Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [20]
Across the Atlantic, south of Neuve Chapelle, France, the British were firing a million shells a day, lighting the night sky for thirty miles “brilliant as if with the glare of the aurora borealis.” The Germans, in a triumph of military science, had recently turned air into a weapon, poison gas. The federal income tax, levied for the first time in 1913, was soon to be doubled to pay for increasing government expenses, including construction of the Panama Canal. The Treasury Department announced a new tax on inheritance over $50,000, and the doctor's fortune far exceeded that. The tax would compromise the legacy he planned to leave his children.
The doctor thought of his son when he read that Wilson was being pushed toward war on two continents. Declaring he would rather be judged by the “verdict of mankind” than by the election of November 7, the President had dispatched the 1st and 2nd infantries of the Pennsylvania National Guard from Philadelphia to Texas on troop trains as a protection force against the border raids of the Mexican Pancho Villa.
In Philadelphia, forty thousand machinists were expected to strike that morning for the rights to an eight-hour workday and overtime—unheard of and excessive rights, the doctor believed, advocated by the Democrat Wilson. What had happened to the rugged, self-reliant Republican nation Dr. Vansant had known? The city grand jury was investigating the “slaughter” of sixty-three pedestrians by motorcars in the past six months. Angry motorists were running down staid pedestrians and poky horse-carriages in a war over the streets. Many men and women simply didn't know how to operate the fast, jerky machines. Motorcar salesmen were supposed to provide five lessons before letting a man leave the dealership, but salesmen often skipped the last few sessions, the Ledger reported gravely, inspiring the newspaper to publish a daily driving lesson. That morning's tip concerned a fundamental element of driving in reverse: One must stop before moving ahead for “the car cannot move in two directions at once.”
The doctor found no succor from the sports columns either. Grover Cleveland Alexander suffered a rare loss to the New York Giants as a Phillies infielder “stuck his finger into a hot grounder and was added to the hospital roll.” The proud Philadelphia Athletics were walloped by the Yankees 7–0 despite the presence in the A's lineup of the game's greatest slugger, Frank “Home Run” Baker. (Babe Ruth was a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox in the World Series that fall, and was said to have a promising swing.)
Dr. Vansant was proud of his famous neighbor, Professor William Curtis Farabee, who returned from South America having discovered “the Garden of Eden of British Guiana.” The explorer added to the archaeological museum's peerless collection a few shrunken heads of the Jivaro and measurements of the limbs of the Macusl, Wapiatiana, Prokoto, Zapara, and Asumara tribes. But Dr. Vansant was astonished to read that many Americans were disappointed in Farabee's expedition. It was a great age of exploration, when Peary reached for the North Pole, and many believed Farabee had set out to find “the lost world” of Jurassic dinosaurs on a remote Amazonian plateau discovered by the British Professor Challenger in 1912. Dr. Vansant was mystified that the average man didn't seem to understand that both the Jurassic dinosaur and Professor