Sunday morning coffee

16 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Governors Island, New York City

The New York City draft riots raged from July 13-17, 1863.

Good morning, all. I am having my coffee before setting out for Governors Island in a little bit. We are interviewing a lady who served in the Women’s Auxiliary Corps and after that a gentleman who was a high-level officer here during the Coast Guard years. It is always special to speak to people who lived and worked on the island. The lives people have led can be nothing short of extraordinary, even if they are unaware of it in the moment.

I was listening to the radio the other day on what turned out to be the 40th anniversary (July 13) of the 1977 New York City blackout. There was intense rioting and looting then and over the next several days. When I moved here and began working for the public library in the late 1990s, patrons in my branch told me that in the week after the riots, which at this time were only twenty years past, people were gathering in a sort of ersatz bazaar/flea market in the local park around the corner from the branch to exchange their ill-gotten gains. It would be three pairs of sneakers for a color television set, a gold chain for a transistor radio, or what have you. In my book about Civil War New York I am trying to put the July 1863 draft riots into perspective, explaining that such unrest has a long history in the city. There were several riots in the decades before the Civil War. There were major riots here and elsewhere in summer 1919 just after the First World War, and in New York City again in 1943 during the Second.

I was in Green-Wood Cemetery recently when I came across this new headstone for Edward Jardine, a Union officer from Brooklyn who was wounded in the Draft Riots. Jardine died 124 ago today, on 16 July 1893.

Beautiful day

29 Thursday Jun 2017

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Governors Island

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I was at Governors Island today where two other volunteers and I conducted some oral histories. We spoke to a Coast Guard man who worked on the island in the mid 1990s as the island was preparing to shut down. Closing down Governors Island was no small feat and the process took several months. Several thousand Coast Guard service persons and their dependents lived on the island until 1996. The process was well along for them to transfer. Everyone was gone by the end of that year, but in 1997 a few dozen workers, including the man to whom we spoke today, lived for a few months in Staten Island, commuting on the ferry and crossing over to do the mop up work mothballing the island. It’s strange that the mid 90s are part of history, but such is life.

The other interviewee was a First Army musician in the mid 1960s. He was actually stationed at Fort Dix but once came to the island for a First Army talent contest, which he and his bandmate won. The level of talent in the various military bands, even today, is more impressive than the general public might know. People like John Coltrane had extensive military band experience, in Coltrane’s case in the Navy. It is always special to speak to the people who served on Governors Island. Equally special is to collaborate with the volunteers and rangers who care for the island today.

Two Roosevelts crossing the Atlantic

24 Saturday Jun 2017

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Archibald (Archie) Roosevelt, Governors Island, J. Franklin Bell (General), Theodore (Ted) Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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Archibald and Theodore (Ted) Roosevelt Jr. left for France on 20 June 1917.

Theodore Roosevelt spoke from the pulpit of the Oyster Bay Reformed Church at Brookville on Sunday 24 June 1917 on behalf of the Red Cross. Raising funds and awareness for that relief organization was not his only reason to take to the podium however; with sons Archibald and Theodore now crossing the Atlantic aboard the Chicago to join Pershing’s nascent forces, he could announce that the boys had indeed left American soil. By June it apparent that the Wilson Administration, wisely, was not going to let Roosevelt command a division in France. The Colonel was committed, quite publicly, to sending his sons, so much so that he pulled all the strings he could get his sons to Europe as quickly as possible.

That became a reality when the Chicago left New York for Bordeaux on Wednesday 20 June. The late spring of 1917 had entailed a great deal of back and forth for Archive and Ted. They had spent the past several weeks getting in some final training in Plattsburg before traveling ceaselessly between New York City, Washington, and Oyster Bay as their fate was being decided. Eventually the War Department sent secret orders directing them to report to General J. Franklin Bell on Governors Island. It was there at the Department of the East that they received their final instructions. They had a few more days to pass before the passage of the Chicago and so went back to Long Island to say their final goodbyes to their families. Then it was back to New York. The waiting to go overseas was finally over.

Theodore Roosevelt had been an advocate for American involvement in the Great War since 1914. When he spoke at the Oyster Bay reformed Church one hundred years ago today, he had a personal stake in the conflict that was not there even one week prior.

(image/New York Times)

“The return of the Mayflower, armed.”

