Pollyanna, the Book and the Game

Somehow, I missed reading Pollyanna while growing up—probably because the title was a girl’s name and as a young boy I knew that anything involving girls was likely to give you cooties.  (It is rather ironic that how to avoid catching cooties turned out to be rather useful during the pandemic.)  Accordingly, I never read Pollyanna or any of the Nancy Drew books while reading all of the Hardy Boys, Rick Bryant, and Tom Swift series.

There was a movie version of the book in 1960, and I may have seen it, but the only theater in town at the time was a drive-in theater and during any movie by Disney not involving John Wayne or Fess Parker, I usually spent my time in the playground directly below the screen paying scant attention to the movie.  Evidently, Hayley Mills was wonderful, but I’ll just have to take IMDB’s word for it.  I was going to watch the movie and call it research for this blog….but the Disney Channel insists I cough up a lung just to watch it.  Instead, I read the book and watched the 1919 silent version starring Mary Pickford.  Though there are eight different movie versions, the silent one was the only version available for free on YouTube.

Truthfully, I didn’t learn much watching the silent movie except that it was fairly faithful to the book.  I may have missed something because I got interested in researching the biography of Mary Pickford and forgot to watch most of the middle part of the movie.  You really don’t learn much from listening to the dialogue of a silent movie.  (Did you know, for example, that when Mary Pickford was called as a witness in a trial, a lawyer took advantage of the situation by asking her, under oath, to state her age?  Pickford answered, “Twenty-one, going on twenty.”)

Having read the book, I can tell you that it truly sucks.  The author, Eleanor H. Porter, was a turn of the century author of a long list of rather boring books that were published between 1910 and 1920, all of which were incredibly bad, even for that period.  The exception, supposedly, is Pollyanna, published in 1913, and became an overnight sensation and started a cottage industry of sequels that continued even after Porter’s death.

Pollyanna was a young girl who invariably saw the good in every situation, usually by playing the “Glad Game”, invented by her father, a poor minister.  Periodically, the Ladies’ Aid Society would send the minister a barrel of hand-me-down items to aid in his ministry.  When Pollyanna, hoping to find a doll, emerged from the barrel with a pair of crutches, her father told her she should be glad, if only because she didn’t need the crutches.  The ‘Glad Game’ and how Pollyanna taught the game to a town full of self-centered and heartless people and transformed them into lovable Stepford peasants is the basis of all of the books in the series. 

The book, hopelessly schmaltzy, is heavily influenced by Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer—even to the similarities in the names of several characters, orphans raised by spinster aunts, and faithful servants.  Unfortunately, the book does not have any of the same wit, satire, and insight into society.  You can read it for yourself, for free, here. 

The book came out in 1913, and became so popular that Parker Bros. did a product tie-in, producing a board game called Pollyanna, the Glad Game.  The game was patented in 1915, but did not go on sale until 1916.  George Parker, the founder of the company and developer of most of the early games, did what any good company in a rush to deliver a product would do—they took an existing game and modified it just enough not to be sued and claimed they had invented it.  In this case, the original game was Parcheesi. 

Note.  A lot of games were modeled after Parcheesi.  When I showed a friend the game of Pollyanna, she said how much it reminded her of a game she had played in Germany, Mensch ärgere Dich nicht.  I looked up the game, and sure enough, it was based on Parcheesi.    In the US, Aggravation is a popular game.  In England, they play Ludo or Snakes and Ladders.  Or you could play Ashte Kashte, Chaupur, Patolli, Parques, Sorry and a host of other games, all of which are versions of Parcheesi, which in turn was based on the ancient Indian game Pachisi. 

Parker Brothers owned the rights to the game, and brought it out every few years, usually when a new motion picture version of the book was released, with only minor cosmetic changes to the playing board.  For a brief period, the game was known as Dixie Pollyanna, but the rules of the game and use of dice remained constant.  For a brief time, there was an “adult” version of the game called “Parker Brothers Track Pursuit Game.”

