After class today I was following up on some leads that will hopefully carry over into the next few class meetings. I was searching the Brooklyn Daily Eagle database when I came across an article about one William Patton Griffith. This led me to a search engine to find out more about the man. And that is where, among other things, I came across the photo you see here. It is the front and back of the same image. Griffith fought in the Civil War and was in his 90s when he finally died in the 1930s. Like many veterans he was actively engaged in veteran and civic affairs throughout his adult life; in his final years he was brought out for public engagements, one of those aged Civil War veteran whose symbolic power at Decoration Days and Fourths of July rested in that he survived anachronistically into the mid twentieth century. How in the 1920s or 1930s, in the wake of the Great War, the Roaring Twenties and Great Depression, could one not have been moved to meet a survivor of Gettysburg, Pea Ridge, or the Peninsula Campaign?

It is a striking images. He exudes the appearance of a man nearing the end of his life seemingly content that he has accomplished what had set out to achieve. What struck me too was his job title: patriotic instructor. Some very rudimentary digging indicated that this was a formal position within the Grand Army of the Republic, of which Griffith was a long and active member. It is tempting to scoff at such a thing, but as the saying goes the past is a foreign country and they do things differently there. I intend to talk more about Griffith in class next Tuesday.

(images/New York State Archives, Grand Army of the Republic records)

I had the opportunity this past weekend to spend some time with the official historian of a particular American military unit. This is an outfit that stretches back to the mid-nineteenth century and has fought in most of America’s engagements since that time. No longer active duty, this individual traces his time with the outfit back to the early 1970s. During our conversation he mentioned the unit’s annual dinners, which he has attended going back to his days as a young, active duty officer. I asked him if at these annual gatherings he ever had the opportunity to meet and talk with any of the Great War veterans who had worn the regiment’s insignia in 1917-18. He lit up when I asked and said that indeed he had. These WW1 veterans would have been in their mid 70s at the time.

The historian filled in a few anecdotes before noting ruefully that while he had indeed made these men’s acquaintance, he did not engage with them as extensively as would have liked today. Now those doughboys are all gone. Of course he was not the unit historian at that time, but a young, Vietnam-era officer with much on his mind. Today as the unit historian he has made certain to record and preserve all he can about the rapidly fading WW2 veterans. In just a few years they too will be all gone.

(image/Visitor7 via Wikimedia Commons)

The social changes that the Great War wrought are sometimes overlooked. Certain issues, most notably the Civil Rights Movement here in America and independence for Europe’s colonies–showed some progress in the 1920s and 30s but did not come to fruition until after the Second World War. Two that did succeed were Prohibition and Suffragism. It was not coincidental that the 18th and 19th amendments passed just after the war’s end. Calls for Prohibition and women’s right to vote went back decades prior to American involvement in the war. In 1916 proponents of both did all they could to influence that November’s presidential election, and state and local elections too of course.

On the early spring day of April 6, 1916 suffragists Alice Burke and Nell Richardson left New York in their Golden Flyer for the West Coast. Their objective was to raise awareness and interest in the female vote. They visited forty-two states, by-passing New England, and drove over 10,000 miles in the April-October excursion to California and back. Keep in mind that there were no highways at this time. It was even three years prior to the Army’s 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy in which Dwight Eisenhower participated. And that one only went 3000 miles.

It is somewhat surprising that the Burke/Richardson is not better known than it is. I’m guessing that a reason might be that we already have a standard narrative of the Women’s Rights Movement and this doesn’t fit the formula. Of course that is a problem regarding the Civil War and pretty much every historical subject. The heroes and villains get set and that’s it, at least for many people. Whatever the reason for so little interest in this event, it is an amazing story that deserves more attention than it has received.

(images/Library of Congress)

Sergeant York was one of the tens of thousands of doughboys who filled out an MSR reflecting on his experience in the Great War.

Last night I finished Edward Gutiérrez’ Doughboys on the Great War. In 2000 Dr. Gutiérrez, now a lecturer at the University of Hartford, began analyzing the Military Service Records (MSRs) that American fighting men filled out upon returning from France. Several dozen states had some version of these questionnaires, though the length and thoroughness of the questioning fluctuated wildly from state to state. Some states had index cards asking for such basic information as name, age, rank, unit, length of service, and current address. Four states–Connecticut, Minnesota, Utah, Virginia–went much further and created a several-page document in which soldiers and marines could discourse more fully on their experience. Many veterans did just that, sharing their impressions of their training, the competence of their officers, their fighting experience, and whatever else they chose to share. According to Gutiérrez–and I see no reason to doubt him–these sources had been sitting pretty much untouched for nearly a century before he began reading them.

