by Theo Emery
The idea likely appealed to Sibert. The general didn’t traffic in temporary solutions and stopgap measures; he was a man who had sunk his legacy into the Panama Canal, the most permanent solution imaginable to a problem of navigation. The idea that the army would simply have to pack up from American University after the war and abandon more than a million dollars’ worth of scientific investment probably did not sit well. On August 2, Sibert passed Burrell’s idea up the army chain of command, asking that the army’s Real Estate Division study the feasibility of buying American University.
The very next day, that plan went up in smoke.
Chapter Thirteen
The Meuse and the Mousetrap
A brisk wind blew across the fields behind former senator Nathan Bay Scott’s country house on August 3. It was a Saturday morning, and the banker sat on the porch enjoying the fresh air with his wife, Agnes, and her sister, Carrie. Chickens clucked around the veranda, and songbirds darted overhead. The temperature was already above seventy degrees at 8:00 a.m. with the sun still climbing, and the windows of the house were wide open to let in the breeze. Soon the drenching swelter of August would drive Washington’s bankers and politicians out of the city and city residents to the packed municipal swimming pools. Though the war still raged toward its bloody apogee, Congress had adjourned for summer, and civil servants had departed for cooler climes.
During the week, Scott’s home was the Willard Hotel, several blocks from the Continental Trust Company, where he was president. A few blocks in the other direction lay the White House and the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where his career in Washington had begun. On the weekends, Scott drove out of town to his country house and left all that behind. The road turned west alongside the barbed-wire-topped fence enclosing the hilltop campus of American University, with its ramshackle village of wooden outbuildings and storage sheds around it. Then it was down the hill to his house, where he could unload his bag and sink into a porch chair.
As Scott chatted on the porch around 8:30 a.m. with Agnes and his sister-in-law, they spotted a yellow cloud billowing from the American University property in the distance. The three watched in growing alarm as the fast-moving vapor blew toward them, undulating in the breeze. Perhaps it was smoke from a brush fire, he thought, but there was something about the mustard-colored plume that seemed sinister, dangerous even, as it curled up from the ravine behind the house and surged toward the porch. The wind brought a strange smell with it, too, a pungent, acrid odor.
Scott and the two women rose hurriedly to their feet, but their eyes and throats had already begun to burn. Half blinded, they stumbled into the house and slammed the porch door. Coughing, eyes streaming, face burning, Scott went through the house, slamming shut the open windows as the cloud enveloped the house. Barely able to see, Scott fumbled his way to the phone and dialed.
A mile away, the phone rang in the headquarters of Camp Leach. Former senator Nathan Bay Scott had been gassed.
The release of the chemical plume that engulfed the Scott house was hardly the first accident at American University. But earlier mishaps, for the most part, had been confined to the station, and the casualties were treated inside the fence at the busy infirmary at Camp Leach.
This time the gas had affected a civilian—and a famous one at that. When the call came in to Camp Leach, the officers would have instantly recognized Scott’s name. When Scott left West Virginia for Washington, he had been one of the state’s richest businessmen. Wealth and fund-raising prowess for Republicans earned him President McKinley’s appointment as secretary of the Treasury. After that, he spent twelve years in the U.S. Senate before he retired from public service to become president of Continental Trust. He was enmeshed in the city’s social life, a familiar figure at state dinners and charity galas. Since his retirement from public life, his name still appeared regularly in the Washington papers, sometimes in the society pages but even more frequently in the regular ads for Continental Trust, which urged thrifty customers to “Settle Down and Save Up.”
It wasn’t until 10:00 a.m. that Captain Brace, the Camp Leach surgeon, turned off Ridge Road into Scott’s driveway. Two men got out of the car with him, Major C. K. Jones, the commander of the First Engineers Battalion, and G. E. McElroy, the safety engineer at Camp Leach. As they clambered from the vehicle, they lugged gas masks for the Scotts. The cloud had long since dissipated, but lifeless carcasses of chickens and farm animals lay around the house. Agnes Scott was the least affected and was already feeling better, but the gas had virtually blinded her husband and seared her sister’s lungs and throat. Captain Brace attended to the former senator and his sister-in-law. Soon after, the two departed for the Willard Hotel, where Scott’s personal physician was going to treat him. Agnes Scott stayed behind. One of the engineers offered her a gas mask and seemed hurt when she refused it.
“They may be just the thing to save our lives, but I cannot imagine the senator getting up 15 minutes earlier every morning to practice a gas mask drill,” she said.
The phone began to ring at Camp Leach as reporters called about the incident. An explosion at the station had injured enlisted men, one reporter scribbled down. Such things should be expected because of the nature of the experiments, another was told.
In the evening, Scott roused himself from his hotel suite to speak with reporters. Face blistered, he said soberly that the incident had been a narrow escape and had given him a new appreciation for the perils that soldiers faced on the front lines.
