by Theo Emery
Henderson warned that the bureau laboratory would not be adequate for long, though, and the research would soon outgrow the space. Henderson’s own physiological work would require three thousand square feet of lab space alone. “My idea of the situation is, that this is a great big job, an emergency job, not like ordinary research work, where one has a year or two to get underway,” Burrell said. “We are very rapidly going to outgrow the facilities of the Bureau of Mines.”
The solution, it turned out, lay only a few miles up Massachusetts Avenue, at a small, struggling Methodist college called American University.
On the morning of April 26, the streets around the White House were in an uproar. French vice premier René Viviani and Marshal Joseph Joffre, France’s most senior military officer and the hero of the Battle of the Marne, had arrived in Washington the previous evening and were scheduled to call on President Wilson and Secretary of State Robert Lansing that morning to seal a military pact. French and American flags draped the sides of automobiles, and crowds gathered on the sidewalks to catch a glimpse of the French delegation.
Before the pageantry got under way, Benjamin F. Leighton made his way up the steps and through the colonnades flanking the door of Washington’s Riggs National Bank, less than a block down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. Tall and lean with untamed eyebrows, he was expected at an important meeting of the board of trustees of American University. A devout Methodist from New England, Leighton had been on the university’s board for years as it struggled to establish itself and find its financial footing.
Leighton and the university trustees were meeting at a critical juncture for the school. For a quarter century, their efforts to build the endowment, construct the buildings for their campus, and attract a cosmopolitan student body had stumbled. Officially, the university had been open since 1914, but the war in Europe cast a shadow over its first few years. It boasted only a handful of graduate students, and there was no clear path to enrolling more. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Congress was debating a bill that would institute a military draft for conscripting thousands of soldiers and sailors. Young people destined for the battlefields meant fewer students, and American University couldn’t spare a single one. The trustees needed to ensure that the university could survive the lean war years ahead.
Charles Glover, the president of Riggs Bank and one of Washington’s wealthiest businessmen, was the university treasurer. Riggs had become a cornerstone of Washington power that would declare itself “the most important bank in the most important city in the world,” and Glover’s vast wealth and political leverage were enormous. When it was founded, American University saw its future in similarly grandiose terms—the most important university in the most important city in the world. But unlike the bank, American’s bold aspirations had yet to become a reality.
A sense of divine providence had driven the effort to found American University a quarter century earlier. For years, prominent Methodists had urged Bishop John Fletcher Hurst to start a national university, a center of scholarship to rival Georgetown University and the Catholic University of America, the Roman Catholic universities in the city. The idea had preoccupied the bishop, who saw himself as an agent of George Washington’s divine mission to establish a national university.
Bishop Hurst found the property in early 1890, after plodding across the city on horseback in search of suitable land. The church bought the land for a hundred thousand dollars and began raising money for the endowment in 1890. But despite Hurst’s optimism, one obstacle after another prevented his vision from becoming a reality. Nothing, it seemed, went as planned. Fund-raising flagged. More than a thousand applications for admittance piled up. Methodists across the country, confounded by the endless delays, clamored for the school to open.
American finally opened on a warm, breezy day in late May of 1914, when President Wilson mounted a bunting-draped dais on the campus to dedicate the school. But the campus around him was a shadow of Hurst’s vision, with just a single completed building, the College of History. The exterior of a second building, McKinley Hall, was finished, but the inside remained an empty shell, and the university opened with only twenty-eight graduate students. Barely a month later, an assassin in Sarajevo took the life of Archduke Ferdinand, and Europe plunged into war.
As the school’s board of trustees met to decide the school’s future on April 26, the crowd outside the bank broke out into noisy cheers as Joffre and the delegation arrived at the State, War, and Navy Building, then crossed the street for a brief ceremony at the White House to seal the military pact between the United States and France. The crowd swelled even larger as Joffre returned across the street to meet with Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. When the delegation left the building and drove down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol, pedestrians turned to gape, and cars stopped in the road, flags waving from windows and horns blaring.
When the trustees emerged from the meeting at the bank, they had made a fateful decision: to offer their campus to the federal government to use during the war. The two buildings and the grassy quadrangle between them, the ninety-two acres of wooded dells and meadows at the rear of the campus, would become the domain of the federal government. The grand aspirations for a world-class university, the unflagging belief in divine intervention, fell away in the face of the stark reality that the university faced. Albert Osborn, the board’s treasurer and secretary, wrote a short entry in a chronicle of the university business: “On motion, the executive committee declared that the sentiment of the committee is that the buildings and grounds of the university should be tendered to the Government for such purposes as may be necessary and fit, and that the Chancellor and President of the Board communicate this offer to the President of the United States.”
Bishop Hurst had envisioned the university bound up in divine purpose, moving toward a heaven-inspired destiny. The university newspaper used similarly lofty terms to describe the trustees’ decision to offer the campus to the government, as dedicating the university’s meager resources to a great national enterprise and accepting the “torch of war” like an Olympic relay runner.
