Frenchman First to Fly a Floater

The Wright Brothers may have been first, but for a number of reasons within the first decade of flight the French leapt ahead of the Americans and their chief rival Glenn Curtis in technical innovation and the advancement of aviation.  It was not really so surprising.  In the early decades of the 20th Century French science and engineering led the world in many areas.

Perhaps one of the most important advancements in aviation was the development of a floatplane—an aircraft that could take off and land on water.  Everyone knew that such a development was crucial in making air travel practical over long distances and commercially.  Some had tried with disastrous results.  Until Henri Fabre.

On March 28, 1910 Fabre, who had never before flown an airplane of any type, took off from the Étang de Berre, a tidal lagoon by the small port of Martigues northwest of Marseille near the Côte d'Azur, and successfully touched down on the water 1,500 feet later.  Fabre made three more flights that day until the plane, dubbed the Fabre Hydravion, crashed with minor damage.  By the end of the week Fabre was able to fly over three and a half miles.

Fabre, born on November 28, 1882 had the perfect combination of background and training to become the first to build and fly a seaplane.  He was born into a prominent Marseille ship building company and educated at the Jesuit College there.  Unlike the Wrights, Curtis and other American aviation pioneers who were basically tinkering mechanics, Fabre was a trained scientist and engineer.  He immersed himself with everything that was known about aircraft and especially propeller design.

By 1906 he began to work on solving the challenges of building a floatplane.  To do so, he had to make several innovations, especially the development of light, reliable pontoons.  To create a light weight but strong frame, Fabre designed and patented the Fabre beam. 

Fabre was assisted in the construction and testing of his aircraft by Marius Burdin, a former mechanic for Captain Ferdinand Ferber, the Army officer considered the father of French aviation, and by naval architect Léon Sebille.

Together this highly skilled team built a fragile looking buy deceptively sturdy monoplane with a frame and the leading edges of the single wing and two small foreplanes made of Fabre beams.  The pilot sat on a bicycle seat with legs astride the top beam of the frame.  A double-bladed Gnome Omega rotary 7-cylinder pusher engine provided the power.  The whole contraption sat on three pontoons, one mounted below the bottom frame beam before the pilot, and two from the wings, all supported by strong guy wires.

Word of the successful flights soon got around and soon others interested in floatplane technology beat a path to Fabre’s door.  Gabriel and Charles Voisin, proprietors of France’s first aircraft manufacturing company, bought several Fabre pontoons for use on their own Voisin Canard, a land based aircraft they converted for the French Navy.  Glenn Curtis, known as the father of American Naval aviation also bough Fabre pontoons which he used for the first successful U.S. floatplane flight on January 26, 1911 at San Diego.  Curtis soon adapted the Fabre design with modifications to create an amphibious Model D.

Fabre took the Hydravion to the prestigious Concours de Canots Automobiles de Monaco for a demonstration flight on April 12, 1911.  This time mechanic Burdin was at the controls when he crashed and smashed the aircraft beyond repair.

Fabre never built another model.  Instead he turned his attention to the manufacture of pontoon for others, the exploitation of the Fabre beam, and other engineering and business pursuits.  He led a long and honored life and was still seen rowing on in the harbor of Marseilles as late as 1971.  He died on June 30, 1983 at the age of 101, the last of the original aviation pioneers.

As for the Hydravion, its parts were salvaged after its last flight.  Eventually it was re-assembled and restored.  It is now on display at the Musée de l'Air in Paris.

Andy Jackson’s Other 1814 Battle

U.S. Army Regulars top the Red Stick breastworks in the Battle of Horshoe Bend.  Lt. Sam Houston takes an arrow to the leg.

In 1814 Andrew Jackson took a little trip.  But despite the memorable ballad, he never came “down the Mighty Mississip.”  Well before he got to New Orleans he and an army of Tennessee Volunteers, a company of Army Regulars, and a few hundred Cherokee and Southern Creek allies plunged deep into the Alabama wilderness in pursuit of a “renegade” faction of the Creek Nation known as the Red Sticks.  He found them at a place called Horseshoe Bend and fought them in the most important American battle you have probably never heard of.  Even if he had never triumphed at New Orleans, his victory there would have secured him veneration as one of the young nation’s greatest military heroes.