Studying the lives of returning soldiers has become a cottage industry over the past few years. Brian Matthew Jordan’s Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War is one example. This trend should not be surprising given that we have had so many veterans returning from combat in our own time. This is a welcome addition to the scholarship. The crux of Gutiérrez argument is that, while some had difficulty adjusting, for the most part doughboys returned to society quickly and seamlessly. This runs contrary to the narrative articulated by such Lost Generation writers as Hemingway, Fitzgerald and even Faulkner in the 1920s.

Some states followed up in the 1960s and 70s, by which time the veterans were well into middle age. These later accounts differ in that they lack the immediacy of the questionnaires the veterans filled out immediately upon their return from the war. A sourness set in for many in the 1930s, climaxing in the Bonus Army march in Washington. In the 1940s Doughboys noted ruefully that there was no GI Bill for them as there was now for the soldiers returning from the Second World War.

Gutiérrez has written an important book laying out some of the issues faced by the doughboys during and after their service. Hopefully during the centennial additional scholars will explore this topic.

(image/Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2006004542/)

Hey all, it is another early Sunday morning. I am off to Governors Island in a bit.

Today is the final stage of the Tour de France. I liked the way the Tour incorporated elements of WW1 commemoration into some of the racing stages. I hope this continues through 2018. It seems there is so much they could do without impeding on the integrity of the  race itself. One thing that is unique about the Tour is that its course changes year-by-year. It seems that for one thing they could alter the course here and there to visit battlefield sights. This seems to have already happened to a certain extent.

This all got me thinking to past tours, including one that took place at one of the most unique moments in pre-war history: the 1910 funeral of King Edward VII. As you can from the image, most of the European crowned heads-of-state turned out. I once wrote something on the TRB Facebook page about how former president Theodore Roosevelt represented the United States and had a good laugh at the pomposity on display. Still, he did get along with many of these people, including Kaiser Wilhelm II.

These nine rulers are just some of the European royalty who showed up for the funeral of King Edward VII on May 20, 1910. Their striking resemblance is not coincidental; many were related to one another. Less than five years later they would be at war.

It is hard to imagine how Europe would have turned out had the Great War not taken place and many of these monarchs not been deposed.

The Tour de France took place two months later and the winner was Frenchman  Octave Lapize. When the Great War came Lapize became a pilot in the French Army. He was killed on Bastille Day 1917.

July 31, 1910: an exhausted Lapize wins the Tour de France two months later. Note the flowers.

(Funeral image photographed by W. & D. Downey and Lapize image by Agence Roi from Bibliothèque Nationale de France; both via Wikimedia Commons)

John Nicolay (seated) and John Hay (right) were best friends who worked selflessly for Abraham Lincoln. After the war they toiled equally hard to craft his legacy and defend the Unionist perspective of the war.

Last night I finished Joshua Zeitz’s Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln’s Image and gained a lot from reading it. Zeitz traces the relationship between the 16th president and his two assistants from the time they met prior the Civil War all the way through the early years of the twentieth century when Nicolay (1901) and Hay (1905) died. I have always known the general outline of the story of how the two wrote their mammoth ten-volume Lincoln biography in the 1880s. Zeitz does a good job of capturing the two competing and contradictory impulses at work in the decades immediately after the war. On one hand there was a tendency to deify the martyred president. Republicans couldn’t go wrong waving the bloody shirt. At the same time the Lost Cause narrative was gaining traction in these years, with such figures as Jubal Early laying the foundation for what would prove to be a remarkably resilient narrative about why the war was fought and how it was lost. We’ve seen the dying throes of this narrative play out in the headlines and cable news shows over the past several weeks.

Hay and Nicolay were very much writing against this narrative, though ironically the Lost Cause was being disseminated in the same place at the same time. While The Century was publishing excerpts from the highly anticipated biography, that magazine was also publishing pieces from Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. B&L was drum and bugle history and sought to give both equal time to the Union and the Confederacy, while strenuously avoiding the cause and consequences of the war. One can only imagine what people were thinking when they read these pieces juxtaposed next to one another, which they did for years. Sometimes Hay and Nicolay could be unfair, especially in their rough handling of General McClellan, who they disliked intensely and were determined to excoriate.

Nicolay and Hay both had long successful careers after the Civil War, including stints overseas in important diplomatic positions. Hay wound up U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, where he did so much to build the special relationship that served the U.S. and Britain so well during the First World War and then through the twentieth and early twenty first century. He was of course later Secretary of State in the McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt Administrations as well, where he continued his important work.

(image by Alexander Gardner taken in studio in Washington, D.C. on November 8, 1863, less than two weeks prior to the Gettysburg Address; Library of Congress.)