“It is a matter of regret that the University is not thus equipped for bearing its full share of responsibility in rubbing the lamp of science in this nation’s crisis, but it proposes to remedy this situation at once, to meet if possible the present demands of the war, and surely those of the future peace,” the paper read. Unable to build its own laboratories or finish its facilities, the school was inviting the federal government to step in, a gesture that hopefully “wealthy and patriotic friends” would recognize and reward in the future. War might destroy the university, or it might save it.
After the board voted to offer the campus to the government, Leighton sent an official letter to President Wilson. It read like an invitation to a dinner party or a weekend in the countryside, peppered with stiff formality:
To His Excellency, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States.
Sir: In behalf of the Board of Trustees of the American University, located in the District of Columbia, I am authorized to extend to the United States Government the use of ninety-two acres of land lying within the District and composing the campus of the University, together with the use of the College of History Building containing twenty-one large and commodious rooms, and also the McKinley Auditorium, not quite completed, which could be made available as a barracks, or for such purpose as the government may desire.
The campus may be used either for a camping ground for troops, for gardening and raising products for the Army, or for such other purpose as you may elect.
There is a bountiful supply of city water on the premises and the grounds are easily accessible by means of the Washington City trolley service.
The character of the land is such as would make it available as an aviation ground.
Respectfully,
B. F. Leighton
President, Board of Trustees, American Univer
sity
The president’s secretary thanked Leighton for the offer and passed the letter to the secretary of war, who sent it on to the U.S. Army chief of engineers, Major General William Black.
During peacetime, the Corps of Engineers masterminded public works large and small, from the Panama Canal to lighthouses to coastal fortifications. At the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the corps taught army elites the science of construction and the physics of wind and water. The corps had a special relationship with Washington itself, executing Pierre L’Enfant’s plan to transform Washington into a glimmering jewel among world capitals. They graded city streets, erected grand government buildings, and completed work on the Washington Monument. Now the engineers’ peacetime training was shifting to wartime endeavors. Black had planned to build cantonments for two regiments at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, the only large site available in close proximity to Washington where soldiers could train before shipping out to Europe. The offer from American University unexpectedly presented a better option within the district and the corps’ jurisdiction, unconstrained by the problems of crossing the river.
On the warm, clear afternoon of May 17, two officers from the War Department drove up to American University to visit the campus. What they found was a far cry from the verdant campus bubbling with scholarly activity that its founders had envisioned. The College of History stood by itself at the corner of the campus, a lonely marble edifice facing northwest across an open expanse of fields. To its northwest, McKinley Hall sat alone at the corner of a phantom quadrangle; the buildings planned to ring its circumference had never been built. In a melancholy testimony to the school’s difficulties, the building’s interior was still incomplete almost ten years after it was started. The same was true of the rest of the campus—not a single cornerstone had been laid for any of the other nineteen buildings. Past the campus, Massachusetts Avenue was a rolling, dipping country lane with scrub brush hanging over the sunken roadway.
It was exactly what the army engineers were looking for. The quadrangle was a perfect parade ground for drilling. The open spaces designated for libraries and classroom buildings were ideal for barracks and mess halls and commissaries. The campus was far removed from the downtown federal offices, but trolleys made it easily accessible, running up Massachusetts Avenue to the traffic circle just outside the campus. Electric lines brought power to all corners of the campus, while water lines had been laid alongside Massachusetts Avenue. Even if they needed more space, tracts of farmland could be leased beyond the ninety-two-acre campus.
But the army engineers weren’t the only contenders for using the campus. The day after the two officers scouted out the location, the phone rang on Albert Osborn’s desk. The voice on the other end of the line said he was calling from the Bureau of Mines and that he, too, wanted to come out to see the campus. He was particularly interested in the unfinished McKinley Hall, and whether it could be converted for use as a laboratory. It would be for chemistry research, the man on the phone explained to Osborn. Chemistry needed for the war effort.
As perfect as the campus was for the engineers, it was equally ideal for the chemists. After Manning’s meeting the day after the war declaration, the director’s deputies had searched for lab locations in Delaware, New Jersey, and other areas. Even before the trustees’ offer had arrived, Manning or one of his deputies had been informed about the struggling university on the northwest heights. To Manning, the appeal wasn’t the parade ground or the availability of land for barracks: it was the vacant, unfinished McKinley Hall, which anchored the campus quadrangle. The building was a blank slate, ready for whatever apparatus or equipment the scientists chose to install. Manning wrote to George Hale:
A patriotic offer of grounds and buildings by the trustees of the American University has made available for the work on noxious gases a location and opportunity for development which appear ideal. In location and in a number of other respects it will be convenient not only for investigation, but also as a center for instruction in regard to both the offensive and defensive sides of gas warfare.
Manning had found his laboratory.