Historians are somewhat divided on how to categorize the conflict.  Many, maybe most, put it in the broader context of the on-going War of 1812 because the Red Sticks were informal allies of the British and were largely armed with weapons smuggled from Spanish Florida.  Others insist on calling it a distinct Red Stick or Creek War and placing it more generally in the context of an on-going, genocidal land grab from Native Americans.  It seems to me it was both.

The whole thing started as something of a civil war within the Creek Nation.  The Creek were a large tribe whose traditional territories and hunting grounds stretched from western Georgia across much of the mid-South.  Like their cousins, and sometimes rivals for hunting grounds, the Cherokee they were sometimes considered one of the Civilized Tribes because they tended to live in permanent or semi-permanent settlements and engaged in extensive agriculture in addition to hunting.  In the eastern and southern portions of their range in Georgia, many had adopted White farming methods, clothing, and customs.  Many intermarried with frontier Whites and the more prosperous owned slaves. 

When war broke out with the British these Creeks, who had lived cheek to jowls with Whites in a sometimes dicey, but essentially stable relationship for decades, declared their allegiance to the United States and expressed willingness to support the Army militarily if need be.

A larger group of Creeks residing further inland, however, maintained their traditional culture and were resentful of both the “civilized” branch of the tribe and the continuing pressure of encroaching settlement in their territory by Whites. 

In 1811 the great Shawnee Chief Tecumseh, a close ally of the British, toured the Five Civilized Tribes of the South in an effort to bring them into his Indian Confederacy to oppose American expansion.  The British, he told tribal leaders, would provide arms and guarantee a permanent Native homeland off limits to settlement.  The Cherokee, Choctaw, Lower Creeks, and other tribes who all had treaties with the U.S. refused to join.  But the Red Sticks, influenced by younger warriors, were ready for war against the Americans.

They did not formally join Tecumseh’s Confederacy but became allies and allies of the British, who were active in near-by Florida.   The Red Sticks were soon raiding isolated farms and settlements in a relatively low key guerilla war.  In support of their treaty commitments, Lower Creeks asserted their claim to tribal leadership and moved against the Red Sticks, arresting those warriors they could find.  The Red Sticks responded with attacks on the Lower Creeks including the slaughtering of cattle, pigs and other domestic animals that were symbolic of adoption of white ways.

In July of 1813 a sizable party of Red Sticks was returning from Florida with a pack train of horses loaded down with corn meal, powder, shot, and arms purchased with £500 sent to them by the British from the Spanish in Florida.  Lower Creeks got wind of the transaction and sent word to American troops at Fort Mims, Alabama.  Troops under Major Daniel Beasley of the Mississippi Volunteers led a mounted force of 6 companies 150 white militia riflemen, 30 mixed blood Creek known as métis under Captain Dixon Bailey to intercept Red Stick Leader Peter McQueen party.

The troops surprised McQueen’s party during a mid day meal break and quickly scattered them, capturing the pack train.  But the undisciplined Militia fell into a frenzy of looting as they tore into the packs.  McQueen rallied his warriors in the surrounding swamp and re-took the camp and supplies in a bloody fight known as the Battle of Burnt Corn.

After the battle McQueen and other Red Stick leaders called for a massing of warriors.  Raids stepped up.  Panicked settlers, their slaves, métis and other Lower Creeks sought refuge at Fort Mims, which was palisaded with a block house.  About 520 people including 230 ill trained Militia and Creek warriors, crowded into the fort which was located about 40 north of Mobile on the Alabama River.

On August 29 somewhere between 750 and 1000 Red Sticks led by McQueen and the other head warrior, William Weatherford launched an attack on the Fort, symbolically also at a noon lunch break.  Major Beasley had neglected to put out pickets or sentries and had ignored the warnings of two slaves who had been gathering firewood outside the post.  One gate of the fort could not even be completely closed because of drifting sand. 

