Category Archives: Those we remember

Ulysses S. Grant Jr., 1852-1929

22 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by in Governors Island, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Those we remember, Ulysses S. Grant Jr. (Buck)

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Julia Dent Grant with Frederick and Ulysses Jr. in St. Louis, 1854. Lieutenant Grant was in the Pacific Northwest at the time and had not yet met his second son. This daguerreotype was discovered in 2016 and sold at auction in Cincinnati for $18,000.

Ulysses S. Grant Jr., Buck to the family, was born on this day in 1852. By this time his father was on his way to California with the 4th Infantry Regiment and a party of about seven hundred wives and children. The 4th was stationed briefly at Fort Columbus on Governors Island before their trip. Quartermaster Grant went briefly to the District of Columbia to see about supplies. While he was in Washington, Henry Clay—the Great Compromiser—died there, bringing things to a standstill. An empty-handed Grant returned to New York City and the regiment sailed for Panama on July 5.

This photograph of travelers crossing the Isthmus of Panama was taken in the early 1900s. The 4th Infantry crossed in much the same way over half a century earlier. One out of seven who made that trip died of cholera. This danger is why Ulysses and Julia decided the family would instead go to Bethel and then St. Louis.

Remember, the canal did not come into being until Theodore Roosevelt picked up where the French had failed. The Panama Canal opened in August 1914 at almost the same moment the Great War was starting. Instead travelers crossed the Isthmus by mule and wagon. To say that it was a hazardous journey would be an understatement. That is why Ulysses and Julia decided she and young Frederick, just two, would not make the voyage. Instead, they would go to Bethel, Ohio and then Missouri. It is a good thing they didn’t; one hundred people in the 4th Infantry’s party died of cholera. The pregnant Julia and the toddler Frederick might well have become two more victims. Instead Julia gave birth to young Ulysses in Bethel. Lieutenant Grant did not learn this until the mail finally reached the 4th Infantry at Fort Vancouver (Columbia Barracks) just before the new year.

(images/top, unknown photographer, taken in St. Louis (Cowan’s Auctions) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; bottom, Library of Congress)

Percy Grainger, 1882-1961

12 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in Governors Island, Guest Posts, Jazz, New York City, Those we remember

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My good friend Molly Skardon, a fellow volunteer with the National Park Service here in New York City, wrote this guest piece about Percy Grainger, who was born this week in 1882. The musician and composer was already in his 30s when the war broke out in 1914. The next five years however would prove crucial in his personal and artistic development. Molly is uniquely suited to writing about Grainger. She has run the Oral History Project at Governors Island for many years and has interviewed many Army band musicians who were stationed on the island. She also works at Juilliard. New York City was the focal point for the American war effort, and even then becoming a nexus for the nascent jazz scene.

Happy Birthday to Australian musician Percy Grainger, born July 8, 1882. Grainger was pursuing an international career as a pianist and composer when the Great War began in Europe. Publicly criticized for not joining the British war effort, he sailed for America in 1915 and enlisted in the U.S. Army in June 1917, at age 34.

His first Army assignment was with the 15th Coast Artillery Band, stationed at Fort Hamilton, which is the ensemble pictured above. Grainger is the saxophonist in the center, above the small white X. Since it appears to have been chilly when the picture was taken, the time might be late 1917 or early 1918.

In June of 1918, Grainger came to Governors Island as an instructor in the program founded by the Institute of Musical Art (later part of what is now The Juilliard School) to train Army bandmasters and band musicians. Classroom instruction took place at the Institute, at Broadway and 122nd Street in Manhattan, and performing and conducting were taught on the Island.

Grainger was not particularly skilled on either the saxophone or the oboe, which he also played, but he was fascinated by wind, brass, and percussion instruments and wrote a great deal of music for them in various combinations, thus earning the gratitude of concert and military band players of succeeding generations. However, his most popularly known work is probably “Country Gardens,” an old English tune that he arranged for piano while at Fort Jay, as noted at the end of the published sheet music (“Written out, Fort Jay, Governor’s Island, N.Y., June 29, 1918”).

Grainger was discharged from the Army in 1919, and lived for the rest of his life in White Plains, New York just north of the city.

(image/Library of Congress Bain Collection)

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)

 

Pausing to remember Lincoln in 1918

15 Sunday Apr 2018

Posted by in Memory, Monuments and Statuary, New York City, Those we remember

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Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 14, 1918

New Yorkers stopped what they were doing in mid-April 1918 to remember the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It is important to remember that Lincoln’s death was still within living memory for many Americans; it had only occurred fifty-three years previously. With so many young men now in training camps and soon to be on their way to France, the Lincoln commemoration was muted. As the headline here shows, the Brooklyn Riding and Driving Club remembered both Washington and Lincoln at its 27th annual dinner on Saturday 13 April. Present for that event at the Montauk Club were officers from the British and French Armies. During a toast to men for the BRDC who had joined the AEF, one poilu reflected “The German [1918 spring] offensive is to be taken seriously but the real days of anxiety were the days of 1914. Now we know that you are rushing troops to our aid. Then it was a question of ‘to be; or not to be.”

