18 Sunday Jun 2017
Posted in New York City
≈ Comments Off on Union Square’s Great War
Mabel Garrison aboard the Recruit
Happy Father’s Day. They have posted my article about the U.S.S. Recruit over at Roads to the Great War. Enjoy.
(image/Library of Congress)
30 Tuesday May 2017
Posted in Memory, Monuments and Statuary, Museums, New York City
I was at the Brooklyn Museum of Art this afternoon to meet with officials about the walking tour I am doing on Sunday 11 June from 12:00 – 1:00 pm for the museum. The idea was to do a walkthrough of the presentation to see if it fits into the time slot and to decide if any changes or additions might be in order. I ran two people though the walking tour, and we had a fun and productive time running though the thing. I got some good feedback as well. There is nothing like the live audience to keep you humble. Grand Army Plaza was laid out by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted in the years just after the Civil War. The area is one of the places of Civil War memory not just in New York but in the United States. So many people walk past it all every day with no idea. I am looking forward to this event.
30 Tuesday May 2017
Posted in Charles S. Whitman (Governor), J. Franklin Bell (General), John Purroy Mitchel, New York City, Preparedness (WW1), Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)
≈ Comments Off on Decoration Day 1917, cont’d
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.)
29 Monday May 2017
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)
28 Sunday May 2017
Posted in Heritage tourism, Memory, Monuments and Statuary, New York City
≈ Comments Off on Sunday morning coffee
I read with sadness yesterday about the death of Greg Allman. He was the second from the Allman Brothers Band to die in 2017. Drummer Butch Trucks committed suicide in January. I am listening to Live at the Fillmore East as I type this. Personally I never thought the band was the same after the 1971 death of Duane Allman in a motorcycle accident. The band was still tight and had its moments but Duane was the true artist. The death of his younger brother is nonetheless sad. Seeing them play during one of their annual month-long stints each March at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side was something I always thought about but never got around to doing. Now that will never happen.
I was in Green-Wood Cemetery yesterday playing tour guide for a friend. Afterward we had lunch in an Italian restaurant near the 5th Avenue entrance. The cemetery was buzzing with activity. There were at least three funerals happening all at once. Perhaps there were so many because the officials and families usually do not hold burials during the winter months. Instead the departed are kept in a temporary resting place before final interment come spring. I came across the trailer you see above on my way through the cemetery to see my friend. It’s a hearse on motorcycle. I had a ten minute talk with the fellow responsible for the vehicle. He said that about eighty people on motorcycles were to be in the procession. Sure enough, we saw the motorcade go by about an hour later.
Hubert V W Card’s headstone and weathered flag from a past ceremony. Boy Scouts were out in force yesterday putting fresh flags on the headstones of other veterans in preparation for Memorial Day.
Leaving the house yesterday, I ran into my neighbor walking her dog. I explained that I was meeting a friend in the cemetery and that Green-Wood has been a focus of Decoration/Memorial Day observations going back almost a century and a half. I saw teams of Boy Scouts putting flags on veterans’ headstones. One of them even offered me a flag but I said no thank you, figuring the banners were meant for the veterans themselves. I wanted to take a picture of the flag planting but it didn’t seem appropriate. When I got to the other side I saw that cemetery workers had already set up the tents for tomorrow’s Memorial Day program. As I said remembrance events in Green-Wood date back to the Grand Army of the Republic’s call for a Decoration Day in the late 1860s. GAR veterans were joined by soldiers from the Spanish-American War, the Great War, and our other engagements in subsequent decades.
One thing I have always wondered is if there was a drop-off in Memorial Day ceremonies in such New York City places as Green-Wood Cemetery in previous decades. There was a demographic shift from New York City to the suburbs and the Sun Belt in the 1950s-1990s, which took many veterans and their families away from Brooklyn and the other boroughs. It would seem too that the hard years of the 1970s and 1980s would have led to a drop-off in heritage tourism and public ceremony even in gated places like Green-Wood. New Yorkers found their history again in the 1990s when the city itself began revitalizing and became safer. I myself am part of these trends.
Remember that Memorial Day is more than barbecues and a day off.
25 Saturday Mar 2017
Posted in Governors Island, Leonard Wood (General), New York City, Woodrow Wilson
≈ Comments Off on Leonard Wood’s reassignment
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)
22 Wednesday Mar 2017
It was colder than I thought it would be when I met a colleague this morning at the CUNY Graduate Center to take some location footage for our WW1 documentary. We shot here for a bit before moving down to 30th Street to get a better angle to film the Empire State Building. I got my masters degree here over a decade ago. One thing that is so unique about the Grad Center is that it has no campus per se, You felt less detached and more connected to the metropolis that was going on just outside while you were sitting there in class. I always found that comforting and felt it gave what I studied more immediacy. People who know Old New York may recognize this building as the site of the B. Altman’s department store. I believe my grandmother took my aunts here when they would visit the city back in the day. I’m sure they followed their excursions with a trip to the Automat.
