Made In America - Bill Bryson [188]
One Washington term that has existed officially only since the early years of this century is, surprisingly, White House. On the original plans, the building was described only as ‘the Palace’. No one knows when people started calling it the White House – but, oddly, it appears to have been before it was painted white. From 1800, when John Adams became its first resident, to 1814, when the British ransacked and partly burned it, the building was of unadorned grey Virginia freestone. Only after the British had vandalized it was the decision taken to paint it white to cover the smoke stains. So it is a little odd that people were calling it the White House as early as 1810. In any case, the name didn’t become official until Theodore Roosevelt began printing it on the executive mansion stationery sometime after 1901.
Only in comparatively recent times, incidentally, has the White House become an unapproachable fortress. As late as the Harding era (1921-3) the public was allowed to picnic on the White House lawn or even wander over and peer through the windows of the Oval Office.14 Harding himself sometimes answered the White House front door.15
II
And so to military matters.
There is an old joke that goes: ‘Dear Diary: Today the Hundred Years War started.’ The fact is that most wars didn’t get the name by which we know them until the nineteenth century. The American Revolution wasn’t normally called that until the nineteenth century. It was the War for Independence, or simply the War with Britain. The Civil War was at the time of its fighting more generally called the War Between the States by southerners and the War of the Rebellion by northerners. World War I for obvious reasons wasn’t so called until there was a World War II. (It was the Great War.) World War II, although the term was commonly applied, didn’t become official until the war was nearly over; Roosevelt didn’t like either World War II or Second World War. Throughout its early years, he called it – a trifle melodramatically – the War for Survival, then shortly before his death started referring to it as the Tyrants’ War. Other names that were commonly attached to it were War of World Freedom, War of Liberation and the Anti-Nazi War. In 1945, the question of a formal name was put to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. His choice, World War II, was formally adopted by President Truman.16
Battles, too, often went by a variety of names, particularly those of the American Civil War. Ulysses S. Grant didn’t refer to the Battle of Shiloh but of Pittsburg Landing. To the North it was Bull Run, but to the South it was Manassas. The northern Antietam was the southern Sharpsburg, as the southern> Murfreesboro, Perryville and Boonsboro were to northerners respectively Stone River, Chaplin Hills and South Mountain.17
Wars are always linguistically productive, though military slang and terminology, like armies themselves, tend to be continuously replaced with fresh recruits. In consequence, battlefield terms usually either survive more or less indefinitely – bomb dates from 1582, grenade (from pomegranate and ultimately from Granada) from 1532 – or else fade from the vocabularies of all but military historians.
Almost all that survives from the period of the American Revolution, apart from the (mostly mythical) slogans and catchphrases discussed already in Chapter 3, is a single song: ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’. It was the most popular tune of the day, sung by both sides with lyrics that chided the other. No one knows who first sang it or when, though the mocking tone of the words in the best-known version suggests British authorship:
Yankee Doodle came to town,
riding on a pony,
stuck a feather in his cap,
and called it macaroni.