The Red Sticks stormed and easily took the outer palisade as the soldiers and civilians retreated behind a lower secondary defense.  Captain Bailey rallied his forces and held off the attackers for two hours all the while being peppered by fire by Creeks using the outer perimeter’s gun loops.  Both sides suffered significant losses.  The Red Stick retreated outside the walls to regroup.  A second attack at 3 pm sent the defenders reeling back to their block house bastion, which the attackers set on fire.

After resistance finally collapsed around 5 pm warriors began to club and tomahawk the wounded and other survivors despite Weatherford’s attempts to restrain them.  At least 250 were killed and scalped, their bodies left where they lay.  The Red Sticks spared about 100 surviving slaves, but took them captive along with 30 or so women and children.  36 defenders, including the mortally wounded Captain Bailey escaped to tell the tail.  Two weeks later a relief column arrived to find the Fort destroyed and the bodies of both the defenders and about 100 Red Sticks rotting in the sun.

The news of the Fort Mims Massacre set off a panic across the frontier.  Settlers streamed to the safety of older settlements.  The Federal Government was unable to provide much help.  Most of the Army was on the Canadian Frontier or scattered in costal defense forts.  The best they could do was to call up the Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi militia and volunteers and place them under the overall command of lawyer/planter/politician General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee.  While other militia units mostly took up defensive positions on the edge of Red Stick territory, Jackson assemble an army to extract vengeance and, “Make Alabama safe for White settlement.

Jackson had commanded the Tennessee Militia since 1802.  Under his over-all command units had been engaged in the ongoing Indian Wars that consumed the frontier in the years after the American Revolution.  Not only did his Tennesseans include many veteran Indian fighters and experienced officers, but Jackson had drilled and trained them.  These troops in no way resembled the rag-tag militias most states sent into the field.  They were well armed, well trained and fiercely loyal to their demanding commander.

As soon as weather permitted in 1814 Jackson headed into Alabama  at the head of an army of over 3000—2000 infantry including the Regular Army 39th Infantry Regiment, 700 cavalry and mounted riflemen, and 600 Cherokee, Choctaw and Lower Creek auxiliaries.  He also had at least two batteries of field howitzers.

Jackson march his column through the wilderness with discipline and as much stealth as an army on the move could muster. 

By March 27 his scouts informed him that he was within six miles of Chief Menawa’s Red Stick camp of Tohopeka, nestled in a loop in the Tallapoosa River called Horseshoe Bend in central Alabama.  Jackson sent his close friend and longtime political crony General John Coffee with the mounted riflemen and the native auxiliaries south across the river to surround the Red Sticks’s camp, while Jackson stayed with the rest of the 2,000 infantry north of the neck created by the bend in the river. 

He found the camp surprisingly well fortified behind an impressive earth and log breastworks stretching across the neck.  The logs were laid in a 400 yard zigzag line that permitted a lethal enfilading fire from behind its protections.  These kinds of field fortifications were seldom encountered in Indian warfare.

Around ten o’clock in the morning, Jackson opened up with his artillery on the line.  He pounded away for nearly two hours with no discernible damage to the fortifications.  The fire also concentrated the attention of the Red Stick camp, which failed to detect General Coffee’s maneuvers to their rear.

Around noon Jackson ordered a frontal bayonet charge on the breastworks led by Colonel John Williams’s Regular Infantry.  Despite taking heavy losses, the troops gained the wall and some got over it.  That included Third Lieutenant Sam Houston who made it over the wall only to be gravely injured by an arrow, a wound that would bother him the rest of his long and colorful life.

As more of Jackson’s men poured over the works, the fight turned into a desperate hand to hand struggle.  Then the Red Sticks were hit from the rear by Coffee’s men.  The fighting continued for hours over a large battlefield that provided good cover for the defenders, who refused to surrender, at least as reported in the official reports of the action.

Red Stick losses, almost all killed, were around 80% of the estimated 1000 warriors in the camp.  A wounded Chief Menawa and about 200 managed to escape and make their way to Florida where they were welcomed and absorbed by the Seminoles there.