Back in Brooklyn we filmed some exteriors at our own campus. Again, the school has that urban feel with a strong energy and so much going on all around it. Speaking of our campus, I received the good news today that our library will almost likely receive a significant Great War display from a particular European organization this coming September-October. If it seems like I am being a little vague that’s because I am. I will go into greater detail when things are truly finalized. I cannot tell you how excited we are about this. The Great War is proving a timely opportunity to raise public awareness of this shared history; with various public officials unduly straining our relations with long time allies, it seems up to those interested in public history to remind the public of the historical ties that bind us to others.
05 Sunday Mar 2017
Posted in New York City, Woodrow Wilson, WW1
≈ Comments Off on Wilson’s second term begins
This grainy image captures the cold and grim mood in Washington as President Wilson (top hat, in carriage) attends the ceremony for his second inaugural on 5 March 1917.
Woodrow Wilson’s second inaugural was one hundred years ago today. As then stipulated by the Constitution he had actually taken the oath the day before, Sunday 4 March, in a small ceremony in the Capitol building observed by his wife Edith, a few cabinet members, and some close friends. It was the fourth time in American history that the inaugural had fallen on a Sunday with public ceremonies thus moved to the following day. In a strange parallel to the 2017 inaugural there was a woman’s march taking place a well, with suffragists coming from around the country to press their cause as Wilson was to begin his second term. The final week of Wilson’s first term had been a tense one. It was ironic that Wilson was taking the oath there and then in that small chamber just after the noon hour on 4 March; when Wilson had arrived at the Capitol earlier that morning, Senator Robert M. La Follette was still successfully filibustering the Armed Ship Bill that would have given President Wilson the authority to arm merchant vessels in defense against German u-boat attacks. When the Sixty-Fourth Congress officially came to an end at the noon hour, so did the hopes for passage of the Armed Ship Bill.
New York City mayor John Purroy Mitchel reached out to President Wilson as the president began his second term.
It had been a trying final week for Wilson On 1 March the Zimmerman Telegram had been made public to the American people. The German secret communiqué to Mexico with its offers of potentially reclaiming lands lost during the Mexican-American War fell on sympathetic ears, especially after the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution, subsequent occupation of Veracruz, and border skirmishes with Pancho Villa. The international scene was a tinderbox, and Wilson’s inaugural was understandably a grim one. Surprisingly he got a little help from an unexpected source, Mayor John Purroy Mitchel of New York City. Mitchel had been active in the Preparedness Movement with Leonard Wood, Theodore Roosevelt and other for some time and thus not a natural ally of Wilson’s. Still Mayor Mitchel reached out to the president on the day of the inaugural offering the administration the use of New York City’s civilian piers as well as full cooperation for use of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and other maritime facilities. Securing New York’s hundreds of miles of water and shorelines was of paramount importance.
(images/top, Library of Congress; bottom, the Brown Brothers for The World’s Work.)
10 Tuesday Jan 2017
Posted in New York City
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 25 January 1946
I got back from vacation today. I was actually in the Ft Lauderdale airport this morning on my way back from my destination. I had passed through it just two days prior to the events of the late last week. Lines were long in places but authorities had things in hand and moving quickly.
With the holidays now fully in the rearview mirror I am looking forward to a fun and productive 2017. I don’t want to give way too much right now, but as things move along I’ll talk more here about various endeavors I have in the works, some in collaboration with others. I’m excited and a little nervous, as if I’m working without a net. That said, I am confident that with hard work and good preparation things will work out as expected. I’m thankful I have interesting projects to work on. I thought I share the above photo of the USS New York leaving the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1946 on its way to the 1946 atomic bomb testing in the Pacific. I find the grainy imagery to be striking. Anyways, here is to a good 2017. Enjoy these winter days.
01 Sunday Jan 2017
Posted in New York City, WW1
American newspapers captured the mood of early January 1917.
I have a candle going and am sitting here with my New Years Day coffee.
It was such a help when the Brooklyn Public Library digitized and published the first half of the BDE morgue’s run about 10-12 years ago. When they completed the second half of that project a few years later, things because even better. I always knew that the Eagle was Brooklyn’s paper of record from 1841-1955, but I don’t think I truly realized how authoritative the periodical was until earlier this past year when I began co-teaching my course and using it so heavily in the classroom. New York with its dozen or so dailies was always a newspaper town–the newspaper town–until the papers began consolidating in the 1950s. By the 80s and 90s only three were left. I suppose I always thought of the Eagle as separate from New York’s newspaper culture because Brooklyn until fairly recently was markedly distinct from Manhattan. The answer is probably not that difficult to earn, I don’t even know if they sold the Eagle in Manhattan.
In its 3 January 1917 edition the Eagle published a series of cartoons that other papers had printed in the days around the turn of the year. The one above in particular caught my attention. It may seem that 2016 with its crazy election season and so many other things was the worst of times, but for perspective remember that a century earlier was the year of Verdun and Somme. When the new year came in 1917 there was still no end in sight for what this cartoon pointedly calls the European War. The Americans did not enter the conflict until April.
Happy New Year. Enjoy your day.
(image/Brooklyn Daily Eagle)
The Strawfoot 