Category Archives: Preparedness (WW1)

Sunday morning coffee

22 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by in Preparedness (WW1), Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Woodrow Wilson, WW1

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Senator Hiram W. Johnson was a founder of the Progressive Party. In 1912 he ran with Theodore Roosevelt on the Bull Moose ticket against Wilson, Taft, and Debs. After the Great War Johnson helped killed U.S. entry into the League of Nations.

I’m gearing up here in my home office to get some writing done on an article. The project is taking a little longer than I wanted but it will get down in due time. The laundry will get thrown in somewhere along the way as well.

I received an email yesterday from Mike Hanlon at Roads to the Great War, who let me know that they published my piece about Henry A. Wise Wood and the League for the Preservation of American Independence. I’ll let one read the entire thing if inclined, but in a nutshell Wood and like-minded individuals such as Senator Hiram Johnson did everything in their power to kill Woodrow Wilson’s Covenant for the League of Nations.

I don’t want to go into any details here, but some colleagues and I at work received some exciting new this past Friday about a public history project for which we submitted a proposal. We heard that ours was one of the winners. Now comes the task of ironing out some logistics and putting the thing together. When the time comes, I will share more.

Enjoy your Sunday.

(image/Library of Congress)

Versailles

28 Friday Jun 2019

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Great War centennial, Preparedness (WW1), Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Woodrow Wilson

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Summer has come full on. I was off today and had the windows open and fan on as I worked on an article I’m doing about Eleanor Roosevelt. I’ve got about 400 in the books and hope to write another 400 or so this evening before declaring victory. I would be remiss if I did not pause and note that today, June 28, 2019, is the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors. I don’t intend to write too much about it right now because there is already so much good reading out there today. For now I though I would emphasize the quickness and degree to which resistance to the treaty, especially its covenant for a League of Nations, had manifested itself even before the ink had dried.

Henry A. Wise Wood, the son of Civil War Era New York City mayor Fernando Wood, led the campaign against the League of Nations the very day of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

One hundred years ago tonight the League for the Preservation of American Independence held a rally in New York City’s Carnegie Hall. One of the American Independence League’s leaders was Henry A. Wise Wood, an engineer and inventor who had been active in the Preparedness Movement with Theodore Roosevelt and others in the Great War’s early years before American entry into the conflict. Born in 1866, Wood was the son of three-time New York City mayor Fernando Wood. The League for the Preservation of American Independence enjoyed tremendous popularity and easily filled Carnegie Hall that night in protest against Wilson, the Versailles Treaty, and prospective League of Nations. A spinout crowd gathered outside on the sidewalk. Wood asked that the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt fill the hall.

TR had died almost six months previously but almost certainly would have opposed the League of Nations. One Roosevelt who did support it was Franklin, who when he ran for the vice-presidency in 1920 advocated for the League. FDR’s position may or may not have been opportunism based on loyalty to Wilson and the knowledge that, because he and running mate Jacob M. Cox would likely lose the election, he could take a position confident in never having to carry it out. Franklin D. Roosevelt did learn the lesson of the failures of Versailles however, and when he became commander-in-chief began pushing for what became the United Nations a quarter of a century later.

(image/Library of Congress)

 

Fiorello La Guardia’s Memorial Days

26 Sunday May 2019

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), John Purroy Mitchel, Memory, New York City, Preparedness (WW1)

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I hope everyone’s Memorial Day Weekend is going well. I’m meeting someone on the far end of Green-Wood Cemetery in about an hour. We’re going to explore the cemetery and then get lunch before the true heat of late spring kicks in. We submitted final grades the other day but there is still some detail work and mopping up in the coming days as we cap off the academic year. I started John Strausbaugh’s Victory City: A History of New York and New Yorkers During World War II. Last year after completing the manuscript for Incorporating New York I read his 2016 book about Civil War New York. I intentionally held off on reading it until finishing the draft of INY because I wanted to follow my own vision for the narrative and did not want others’ ideas seeping in.