I became aware of the game through my son, The-Other-One (not What’s-His-Name) and his wife, The Leprechaun.  Her family was addicted to the game and played it at family reunions and other gatherings.  Since the game was no longer commercially available, they made their own boards and held tournaments.  Naturally, over time, the rules had been allowed to evolve a little.  The way they played, for example, each player had his own color coded dice and at the end of a player’s turn, if the player had forgotten and left the dice on the board, any other player was allowed to pick up the dice and throw them in any direction—usually under a sofa—forcing that player to scramble and search for the dice.  This was definitely not an original rule for The Happy Game.  It does, however, speed up play.

My wife, The Doc, and I really enjoyed the game and began a search for a game of our own.  Eventually, we found an ancient board from EBay and assembled our own game, noting a few changes between the original game and the more modern version we had played at my son’s house.  Eventually, we even located a source for the original rules, available here.

I found one of the changes to the rules particularly interesting.  If a player positions two pieces on the same square, other players cannot pass this barrier.  My son’s in-laws called this barrier a wall, but the original rules refer to this as a blockade, an important distinction at the time when the game was first published in 1915.  In 1898, the U. S. Navy sent ships to blockade the ports of Cuba, preventing ships from Spain from entering.  At the time, a blockade was considered an act of war, forcing the proud country of Spain to declare war against the United States despite the fact that a single capital ship of the United States was quite capable of destroying the entire Spanish Navy.  When the US used the navy to prevent the Soviet Union from shipping nuclear missiles to Fidel Castro, they were very careful to refer to it as a quarantine. 

My son’s version of the game has a few other distinctions.  There are a few more spaces on each side, meaning pieces have to move a little farther on each side, a change that I believe adds to the strategic nature of the game.  At right is the version of the board as played today.  I think the game deserves a new life, and since it is no longer available, I suggest you make your own, using the board my son made as a guide.  You will also need a pair of dice (or more if you want to play by the new rules) and four sets of four differently colored pieces, all of which are available from Amazon.

I promise, you don’t have to read the book to play the game. 

Deal or No Deal

When I was a child, my uncle raised Nubian goats for their milk.  My parents, who believed an idle child was a sure sign of impending doom, gleefully arranged for me to be an apprentice slave.  I came to love the gentle and intelligent goats, though I would have denied it at the time.

A Nubian doe will give milk for an average of two years before drying up, and will produce no milk until she produces kids.  After a five month pregnancy, the goat will have an average of two kids, and shortly after, you can begin milking the goat again.  My uncle didn’t keep a buck (male goat) on the property, so every now and then, he would load a doe into the back of his pickup and drive over to a friend’s farm who kept a male goat for breeding purposes.  If I remember correctly, at that time the breeding fee was a case of Lone Star Beer, minus a small rebate consumed by my uncle as they watched while the doe was “serviced”.

This is the origin of the phrase “customer service”.

This principle was wonderfully demonstrated this week by the wonderful people at the local Mercedes Benz dealership.  My wife, The Doc, loves her Mercedes, a mid-priced SUV that handles well and has given us few problems (even at age 14).  Our only real complaint is that we live in a town that does not have a dealership.  To be more accurate, there is no Mercedes dealership in the entire southern half of New Mexico:  Our nearest dealership is 41 miles away, in El Paso, Texas.

This made the recent recall notice for The Doc’s car somewhat problematic.  More than a million vehicles were recalled due to a potentially defective brake booster.  It seems that—on one vehicle—the booster had rusted to the point that the pressure of hard braking could have burst the booster, totally disabling the entire braking system.  The danger of losing all of the brakes at once was so severe that the people at Mercedes demanded that the vehicles not be driven under any circumstances until the boosters were inspected.

Personally, I was not convinced.  This is the Chihuahuan Desert, and it is drier than Lubbock on Easter Sunday.  It is hard to imagine anything rusting in this desert.  But Mercedes insisted, pointing out that the inspection was free and that they would tow the car both to the dealership and back home.  The people at the national office were friendly, helpful, and most reliable. 

This friendly help turned out to be the exact opposite of trying to do business with the dealership, who told us we had to wait weeks for an appointment and would have to call a third division of Mercedes to arrange for towing.  In the meantime, the dealership told us not to drive the car and to put it into storage. 

