THE SAVING-“OLD-IRONSIDES” HABIT
Reading edition
The annual campaign to “Save ‘Old Ironsides’” is on again. Every few years this ancient frigate is saved from some mysterious destruction, school children are lathered up into a foam of patriotic excitement in which they bring pennies from their banks to aid in the crisis, speeches are made and banners unfurled, and everybody sinks back with a sigh of relief. “Old Ironsides” has been saved again!
And yet it hardly seems more than a couple of years before the cry goes up again: “The enemy!” and bang! a shot whistles across the bows of the famous ship. Then it’s “Save ‘Old Ironsides,’ boys!” and the whole thing begins all over again.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, who aided the first “Save ‘Old Ironsides’” campaign by writing, “Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!” must smile a rather wan smile as he realizes that all that he did was save “Old Ironsides” for the fiscal year 1887-8 and that ever since then a Saving Committee has been kept busy night and day planning future campaigns. They say that the 1930 campaign is going to be the biggest and best yet.
What are these malign forces that seem so persistent in their plots to wreck the good ship “Constitution”? Sometimes it is an unsentimental Government that threatens to junk the whole thing. At other times it is the forces of Nature, which seem to wait until our backs are turned after a money-raising campaign and then jump at the poor old sea-dog as she lies in safety at Charlestown and bid fair to tear her limb from limb.
Whatever it is that we are constantly fighting off, would it not be possible to raise enough money at one crack to keep “Old Ironsides” afloat forever? We have a national surplus of $390,000,000. Couldn’t we just settle this whole thing once and for all by devoting, let us say, half of that to seeing that no more harm ever comes to this precious relic?
Having saved her three times, and won three legs on the trophy, might we not be entitled to permanent possession of it?
Or has the fact that there is a movie entitled “Old Ironsides” anything to do with what James Russell Lowell called “The Present Crisis”?