I am profiting greatly from reading Victory City, which voters many of the themes my colleague and I covered with our class this just-concluded semester. One of the major figures–how could he not be?-of the book is Fiorello La Guardia. I know so much more about La Guardia than I did at the beginning of the calendar year. I thought in recognition of Memorial Day Weekend I would re-up this post from last year.

General Wladyslaw Sikorski (saluting) with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia (right) at New York City Hall, 1942

John Purroy Mitchel, New York’s boy mayor, died 100 years ago this coming July. Mitchel was in office from 1914-17, thus overlapping almost entirely with the early years of the Great War. Mitchel was a proponent of Preparedness and as such became a natural ally of Theodore Roosevelt, Leonard Wood, and others advocating for American readiness to join the fight. After Mitchel left office he joined the Army Air Service and was killed in Lake Charles, Louisiana when he fell out of an airplane during a training exercise in July 1918. Friends dedicated a memorial to him in Central Park near 90th Street and Fifth Avenue in November 1928. For years, especially throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Mitchel monument was a focal point of Memorial Day commemorations in New York City. One regular attendee was Fiorello La Guardia, who over the course of his tenure in office from 1934-45 observed at least nine of twelve Memorial Days at the monument to his mayoral forerunner, Fusion Party associate, and fellow World War 1 aviator.

New York Times, May 31, 1934: La Guardia is second from the right.

The photograph above shows La Guardia at the Mitchel monument on Memorial Day 1934. This would have been just over a year into the FDR Administration and with the Great Depression in full effect. This was also La Guardia’s first Memorial Day as mayor. There were still Civil War veterans marching in New York City’s Memorial Day parades in these years, about 25 this year. In the years after this their numbers dwindled into the single digits.

New York Times, May 31, 1944: La Guardia was pressing for full Axis surrender in the tense days before the Normandy Invasion.

The headline here in which La Guardia advocates for an “aviator’s peace” comes from the 1944 Memorial Day observation. While obviously the public did not know the exact day that the offensive to liberate France would begin, Memorial Day 1944 took place one week before D-Day. Thus we see La Guardia pressing for all out victory. Poignantly, 1944 also happened to be the first year that a Civil War veterans did not participate in Manhattan’s Memorial Day observation. Brooklyn and Queens each had one G.A.R. veteran in the ranks. Spanish-American War veterans, doughboys from the First World War now well into middle age, and active duty servicepersons including WACS, WAVES, and SPARS were all represented.

La Guardia was on hand again at the Mitchel memorial on Memorial Day 1945. He had gotten his “aviator’s peace,” at least in Europe. By Memorial Day 1945 V-E Day had passed and everyone was waiting anxiously to see what would happen in the Pacific.

(top image/NYPL)

Sunday morning coffee

09 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by in John Purroy Mitchel, Leonard Wood (General), Lusitania, Preparedness (WW1), Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Woodrow Wilson

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I am having my coffee and a bite to eat before heading off to the Tomb. I see it is raining. It is too early to tell how it might effect the event at Sakura Park that runs from 12:00 – 8:00. I am watching the progress of Hurricane Florence as well. In addition to the terrible havoc it might unleash on many lives and communities, it may effect next week’s Camp Doughboy weekend on Governors Island. We will keep our fingers crossed that the Florence, and the storm building behind it, do not turn into major tragedies.

You Can’t Raise Two Flags at Once, Brooklyn Daily Eagle August 9, 1915

I was gathering my notes yesterday for next week’s talk about John Purroy Mitchel and came across this political cartoon which I thought I would quickly share. It is from the August 9, 1915 Brooklyn Daily Eagle and, coincidentally or not, is positioned next to an article about Mitchel’s participation in the Plattsburg training camp that summer. The cartoon shows Theodore Roosevelt explaining the dangers of what he and his supporters called hyphenated-Americanism during the Great War. The United States was not yet in the war when this cartoon was published. This was, however, just three months after the sinking of the Lusitania. The tension between Roosevelt, General Leonard Wood, Mayor Mitchel and other Preparedness advocates against President Wilson was building.

