Here is a photograph that is fascinating on about five different levels. It is from the Fall 1925 issue of the Roosevelt House Bulletin, the public voice of the Women’s Roosevelt Memorial Association. The photo was taken on July 4, 1925 in the auditorium of what we now call the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace. This would have been sixty full years after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and, as you can see, the men are all octogenarians. A few may even be in their 90s. The General Sherman Circle, Ladies of the G.A.R. organized the event in cooperation with the WRMA. The turnout was about three hundred, though I am not certain how many were CIvil War veterans. The image is not that great because it is not the original but a photo taken on my camera.

Many of the Roosevelts were involved in veterans groups. Theodore was active in the Naval and Military Order of the Spanish American War. Son Ted was actually a founder of the American Legion. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Ted Roosevelt also came to Governors Island regularly for reunions of the First Infantry Division.

This event on the 4th of July was in support of something called Defense Day, which one of the Civil War vet attendees equated to the old Muster Day. Defense Day seems to have been something akin to the Preparedness movement in the United States after the start of the Great War but prior to American engagement in the conflict. One of Defense Day’s biggest critics was President Calvin Coolidge. Apparently it was an initiative that never got too far off the ground, which is not surprising being that most people in America and Europe were exhausted after what had transpired less than a decade before.

It is incredible to visit the Birthplace and realize you are walking in the same steps where these people once walked.