Evidently, the dealership believes we only drive the car for a lark and we don’t actually need it.

Of course, we continued to drive the car.  Out of over a million vehicles, only a handful had experienced any problem, and all of those vehicles were probably used in places where rainfall was not considered an urban legend.  In any case, it is years too late for The Doc and me to die young.

After a few weeks, and many, many phone calls, Mercedes sent a tow truck and picked up the vehicle, promising to return it shortly and all at no charge.  Two days later, the dealership told us that they had inspected the car and the booster was rust-free and we could come and pick up the car.

I pointed out that they had promised—several times--to tow the car back to us free of charge.  Actually, all three branches of Mercedes involved—the dealership, the national office, and the Roadside Assistance People who had towed it—had all promised to bring the car back to us.  The dealership, while acknowledging that Mercedes had indeed promised to bring the car back to us, said it was their policy to not tow the car back unless the car’s brake booster was actually defective, then they would tow the car back to us while waiting for a part to repair it.

Why Mercedes thought I might need the car if it proved to be too dangerous to drive was never explained. 

Calls to Mercedes Roadside Assistance referred me to the National Office, who referred me to the dealership, who referred me to Roadside Assistance.  Essentially, everyone told me that it was not their job and that I should call someone else.  Everyone I talked to apologized and apologized and then did nothing but suggest I call someone else.  Mercedes does indeed make a great car, though in all honesty, I would suggest you deal with a company whose dealership actually wants your business and that certainly does not include the Mercedes dealership in El Paso.

Naturally, we drove over to Texas and picked up the car.  Halfway back home, the Mercedes National office called and said we had been correct all along, and that they would tow the car back to New Mexico. 

I hung up on them.

I can’t prove it, but I suspect that the dealership had always known that they were supposed to tow the car back to me.  Since Mercedes pays the dealership for warranty repairs and recall work, I suspect that the dealership just decided to screw me over and keep the fee they would have to pay the tow truck company.

I remember a politician in Houston telling me long ago that when a political party had gotten so used to a group’s support that the party stopped asking for their votes, that group no longer actually had a vote.  Evidently, the same thing works in business, too.

When a company has grown so large that it no longer believes it has to work to keep its customers happy and believes that the customers will just keep handing over their money no matter how they are mistreated….

Well, it’s not the first time some Germans have been dead wrong.

Let Them Eat Potatoes

“What’s an Irish seven course meal?  A six pack of beer and a potato.”

If you’re Irish, I hope you will excuse the crude joke, but I’m including it for a reason.  It is almost impossible to talk about potatoes and not mention the Irish.  When the potato blight hit Ireland in the middle of the 19^th century, over a million Irish immigrants came to America, enriching our country in ways too numerous to count.

There is still a lively debate going on about exactly when and where potatoes were first domesticated.  It was somewhere between 4500 and 10,000 years ago, and in either present day Peru or Bolivia, when Native Americans began gathering and planting the tuberous relative of the nightshade family.  Carefully selection of the best specimens to replant, year after year, century after century, with occasional cross-pollination of some plants, eventually gave us the 5,000 varieties of potatoes we have today.

The Spanish brought the potato back to Europe from the New World in the middle of the 16^th century, where it quickly became popular in Spain, England, and Ireland—but not in the rest of Europe.  Today, potatoes are an essential part of the diet in the entire world, with only wheat, corn, and rice being planted more often, but for well over a century after its first being imported, most of Europe had no use for the potato. 

Nowhere was the opposition to spuds more vehement than in France.  The church, using logic that only the French could understand, banned eating potatoes because they weren’t mentioned in the Bible, prompting the French King to outlaw their consumption.   Few French people disagreed with the law because of the popular belief that eating potatoes gave you leprosy. 

Note.  Obviously, French Fries are wildly misnamed.  The name comes from American soldiers stationed near the front during World War I.  The local peasants normally subsisted on a diet based on fish, but when the river froze over in winter, they fried potatoes.  Since the local language was French, the Americans (somewhat ignorant of the local geography) misnamed the dish.  They should have called it “Belgian Fries”.

