Category Archives: J. Franklin Bell (General)

Two Roosevelts crossing the Atlantic

24 Saturday Jun 2017

Posted by 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 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, cont’d

30 Tuesday May 2017

Posted by in Charles S. Whitman (Governor), J. Franklin Bell (General), John Purroy Mitchel, New York City, Preparedness (WW1), Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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Decoration Day, what we now call Memorial Day, originated in the years just after the American Civil War. In 1966, just after the Centennial, President Johnson and Congress pronounced somewhat dubiously that Waterloo, New York was the locale where Decoration Day had begun in 1866. In all likelihood it didn’t happen that way; citizens were showing up independently at local cemeteries throughout the North and South in that first full spring after the war’s end. Tending flowers on graves was timed with the planting season. Still, we do know that two years later John Logan, leader of the Grand Army of the Republic, called for all G.A.R. members to reserve 30 May 30 1868 as the official Decoration Day for members of the organization. This imprimatur added to the institutionalization of Decoration/Memorial Day. I say all this because it did not occur to me until yesterday that this made Decoration Day 1917 the 50th such observation. And yes, that means 2017 is the 150th.

It is unclear if local, state, and federal leaders understood all this in May 1917 but, however coincidentally, it worked out well for the Great War effort. While Governor Whitman was reviewing troops with J. Franklin Bell uptown on 30 May 30 1917, Mayor John Purroy Mitchel was in Union Square christening the U.S.S. Recruit. The ship was just that, a scaled-down mock-up of a battleship built to promote recruiting for the Navy. Mayor Mitchel had long been a proponent of Preparedness and as such was an ally of Theodore Roosevelt, Leonard Wood, and Governor Whitman. Mitchel built the Recruit under the auspices of his Committee on National Defense. Decoration Day 1917 appears to have been something of a tag team affair, with Governor Whitman and General Bell reviewing the Army and National Guard troops uptown while the mayor focused on the Navy farther south. To be sure there was some Navy and Marine involvement in the uptown parade, but it was primarily an Army and Guard event.

New York’s ports were more important to the local economy than they are today–and the Brooklyn Navy Yard was still going strong–but the Navy was nonetheless small and removed from the daily lives of New Yorkers. Hence the idea for the Recruit. Remember, there was no television let alone internet in this era. To see what Navy personnel did–and how you might contribute yourself–the mayor and his allies figured a living model might be helpful. One could buy Liberty Bonds there as well. Here are a few images from that event one hundred years ago today.

(Note: all photographs are via the Library of Congress and were taken on 30 May 1917 with the possible exception of the top most image, which did not have a specific date. I included it to give a panoramic view of the U.S.S. Recruit, which ran about two hundred feet long and forty feet at its widest point.)

 

Decoration Day 1917

29 Monday May 2017

Posted by 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)

No Pullmans this time for troops on the move

08 Monday May 2017

Posted by 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)