Just a few weeks after this cartoon appeared Roosevelt gave a controversial speech at Plattsburg taking the Wilson Administration to task for what he saw as its poor response to the war. General Wood was in attendance in Plattsburg with Roosevelt and later reprimanded by Secretary of War Lindley Garrison.

John Mitchel, Irish nationalist

08 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by in Governors Island, John Purroy Mitchel, New York City, Preparedness (WW1), Reconstruction, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

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Irish nationalist John Mitchel was put on trial in 1848 and eventually sentenced to “transportation” to Tasmania. He escaped to New York City and eventually moved South to support the Confederate cause. Seventy years later his grandson would be killed in a military training exercise getting ready to go to France to fight in the First World War.

Over the past few days I have been drafting the outline for my talk at next week’s Camp Doughboy weekend on Governors Island about John Purroy Mitchel. When I have more details I will share them here. Some may recall that in early July I wrote a piece for Roads to the Great War for the 100th anniversary of his death. Space constraints prevented me from going deeper into the Mitchell family than I would have liked. JP Mitchel was the grandson and namesake of famed Irish nationalist John MItchel. Mitchel the Elder was born in 1815 and put on trial by the British in 1848 when Ireland was in turmoil during the failed European revolutions of that year. He was sentenced to exile–what at the time was called “transportation”–to the Australian outpost Van Diemen’s Land, what we today call Tasmania. There on the Van Diemen penal colony too was Thomas Francis Meagher.

Mitchel and Meagher independently escaped to New York City. Mitchel ended up Brooklyn, living on Union Street and working as a journalist when he wrote his memoir Jail Journal; or Five Years in British Prisons. As the secession crisis heat up he eventually took his family down south, first to Tennessee and as the war went on to Richmond. Mitchel is testimony to the notion that life and humans are complicated; throughout his life he remained engaged in the Irish freedom struggle but was a staunch defender of slavery and the Confederacy. Mitchel was all in for the Confederate cause and all three of his sons served. Ironically two of the boys fought against the Meagher’s Irish Brigade at Fredericksburg in December 1862. One of Mitchel’s sons was killed in Pickett’s Charge near the Codori farm and another died while commanding Fort Sumter in 1864. The third, James, was wounded several times and lost an arm. Mitchel worked as a journalist for several Southern papers supporting President Davis. Ulysses S. Grant because a frequent foil after the general moved east in 1864. As the war wound down Mitchel escaped Richmond with Jefferson Davis’s entourage but was eventually captured and held at Fort Monroe before being released late in 1865. He soon became an editor with Benjamin and Fernando Wood’s New York Daily News, a Democratic vehicle that had given Lincoln much grief during the war and afterward turned it wrath on Reconstruction.

Mayor John Purroy Mitchel (center in top hat) and Cardinal John Murphy Farley reviewing St Patrick’s Day parade, March 17, 1914

John Purroy Mitchell was born in the Bronx in 1879, four years after his grandfather’s death. For reasons that are not clear to me, JP Mitchel was raised Catholic whereas his grandfather had been a Presbyterian. These were not small matters in Irish and Irish-American communities. I am assuming the Catholicism came from his mother’s side; the Purroys were Catholics who had come to New York City from Venezuela. I’m not going to rehash the Mitchel story here, though I probably will go into it more over the coming week as we get closer to Camp Doughboy. By the time he became mayor of New York City in January 1914 John Purroy Mitchel was thoroughly engaged in the Reform movement to clean up government. When war came later that year he was one of the earliest advocated for American Preparedness. It is intriguing to think of Mitchel being so actively engaged in the Preparedness Movement. Many Irish and Irish-Americans supported the Germans because they were fighting the British.

Like his grandfather during the American Civil War however, John Purroy Mitchel was all in for the Allied cause, eventually giving his own life on that Louisiana air field in July 1918. The world is indeed a complicated place.

