American Rifle - Alexander Rose [106]
The Irish graciously admitted defeat, and the Americans were cheered as conquering heroes. Target shooting instantly became the most popular sport in the country and was practiced with consummately “scientific” skill and seriousness (exactly the qualities for which the Irish had been lambasted).Within a month of the match there were no fewer than four rifle clubs in Chicago alone; within a year dozens more sprang up as far afield as Florida and California. There was even one in Peru, established by American expatriates. The New York Rifle Club was by far the most opulent. Equipped with a parlor, a piano, “soft yielding carpet, heavy window curtains, elaborate chandelier, bronzes, and works of art,” the club was intended solely for the wealthy—the same people who had, just a short time previously, regarded rifle users as incorrigible philistines living in backwoods shacks. At Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and the other great universities, students founded rifle clubs, though they were allowed to fire only short-range, low-power bullets. The restrictions didn’t blunt their keenness, and by 1888 some fifty schools and colleges were receiving government-supplied ammunition and teaching marks-manship—considered to be the character-building touchstone of cool nerves, grace under pressure, and steely discipline.
Preachers, pleased that abstinence from alcohol and tobacco improved target scores, lauded shooting’s practitioners in their Sunday sermons, and matches were held in church basements around the country. Forest and Stream commented that “it has become quite the fashion for ladies to practice rifle shooting.” Soon all-women clubs were flourishing in half a dozen cities. Female participation in the manly pursuit—which required the same type of masculine, practical clothes that the bicycling craze would subsequently popularize—might have even encouraged the nascent suffragette movement. Unlike bicycling, though, shooting, ac-cording to the Chicago Field, allowed women to defend themselves and their families against criminals and as such was a worthy endeavor in its own right.33
The “cult of accuracy” and riflemanship became a national phenomenon after the Civil War. Between 1870 and 1885, when the craze reached its height, popular songs were whistled, strummed, hummed, and danced to across the country. Dating from 1880, this example—which requires five rifle shots to ring out, like the booming cannons in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture—commemorates the victorious Americans, but there were also, among many others,“The Gallant Rifles Parade” (a jaunty quickstep), “Maguire’s Rifle Corps,” the “International Rifle-Match” (a waltz sportingly dedicated to the English team), the “National Rifle Quickstep,” the “American Rifle Team March,” and, of course, the “American Rifle Team Polka.”
Church and Wingate had scored a spectacular triumph by making the cult of accuracy an essential creed of Americanism.34 At last the army began to pay attention. Before Creedmoor, Wingate—mindful of the military’s sharply reduced budgets—had advocated using cheaper, reduced-charge cartridges for practice and had nevertheless failed to interest the Department of War; but two years later the department agreed to double the number of training rounds per month to twenty. That figure was still nowhere near enough to turn men into marksmen, but it did allow commanders to hoard their monthly allotment and use them all at once if they wished. Some fortunate soldiers