over looking all the coasts. I am pretty sure that none of them ever fired a shot at another country's navy. Some of them, including Fort Pickens did their best work during the Civil War when Americans decided to shoot each other with the guns entrenched there. Here's a photo of me on the ramparts of Fort Pickens with a gun that was used by Union troops to great effect firing 300 pound shells that destroyed two Confederate forts across Pensacola Bay. From the looks of the emplacements I'd saw there were at least 9 of these in addition to smaller guns for close range targets.

Leading up to the Spanish American War, which is the topic of The War Lovers, ships had become more armored so these guns capable of a 300 pound round were replaced with guns that fired shells in excess of 1000 pounds. If you check the Fort Travis link the industrial military complex pretty much began gun replacement projects, money making projects, at these forts as technology advanced up until the late 1940s when man tried his best to make war a push button affair.

So all this brings us around to the book about loving war. Seems like in the 1890s you had a generation that held in great esteem the exploits of their forbearers during the Civil War and the genocide that subdued the Indigenous people of America. Only thing was there was no war for them. Men like Roosevelt and Lodge or the newspaper man Hearst who was busy setting the pattern for the modern news network by making up stories that divided the opinions of the everyday person. The upper class Angelo Saxons felt a certain anxiety and neurosis by not being able to charge into battle which was a nobel thing man should aspire to so they thought. Anyone who opposed this was called a mugwump which though they meant in in a bad way actually comes from an Indian word that means independent thinker. My dad was a mugwump because after he landed on Omaha Beach in WW2 he told me to never join the army.

A little background to all this is that a few years before the Spanish American War these people tried to drum up a war with England over a border dispute between Venezuela and British Guyana. When they failed it was Spain's time in the barrel and they were more successful.

More successful if you were Hearst and Roosevelt I guess. The triggering event of the war, the explosion of the battleship Maine has pretty much been proven an accident attributed to poor powder storage. It's estimated that combined there there were as many as 60,000 dead from the war of which 90% of these were from yellow fever. I did not look up causalities for the guerilla war in the Philippines that followed.

Though Roosevelt might be a personality that would be what we would call toxic masculinity these days he was a fair president so like many men, myself included there's good with the bad. I really can't like Hearst at all.

Here's Cathy with a gun at Castillo de San Marcos in St Augustine, Fl. It's the oldest masonry fort in the USA and construction was begun by the Spanish in 1672. It has actually been in a battle of the Spanish vs. the British undergoing a couple of sieges and much cannon bombardment that had little effect on the walls.