(top image from The Citizen uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Domer48; bottom, Library of Congress)

John Purroy Mitchel, 1879-1918

06 Friday Jul 2018

Posted by in John Purroy Mitchel, Leonard Wood (General), Lusitania, Memory, New York City, Preparedness (WW1), Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Those we remember, Woodrow Wilson

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Major John Purroy Mitchel in pilot gear, 1918

The have my article up and running over at Roads to the Great War about the life, times, and death of John Purroy Mitchel. New York City’s Boy Mayor was all of thirty-four when he became mayor in 1914. Initially he was an ally of Woodrow Wilson, who in 1913 had appointed him Collector of the Port of New York. Men like Chester Arthur had previously held the collectorship. Mitchel and Wilson soon had a falling out over what the mayor saw as the president’s poor leadership during the war. Soon, Mitchel was very publicly allying with friends like Theodore Roosevelt and Leonard Wood advocating for Preparedness. When he lost his re-election bid, Mitchel became a military aviator. He died in a flight exercise in Louisiana on July 6, 1918, one hundred years ago today.

(image/courtesy of Margaret Maloney via Wikimedia Commons)

 

Fiorello La Guardia’s Memorial Days

28 Monday May 2018

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Purroy Mitchel, Memory, New York City, Preparedness (WW1)

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John Purroy Mitchel, New York’s boy mayor, died 100 years ago this coming July. Mitchel was in office from 1914-17, thus overlapping almost entirely with the early years of the Great War. Mitchel was a proponent of Preparedness and as such became a natural ally of Theodore Roosevelt, Leonard Wood, and others advocating for American readiness to join the fight. After Mitchel left office he joined the Army Air Service and was killed in Lake Charles, Louisiana when he fell out of an airplane during a training exercise in July 1918. Friends dedicated a memorial to him in Central Park near 90th Street and Fifth Avenue in November 1928. For years, especially throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Mitchel monument was a focal point of Memorial Day commemorations in New York City. One regular attendee was Fiorello La Guardia, who over the course of his tenure in office from 1934-45 observed at least nine of twelve Memorial Days at the monument to his mayoral forerunner, Fusion Party associate, and fellow World War 1 aviator.

New York Times, May 31, 1934: La Guardia is second from the right.

The photograph above shows La Guardia at the Mitchel monument on Memorial Day 1934. This would have been just over a year into the FDR Administration and with the Great Depression in full effect. This was also La Guardia’s first Memorial Day as mayor. There were still Civil War veterans marching in New York City’s Memorial Day parades in these years, about 25 this year. In the years after this their numbers dwindled into the single digits.

New York Times, May 31, 1944: La Guardia was pressing for full Axis surrender in the tense days before the Normandy Invasion.

The headline here in which La Guardia advocates for an “aviator’s peace” comes from the 1944 Memorial Day observation. While obviously the public did not know the exact day that the offensive to liberate France would begin, Memorial Day 1944 took place one week before D-Day. Thus we see La Guardia pressing for all out victory. Poignantly, 1944 also happened to be the first year that a Civil War veterans did not participate in Manhattan’s Memorial Day observation. Brooklyn and Queens each had one G.A.R. veteran in the ranks. Spanish-American War veterans, doughboys from the First World War now well into middle age, and active duty servicepersons including WACS, WAVES, and SPARS were all represented.

La Guardia was on hand again at the Mitchel memorial on Memorial Day 1945. He had gotten his “aviator’s peace,” at least in Europe. By Memorial Day 1945 V-E Day had passed and everyone was waiting anxiously to see what would happen in the Pacific.

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.)

 

Augustus Peabody Gardner, part one

16 Tuesday May 2017

Posted by in Leonard Wood (General), Preparedness (WW1), Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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Congressman Alexander Peabody Gardner (D-MA) was on the golf course in 1916 but back in a military uniform one year later. In May 1917 he was appointed a colonel in the Army.

