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The 9/11 Stories About Shared Identity And Mutuality Are Beginning To Seem Tragically Quaint

Americans liked each other.

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To think about 9/11, start eighty-two years earlier. This is my favorite story about who we used to be.

In the summer of 1919, with soldiers home from World War I, the U.S. Army tested itself: If an enemy invaded the West Coast, how quickly could troops equipped with a new generation of cars and trucks, still an early technology, drive across the country to join the fight?

The Transcontinental Motor Convoy covered 3,251 miles from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco in sixty-two days, mostly on unpaved highways, with 81 cars and trucks. A young lieutenant colonel named Dwight Eisenhower went along as an observer, and he thought the dirt paths through the intermountain West didn’t deserve to be called roads. The not-quite 300 soldiers on the convoy broke dozens of primitive rural bridges and stopped to fix them, dragged trucks through mud and silt with ropes, and made their own replacement parts for damaged vehicles in a rolling machine shop. It was hard, dirty, exhausting travel.

But the convoy’s biggest problem just kept getting worse as it went west: The small towns where they took their scheduled stops were excessively pleased by the arrival of the motorized column. Whole communities turned out to greet them. Towns threw dances and picnics and banquets; soldiers arrived at their evening destinations and found tables laden with fresh pies and roasted chickens. A logistics exercise produced weddings and babies, an awkward reality that impaired the military objective of testing the cross-country speed of a wartime maneuver, and the convoy commander had to learn the art of gently declining an insistent brunch invitation. You can see some of that hospitality here, and look for the banquet in........

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