Dr. J.H. McLean's Peace-Makers

Dr. J. H. McLean s Peace Makers - Ukase: We command all nations to keep the peace. An elaborate, profusely illustrated antiwar tract in the form of a satirical manufacturer's trade catalogue offering powerful military ordnance -- "peace-makers" -- which will make "war so terrible and devastating as to shock every community and cause them to rise en masse and declare that the slaughter of their fellows must cease!" (author's dedication). The author was a successful peddler of patent medicines in the St. Louis area, and, as Riling points out (see below) the style of the book, with its frequent bold headlines, is that of a patent medicine brochure. The imagined guns, torpedoes, forts etc. are not overtly fantastic, just bigger, faster, more powerful, more portable. With the impeccably drawn illustrations and confident writing style, the effect is not comically exaggerated so much as insidiously realistic, putting this production in the tradition -- so important in the nineteenth century -- of the eccentric hoax. Included are portable forts, impregnable fortresses (both fixed and floating), modular metal shield blocks, indestructible "Hercules Guns," rapid-fire battery guns, inescapable magnetic torpedoes; 48-shot pistols, and the like. Dr. McLean goes so far as to compare himself to Napoleon, Wellington, Washington, U.S. Grant, and others. " With 75 wood-engraved illustrations in the text, many full page,