In Sunday’s post I mentioned Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to raise four divisions to fight the Germans in the Great War. Two of the major players in that episode were Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and his son-in-law Augustus Peabody Gardner. Lodge and Peabody were Boston Brahmins, part of a world that Roosevelt came to know in the late 1870s while attending Harvard. The names say it all: Lodge, Peabody, Gardner. I am not sure how Augustus is related to Isabella Stewart Gardner, the founder of the museum that bears her name, but the connection is there somewhere. I intend to do a deeper dive on A.P. Gardner later in the centennial, but today I wanted to pause and note something I found to be of great interest: it was one hundred years ago today that he left the United States House of Representative to return to military service.

Augustus Gardner had been a congressman for fifteen years. Before that he had served in the Spanish-American War. Gardner resigned on May 16 and returned immediately to the Officers’ Reserve Corps. Apparently the original plan was to join Major General Leonard Wood’s command in Charleston, South Carolina before going on to France. He was wasting no time. Less than ten days after stepping down, Gardner was stationed for the time being not in the Palmetto State but in New York Harbor at Governors Island. He wrote his wife on May 25 from the Department of the East explaining that he had a small billet in the officers club. He seemed eager to back in uniform but complained that the Army Band was having a soirée just outside. The noise chased him out of his quarters and back to the desk in the Adjutant’s office. Gardner was one of the earliest proponents of Preparedness and knew most of the major players in the movement, including obviously Wood and Roosevelt. With the United States officially in the war and the American military apparatus now gearing up, he was again in an officer’s uniform. He seemed eager to get down to it. In the letter to his better half he explained that he probably would not be leaving the island much because he wanted to focus on the tasks at hand.

(image/Library of Congress)

Preparing for war in Brooklyn

17 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by in Great War centennial, Preparedness (WW1)

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Originally the City Hall of the independent municipality of Brooklyn, Borough Hall was where the Brooklyn Section of Mayor Mitchel’s Committee on National Defense appointed Dykman to be chair on 17 April 1917. The wider commiitee held its meetings at the Manhattan Municipal Building.

Colonel William N. Dykman was appointed chairman of the executive committee for the Brooklyn Section of Mayor John Purroy Mitchel’s Committee on National Defense one hundred years ago today. The meeting of two dozen committee members met at Brooklyn’s Borough Hall, though oddly enough Dykman himself was not in attendance. That his colleagues would appoint him in absentia leads one to think he had agreed to take the post in advance. Mayor Mitchel’s National Defense Committee dated back to November 1915, when pacifist sentiment was strong in the United States. Cleveland H. Dodge, Elihu, Root, and Al Smith were just some of the prominent New Yorkers involved in the Mayor’s Committee on National Defense (MCND). The mayor’s group was an offshoot of Governors Charles S. Whitman’s New York State Committee on National Defense, which had been formed in late October 1915. The now aged Joseph H. Choate brought the statewide principals together at a meeting a few weeks later to see about creating a committee specific to New York City.

The Mayor’s Committee on National Defense advocated for preparedness in the 1 1/2 year lead-up to American involvement in the First World War. Lest one forget however, the United States had been involved in another expedition in the meanwhile; from March 1916 to February 1917 a Regular Army force of 15,000 supported by at least 100,000 National Guardsmen were engaged on the Mexican border. Of the National Guard troops, about 10,000 were from the Empire State. The Mayor’s Committee was determined to learn from the mistakes of the Mexican Punitive Expedition. One way it did this was by conducting a survey of the Guardsmen’s experience. This included questionnaires asking the troops what most frustrated them during their deployment to Texas, as well as a study of the Guardsmen’s civilian employers. The Committee was interested in such things as if the men received civilian pay when called to active service, if their jobs were held for them, and the disposition of civilian employers to losing workers to the call-up. Dykman had been active in all of these endeavors and was eager to put this knowledge to practical use in what would be the significantly larger task of training and equipping men to join the fight in France.