In Prussia, Frederick the Great encouraged farmers to grow potatoes, even distributing cuttings for the farmers to use, but only to provide feed for livestock, since potatoes were still considered to be dangerous for humans to eat.  It was the Seven Years War that eventually led to the root vegetable being more widely accepted.

The Seven Years War (which lasted nine years—1754-1763–in the New World just to confuse future history students) raged across most of Europe and her colonies and was truly a “world war” before we had the good sense to start numbering them.  So many peasants were conscripted into the competing armies that there was not enough agricultural labor to produce food or raise livestock.  The predictable result was widespread starvation.

In 1755, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier was an apothecary in Paris who joined the French Army under King Louis XV to serve as a pharmacist.  While serving in present day Germany, he was wounded and captured by the Prussian Army.  With little food to spare for prisoners, the French prisoners were fed hog feed—potatoes.  As you have probably guessed, Parmentier did not catch leprosy and grew to love the potatoes.

In 1763, upon his return to Paris, Parmentier, while continuing to work as a military pharmacist, began to advocate the planting of potatoes as a cheap and nutritious source of food for the French people.  Though his work was not popular at first, Parmentier continued his experiments, laying the foundation to what eventually would be known as nutrition science.  It was through his efforts that the law banning the consumption of potatoes was finally repealed in 1771.  And though Parmentier developed easy recipes for using the inexpensive vegetable, potatoes were still not popular with French people.

Now an inspector general in the French Army, Parmentier plotted a publicity campaign that would have done a modern public relations firm proud.  Parmentier invited well-known celebrities, such as Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier, to lavish dinner parties where most of the dishes contained potatoes and the bread was made of potato flour.  The pharmacist also presented bouquets of potato blossoms to both King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette; the latter wore the blossoms in her hair on several occasions.

To show his gratitude and to encourage more work on a sustainable food source, the King gifted Parmentier fifty-four arpents of land.  If you are not familiar with pre-metric French measurements, the arpent is a measurement of both length and area based on the even older Roman actus.  In total, the king’s gift was slightly more than sixty-eight acres of farmland fairly close to Versailles on which Parmentier could plant potatoes.

Effectively, the monarch was saying, “Let them eat potatoes.”  The king encouraged the idea, but it was not like he was losing his head over it.

Parmentier not only grew large quantities of potatoes, he made sure that others prized his crop, too.  During the day, his farm was conspicuously guarded by Imperial soldiers, deliberately giving the local peasants and farmers the idea that the farm’s crop was valuable.  Since the guards left as the sun set, the locals used the cover of darkness to steal the now valuable potatoes.  The news of these thefts so delighted Parmentier, that he would reward the messengers with handfuls of coins.

In 1785, the north of France had a disastrous harvest, threatening mass starvation.  The deaths were largely averted by a bumper crop of potatoes.  Four years later, the king subsidized the printing and distribution of a book Parmentier wrote, A Treatise on the Culture and Use of the Potato, Sweet Potato, and Jerusalem Artichoke.  Almost immediately after its publication, the French Revolution began.

In a long and distinguished career, Parmentier helped develop wine and cheese-making, experimented with refrigeration, promoted the use of cornmeal, improved the process of bread making, and promoted the drinking of mineral water.  When he died in 1813, he was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.  Appropriately, his tomb is surrounded with potato plants.

Merci beaucoup, Monsieur Parmentier!

It’s All Bananas

A few decades ago, I was one of the few passengers on one of the strangest trains in the world.  The train, run by an infamous fruit company and guarded by the Honduran Army, made no stops between the banana plantation and the port where ships were waiting to take the green fruit to Houston.  The railroad, now almost a century old, had been built solely for that purpose.

It would probably surprise you to learn that bananas are so profitable that they have been the cause of several wars and have caused some countries to suffer numerous revolutions.

About 120 years ago, a young immigrant figured out a way to buy “overripes” (the bananas that, while still good, would go bad before reaching retailers) directly off the banana boats in New Orleans and hustle them to the rail depot, delivering the bananas on the cheaper overnight trains to grocers along the Gulf Coast.  Since he paid almost nothing for the fruit and could deliver the bananas below the regular wholesale price, Sam Zemurray made a sizable profit by employing accurate timing and precise logistics.

