[Rhodes22-list] Father's Day History Lesson

[brad haslett]

Yeah! The weather has cleared and the temperature has
dropped!  We're headed to the CoraShen.  Here's a good
Father's Day read.  Long, but worth the effort if you
like strange twists of history.

Brad

-------------------

Whistler’s Father
Why didn’t he get a painting?

By James S. Robbins


Everyone knows — or at least has seen — James McNeill
Whistler’s mother, Anna McNeill Whistler, who was
immortalized in her son’s 1871 oil painting
Arrangement in Grey and Black. But few remember
Whistler’s father, George Washington Whistler, who in
his day was one of the most famous engineers in
America.

George W. Whistler’s father, Major John Whistler, was
a British soldier of Irish birth who served under
Burgoyne at Saratoga, and after he was discharged
returned to America to join the U.S. Army. George was
born in 1800 in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, where his father
was post commander. When he was 14 he was appointed to
the U.S. Military Academy at West Point from Kentucky.
Young Whistler excelled at his studies and graduated
tenth in the Class of 1819. 

Whistler later partnered with his West Point friend
William Gibbs McNeill, and worked on some of the first
major railroad projects in America, including
establishing the route for the Baltimore and Ohio.
(Most of the pre-Civil War rail and canal routes were
laid out by West Point graduates.) In 1833, Whistler
resigned from the Army to work at the Locks and Canals
Company in Lowell, Massachusetts, where he designed
canals and aqueducts and built locomotives. He
designed the first American locomotive equipped with a
steam whistle, which coupled with the coincidence of
his last name, lead to the belief that he had invented
it (it was actually invented in Britain). 

Whistler also laid out the route for the Western
Railroad linking Boston and Albany, a route so
difficult it was said that it would be like laying “a
railroad to the moon.” But Whistler completed the
project, constructing what was at the time the longest
and highest railroad in the world. He constructed the
first keystone arch railroad bridges in America, which
are not only still intact, but several remain in use. 

Whistler married Mary Roberdeau Swift, the younger
sister of his classmate William H. Swift, the Goat of
their class (i.e., the cadet who graduated at the
bottom). After his first wife died, George Whistler
married his partner William McNeill’s sister, Anna
Matilda. Their first child was born in 1834, the
future artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler

In 1842, George Whistler accepted an invitation from
Russian Tsar Nicholas I to build a railroad between
St. Petersburg and Moscow, and moved his family to
Russia. The project presented an engineering challenge
since the Tsar had decreed that the railroad run in a
perfectly straight line between the two cities. Legend
has it that he placed a ruler on a map and drew the
line himself. However, his thumb bumped the pencil,
causing a slight jog in the line, which planners
faithfully recreated rather than dare question the
Tsar’s hand-drawn route. The work was difficult,
mostly because of the intrigues and jealousies of the
Russian Court, which Whistler was ill-disposed and
ill-equipped to handle. He remained steadfastly
American in spirit, refusing to address the Tsar as
“your majesty” and refusing a high ranking commission
in the Russian army. He labored on for seven years
under difficult conditions, finally succumbing to
cholera in St. Petersburg in 1849, two years before
the project was finished. When the railroad was
finally completed by lesser hands, the first two
trains to travel it collided head-on.

James M. Whistler, 15 at the time of his father’s
death, was offered a chance to enter the Russian
Imperial School for Pages. His mother decided instead
to return to her home in Connecticut and seek
admission for her son to West Point. In December of
1850, Whistler’s tutor, Roswell Park, the top man in
the Class of 1831 and a former West Point chaplain who
went on to become a noted clergyman, wrote an appeal
to President Millard Fillmore seeking an At Large
appointment for the boy, which was granted. “Little
Jimmy” Whistler entered West Point July 1, 1851, ten
days shy of his seventeenth birthday.

But unlike his accomplished father, James Whistler
took a relaxed view of Academy life. His roommate,
Henry M. Lazelle, called him “one of the most indolent
of mortals. But his was a most charming laziness,
always doing that which was most agreeable to others
and himself.”“ During the day he would rather make
sketches than attend to his lessons. During evening
study sessions, Lazelle would look up from his book
invariably to find Whistler sitting upright, asleep.