That evening, Brigadier General Frederic V. Abbot mentioned the incident to Colonel Edward H. Schulz, the commanding officer of Camp Leach. When Schulz picked up the Post the next morning, the incident was a front-page story. “N. B. Scott ‘Gassed,’” the headline read. “Engineers Experimenting with Elements Believed to Compose Mustard Gas, Which Escape and Descend on Surrounding Country. Chickens and Animals Killed.” A muddle of fact and fiction, the article reported erroneously that the incident resulted from experiments with “mustard gas components” and claimed that the explosion nearly killed Scott. The paper reported that the “nature of the experiments could not be learned last night, as the officers in charge refused all information.”
Colonel Schulz dashed to the house to speak with the Scott family. Scott was still recuperating at the Willard Hotel, but Agnes was there with other family members. She described a far-less-serious scenario than what the paper reported, telling Schulz that no one was “seriously disturbed by the gas,” though they were certainly worried about a recurrence. When Schulz spoke to other nearby residents, none had any complaints.
That might have been a relief to the colonel, but it was only temporary. When the Washington Times came out that evening, its report of the incident was even more sensational than the Post’s. The incident was the paper’s top news and had somehow ballooned into the accidental detonation of a bomb. In a banner atop the masthead, the paper splashed POISON GAS OVERCOMES FORMER SENATOR AND WIFE. The article reported breathlessly that the three “had a narrow escape from death yesterday when a gas bomb exploded prematurely at Camp Leach.” Scott himself, who had sounded circumspect in the Post, sounded much angrier in his quotes to the Times.
“It is an outrage that a citizen cannot enjoy his home without being made to suffer like this. From what I can learn the whole thing was due to gross carelessness on the part of someone, and it has surely caused us all no end of suffering,” he complained, fuming that “those in charge of operations should observe more care in protecting innocent residents.”
It was a catastrophe. Not only had a prominent public figure been injured, but the secret work at American University had become a matter of public record. Scott had revealed to a jittery Washington that dangerous open-air experiments were going on within city limits. The story had the elements of a thriller: an aggrieved innocent with a tale to tell, the careless handling of deadly poisons, a mystery that defied explanation, and the whiff of a cover-up.
While the in
cident was a disaster for the army, there was at least one silver lining: the actual gas that escaped was not correctly identified. Even though Scott described the smell as similar to mustard, it was not mustard gas. It was lewisite.
Of course, it was no surprise that the word “lewisite” never appeared in the newspapers—Sibert had forbidden the word from even being used. But anyone familiar with physiological effects of chemical weapons agents would have known that the substance that swept over the Scott home could not have been mustard gas, as mustard required many hours to take effect. Luckily, none of the reports noted that fact, and the scientists at American were spared probing questions about the nature of the substance. Despite all the worries about leaks, loose talk among the chemists, and now the explosion, at least the secret of lewisite had remained behind the fence at American University.
By the morning of Monday, August 5, Colonel Schulz had written up a preliminary report on the accident. It was not long—just one page, with “Confidential” scrawled at the top. On Saturday morning, he wrote, three soldiers had been brewing lewisite—he described it only vaguely as “the gas”—about a fifth of a mile upwind of the Scott house. The lewisite still was inside a wooden building, manufacturing shack number 8, and was a larger-scale version of the apparatus that Winford Lee Lewis had built on the roof of the lab at Catholic University. The building was in a section of the station southwest of McKinley Hall and the College of History, tucked in a ravine dotted with structures—storage sheds, machine shops, and a laundry platform to scrub off mustard gas residue. The three soldiers had been tending the still when a pipe clogged. Pressure built, and the apparatus exploded. The blast reduced the shack to a pile of lumber and corrugated tin, scattering debris, and released the plume of lewisite. Swept by the wind, the cloud rolled southward, through the barbed-wire fence between the Scott property and American University, and over the Scott house. The camp surgeon treated the three soldiers and then sent them home to recuperate.
After such an embarrassing event, the service needed an emissary to offer an apology to the senator. That task fell to a newly appointed officer on the hill who had extensive personal experience with handling bad public relations: Richmond Levering.
Levering whipped up an apology letter to Scott. “My dear Sir,” the letter began. “Permit me to express my very great regret at the accident which occurred within the enclosure at the American University Experiment Station and resulted in injury to yourself and your family.” He delicately pointed out that an equipment failure caused the accident, not carelessness of the men. “I feel sure that you will realize that as our men are subjected every day to this danger in developing warfare gases for the use of the United States, it is hardly their fault that the unfortunate circumstances attendant upon their work resulted in this personal trouble to you.”
It took almost a month for Burrell to complete his own report on the Scott incident. When he did, the scenario he described was far different than what Colonel Schulz had observed in his report two days after the explosion. The injury to the Scotts, he said, “was more imagined than real.” Rather than a release of 120 pounds of gas, as Schulz reported, it was far less—10 pounds at most. Burrell was dismissive of the press reports, calling them “greatly exaggerated and for the most part erroneous.”
The bad press could not have come at a worse moment. Only days earlier, Burrell had written to Major General Sibert with his proposal for transforming the campus into a permanent chemical warfare research station. Ironically, the plan for acquiring the campus also called for government purchase or seizure of the surrounding properties—including the Scott property—for an open-air proving ground.
