Frederick Law Olmsteds War on Disease and Disunity – The New Yorker

In October of 1862, with the country still reeling from the Second Battle of Bull Run and the Battle of Antietam, Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect and a chronicler of the Southern slave economy, published a pamphlet that called for a nationwide effort to assemble provisions to care for sick and wounded soldiers. The recent battles East and West have completely exhausted the reserved stock, he wrote, and it is found now not only impracticable to accumulate supplies, but impossible to meet even urgent demands daily made by hospitals within sight of the very dome of the Capitol. His plea has a familiar ring today, as does the title of the publication, What They Have to Do Who Stay at Home.

Olmsted is most beloved for his work on New York Citys Central Park and Prospect Park, which he designed and built with Calvert Vaux before and after, respectively, the War Between the States. In recent weeks, New Yorkers have ventured out for strolls and sits among the blossoming landscapes that Olmsted wrought from unscenic acreage a century and a half ago. But Olmsteds service to the country during the Civil War is what makes him especially relevant just now. In 1861, Olmsted gave up oversight of Central Park to run the newly created and privately funded U.S. Sanitary Commission, a predecessor to the American Red Cross. The Civil War was a public-health emergencymore soldiers died of disease than of battlefield wounds, owing partly to the miserable condition of the Armys medical apparatus. Olmsted oversaw the creation and operation of medical boats and field hospitals, and set up new triage and quarantine procedures for infectious patients. The emergency tent hospital in Central Park and the U.S.N.S. Comfort parked on the Hudson were probably the Olmsted-iest things weve seen in a while.

The United States had a relatively small standing army at the start of the Civil War, one that was further divided, in two, by secession. Volunteer regiments were raised and equipped in an enthusiastic but ad-hoc manner, and, when the first test of the new Union forces came in July of 1861, at Bull Run, the result was a disorganized melee. Olmsted, wanting to document and cure the deadly lack of discipline, morale, and medical preparation that he and his front-line responders had witnessed, deployed a team of Sanitary Commission inspectors to conduct a meticulous seventy-five-question survey of the soldiers. Armed with those insights, Olmsted compiled a Report on the Demoralization of the Volunteers, a document the commissions board scuttled for fear that it would have hurt recruiting efforts. The Sanitary Commission was generally a thorn in the side of the federal government, the leaders of which did not immediately appreciate the meddling of wealthy New York lites, or the implication that the war was not under control. Lincoln himself referred to it as a fifth wheel.

So, that October, Olmsted went straight to the people, specifically to the Loyal Women of America, with a direct plea for badly needed supplies for the winter, asking that every woman in the country knit or buy a pair of woollen stockings. Existing sewing societies and reading clubs were prevailed upon to gather blankets, drawers, splints, and pillows to support wounded limbs. Seeing morale as key to health, Olmsted called for jelly, booze, and backgammon boards. Books, for desultory reading and magazines especially if illustrated will be useful, he wrote. (Side note for desultory readers: the Internet Archives National Emergency Library currently offers two very worthwhile biographies of Olmsted: Witold Rybczynskis A Clearing in the Distance and Lee Halls Olmsteds America.)

Olmsteds appeal was printed in newspapers across America, and carried a pithy endorsement from President Abraham Lincoln, who said, lukewarmly, that there is no agency through which voluntary offerings of patriotism can be more effectively made. The White House itself wasnt much help, as Olmsted pointed out a few paragraphs later: For the means of administering to the needs of the sick and wounded, the Commission, he wrote, receives not one dollar from Government.

The welfare of the casualties would be up to the people and to the states, many of which launched their own robust supply drives aimed at equipping native sons. This deeply frustrated Olmsted, who complained, a year later, What real patriot can wish or be willing, even, to have soldiers from his State, or from his town, or his kindred, enjoying extra comforts and luxuries, while wounded men by their side, or on the distant battle-field, are, perhaps, in actual stress of life for want of the very supplies which a better distribution would secure to them? Olmsted was a big fan of democracy doing big things for everyone, including future generations. Whether scenic beauty or war, hospital or park, Olmsted believed that we were all in this together, like it or not. Incompetence wouldnt do. Short-term thinking wouldnt do. It seemed to Olmsted that the entire point of the war was for the states to come together as a country. In union is strength. In disunion is weakness and waste. Can we not, in this trial of our nation, learn to wholly lay aside that poor disguise of narrowness of purpose and self-conceit, which takes the name of local interest and public spirit, but whose fruit is manifest in secession? he wrote.

He was out with the Army as often as he was in Washingtona Fauci and a front-line worker. After the Battle of Seven Pines, in June, 1862, Katharine Prescott Wormeley, one of the Sanitary Commissions top nurses, wrote a letter to her mother, saying, Mr. Olmsted is everything,wise, authoritative, untiring; but he must break down. . . . To think or speak of the things we see would be fatal. No one must come here who cannot put away all feeling. Do all you can, and be a machine,thats the way to act; the only way. Closing the letter, she noted that she was sitting on the floor with Olmsted, resting, with a pitcher of lemonade between them.

At the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single day of the Civil War, some twenty-three thousand Americansfrom the North and Southwere killed, wounded, or missing. The Sanitary Commission agents arrived three days after the battle, and, according to Olmsted, within a week the commission had delivered to the hospitals ten thousand shirts and drawers, five hundred bottles of stimulantsboozetwo thousand sponges, several tons of soup, and other nice articles of nutriment.

That list suggests the current contents of a restaurant called Olmsted, on Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn, which this magazine called an urban sanctuary back in 2016. Its truly one now. The chef, Greg Baxtrom, and his co-owner, Max Katzenberg, had to furlough their staff after the stay-at-home order, but decided to turn their kitchen into a food bank for neighborhood restaurant workers. Soon they started feeding hospital workers, too, and then whoever needed a meal. And now, having received donations of baby formula, diapers, bras, and toothbrushes, Baxtrom is giving away more than food. Were basically a bodega now, he said by phone the other day, in the midst of opening boxes. He was converting the restaurants private dining room into the Olmsted Trading Post, selling bread, organic vegetables, bottled cocktails, and wine, to help fund their food-bank efforts and rehire some of his furloughed employees. To ward off demoralization, flower boxes and a rainbow pennant banner frame the front window, on which the Trading Post logo is nicely painted, as though the pop-up may stay for a while.

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Frederick Law Olmsteds War on Disease and Disunity - The New Yorker