07 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Governors Island, J. Franklin Bell (General), John J. Pershing (General), Peyton C. March (General)

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Pershing (seated second from left) and his staff, June 1917

The above quotation may sound like hyperbole–because it was–but that was the mood on board the RMS Baltic when she was pulling into Liverpool one hundred years ago tonight with Major General John Pershing and his entourage of nearly two hundred on board. As the pilgrims had once sailed from the Old World to the New, so their descendants were doing nearly three centuries later. At least that is the way one diarist captured it for the New York Times as the Baltic was met by the American destroyers coming into port. It had been almost two weeks since Pershing had left Governors Island and sailed from Sandy Hook. The trip had been a quiet one, largely because Pershing and his staff were so busy planning, but the mood was now ebullient when land was seen. Everyone knew this was Next Phase in the war.

The Great War was to be an extraordinary challenge for the American military, which had been hampered by all kinds of logistical problems in the relatively small campaigns in Cuba and Mexico over the previous two decades. Men like Pershing; J. Franklin Bell, still back in New York Harbor commanding the Department of the East; Chief of Staff Peyton C. March in Washington; and the Regular Army officers at the new bases materializing across the United States whose job it now was to train the raw recruits, had learned many lessons from these experiences. Leaving the United States was itself a lesson learned. Pershing’s voyage was the worst kept secret in New York; everyone knew something was afoot when they saw the docks operating with greater urgency than usual. It didn’t help either when the cannoneers on Governors Island set off a salute as the Baltic set forth. So much for confidentiality.

Pershing’s first night in Europe was fairly anti-climactic. The Baltic pulled into the River Mersey at 11:00 pm and docked for the night. The real action would begin the following morning. Everyone was anxious and excited to see what they next day would bring.

(image/Library of Congress)

Decoration Day 1917

29 Monday May 2017

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Baseball, Charles S. Whitman (Governor), Governors Island, J. Franklin Bell (General), Leonard Wood (General), Memory, Monuments and Statuary, New York City

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I wanted to share a few images from Decoration Day 1917. These photographs were taken near the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Monument in Manhattan’s Riverside Park. Turn out was higher than for Decoration Day parades in recent years, which is not surprising given that this was the first Memorial Day since the call for war. The parade route was actually cut shorter in 1917 to accommodate the increasingly infirm veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic. About four hundred GAR veterans marched in New York City’s 1917 Decoration Day parade, one hundred and thirty fewer than just a year earlier. Veterans of the Spanish-American War and New York Guardsmen recently returned from Texas fell in behind. All told, 18,000 men and women marched in the parade through the Upper West Side. For the first time ever there was a regiment of Negro troops included in New York City’s Decoration Day parade. Though many would not have grasped it at the moment, the perceptive understood that this was an early sign of the coming of what became the New Negro Movement.

That is Major General J. Franklin Bell, commander of the Department of the East on Governors Island, and Governor Charles S. Whitman on the review stand. In the two middle image, they are there on the right in the box. Conspicuously absent is Leonard Wood, though his spirit in a sense was present. Before leaving New York City several weeks earlier he had given his blessing for a parade of the Public School Athletic League. While the veterans’s event was going on, a separate parade comprised of 40,000 schoolchildren was taking place south of here.

Memorial Day also means baseball. Just north of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Monument in the Polo Grounds Grover Cleveland Alexander of the Philadelphia Phillies lost 5-1 to the New York Giants. He went on to win thirty games that season. The following year Alexander was in France fighting the Germans. The Yankees were in Philadelphia playing the other team from the City of Brotherly Love, the Athletics. The Yankees won a double header and held the A’s scoreless over twenty-four innings. The Dodgers, then still the Brooklyn Robins, lost 2-0 to the Braves in Boston. It’s worth noting that the American League was less than twenty years old at this time and very much a competing association with the National. American League owners consciously put teams in cities were the Senior Circuit already had a presence. It says something about the size and influence of Gotham that unlike Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities New York ended up with not just two but three teams.

Enjoy your Memorial Day, everyone.

(images/Library of Congress)

Cooks and Bakers: Apply here

26 Friday May 2017

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Governors Island

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Four men learn the basics in a Great War era Cooks’ and Bakers’ School, circa 1917

They say an army moves on its stomach and no one understood this more than the U.S. War Department in May 1917. One hundred years ago today the Quartermaster Corps on Governors Island issued a joint statement along with the Navy asking trained cooks to join the ranks. Pay for a trained military cook could come to as much as $45 a month, or just over $1,100 in today’s dollars. It was not just cooks that were in short supply. Equally scarce were butchers and bakers. Recruiting qualified candidates was no small task. One general estimated in 1918 that a single regiment of a thousand or so men required as many as forty-five trained cooks to keep the unit properly nourished. The general continued that more than 11,000 cooks would be necessary to feed what was becoming the American Expeditionary Forces. It was an immediate problem; people must eat every day and hundred of thousands of men were enlisting across the country.