The battle broke Red Stick power.  The old General established Fort Jackson near Wetumpka, Alabama as a base of operations for mopping up actions.  He dispatched messengers to summon tribal leaders to sign what everyone knew would be a dictated peace treaty.  Among the messengers was Sgt. Davy Crocket, an experienced hunter who was fluent in Creek and other Indian languages.    He grew to sympathize with the defeated enemy and their harsh treatment at Jackson’s hand eventually made him a Whig and Old Hickory’s political enemy.

The treaty signed by leaders of several bands including the Red Stick Upper Creeks, and the Lower Creeks on August 9, 1814 ceded   23 million acres of their remaining land in Georgia and much of central Alabama to the United States government.  The loyal Lower Creek were shocked to be told that they had to give up their lands, but had no choice.  And the Choctaw and Cherokee who also fought alongside the Americans discovered that the Creeks had signed away land that they had long considered theirs.

Removal was not immediate although some bands began relocating across the Mississippi within a couple of years.  The rest followed over time or were force marched out under Jackson’s unforgiving and absolute Indian Removal program during his presidency.

As a reward Jackson was promoted to Major General of Volunteers and kept in the field.  Meanwhile the British, in a tardy response to the appeal for aid by the Red Sticks, had enlisted survivors in Spanish Florida and began arming others as they arrived.  They garrisoned 400 Royal Marines at Pensacola.  Without authority, Jackson marched his army into supposedly neutral Spanish territory easily taking the city and dispelling the threat.  The move also prevented Britain’s new Creek and other native allies from pressing their attempted siege of Mobile. 

Having essentially secured the Gulf Coast, Jackson then marched his battle hardened army overland to reinforce threatened New Orleans.  You probably know the rest of the story.

American school children used to learn about the famous Battle of
Tippecanoe in which General William Henry Harrison killed Tecumseh and destroyed forever the threat of his Confederacy.  That, they know safely opened up the Old Northwest Territory for settlement.

But for some reason they are not taught about the Battle of Horseshoe Bend which had equally disastrous effect on the Southern tribes and entailed an even larger direct land grab.                                                                                                                            

Looking Backward at Edward Bellamy

Edward Bellamy was a literary man of no great distinction.  Frail and tubercular he had to abandon journalism as too strenuous and took up writing novels in a desperate attempt to make a living. The novels sold moderately, perhaps enough to eke out a living on the bottom rung of middle class respectability.  They had no particular merit or anything to distinguish them from hundreds of others published annually.  Certainly none would be remembered or read today.

Then he tried his hand at a social fantasy.  Overnight, it seemed he and his book Looking Backward were both famous and the center of an exciting popular reform movement.

Bellamy was born March 26, 1850 in Chicoppee Falls in western Massachusetts. He was the son and grandson of Baptist ministers.  A word about New England Baptists of this period.  Do not get them confused with today’s Southern Baptists.  Although Evangelical the Baptists were radically egalitarian and having been oppressed by the established churches of the Standing Order—the Congregationalists and, yes, the Unitarians—they reveled in the status of dissenters and outsiders.  Since members of the established churches tended to be first Federalists, then Whigs, and finally Republicans, Baptists tended to be Democrats largely out of loyalty to Thomas Jefferson and his steadfast devotion to Freedom of Religion.

After what public education Chicoppee Falls could offer and reading in his father’s library, Bellamy went off to Union College in Schenectady, New York.  For whatever reason, he dropped out of school after completing just two semesters.  He somehow found the money for a trip to Europe, spending most of his time in Germany, still the epicenter of romanticism and a hotbed of Biblical criticism and various socialist schemes.  Certainly more than enough to shake out any cobwebs of theological and economic orthodoxy.

On returning to the states he seemed a young man at loose ends.  He tried his hand at reading law but quickly abandoned it.  He drifted into newspaper work.  Probably through connections from Union College, he found work at the New York Daily Post which was co-owned and managed by John Bigelow, an 1835 Union graduate and benefactor of the college.  He worked under the eye of editor-in-chief William Cullen Bryant, the noted poet and former abolitionist who was also a vigorous advocate and defender of labor.  Although he did not spend long on the paper, as a young man absorbing influences like a sponge, it was formative.