Chapter Three
Diabolical Instruments
As President Wilson waited in the White House to deliver his nighttime speech to Congress, Judge William C. Van Fleet stepped out of the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan for a brief walk around Foley Square. On April 2, 1917, a slate-gray sky hung over New York City, and there was a hint of rain in the cool midafternoon air. For more than a week, Van Fleet had presided over a trial that had transfixed New York. Six men—five Germans and one naturalized American—faced conspiracy charges for setting fire to merchant ships at sea using bombs assembled under the very noses of an unsuspecting public. Day after day, the tabloids reported the latest outrages from the courtroom: how top German diplomats had bankrolled the operation, how the bombs had been engineered in a clandestine workshop in Hoboken masquerading as a fertilizer factory, how the devices were assembled on an interned German vessel. The prisoners, all wearing black Prince Albert coats and spats, glowered at the government witnesses who took the stand to testify against them. One of the defendants, a wizened former ship’s captain named Carl von Kleist, shook his head and muttered “Oh! What damn lies!” under his breath during the testimony.
When the government lawyers presented their evidence early in the trial, the counsel’s table resembled a chemistry-lab bench. Tall glass jars of acids, beakers, and boxes of potassium and sodium nitrates lay jumbled on the wide tabletop. The bombs themselves—metal tubes about the size of cigars—rested on the clerk’s desk and on the bar rail between the defendants and the packed gallery. The jury had watched in silence as the witness standing next to the table, a fire department chemist named Leo Lieberman, explained the reaction that set fire to dozens of ships. The bombs weren’t typical explosives like the dynamite that German agents had used to blow up munitions plants and armories throughout the country. These were chemical bombs, the ingredients calibrated and separated within the chambers of lead pipes like the ones resting on the bar rail. When acid ate through the tin barrier in the middle of the device, the chemicals ignited with a furious white heat.
“Sulfuric acid,” Lieberman said, holding up a liquid-filled bottle. He picked up a large jar from the table. “Coming in contact with permanganate of potash”—he held up the jar for the jury to see—“forms manganese dioxide which burns with an intense flame.”
In his closing arguments, the defense attorney tried to argue that the conspiracy was political, not criminal, but the judge would have none of it, interrupting the lawyer to say that was nonsense. Still, Van Fleet knew that it was impossible to ignore the war fervor and had delivered a stern warning to the jury not to let antipathy toward Germany cloud their deliberation and judgment. After Van Fleet sent the jury to deliberate at 3:05 p.m., he went for his stroll.
He had expected to have time for at least a short walk to stretch his legs. He overestimated. The jury sent a note to the clerk after only fifteen minutes, saying they had reached a decision. It took another thirty minutes for Van Fleet to return from his walk, and after he hurried back to the bench, the jurors filed into the packed courtroom. Von Kleist, the former ship’s captain, sat still as the foreman rose. The clerk asked the foreman if they had reached a verdict. They had. “We find all the defendants guilty.”
The judge ordered steep bail bonds to ensure that the men couldn’t leave the Tombs—the city jail—before their sentencing on Friday. But the man most responsible for the chemical devices, whose name came up again and again during the trial, wasn’t among the six men in the prisoner’s dock and had never been in the courtroom. Von Kleist and the five crewmen were just the footmen in the plot. The man at the heart of the sabotage, the prize who had eluded police, was a German chemist named Dr. Walter Theodore Scheele. He had engineered the bombs in his factory laboratory in Hoboken and taught the longshoremen and the boilermakers how to assemble the devices before th
ey were smuggled into the cargo holds of ocean-bound ships. After von Kleist’s arrest, agents from the Bureau of Investigation moved on the other men, plucking them up one by one. But somehow, word had reached Scheele that his cover had been blown, and as quick as one of his lab-bench conflagrations, he had vanished like a puff of smoke.
Before the war, no one would have looked twice at Walter Scheele. The chemist and his American-born wife, Marie Magdalene Scheele, lived in a rented row house in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, a few blocks from the pharmacy Scheele owned on a busy corner of Cypress Avenue. Barrel chested and balding, his face a web of scars, the chemist still had a thick German accent after almost a quarter century in the United States. He had assisted the district attorney’s office for a time, helping out with investigations and testifying in murder trials involving poison and chemicals. Marie was a sharp-tongued, domineering woman, a hectoring contrast to her soft-spoken, pensive husband. Every morning, Scheele cocked an alpine hat on his head and tucked a pearl-handled revolver into his waistband for the short walk from their house to the drugstore. As he strolled the streets of Brooklyn, impeccably dressed and sharply erect, he invariably had a cigar clamped in his lips.
Scheele had come to New York in 1893 with a wave of hundreds of thousands of Germans who flooded into the United States starting in the mid-1880s. Many emigrated because of economic hardship or displacement during the unification of the German empire, but Scheele came to America for a very different reason. He was a spy, paid a yearly retainer for reconnaissance of the American chemical industry. Though Scheele worked hard to knit himself into the fabric of New York’s expatriate neighborhoods, the scars on his face were a sign that he was no ordinary German: the healed wounds were marks from sabre duels that were a bloody ritual among Prussian aristocrats and military officers.