Zemurray made his profit by improving logistics and more than a century later, as we shall see, that is still the crucial factor in the banana business.

Eventually, the larger fruit companies saw the profit in Zemurray’s enterprise and they bought him out, offering a small fortune for his business.  Zemurray promptly relocated to Honduras and bought a banana plantation, intending to modernize it and increase the yield enough to become a major player in the fruit business.  Unfortunately, Zemurray’s timing was bad, because Honduras had just raised import taxes on the type of machinery necessary to improve his plantation.  Worse, the United States was using its military to “stabilize” the economy (and the current president) of Honduras, so that the Central American nation could make regular payments on its national debt—most of which was held by American and British banks.

Undeterred, Zemurray hired a half-dozen mercenaries, then bought a crate of rifles and a very small boat that had been used in the Spanish American War.  Despite the best efforts of both the American and British navies, the small vessel successfully made its way from New Orleans to Honduras and in an incredibly unlikely war, overthrew the government and installed a new Honduran President, who had been handpicked by Zemurray, and who “coincidentally” allowed Zemurray to import, tax-free, the  equipment necessary to modernize that plantation.  One of the improvements was the train I was riding while researching that revolution.  Eventually Sam "the Banana Man" made enough money to buy the largest of the fruit importers, United Fruit.  Today, we call that company Chiquita Brands International.

Note.  The research eventually became the thesis for my graduate degree.  I think it is exciting reading and you can still request it through inter-library loan from Enema U.  Personally, I think it would make a great movie starring Brad Pitt.

Editor’s note.  I personally edited the thesis and I guarantee that it is a fascinating story.

There is a new revolution brewing in the banana shipping business, but this time it is the shipping companies that are acting like the armed mercenaries.  It is far too early in the war to predict who the winner is going to be, but among the guaranteed losers are the consumers and the Central American countries that produce the fruit. 

Green banana bunches used to be hung upside down in the cargo holds of freighters who raced to get them to American ports.  Bananas were considered a dangerous cargo and not just for the alarming numbers of poisonous insects that live among the bunches.  (A single banana is called a finger, several fingers together make a hand, and anywhere from 5 to 20 hands clustered together make up a bunch or a stalk.)  As green bananas ripen, they give off a lot of heat.  In the not too distant past, a number of cargo ships that had suffered ventilation system malfunctions actually caught fire from the heat of ripening bananas!

Today, green bananas are loaded into steel refrigerated cargo containers which are stacked on monster ships as long as the Empire State Building is tall (roughly 1250 feet).  These ships make their way to American ports—chiefly New Orleans, Houston, and Los Angeles—where giant cranes transfer the cargo containers to trucks equipped with wheeled rigs that swap  empty containers for the containers of still-green bananas, that are then transported to the wholesalers, who quickly ripen the fruit with ethylene gas.  It everything goes right, the simultaneous arrival of loaded and empty containers is a well-orchestrated ballet performed by cranes, trucks, and massive ships.

Unfortunately, for the last year and a half, the ballet has been performed by blind elephants on rusty pogo sticks.

It started with COVID’s shutting down the docks.  Ships arriving at ports waited for weeks to be unloaded, using massive amounts of fuel to maintain position offshore while the bananas in those containers turned to mush.  Once they were finally unloaded, the dockyards quickly filled with containers waiting to be delivered and empty containers waiting to be loaded onto ships and sent back to China.  Before long, companies wanting to return empty containers couldn’t do so because the dockyards didn’t have the space to store them.  The yards of trucking companies and warehouses quickly filled up with empty containers that the dockyards refused to accept.

For all of this, the costs kept rising, with the biggest cost being detention and demurrage fees.  Demurrage fees are charged to the recipient of a container who does not pick up the container from the dockyard on time.  Detention is the daily fee shipping companies charge for each day’s delay in returning the empty container to the docks.  The trucking companies, however, are only allowed to pick up or return the containers when the shipping companies allow access to the docks, and right now, there are long delays to do either.

