Saturday Links

When yachts hunted submarines, the domestic side of the Manhattan Project, the problem with settler colonialism, and more.

The yacht Niagara in 1898. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Good morning! In Airmail, Henry S. Schlesinger writes about the time lavish yachts—some with Tiffany interiors and pipe organs—were sent to hunt German submarines: “In late February 1917—two years after World War I began and just before America entered it—the assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, addressed members of the New York Yacht Club (N.Y.Y.C.) in a meeting that likely took place in the club’s Model Room. In what was described in the press as a plea, F.D.R. asked club members to put their yachts at the service of the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard. With America’s entrance into the war imminent, the military was woefully short of seagoing vessels . . . The yachts, many nautical vestiges of the Gilded Age, were some of the most lavish afloat. The 243-foot Harvard, formerly the Eleanor, owned by banker George F. Baker, featured an interior designed by Tiffany & Co., complete with Persian rugs and Barbizon art. Howard Gould’s 282-foot Niagara featured décor of Renaissance tapestries and a Welte Philharmonic Organ, a huge, complex instrument with 19 ranks of giant pipes, similar in concept to a player piano.”