[On July 31, 1876, the U.S. Revenue Cutter School of Instruction—now known as the Coast Guard Academy—was founded. So this week for its 150th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Coast Guard contexts!]
A trio of iconic individuals and moments that illustrate the Coast Guard doing what it does best (along with the WWI rescues I highlighted in yesterday’s post):
- Joshua James (1826-1902): That hyperlinked page, a biography of James to contextualize why there’s a Coast Guard cutter named after him, does a great job explaining just why he was during his lifetime (pretty literally, as he joined the Massachusetts Humane Society at the age of 15 and died while on duty with his crew at the age of 75) and remains to this day the most well-known lifesaver in world history. Here I’ll just note how much life-saving was a family affair for James—one he inherited from his father and older brother (at least in part because his mother and baby sister had perished in a shipwreck when he was just 10 years old); one he shared with his wife Louisa Luchie; and one they passed on to one of their sons, Osceola James. There’s of course a long American tradition of multigenerational military families, and I don’t want to denigrate such families in the slightest, but I think a multigenerational lifesaving family is even more inspiring still.
- February 1952: That piece from the Coast Guard’s official page tells the story of Bernie Webber’s heroic rescue of 32 men from a sinking 500-foot tanker ship off the coast of Cape Cod during the horrific hurricane of February 17-18, 1952; this Humanities magazine article traces the story of a concurrent rescue of men from a second such tanker, as captured by authors Michael Tougias and Casey Sherman in their book The Finest Hours: The True Story of the Coast Guard’s Most Daring Sea Rescue (2009). Webber was just 23 years old when he led a crew of four (all of whom received Lifesaving Gold Medals for their efforts), and I fully understand why such individual figures and stories can be particularly inspiring. But I agree with Tougias’s argument (articulated in that Humanities article) that rescues like these are collective efforts, and reminders of the truly impressive feats that communities can achieve in the face of disasters.
- Hurricane Katrina: Sometimes those feats are less about impressive successes and more about solidarity and survival in our most destructive disasters, though. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in September 2005 is one such period, and the efforts of the Coast Guard during that period are far less about heroism and more about collective perseverance. That second hyperlinked article documents many of those day-to-day, gradual, partial efforts—the story calls them “miracles,” and while I’m hesitant to use that term for anything associated with the horrors of Katrina, I do think it’s important to note that stunning and successful rescues aren’t the only form of miracle that the Coast Guard performs. Sometimes, just being there to do the work for which this organization has become rightly famous is more than enough.
Last Coast Guard context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What you do think?
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