American Rifle - Alexander Rose [103]
Napoleon III’s humiliating defeat in 1870 at the hands of Bismarck’s Prussians was greeted joyously, or perhaps with a scintilla of schaden-freude, throughout the United States.20 “Anything that knocks the nonsense out of Johnny Crapaud will be a blessing to the world,” as James Russell Lowell had commented to Charles Eliot Norton just before the war.21 The French, already suffering from a reputation for dandyism—many Americans were adamantly convinced that French officers wore saucy makeup—suffered still more when measured against their warlike neighbors to the east.22 At about this time the seemingly ineradicable “feminine” stereotype of France—fashion-obsessed, pretentious, elegant, brittle, frivolous—yet again bloomed.23 Indeed, compared to Colt or Winchester, even the name of their army rifle sounded a bit girly: chassepot.
Given the Germanophilia of the era, it was hardly surprising that William Church looked to the Schützenbünde—social and fraternal clubs for avid shooters—to save the American tradition of fine shooting. These organizations were made up of German-Americans or recent immigrants who had brought their country’s hunting traditions along with them; in this sense they were descendants of the eighteenth-century emigrants to Pennsylvania who had created the Jäger-Kentucky rifle tradition in the first place.24 The Schützenbünde held dinners, fairs with merry-go-rounds and singers, and popular shooting competitions. Members gloried in medals and secret handshakes, and sundry Rhine maidens bestowed kisses and garlands on those anointed König (king) of the competitions. The largest Schützenbünde were especially prominent in the cities of the East Coast and in those with significant Germanic populations (Chicago, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati, for instance). New York mayor John Hoffman was proud to declare that the upright behavior of Schützenbünde members proved that “love of the rifle is not in-compatible with respect for the law.”
Encouraged by the success of the Manual for Target Practice and inspired by the Schützenbünde, Church and Wingate conceived a bold plan to introduce marksmanship to the general public. They approached New York National Guard officers to help them set up an organization they called the National Rifle Association, which they founded on November 21, 1871.25
The NRA and the nascent National Guard were bound to share close genetic connections. Not only would Wingate become president of the National Guard Association (established in 1879), but originally both began as fraternal organizations; their officers were mostly uppermiddle-class gentlemen in the industrial cities of the North; and their membership quickly spread across the country, altering their character and composition. Perhaps most important, their cardinal principles were virtually identical. Both believed “in rifle practice [to promote] manliness, healthfulness, self-reliance, coolness, nerve and skill.”26
With Church as vice president and Wingate as secretary (and Civil War general Ambrose Burnside, the inventor of a rifle himself, briefly installed as president), the association was granted $25,000 by the state legislature to purchase a rifle range. The NRA agreed to raise an additional $5,000, and the cities of Brooklyn and New York chipped in $5,000 each.27
Colonel Henry Shaw, charged with finding a suitable piece of land for the new rifle range, bought a plot owned by the Central and North Side Railroad of Long Island for $26,250. Originally the site of a farm run by the Creed family, its seventy-acre flat expanse of brambles and grass resembled an English moor, thought