Lincoln was being remembered throughout the city that weekend. In its April 14 edition the New York Times published recently discovered letters by Lincoln and Robert E. Lee. Maybe I am reading too much into it, but it could be that in presenting letters from both Lincoln and Lee the Times sought to balance regional sympathies. That day the Calvary M.E. Church in Harlem hosted Laura D. Prisk, who for the past several years was pushing to officially designate June 14 as Flag Day. (That came to pass in 1949.) There were many veterans from the Grand Army of the Republic on hand to see Mrs. Prisk and others talk about the ongoing war in Europe. Prisk proclaimed that “Much attention is being payed to the long-range gun of the Hun but the real long-range gun is that of America, reaching 3,000 miles to the battle line.” Prisk was in attendance again the next day when she laid a wreath and spoke at the Lincoln statue in Union Square. On hand were sailors from the USS Recruit, the depot established in Union Square the previous May to sell liberty bonds and spur enlistment.

 

 

Thinking of Phillis Wheatley during National Poetry Month

11 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Those we remember, Writing

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Dr. David Waldstreicher opened discussing the Phillis Wheatley statue that stands on Beacon Street in Boston.

About 10-12 years ago I was having coffee with someone from work when we somehow got on the topic of Classic Studies. I mentioned that in today’s world the study of Classical Antiquity and Literature has been de-emphasized, to our detriment. I included myself in the category of those whose knowledge about these fields is woefully inadequate. That now-long-ago conversation came back to me last night when a friend and I went to the CUNY Graduate Center to hear historian David Waldstreicher discuss the progress of his current project, a biography of African-American poet Phillis Wheatley. Dr. Waldstreicher specifically mentioned our current generation’s lack of Classical Education. That so few people–again, myself included–have read the works of Virgil, Herodotus and others prevents contemporary readers from fully understanding the works of poets such a Ms. Wheatley, who incorporated themes from ancient texts into her own work.

Dr. David Waldstreicher shows the audience an image of Wheatley’s writing with Thomas Jefferson’s hand-written notes on the bottom.

Dr. Waldstreicher said during his talk that for his biography of Wheatley he has had to educate himself in two areas about which he previously knew little, the Greek and Roman Classics & West African History. Wheatley herself had come from West Africa and later self-educated herself in the Classics. These experiences were pillars in her writing. It was impressive the way Professor Waldstreicher pulled all these threads together during his talk. In passing, he mentioned Jonathan Williams, Benjamin Franklin’s grand-nephew who was the first superintendent of West Point and who shortly after that worked on the forts at Governors Island. I spoke to Dr. Waldstreicher after his talk and mentioned these Williams’s connections. He seemed duly impressed.

Waldstreicher is a Distinguished Professor of History in the Graduate Center and an authority on slavery in the early years of the Republic. He did an extraordinary job explaining the fluidity of slavery in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century American society and how it differed from bondsmanship in the Caribbean and Brazil, and later in the United States. Apparently that his talk fell during National Poetry Month was a coincidence. If it was, it proved to be a fortunate one. The lecture gave the audience a great deal to think about, which was obvious in the number of questions asked during the Q&A period, which ran long. That’s the true sign that a speaker has engaged his audience well.

April 4, 1968

04 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Memory, Those we remember, Woodrow Wilson

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Ronald Reagan signed the bill creating the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in November 1983, fifteen years after King’s death.

I would be remiss if I did not pause and write a few words on this, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I was less than a year old when he was killed in Memphis. Oddly however, the older I get the more events like this seem less like “history” and more like current events. Here in full-blown middle-age, my entire concept of time has evolved. When my father was alive he lived within a few hour’s drive from Memphis. I visited each summer I would usually borrow his car and take an overnight side trip to somewhere or other. More than once that place was Memphis. I visited the Lorraine Hotel, site of the King assassination and home today to the National Civil Rights Museum, more than once. Walking in the vicinity one could see the empty lots that were the results of the riots and, later, urban renewal. I have not been there now in many years, but I believe that gentrification is at last moving things along.

