by Theo Emery
There was still no room on the hill for barracks, so like all the other young men, Maurer found a room to rent in a nearby neighborhood. Washington wasn’t France, but it was a place to meet other young men from all over the country. Almost every college in the nation was represented on the hill, and he made fast friends with many other chemists up at American University. Though the work definitely followed army hierarchy, with higher officers mapping out the research for the lower-ranking and enlisted men, a democratic spirit suffused the work on the hill nonetheless, he wrote back to Baylor.
Will discovered that numerous Baylor classmates were in Washington, including two that he ran into one day at the Library of Congress. He met a young woman named Ruth who became his sweetheart. They went all around the city together to see the sights—to the zoo, to the Potomac River cascades at Great Falls, to downtown landmarks, where they posed together, smiling, he in his khaki uniform and she in a jaunty tam with a pom-pom on top. The Texas Club in Washington was a favorite place to mingle with fellow soldiers from home. “Washington was the gathering place for thousands [of] young war workers from every state in the U.S.A. and the social opportunities were of rare excellence,” he wrote home.
Will was assigned to a shell-filling unit that worked out of a rough wooden shack that he jokingly called “my office.” An upside-down horseshoe adorned the door, and DEATH VALLEY was scrawled on the planks. One of the substances he experimented with was called Paris green, a copper and arsenic compound used as both a dye pigment and an insecticide. It was also known as Scheele’s green—another toxic substance discovered by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Walter Scheele’s distant relative. Members of his unit were expected to arrive early in the morning for drills, and they were rarely able to leave the station at the end of their shifts. At day’s end, the men would pile into trolleys back to their rented rooms, their uniforms reeking from the chemicals they had been working with that day. The civilians who boarded farther down the line were soon sneezing and crying because of the fumes emitted from the soldiers’ clothes.
The men worked long hours under risky conditions, but they were well aware that things could be worse. Every day, the Washington newspapers reported on the bloodletting in France and regularly published notices about soldiers who had been killed. Will was grateful for the relatively easy life he had, with extra pay for meals and his rented quarters. “[W]e had to suffer few of the hardships of the boys in the line,” he wrote.
Nonetheless, the hill had its dangers. Periodically, gas would escape during experiments in McKinley Hall, requiring evacuation and fumigation of the building, and caged canaries in the labs would help the chemists gauge when gas had built up to dangerous levels. One morning in late June, a private stopped at a guarded gate, cradling live ordnance in his arms—a mortar shell or a Livens drum—on his way to the experimental fields beyond the fence. The two sentries asked for his pass, but the private had forgotten it. He set the bomb down and went to get his orders. Seconds later, the shell detonated, tossing both guards into the air, fracturing the leg of one and blowing off part of the other’s foot. There had been two other explosions or fires in the two weeks before that. A man named George Temple was in charge of repairing all the motors across the station, including the fans in the laboratory fume hoods. Temple was constantly burned by the chemicals that collected on the fans he repaired. He was one of the lucky ones. When one of his close friends reappeared after a long absence, Temple asked where he had been. “I got a bad dose of gas,” the man told Temple, “and I know I’m not going to get well.” He died soon after.
While accidents were common, not all the dangers chemists like Will faced were accidental. By mid-1918, tests with human subjects—what the Research Division called man tests—were in full swing. Innumerable types of tests awaited the chemists in the man-test house, a long, low building just to the northwest of McKinley Hall. The men donned gas masks to see how long it took for an old gas to infiltrate a new filter canister or to determine if existing canisters worked for a new gas. They tested out protective gear: gloves and suits and boots. There were skin tests, where the men rolled up their sleeves and exposed their skin to drops or vapors of chemical agents.
The ever-increasing number of experiments in the man-test laboratory required the gas mask division to write a report on the various methodologies, to keep all the various types of tests straight. “The man test work has developed so rapidly and the substances tested have become so numerous that it is deemed advisable to collect under one cover all the various methods used,” the report read.