The Army could train men in the culinary arts as well. Cooks’ and Bakers’ Schools had been a common feature of military barracks in the Regular Army for some time. With the United States now in the war the Army, Navy and Marine Corps were expanding their culinary schools, which were usually a four month program covering the basics of food preparedness. Recruiting food preparers proved slow going and further pleas went out over much of the summer of 1917, usually to little avail. Apparently the men were not interested because they preferred the glory of shouldering a rifle and fighting the Hun than they did the alleged ignominy of ladling soup and potatoes to hungry doughboys.

(image/New York Public Library)

No Pullmans this time for troops on the move

08 Monday May 2017

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Governors Island, J. Franklin Bell (General), Leonard Wood (General)

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New York National Guardsmen traveled in luxury on their way to the Mexican Border in June 1916 during the Punitive Expedition (above). Accommodations would be more spartan eleven months later in the leadup to the larger campaign to come against the Kaiser.

I have not been there yet but the Governors Island season began last weekend. Normally things get underway Memorial Day Weekend but they are starting earlier this year. Things were moving at Governors Island one hundred years ago as well. Leonard Wood was gone by now, banished by Newton Baker and Woodrow Wilson to the Department of the Southeast in South Carolina. The new commander in New York Harbor was J. Franklin Bell. He got off to a running start; the Plattsburg training camp was scheduled to open in mid-May, within two weeks of his arrival at Governors Island to command the Department of the East. Thankfully General Bell had men like Major Halstead Dorey continuing with the work they had begun over the previous few summers preparing the nascent American forces. Officers at the Preparedness camps were also working diligently.

Now there was an increased sense of urgency. With war having been declared over a month ago men were moving not just to Plattsburg but to camps across the forty-eght states. This created an extraordinary logistical problem for the War Department. The act of moving men, let alone training and supplying them, was a task unto itself. On 8 May 1917 officers at the Plattsburg training camp announced the train schedule for the troops slated to start arriving later in the week. Here and elsewhere the railroad system was the primary means of travel and the system was severely tested and strained as spring went on. This was not lost on Secretary of War Newton Baker. On 21 April Secretary Baker had issued an order prohibiting the use of luxurious Pullman sleeper cars for the movement of American troops. It was to be day cars only for the doughboys. The measure allowed for a few exceptions–with prior approval–under extenuating circumstances but Baker was adamant that the order be carried out So many men had to be moved to so many different locales on so few rails that there was no other option.

(image/Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 29 June 1916)

The Yankees support General Wood

10 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Baseball, Governors Island, Leonard Wood (General), Preparedness (WW1), Woodrow Wilson

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The New York Yankees play their home opener this afternoon against the Tampa Bay Rays. In 1917 the Yankees opened their season at the Polo Grounds versus Babe Ruth and the Boston Red Sox. Leonard Wood threw out the first pitch. I wrote about that two years ago on Opening Day. Here today are two more images of that event. This was 11 April 1917, in between Wood’s lateral demotion from the Department of the East and his move to South Carolina. Dorey had worked for Wood from their time together in the Philippines through the Preparedness movement on Governors Island. President Wilson had relieved Wood of command there a few weeks before this photo was taken. Wood however was still in New York wrapping up in preparation for his transfer to the Department of the Southeast.

Even more intriguing is the photograph below.The men to the extreme right are Yankee owners Colonel Jacob Ruppert and Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston. Ruppert is the better known today and was the George Steinbrenner of his era: a German-American who bought the Yankees at a low point and turned them into a juggernaut. On April 13, two days after this photo was taken, Ruppert and other German-Americans met with New York City mayor John Purroy Mitchel at City Hall to announce their formation of a Committee of Men of Teuton Blood in support of the American war effort.

All but forgotten today is his co-owner, with whom he bought the sputtering Yankees in 1915. Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston had served in the Spanish-American War nearly two decades earlier. In February 1917 when things were heating up with Germany he proposed a Sportsmen’s Battalion of athletes to fight should war indeed come. When it finally did, Huston returned to military service and served in France as part of the 16th (Engineers) Regiment. He eventually became the colonel of that unit.