Bellamy chose to move closer to home, taking a job with the most important paper in western Massachusetts, Springfield Union.  Now we come to the scene where, if this was a bio-flick, we would see Bellamy hunched over a desk, pen in hand.  Probably in his shirtsleeves with arm garters, cravat loosened, celluloid collar unhooked, hair a tad disheveled.  He is working furiously by oil lamp.  He coughs. Foreboding music swells.  He presses a handkerchief to his mouth, coughs again, and stares at the crimson splotch of blood on the cloth.  We know in an instant that he has consumption and is ultimately doomed.

In 1877 Bellamy went to the Hawaiian Islands for a yearlong rest cure.  Most New Englanders of the period were going south to places like Charleston or even Cuba.  A few were taking the long train trip to the desert southwest.  Bellamy’s choice was influenced by reading Mark Twain’s popular accounts of his time in the Sandwich Islands nearly a decade before.  He took to the palm trees, sea, and native girls.  He also took to writing.  He completed his first novel, Six to One while there. 

The book did not make much of a splash, but sold well enough to Bellamy to decide that he could no longer stand the stress and demands of daily journalism. 

In his second novel, Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process, published in 1880 Bellamy dabbled in some fantastic elements.  A doctor invents a process which can erase painful memories from the brain.  When the woman he loves is seduced and abandoned by a cad he uses the process on her.  She is cured and about to fall gratefully into his arms when the doctor awakes, realizes it was all a dream, and his beloved has committed suicide.  Pot boiler stuff.

In real life, despite his inevitably fatal condition, Bellamy fell in love and in 1882 married Emma Augusta Sanderson. Their marriage was apparently happy and produced two children, a boy and a girl.

After another novel, Miss Ludingto’s Sister, in 1884, Bellamy tried something daringly new.  Utopian novels were not new.  They dated back to Sir Thomas Moore’s Utopia published in Latin in 1516 which gave birth to the genre.   But such novels were not common.  Bellamy was probably inspired by the work of pioneer science fiction author Jules Verne whose work in translation from the French was beginning to be popular stateside. 

He was also well aware of a body of works on cooperative societies, Christian socialism, and even Marxism that included Charles Fourier, Robert Owen and Henri Saint-Simon, as well as to the Associationism of Albert Brisbane whom Bellamy had met in the 1870s.  Two more recent works were also influential in his thought, Laurence Gronlund’s The Co-operative Commonwealth in 1884, and August Bebel’s Woman in the Past, Present, and Future in 1886.

In Looking Backward: 2000-1887 Julian West falls into a deep, hypnotic induced sleep in Boston in 1887 and awakens in the same city, but utterly transformed city in the year 2000.  He is introduced to his new surroundings by a kindly and scholarly Doctor Leete who regards the cut throat world of the 19th Century as a barbaric Dark Age.

In the new world all industrial production is controlled by the state and it products shared equally among the population.  Technical innovation has greatly reduced the hours of labor needed to produce any item and distribution though common warehouse like stores has cut out layers of middlemen and the goods delivered to the door.  Everyone is paid in equal credits on which they can draw to purchase the necessities of life and access to enriching culture.  Those doing hard physical labor work a few hours a day.  Those whose work requires intellectual rigor and specialized training are rewarded with even fewer hours.  Everyone retires at age 45 with the same guaranteed benefits as working members of society.

With all of the extra leisure, everyone has the opportunity to enjoy the arts.  Symphony concerts and lectures by the greatest minds in the world are delivered to homes over the telephone lines in a manner later readers have compared first to radio and more recently to the internet.

Most people eat daily at communal dining halls where nutritious meals are deliciously prepared by expert chefs.  Travel is provided on free public transportation.  Despite these communal aspects to society, every family has their own comfortable home with the privacy that entails.

On the social level, women are respected and treated as equals and partners both professionally and in the home.  Most crime, which arose out of want, privation, and ignorance, has been eliminated.  Remaining crime is considered the result of disease and atavism, a tendency in some to revert to a savage ancestral type.  These conditions can be medically treated.  What criminals exist are tried by a triumvirate consisting of a chief judge, a prosecutor, and a defender, all of whom must ultimately agree on a sentence after dispassionately reviewing the evidence and the accused’s  prospects for ultimate rehabilitation.