Since the previous winter, the Medical Advisory Board had met regularly in the Bureau of Mines offices to confer over the findings of its pathological, physiological, and pharmacological units. Sometimes Van Manning chaired the meeting and sometimes Yandell Henderson. The doctors complained that their work wasn’t valued as much as the chemists’. Before he was sidelined in June, Manning had seen to it that the doctors got the attention and resources they needed; he was always prepared to bend the rules in the interests of research.
With the organization of the Chemical Warfare Service, Sibert fused all of the domestic medical work into a new Medical Division and put the work on equal footing with that of other divisions. When the group convened in late July, the first order of business was the militarization of their work under the umbrella of the Chemical Warfare Service. The second topic was a grim one. One of the most recent additions to the division, a physician named Dr. Aldred Scott Warthin, described how he had recently taken an urgent trip to the Dow plant in Midland, Michigan, to see eight soldiers who were being treated for mustard exposure. As the doctors approached the building where the men were recovering, they recognized a telltale stench: the putrid odor of gangrene. In a basement, they found men lying on cots in crude and unsanitary conditions, with mustard burns from their necks to their ankles. A salve covered the burns; underneath the salve, infection was spreading, and gangrene with it. They had only been seen by a nurse trained in treating minor burns and blisters. No clinical tests of any kind had been done. The basement had no screen door to keep out flies, and other noisy activities were going on alongside the cots. Only seven men lay in the foul basement; one had already died, and a second soon succumbed.
The incident illustrated the problems facing the rapidly expanding service. The consolidation meant the absorption of domains that had previously fallen under other army branches—including Edgewood Arsenal—and with it, thousands of officers, enlisted men, and civilians. By July of 1918, more than ten thousand people were working at Edgewood alone. Most were civilians working on the dozens of barracks, shell-filling plants, factories, and other buildings; enlisted men made up the bulk of the remainder, with about one hundred officers. Over the fall, the number of civilians would fall sharply while the ranks of enlisted men rose. As the chemical plants at Edgewood went into production one by one, the arsenal saw its casualties go up, too. There had been just 14 casualties at Edgewood in June. In July, that rose to 63, and then 279 in August. The work in gas plants proved so dangerous that Sibert proposed that enlisted men working in them receive the same service stripes as soldiers deployed to the front lines.
In seven meetings prior to the Chemical Warfare Service consolidation, the medical unit had almost exclusively discussed tests with animals during deliberations. But in its July meeting, the Medical Service doctors discussed an expansion of man tests to gather statistics on sensitivity of human skin to mustard. Johns Hopkins physiologist Eli K. Marshall, the chief of the pharmacology division, proposed testing three thousand to five thousand men. In addition, five thousand men likely to be exposed to mustard—such as soldiers in shell-filling plants—should be tested for sensitivity before being allowed to work with the gas warfare agent, he proposed.
During morning roll call at American University, soldiers were asked to volunteer for the man tests—an unsavory aspect of army life on the hill that gave the chemists a grim sense of gallows humor. Duri
ng a stunt-night talent show, the men in Maurer’s unit sang a song with a refrain that went, “Oh man tests! how we did love them! / To dodge them was our only wish; / For they always came round on Friday / And gas don’t mix well with fish.”
The exasperated camp surgeon, Captain E. A. Brace, constantly attended to burns and blisters, lacerated arms and legs, and eyes swollen shut by gas. The injured arrived at the infirmary with skin bulging with chemical burns and blisters that were sometimes accidental but often the result of intentional experiments. He wondered about these experiments at the station, performed even without a doctor present.
