Not All Warriors
by
William H. Baumer, Jr.

The Author and the Work

A 1933 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, William Henry Baumer, Jr., as is faintly intimated in the biographical sketch of him in Cullum's Register and more explicitly stated in the obituary in Assembly linked there, made his career to a large extent in writing, a career of which this book pretty much marks the beginning.

Not Only Warriors, a set of seven biographical sketches of West Point graduates who made their name primarily in fields other than warfare, was written while Capt. Baumer was teaching history at the Academy. I suspect it was conceived as a sort of teaching aid for his students, which would account for its heavy reliance on secondary sources: and as an easy-flowing digest of the voluminous material available on each of his subjects, it is successful.

The book would, on the other hand, have benefited from more time than a hard-working West Point instructor has at his disposal; or at least, that's the best face I can put on his numerous infelicities of style, and on what often looks like a talent for ambiguity — starting with the title of the book: These men were not only warriors? or West Point produces not only warriors? — and finally the occasional downright howler: the two most striking are here and here.

p. ix  Foreword One of the most remarkable things about West Point is the multiplicity of the outlets into which the energies of her graduates have flowed. Well did the late Theodore Roosevelt say, in 1902, on the occasion of her centennial — "No other institution in the land has contributed so many names to the honor roll of the Nation's greatest citizens." On history's scroll the names of West Point's great captains are writ indelibly. Over­looked to a great extent, however, are the deeds of those graduates who, in the walks of civil life, contributed to the building and maintenance of a great nation. Oddly enough, the explanation is simple. The very catholicity of their achievements, so inextricably woven with the life of our nation, has obscured the educational origin of these men. Captain Baumer has had a happy thought in placing within these covers vignettes of the lives of seven West Pointers, a cross-section of the Long Gray Line who doffed Army Blue to play a decisive part in the fields of civil endeavor. Gathered as all West Pointers are from the melting pot which is our citizenry, these men reacted politically, socially, and economically as did other university groups. They were human beings, with all the qualities, good and bad, to which human flesh is heir. They did have, however, one thing in common — the character-building hall-mark of their Alma Mater — Duty, Honor, Country. Today, as our nation stands in the welter of another world crisis, it is good to remember what West Pointers have accomplished in the past. From that we may, with the late Chief Justice Edward Douglass White, draw comforting conclusion for the future:  p. x  "West Point — a school that has produced a man to meet every national emergency that has ever confronted the country." R. Ernest Dupuy, Lieut. Col., F. A. Washington, D. C., April 14, 1941.

Technical Details

Edition Used

The edition followed in this transcription was that of my own copy of the first edition, © Smith & Durrell, Inc., 1941. That copyright was not renewed in 1968 or 1969 as then required by law in order to be maintained. The work is thus in the public domain; details here on the copyright law involved.

The book is unillustrated.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57  these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise which I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

My transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The printed book was well proofread, with few typographical errors. I marked my corrections, when important (or unavoidable because inside a link), with a bullet like this;º and when trivial, with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the bullet or the underscored words to read the variant. Similarly, bullets before measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., •10 miles.

A number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.

Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you.

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The icon I use to indicate this subsite is the central device of the Great Seal of the United States in the schematic version found on the cover of my copy of the book. The cover also includes small portraits of the seven men whose lives are told in the book, and the whole is done in West Point's colors: black, gold and grey; whence the odd coloring of the national bird.

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
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