Yankee owners Jacob Ruppert and Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston (in suits, far right) went out of their way on Opening Day 1917 to publicly express their support for Major General Leonard Wood. One month later Huston himself would join what became the A.E.F.

(images/Library of Congress)

Leonard Wood’s reassignment

25 Saturday Mar 2017

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Governors Island, Leonard Wood (General), New York City, Woodrow Wilson

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The Outlook, a pro-Preparedness magazine for which Theodore Roosevelt wrote, told the story of Wood’s transfer in this 1917 article.

The United States was all but on a war footing by the last week of March 1917. There had been several sinkings of American ships that month. On March 20 Woodrow Wilson had called for a special of Congress to be held on April 2. In the meantime National Guardsmen were boarding trains and shipping out to various posts. No one therefore thought anything too amiss when on the afternoon of March 24 Wilson left the White House and traveled to Newton Baker’s office in the State, War, and Navy Building. It seemed natural that the President and Secretary of War would discuss the fluid situation. Instead the two made the fateful decision to relieve Major General Leonard Wood of his duties as commander of the Department of the East on Governors Island. Wood was notified that evening and responded the following day, Sunday March 25. The rest of the country found out the following day.

While some claimed at the time that Wood’s transfer was unexpected, more aware individuals had seen the writing on the wall for some time. Wood had been making increasingly passionate pleas for Preparedness for much of the past year, and was never more publicly vocal than in those last winter days of 1917. Remember that then as now New York City was the media capital of the nation. The city had nearly a dozen daily newspapers, most of which were sending reporters around following Wood’s many appearances.

Technically Wood was not demoted. He remained in the Army and kept his rank. Wilson got rid of Wood by dividing the Eastern Department into three separate jurisdictions. The number of military departments went from four to six. J. Franklin Bell was to move from the Western Department to take over in New York. Wood was given the option of taking over in Hawaii, the Philippines or a new Department of the Southeast in Charleston, South Carolina. Wood chose the latter and effective May 1, 1917 would leave Governors Island island for the Southeastern Department. The Wilson Administration said all the right things, publicly claiming that it was merely a lateral move, but everyone new that this was not the case. New York City was obviously going to be the focal point of any American involvement in the Great War. Wood would now not only be far removed from Governors Island and the New York limelgiht but banished out of the Northeast itself, where support for the American war effort was much stronger than in the more isolationist, solidly Democratic South. Wood was stoic and put on a brave face. When the news came down he responded simply “I am a soldier and I go where I am sent.”

(image/New York Public Library)

“Federal Reserve Students”

02 Thursday Mar 2017

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Governors Island, Preparedness (WW1), Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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George True Blood, seen here on Governors Island in 1917 after his promotion to brigadier general, was responsible to the tens of thousands of applications pouring in to the Eastern Department that winter just before America joined the war.

George True Blood, seen here on Governors Island later in 1917 after his promotion to brigadier general, was responsible fro the tens of thousands of applications pouring in to the Eastern Department that winter just before America joined the war.

Americans were watching with increasing anxiety as the winter of 1917 moved along. Everyone was wondering what would happen with the German u-boat attacks and looking ahead to what spring and summer might bring. No one of course knew that the United Sates would enter the war the first week of April. The first week of March 1917 officials were predicting that 50,000 men and 10,000 young males between 15-18 would registeri to attend the Military Training Camps for civilians in Plattsburg, New York and elsewhere before they opened that June. They were to be called “Federal Reserve Students.”

Things had changed a great deal since the first camps in 1913; as pf summer 1917 the civilian camps were to officially be under the auspices of the Army. This had a number of implications. For one thing in previous years the men had paid their own way, which explains why most Plattsburg men came from upper class families, usually from the Northeast where interventionist sentiment was stronger than in the South and West. The Army would pay for uniforms, food, arms, and travel expenses. The duty of processing the letters of interest fell to Leonard Wood and his staff at the department of the East on Governors Island. He tasked his chief of staff Colonel George True Bartlett to take care of it.

Theodore Roosevelt was watching it all closely and was never happier than when he heard that his eighteen-year-old nephew, William Sheffield Cowles Jr., his sister Anna’s only son, was intending to attend. As it turned out, neither Cowles nor the other 60,000 boys and men attended the civilian training camps that winter. When war indeed came, the Army prioritized the camps at Plattsburg and elsewhere exclusively for military use alone.