In late July of 1918, the American University Experiment Station gained a new superintendent: Richmond Levering, a newly minted officer in the Chemical Warfare Service. The U.S. Navy had rejected his overture to join the American Patrol Detachment in the Caribbean, but he had found another option. Back in April, Levering had met George Burrell in Washington when they had gathered in Van Manning’s office to discuss Walter Scheele’s contributions to chemical warfare. In July, as Levering searched for a new role in the war effort, Burrell offered Levering a position in the Chemical Warfare Service. As Research Division chief, Burrell would have known what was taking place at Jones Point. Perhaps Levering asked Burrell directly for a job, or perhaps A. Bruce Bielaski asked Burrell on Levering’s behalf. In either case, Burrell wrote to Bielaski on July 20 requesting that Levering be allowed to transfer to the service.
Bielaski wrote back with his approval of the transfer, saying that Levering would probably be more valuable with the Chemical Warfare Service in Washington than as a special agent. A former U.S. attorney separately wrote to the War Department to lobby on Levering’s behalf, praising his “clear-headed judgment” and “most untiring energy.”
Exactly what arrangement Levering negotiated with the Chemical Warfare Service is unclear. The operations at Jones Point continued as before, using Levering’s properties and presumably relying on his financial support, but without his direct involvement. Levering moved from Manhattan to Washington, taking an apartment near Dupont Circle. Commissioned as a major, he was put in charge of the experiment station’s administration, replacing Superintendent Lauson Stone.
One of Levering’s jobs included a compliance review of new security rules across the Chemical Warfare Service and all of its far-flung outposts and satellite locations at universities and labs. There were still problems with leaks months after the Research Division had cracked down on loose talk among its chemists; in one incident, a contractor asked an officer about tests at American University that were supposed to be secret. New rules required all visitors to Chemical Warfare Service facilities to show a government-issued photo credential to gain entry.
The oilman wrote to campuses, laboratories, and other gas investigation sites warning of “disloyal persons or enemy Aliens” trying to infiltrate the Research Division. He demanded an accounting of all their security procedures, stressing that a confidentiality breach in one location could jeopardize information in Washington. Some of the respondents were clearly annoyed at the inquiries. “We write no reports on secret matters,” Winford Lee Lewis wrote from Catholic. “I have absolute confidence in the men in my unit.”
One of the locations under Levering’s jurisdiction was his own stockade at Jones Point, where life for Walter Scheele had settled into a kind of repetitive rhythm. On July 4, the bureau agents had allowed him and Marie to putter across the Hudson under the stars for a rare night of freedom at the Eagle Hotel. Since then, the experiment station had returned to its former routine. Two officers from American University had arrived at Jones Point on July 10 to assist with the research; in a progress report that went to Thomas Edison and officers in Washington, Bruce Silver predicted that they would be valuable assistants in future developments at Jones Point. Otherwise, little had changed at the experiment station. The same passel of experiments continued—tests with incendiary darts, wing dope, helline. The U.S. Navy disappointed the scientists after a review of their experiments found that liquid oxygen was probably incompatible for maritime use because of the difficulty of putting refrigeration plants on board navy vessels. Still, regardless of such setbacks, the humdrum nature of the agents’ reports gave little hint of trouble.
But there was trouble. Walter Scheele continued to seethe at his imprisonment. He had left behind two years of confinement in Cuba only to be imprisoned again in rural New York. A tiny number of people knew that he was even alive, penned inside the stockade at Jones Point, working with the threat of execution over his head. He was allowed an occasional excursion across the river to the pharmacy in Peekskill—always escorted by a bureau agent—but after their near arrest in April, the agents took him only grudgingly. As the months went by, he festered with resentment over his predicament.
On Saturday, August 3, Charles DeWoody came up from New York to meet with the doctor and his wife. Scheele had been agitating for Marie to join him at the renovated quarters at Jones Point in some semblance of domestic normalcy, even if they were surrounded by guards and barbed wire. Agent O’Donnell—code-named O’Dell— took Levering’s car, drove to Haverstraw to pick up the chemist’s wife, and then brought her up to Jones Point. He fetched her husband, and all three crossed the Hudson to Peekskill. A car brought them to the Eagle Hotel, where DeWoody waited for them.