Imagine you are on vacation and when you fly to your destination, the rental car company tells you there will be a five day delay to pick up your car, but that you will have to pay the daily rental fee for the car while you wait.  Then, when you try to return the car, you are told the car lot is full and you can’t return the car until next week, all the while still paying that daily rental fee.

Faced with such a dilemma, if you were the trucking company, you might be tempted to dump the empty container in the street outside the dockyard and tell the shipping company to handle it themselves (I originally expressed this more colorfully if not accurately, but my editor changed it, citing good taste.)  Several trucking companies have done just that so that it is not hard to find abandoned containers in the roads around the Port of Los Angeles.  A trucking company that does not pay the late fees can be slapped with a shut-out notice, meaning that the company’s trucks will no longer be allowed to enter the dockyards, effectively putting that company out of business.

To make dire matters even worse, some shipping companies only allow a trucking company to deliver an empty container if the trucker is picking up a filled container at the same time—a combination that is not always possible, especially now.  All of this means endless delays, mounting fees and charges, and… well, what do you think happens to those bananas after delivery has been delayed by two weeks?  Picture black banana pudding topped with dead spiders.

Currently, the only way a fruit importer can be sure that it’s cargo clears the docks in time to still be salable is by paying exorbitant fees to expedite the delivery.  These fees can easily mean that the retail price of the bananas rises by more than 50%.  (This increase in shipping costs raises the cost of more than just bananas—it affects everything we buy.  The cost of shipping a container of goods from China to Los Angeles rose from an average of $2,000 to over $20,000, from January, 2019 to now.)

The problem will be solved eventually by a combination of factors.  As the price of bananas from Central America rises, consumers will buy fewer of them, possibly substituting domestic fruit.  Fewer bananas will be purchased, leading to increased competition among plantations throughout Central America, to see who can produce the cheapest fruit.  Some plantations will fail, causing the revenue of some small countries to be lower, and forcing many, many former plantation employees to have to find work elsewhere…perhaps in the United States.

Meanwhile, more efficient dockyards with larger storage space will be serviced by new shipping companies.  Some of the freight that normally goes through California will be rerouted to ports on the East Coast.  Eventually, new companies in new locations will profit from innovation in states less regulated than California and, essentially, a modern version of Sam Zemurray will arrive.

Until then, bananas won’t be selling for peanuts.

The Defense of Federal City

Anyone who has driven through Washington D.C. can probably tell a personal horror story about the city’s numerous traffic circles.  Tourists frequently get caught in DuPont Circle, destined to make multiple trips around the central fountain erected by Admiral Francis Du Pont, the Mexican-American War hero who captured San Diego.

Note.  The biggest problem with driving in the capital seems to be the large number of cabs driven by people who apparently have arrived in the country the previous week and have only a rudimentary understanding of either the city or our traffic laws.  A couple of years ago, I caught a yellow cab and asked to be taken to the Argentine Embassy.  When the driver said he didn’t know the address, I told him to just go to the White House and I would direct him from there.  To which the cabbie answered, “The White House?  Where’s that?”

If you haven’t been to the capital, the city is laid out in a grid with streets named after letters running East/West, and streets running north/South named after numbers.  To this perfectly understandable system, wide thoroughfares running at strange diagonals crisscross the city and wherever two of these avenues cross, there are multi-lane traffic circles with cars circling counter clockwise endlessly searching for the exit they just passed.

Note.  Traffic circles are all the rage right now with city planners.  There is ample evidence that traffic circles move vehicles through an intersection faster than traffic lights and result in fewer traffic fatalities.  What the city planners never say is that, while fatal accidents decrease because colliding cars hit at a slight angle, the frequency of these non-fatal accidents actually increase.  And with traffic circles with numerous lanes, that increase is dramatic.

