Union victories at sea during America’s Civil War were followed by three decades of financial neglect of the United States Navy. Apathy and Complacency combined as powerful anesthetics to naval funding by six consecutive presidential administrations. When a seventh president, Benjamin Harrison (1833 to 1901; U.S. president, 1889 to 1993), finally championed modernizing the U.S. Navy, he was featured gallantly in 1891 by Judge on one of that satirical magazine’s cover pictorials. On a rocky outcropping dated “1861,” a drowsy sailor is identified as a “U.S. Marine” (upper right). A pair of rescuers (left) approaches him: the wand-wielding “Columbia” (identified lower right, symbolizing the United States) and President Benjamin Harrison. The latter clutches a scrolled copy of his Subsidy Act (middle right), which bankrolled the building of postal ships designed for ready conversion into naval warships. Many of the latter would contribute to the U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War. (Copyright © the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology.)
Union victories at sea during America’s Civil War were followed by three decades of financial neglect of the United States Navy. Apathy and Complacency combined as powerful anesthetics to naval funding by six consecutive presidential administrations. When a seventh president, Benjamin Harrison (1833 to 1901; U.S. president, 1889 to 1993), finally championed modernizing the U.S. Navy, he was featured gallantly in 1891 by Judge on one of that satirical magazine’s cover pictorials. On a rocky outcropping dated “1861,” a drowsy sailor is identified as a “U.S. Marine” (upper right). A pair of rescuers (left) approaches him: the wand-wielding “Columbia” (identified lower right, symbolizing the United States) and President Benjamin Harrison. The latter clutches a scrolled copy of his Subsidy Act (middle right), which bankrolled the building of postal ships designed for ready conversion into naval warships. Many of the latter would contribute to the U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War. (Copyright © the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology.)
Melissa L. Coleman, M.D., Penn State College of Medicine, Hershey, Pennsylvania, and George S. Bause, M.D., M.P.H., Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