Whistler was bold in his occasional ignorance. At a
history exam he was asked the date of the Battle of
Buena Vista, and confessed that he did not know.
“What!” the instructor said, “You do not know the date
of the Battle of Buena Vista? Suppose you were to go
out to dinner and the company began to talk of the
Mexican War, and you, a West Point man, were asked the
date of the battle. What would you do?”

““Do?” Whistler replied with hauteur, “Why, I should
refuse to associate with people who could talk of such
things at dinner!”

Whistler’s forte at the Academy was drawing. He had
begun sketching at the age of four, and quickly
established himself as a talent, ranking at the head
of his drawing class. He was fond of his own work, and
not given to having it altered. One day Whistler was
sketching a peasant girl in art class, and the drawing
professor, noted Hudson River School artist Robert
Weir, stopped to examine the composition. He then went
to his desk and filled a brush with ink — Weir was an
inveterate editor of his students’ work — and moved
back towards Whistler. Whistler saw him coming, raised
his hands and said, “Oh, don’t sir, don’t! You’ll
spoil it!”

Whistler became known among the Corps of Cadets for
his comedic sketches. He would take the opportunity to
make drawings wherever he went, on loose paper, in
books, on tent flaps, desks, or stools. George
Ruggles, USMA 1855, breveted four times in the Civil
War and present at Appomattox, recalled Whistler’s
“keen sense of the ridiculous. In the recitation room,
at church and almost everywhere... he would sketch, in
a second or two, cartoons full of character and
displaying the utmost nicety of appreciation of its
ludicrous points.” In the summer of 1852 he produced a
four-frame sequence entitled On Post in Camp. In the
first drawing, “First half hour,” a cadet stands at
attention with his musket shouldered; the second half
hour shows him leaning against a tree; in the third
half hour he sits at the base of the tree; and in the
last half hour he is sound asleep.

Whistler was popular with cadets and faculty alike,
and the son of a West Point legend. But no cadet can
escape the consequences of low grades and high
demerits. In his plebe year Whistler ranked in the
bottom ten of his class overall, though was in the top
ten in French. He had 190 demerits, which brought him
close to expulsion. His offenses were for the most
part not serious — inattentiveness, lateness,
carelessness: the kind of thing one would expect. Fate
struck in his third year. At the final chemistry
examination, Whistler was asked to discuss silicon. 

“I am required to discuss silicon,” he began. “Silicon
is a gas...”

““That will be all,” the instructor said, and Whistler
was marked deficient. The Academic Board voted to
expel him. Whistler was mortified. He wrote a lengthy
letter to the secretary of War, future Confederate
president Jefferson Davis, asking for a
re-examination. He said that after three years at the
Academy, “all my hopes and aspirations are connected
with that Institution and the Army, and that by not
passing, all my future prospects are ruined for life.”


The matter was referred to the West Point
Superintendent, Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee. Lee
reviewed Whistler’s record and found that his
combination of low grades and high demerit totals was
too much to overcome. “I can therefore do nothing more
in his behalf,” Lee wrote, “nor do I know of anything
entitling him to further indulgence. I can only regret
that one so capable of doing well should so have
neglected himself and must now suffer the penalty.”
Davis concurred, and Whistler’s expulsion stood. When
Whistler departed West Point, Professor Weir observed
that “with only the most ordinary industry [he] would
make a name as an artist.”

Whistler always looked back fondly on his experience
at West Point. He said he looked “dandy in gray,” and
spoke highly of Academy discipline and the honor code.
After he became famous, he presented a book to the
West Point library inscribed, “From an Old Cadet,
whose pride is to remember his West Point days.” Later
in life he reflected on the examination that had cost
him his military career. “If silicon had been a gas,”
he said, “I would have been a Major General.”
Whistler’s classmate Marcus Reno noted that if
Whistler had been commissioned, no one would have
heard of his mother. But maybe more people would have
remembered his father.

--James S. Robbins is author of Last In Their Class:
Custer, Pickett and the Goats of West Point, from
which this essay was adapted.



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