In dialog, one by one West brings up objections to the new order, asking pointed questions and Dr. Leete patiently explains the near perfection of the new system.

West arouses from his slumber, but is convinced that he has been shown the future:

I had visited a world incomparably more affluent than this, in which money was unknown and without conceivable use.... These exchanges money effected—how equitably, might be seen in a walk from the tenement house districts to the Back Bay—at a cost of an army of men taken from productive labor to manage it, with constant ruinous breakdowns of its machinery, and a generally debauching influence on mankind which had justified its description, from ancient time as the “root of all evil”.          

Bellamy shied away from, but did not totally shun, the use of the word socialism which then, as now, was burdened with political and social baggage.  He preferred to call the system he described as Nationalism because all of the means of production and distribution had been nationalized.  This is not to be confused with the use of nationalism as the exhalation of the nation state in its fierce, self-interested  completion with all other nation states.

No one was more astounded than Bellamy, who at first insisted that he did not mean to spark a social revolution only to offer “a literary fantasy, a fairy tale of social felicity,” when the book became an overnight sensation, flying off shelves faster than the publisher could issue new editions.  There were not whole books shops filled then with alternative universes and visions of the future.  This was new and exciting to most readers.

It also struck a deep chord in a nation that was in the midst of a brutal ongoing class war  in which the capitalists and bosses offered no quarter—11 years after the era began with the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and just two years after the launch of a national movement for the Eight Hour Day and the Haymarket Affair.

Literate workers were inspired by any vision of a socialist utopia.  The middle class, particularly the educated elite, were charmed with a vision of socialism that did not seem rooted in the implacable class conflicts of Marxism, but offered a cooperative solution that erased class differences without destroying comfortable civilization.

How popular was Looking Backward?  In the little more than a decade remaining in the 19th Century, it became the second most widely read American novel, trailing only the ante bellum Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and edging out the wildly popular Ben Hur by Lew Wallace published in 1880.

Overnight Bellamy and Nationalist Clubs sprang up first to discuss the ideas in the book and quickly to find ways of implementing them.  By 1890 there were more than 160 such clubs all around the country.  Among the leading intellectuals that were involved were heavy weights like William Dean Howells and Edward Everett Hale. Eugene V. Debs, Grand Secretary and Treasurer of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and other labor leaders were also attracted.

At first Bellamy held himself aloof from the movement he had inspired.  But within a year he became energized with the idea that his Utopia might just be achievable.  He threw himself into the movement, touring and speaking widely and writing articles in many of the top publications in the country.  In 1891 he established his own magazine, The New Nation as an organ of the movement.

Bellamy believed that political action by an educated leadership could usher in his vision of socialism.  He and many of his followers threw themselves behind the new People’s Party or Populists as a vehicle for that transformation.  After a while efforts of the Nationalist Clubs and the People’s Party became so enmeshed as to be indistinguishable.  Many elements of the Nationalist program did make it into the Populist’s platforms.  But there were also other forces and visions at work, especially the agrarian populism growing out of the Grange Movement, remnants of the Green Back Party, and followers of Henry George, exponent of another popular reform plan the Single Tax.

Meanwhile the class war was only getting uglier with the Homestead Strike of 1892, and industrial warfare in the coal fields   and western   metal mining districts.  Labor leaders like Debs were growing disenchanted with the Nationalists gradualist approach and the reliance on middle class leadership rather than working class self liberation. 

The coalition behind the Nationalist movement began to fall apart almost as quickly as it formed.   Bellamy had to close The New Nation in 1894 for lack of revenue.  Most clubs had dissolved.  Working class militants looked increasingly to Marxism and the middle class looked for milder reform models.

By 1895 Bellamy, increasingly fragile, retreated from active political activity.  He dedicated himself to writing a sequel to Looking Backward that would concentrate on his vision of equality of women.   Equality expanded many of the themes of the first book.   But its time had already passed.  It sold moderately well to devotees, but was not a huge success.

It was Bellamy’s last effort.  On May 22, 1898 he succumbed at last to tuberculosis in the ancestral home in  Chicoppee Falls where he had long lived with his wife and children.  He was only 48 years old.