With a few modifications, the city plan was laid out by Pierre Charles L'Enfant, an associate of Lafayette who served on General Washington’s staff during the American Revolution.  After the war, President Washington gave L’Enfant the task of drawing up the plans for the new capital which was at that time being called ‘Federal City’.  Far exceeding his directive to come up with a city plan, L’Enfant took it upon himself to help fix the location of the city, design the city plan, secure leases at quarries for stone, and even specify the size of the government buildings.  His design for the ‘President’s Palace’, for example, was for a residence five times the size of the current building.  In today’s world of mega-mansions, that doesn’t sound that impressive, but when the Executive Mansion was finally constructed—it wasn’t called the White House until the 20^th century—it was the largest American residence in history.

The Federal District was to be a square rotated 45°, ten miles to a side, straddling the Potomac River and more or less equally located on land ceded by Maryland and Virginia.  This location was a compromise between the northern location desired by Alexander Hamilton and a Southern site that Thomas Jefferson wanted.  (And yes, the basis of the argument was slavery.  If George Washington, a Virginian, had not been president when the Resident Act was finally passed, the site would probably have been farther to the north.)

There is a consistent and stubborn myth that L’Enfant designed the city’s circles as defensive positions due to his experiences during the French Revolution.  Supposedly, the circles were positioned so that cannons placed there would have interlocking fields of fire down avenues of approach preventing invading armies or mobs of revolutionaries from reaching the capitol buildings.  There are several problems with this urban legend.  First, L’Enfant never saw the French Revolution because he remained in New York after the American Revolution, where he established a profitable engineering firm.  And while I suppose you could use the circles as a place for artillery batteries, most of the circles are located in the south side of the lopsided square that forms the capital, where the Potomac River south of the city forms a natural defensive line.

A much larger problem for this myth is the fact that L’Enfant did not design circles at the intersections, but large rectangles.  And inside each of the rectangles, L’Enfant planned for each state to set up an informal embassy representing their economic interests.  The senators and representatives from each state would build their homes around these plazas, developing little communities that promoted the commerce and culture of their states.  In the center of the rectangles would be fountains and statues erected by the state honoring their distinguished citizens and historic events.

L’Enfant positioned each of the public squares within sight of at least two other squares, promoting a sense of unity and cooperation between the states.  Unfortunately, this plan for a city to emerge from a collection of ‘walking communities’ was never realized, as none of the states expended any money or any tangible effort to establish any kind of presence within their squares.  Over the years, most of the land originally inside the squares came to be owned privately.

There is one last, final nail in the coffin of the ‘circles as defensive zones’ theory.  In 1861, the capital was actually under threat of attack by the Confederacy.  Directly across the Potomac River was Virginia, not only part of the Confederacy but containing the rebel capital of Richmond, only a hundred miles from Washington, DC.  (If you are wondering what happened to the Virginia land directly across the Potomac, that originally was part of the federal district, it was ceded back to Virginia in 1847 due to the citizens south of the river complaining about the loss of voting rights in national elections.  Originally 100 square miles, with the retrocession, the capital shrank by a third.)

Obviously, the Union had to build fortifications to defend the nation’s capital.  Ignoring the various circles, the Union Army built 68 forts, 93 artillery batteries with 807 cannons, 13 miles of rifle trenches, and 32 miles of military roads linking the fortifications.  Not a single one of these fortifications involved one of the squares/circles.  (The X’s on the map indicate the location of the forts.)

The proof of the effectiveness of the forts came in June 1864 after General Grant moved many of the seasoned troops out of Washington to replace the troops he had lost chasing General Lee.  As the forts were now manned by new recruits and men recovering from battle wounds, Lee saw an opportunity to strike the Union capital, and sent General Jubal Early and his army to capture the city.  The battle raged for several days and the Confederates penetrated the outer defenses as far as the present site of Walter Reed Medical Center before General Early conceded that the Union defenses were simply too formidable to continue the attack.  The fighting never got close to the inner city.

During the battle, President Lincoln came to observe the battle personally.  The tall president was easily recognizable—standing on a parapet, wearing his customary stovepipe hat.  A Confederate sharpshooter fired a round at Lincoln, striking a surgeon standing next to the president.  So far, Lincoln is the only serving US president to have been shot at during a battle.

One last point.  When Lincoln was shot at, a Union officer yelled, “Get down, you fool!”  I’ve always thought that advice should be given to every president.