The meeting did not go well. DeWoody told the chemist and his wife that she would be allowed to move to Jones Point to be with her husband, but she could not come and go at will. She could only leave the enclosure occasionally, and then only with explicit approval from the department’s agents.
Scheele exploded in anger. It wasn’t enough that he’d spent months of incarceration separated from his wife. Now DeWoody was turning Marie Scheele into a prisoner as well. “Scheele for a period of a half an hour showed his teeth and his true colors,” DeWoody wrote in his report. Raging at DeWoody, Scheele challenged the superintendent to prosecute him. He said he had never been arraigned, and his detention was illegal, and claimed that his deal with Levering and Offley allowed his wife to be with him permanently. He had held up his end of the bargain, he fumed, surrendering his chemical secrets to the Americans. Now that deal was broken, Scheele insisted, and he had no intention of allowing his wife to become a prisoner with him.
DeWoody countered that Scheele’s treachery against America had not been forgotten and that his four months at Jones Point had not wiped away his transgressions. Moreover, the department’s precautions weren’t simply to isolate Scheele; the department was also protecting him from those who might want him dead, and they would have to extend that protection to Marie Scheele as well.
Scheele finally quieted. They would accept the government’s terms, they said, but with their own conditions. Mrs. Scheele must be permitted to leave the enclosure upon request at least once a month—or more if the Bureau of Investigation allowed it—and DeWoody needed to establish a way for her to stay in touch with her family, in case her mother fell ill or some other misfortune befell her kin. DeWoody agreed. They also demanded that Agent O’Donnell could take the Scheeles out in the boat or in Levering’s automobile from time to time, with the understanding that neither of them was allowed to talk with anyone they met en route, and Scheele insisted that he must be allowed to go to the drugstore in Peekskill to buy necessary items. DeWoody agreed, even though he suspected that the frequent drugstore trips were probably just a pretext to get away from the experiment station.
After the meeting, Agent O’Donnell brought the Scheeles back to the pier, ferried them across the river, and returned Marie Scheele to her rented room in Haverstraw. For now, Scheele had been placated.
The service had become a huge enterprise, sprawling across cities and states, one leg planted firmly in America and the other in France. On July 16, the U.S. Army surgeon general had handed William Sibert control of all the Medical Department laboratories, plants, and stations related to mask making—National Lamp Works in Cleveland,
Hero Manufacturing in Philadelphia, B.F. Goodrich Company’s lab in Akron, the Fulford Manufacturing Company in Providence, Rhode Island, the Plymouth Rubber Company in Canton, Massachusetts, and Pacific Gas and Electric in San Francisco—all of them flipped to Chemical Warfare Service control. In Long Island City, the Gas Defense Plant was making gas masks by the thousands to ship overseas, and a new “fighting mask” would soon be ready for the Americans to wear into combat. The helium plants in Texas were poised to begin making three million cubic feet of the gas code-named “argon” each week. Edgewood was making tons of gas each week, which would soon be shipped in American shells. A bromobenzyl-cyanide plant was under construction in Kingsport, Tennessee, as well as a sodium-cyanide plant in Saltville, Virginia. Construction was almost complete on a fourteen-thousand-acre gas warfare proving ground in Lakehurst, New Jersey, about fifty miles east of Philadelphia. It would have facilities similar to those at American University but orders of magnitude larger, with a farm to accommodate two thousand goats and kennels for more than two hundred dogs for testing, an ice plant that made two tons of ice a day, twelve barracks, a YMCA, its own post office, and a hospital and an infirmary for anyone injured, maimed, or gassed.
But the combustible heart of the service was still Mustard Hill. Burrell wanted to make sure that this fledgling science would have a place for research in perpetuity. And that place, he felt, should remain American University.
On the last day of July, Burrell proposed turning American University into a permanent seat of the Chemical Warfare Service. The plan he presented to Sibert was a simple one: the army should buy the school and the land around it. “The permanent buildings at the American University, and the equipment that has been collected at this station will furnish a fine home for such a permanent Research Division,” he wrote.