The American Guide Series, produced by the Federal Writers’ Project, is one of the most well-known WPA projects. Written as a collection of travel guides, the series included suggested tour routes as well as essays on the history and culture of each U.S. state and territory. Major U.S. cities and several regions were also given their own separate guidebooks.
The state guides give a fascinating snapshot of American life in the 1930s. Written in a lively and approachable style, they detail and celebrate the rich diversity that our country displayed at that time. The writers’ enthusiasm is infectious and their guide is as much fun to read today as it must have been for travelers in the 1930s.
Several historians have written about the American Guide Series over the past 80 years, but no one, to my knowledge, has used them as current-day travel guides. That is just what I set out to do. I am an American historian, art photographer, and enthusiastic traveler. I have read each of these guides. I love them for their wonderful enthusiasm and their curiosity about every aspect of regional life—from food, to linguistics, to folklore, to statistics, to geography, to environment, to history—and especially for their liberal attitudes and respect for diversity. In this series, I will be posting photo essays and articles based upon tours recommended in the guides.
Fern L. Nesson
John Paul Jones, the “Father of the American Navy” was our country’s first well-known naval commander. Jones was born in Scotland, became a sailor at thirteen, and ascended to the position of commander on British merchant ships. After he killed a mutinous crew member with a sword, he fled to Virginia in 1775 and volunteered his services to newly-formed Continental Navy. For two years, Jones commanded several small ships with which he raided British vessels in the Bahamas, Nova Scotia and Ireland. Two notable successes were his capture of the Mellish, a British ship carrying a supply of winter clothing intended for British troops in Canada and the Drake, a British military vessel in the Irish Sea. The capture of the Drake was one of the Continental Navy’s few significant military victories during the Revolution and it came to symbolize the American spirit and serve as an inspiration for the permanent establishment of the United States Navy.
In 1779, Jones was given command of a 42-gun ship donated by the French. He renamed it the Bonhomme Richard in honor of Benjamin Franklin. On the evening of August 14, Jones, accompanied by five smaller American ships, engaged two British ships, the Serapis and the Countess of Scarborough, in a battle at Flamborough Head in the Irish Sea. It was a historic battle!
Recognizing that he could not win a battle of big guns, especially at night with the wind dying, Jones attempted instead to block the Serapis’s path of escape. When this appeared likely to fail, the captain of the Serapis demanded his surrender. Jones refused uttering his most famous words, “I have not yet begun to fight!” Continuing to fire at the Serapis, Jones made it possible for the American ship, Alliance, to approach nearer and to fire a broadside at the Countess.The broadside hit both the Bonhomme Richard and the Countess. Soon after, the Countess surrendered.
With Bonhomme Richard burning and sinking, her flag was shot away. The British commander asked if the colors had been struck as a sign of surrender and Jones replied “I may sink, but I’ll be damned if I strike.” An attempt by the British to board Bonhomme Richard was then thwarted, and Jones launched a grenade which caused the explosion of a large quantity of gunpowder on Serapis‘s lower deck. While the Serapis was fighting the onboard fire, the Alliance fired two more broadsides again damaging the Bonhomme Richard but also rendering Serapis unable to move. Serapis surrendered. The Bonhomme Richard sank and but Jones was able to repair the captured Serapis and sailed it to Holland.
After the Revolutionary War ended, Jones received a gold medal from the Continental Congress and King Louis XVI of France named him a “Chevalier.” But Jones was not ready to retire. Having no further commissions from the US Navy, he volunteered and served in the Russian Navy from 1787 to 1790 when he was accused of rape (apparently unjustly) by a young Russian woman. Although his guilt was much in doubt, Empress of Catherine II exiled him from the Russian Navy for two years. Jones left for Paris where he died in 1792. He was buried in the French Royal family’s Saint Louis Cemetery but, four years later, France’s revolutionary government sold the property and the cemetery was closed and all-but forgotten.
In 1905, after a search lasting six years, the U.S. Ambassador to France, Horace Porter, located the cemetery. Apparently, Jones’s body had been preserved in alcohol and interred in a lead coffin. Horace dug up five lead coffins on the grounds and exhumed the bodies. The body in the third coffin, unearthed on April 7, 1905, was identified as Jones by comparing his preserved face to the bust of him done by Jean-Antoine Houdon in 1780.
Porter sailed with brought Jones’s body on a Navy cruiser, which was met in the Chesapeake Bay by a procession of seven Navy battleships. On April 24, 1906, his coffin was installed at the US Naval Academy and Teddy Roosevelt gave a eulogy. Finally, in 1913, the Academy placed Jones’s remains in a bronze and marble sarcophagus located in a crypt below the Naval Academy Chapel:
“NAVAL ACADEMY CHAPEL, The dome over the crossing, with its glittering gilded cupola, rises more than two hundred feet above the ground. Its former terra-cotta decorative work drums, flags, and festoons—has been replaced with plain sheet copper; the coffered ceiling is ornamented with symbolic designs in plaster. Stained glass windows in the apse and transepts commemorate naval heroes Sampson, Mason, Porter, Farragut—and Academy men who served in the World War. Under the crossing is the crypt, a round colonnaded chamber containing the bronze and marble sarcophagus holding the dust of John Paul Jones, who on his death in 1792 was buried in Paris. In 1905 the coffin was ceremoniously transferred to America. The sarcophagus somewhat resembles Napoleon’s in the Hotel des Invalides, Paris.”
Maryland Guide p. 192.
I visited the Academy Chapel and Jones’s crypt on a quiet day in early March. Both the Chapel and the crypt are impressive. The theme of sailing, its perils and its glory, is consistent throughout and the scale of the architecture and elegance of the materials is amazing. Jones’s sarcophagus does indeed resemble Napoleon’s and the crypt rivals the magnificence of European royal tombs. From the Navy’s point of view, Jones was never, and should never be forgotten. He was larger than life and he remains possibly even larger in death.
March, 2023