I remember when MLK Jr. Day became a holiday in the early 1980s. Again, at the time I thought his death was part of some ancient past, and yet the creation of the holiday was only fifteen years after the shooting. The evolution of the holiday itself has a convoluted history, one mired in national and even international events. A search of the New York Times digital archive from 1983 pulls up all kinds of articles about the unresolved issues of the Civil Rights Movement as well as commentary from TASS, the Soviet news agency, offering their cynical take on the drama of the holiday hanging in the balance. When King was assassinated the Tet Offensive was in its fifth week. Bobby Kennedy gave the eulogy for King and would himself be assassinated two months later. All that spring and summer there were riots and political upheaval across the United States, in Paris, Czechoslovakia, and Mexico City just before the Summer Olympics.

Viewed a certain way, King’s activities can be seen in the context of the World Wars. His assassination came just fifty years after Woodrow Wilson issued his Fourteen Points, and twenty-seven years after FDR announced the Four Freedoms in his January 1941 State of the Union address. King knew these things. It is not an accident that the Civil Rights Movement here in the U.S., and Independence Movements around the world, developed how and when they did. One can’t help but think of things like Ho Chi Minh at Versailles after the Armistice pleading his case for an independent Vietnam. King was reluctant to speak publicly against Lyndon Johnson because of all the president had done for Civil Rights, but in the year before his assassination King’s denunciations of the war in Southeast Asia became increasingly strident. In the library where I work, over the past fifteen years, a colleague and I have been ordering the King Papers as they have incrementally released. The historiography on the release of someone’s correspondence is itself a fascinating genre. History is a humbling thing and the deeper one goes the more one sees the relationships between what are very complicated events.

(image/White House Photo Office)

Abraham Graff, 1828?-1865

31 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by in ACW, Theodore Roosevelt Sr (Father), Those we remember

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Private Abraham Graff died 153 years ago today. As you can see from the muster roll above, Graff served in the 7th Veteran Infantry Regiment. This unit mustered in just in time to serve in Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign. Graff himself did not see action in that bloody ordeal, having joined the Army on June 25, 1864. He was in Virginia for the Siege of Petersburg. What makes him interesting here, beyond that his was a life cut short, is how and why he entered the unit: Abraham Graff was Theodore Roosevelt Sr.’s replacement in the American Civil War.

Passenger manifest from the Amalie listing an Abraham Graf arriving in New York City on June 23, 1864.

Little is known about Graff. We do know however that he was a German immigrant who had just come to the United States. I cannot tell with 100% certainty but the passenger manifest above lists an Abraham Graf having arrived in New York City on June 23, 1864, two days before “our” Graff mustered in. The last name is spelled differently (with one F here) and the age may be off a year or two according to what we know, but these types of things are not uncommon in historical records. We do know that the Abraham Graff that took Roosevelt’s place was freshly-arrived. This may well be our person. How many Abraham Graff’s could have come from Germany that same week or month?

Private Abraham Graff’s death certificate, complete with notation that he was Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.’s) substitute. Note that it lists the house number as 33 East 20th Street, not 28 as we know it today.

Graff’s Civil War experience was a difficult one. He was taken prisoner, let go, and died of scurvy in a Union hospital in Maryland on March 31, 1865.

FDR, 1882-1945

30 Tuesday Jan 2018

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Those we remember

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The desk Franklin Delano Roosevelt kept in the family’s East 65th Street townhouse

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on this date in 1882. On these winter days I sometimes think of the coming summer, when among other things I usually make a day trip to Hyde Park. When I was there last summer I asked the ranger if the site does something every January 30 to commemorate the occasion of the only four term president’s birth. She said the library & museum hold a brief ceremony every year, often with a contingent from the West Point Band just down the Hudson on hand to play. She emphasized the brevity of the ceremony. The winds blowing cold off the river in late January make a longer event untenable.

The photograph of the desk you see above was not taken in Hyde Park. I took the photo this past November at the Roosevelt House on East 65th Street. I sent the image to a friend of mine the night I took this. He was shocked at how modest and unadorned the desk was. I explained that, for all the wealth the Roosevelts had, they tended toward Dutch restraint. Roosevelt once famously said while president that he did not want a memorial in his honor after his death to be any larger than his desk. They honored that request in the mid 1960s. That it took twenty years to build even such a modest edifice is testimony to how long these things take.

When we think of the Hudson River Roosevelts we think of Hyde Park and Washington. Over course there were the twelve White House years. Thirty years before then, during the First World War when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin and Eleanor rented a house from her Aunt Bamie just off Dupont Circle. Still the Manhattan home, with his mother Sara living next door in a detached townhouse, was very much the family domicile for large stretches throughout their lives. I kept the image above in my photo stream for the past 2 1/2 months waiting until this winter day to mark the 136th anniversary of FDR’s brith.