All of that was thrown into jeopardy by the Scott fiasco. This incident was an unwelcome distraction that cast a harsh public glare on the research just as the machinery of chemical warfare was shifting into high gear. Gas shipments to France, which had been halted in July because of shell shortages, would soon start up again, and Sibert drew up plans for transporting gas across the ocean in specially outfitted ships. In late August, the Oldbury Electro-Chemical Company plant in Niagara Falls began filling Livens drums with phosgene for shipment overseas. Problems with manufacturing mustard were finally getting ironed out, after Fries sent a British chemist to the States with another new process, requiring an overhaul of the plants at Edgewood. Sibert asked the Department of Ordnance to furnish one hundred thousand incendiary darts and ship them to Edgewood Arsenal by September 10. The overseas division of the service ordered up hundreds of bombs to test for dropping gas from the air. The chemists were running tests on a potent new sneezing gas, diphenylaminechlorarsine, or adamsite. At last, the self-playing pianolo that Fries envisioned was making music.
Despite the inopportune timing of the Scott accident, Sibert and Burrell pressed forward with their plan to try to acquire the university and the land around it, and the army made official overtures about a possible purchase. In late August, Brigadier General Hugh S. Johnson, the army’s director of purchases and supplies, wrote to American’s board president, Benjamin Leighton, asking to talk with him about purchasing the school. “It is desired to have some discussion with you as to the present situation at the American University and to have your idea of what the Government would be expected to pay for the ground and the buildings if it should undertake to purchase them,” Johnson wrote.
Leighton’s reply arrived with a postmark from the backwoods of Maine, where he was vacationing. If the army wanted to buy the campus, it would cost $2 million for the land and the buildings. He didn’t plan to return to Washington until mid-September, he wrote, but if the army was serious about moving forward, the board could convene a meeting and he would return early.
Two million dollars was too much for the army, but Sibert already had a backup plan in case Leighton asked for too much. The army would condemn the property—that is, seize it by eminent domain—reducing its value considerably, thus making it far less expensive to purchase.
There were practical reasons that Sibert wanted to acquire American University and turn it into a permanent seat of chemical warfare research, but there were also legal reasons. For the army accountants and bureaucrats, American University was a legal nightmare. When Sibert took over the Chemical Warfare Service, he investigated the arrangements in place between American University and the Bureau of Mines. He discovered that there were almost none. Manning, who had proved so adept at cutting red tape and bending bureaucratic rules for his chemists, had allowed construction everywhere on campus without any kind of written agreement or permission from their landlord. Other than the original 1917 agreement and a few ancillary documents, such as permission from the university to build bomb pits, no agreements related to construction had ever been committed to paper.
Astonishingly, that included the huge new chemistry laboratory that Manning had pressed for so urgently. The state-of-the-art lab, it turned out, was a boondoggle in several respects. As part of Sibert’s push to purchase the campus, the army quartermaster investigated the half-finished project. As with most of the campus, there was no legal arrangement between the Bureau of Mines and the university over the new laboratory. Some of the university trustees had asked for a written agreement to clarify the status and ownership of the building after the war. The experiment station architect “told them to ‘forget it,’ that no agreement was needed; that if they wanted to get rid of it when the war was over, a few sticks of dynamite could be effectively used, or if they wanted to use it, that he had so designed it that it could be marble-faced and thus converted into a very decent building.” The investigation also discovered that construction of the building had been badly bungled and its costs grossly miscalculated. Originally estimated at about $250,000, additional construction to fix the foundation and other problems would raise the price to $675,000—more than two and a half times its original price. Purchasing the property and all the buildings would allow the Chemical Warfare Service to protect the service’s inves
tments at American University, which totaled more than a million dollars, and at the same time cut through all the tangled legal problems that ensnared the experiment station.
The Scott incident had now thrown that entire plan into doubt. The accident not only put the army at odds with nearby residents and the alarmed city government, but it also inflamed the antagonism between the Research Division and the Corps of Engineers that Sibert had worked so hard to patch up. Major General William Black, the chief of the engineers, wrote a terse letter to Sibert about the incident:
Is not your Chemical Station at the American University too close to residences and to Camp Leach for the safe handling of war gases in any such bulk as seems to be now used there? The responsibility for accidental death or injury to outsiders is very grave. I hope that you can see your way clear to such a change in procedure as will remove the existing risks.
On September 11, Sibert sat down at his desk to draft a response to the engineer’s complaints. He had a difficult line to walk. Black was an extremely powerful figure, head of the army branch that had cemented Sibert’s legacy in Panama. His views were not to be taken lightly. But Sibert didn’t want to knuckle under to the increasing pressure on the Chemical Warfare Service to curtail its activities in Washington. There was too much at stake.
In his letter to Black, Sibert conceded that the accident was serious. Because of the blast, stockpiles of explosives at the station were reduced considerably, and new precautions had been adopted to reduce threats to residents or the engineers. But he also insisted that the work must continue at American University. “It is not practicable to transfer much of this work to any other locality without serious loss of time and efficiency as hardly appears to be justified.”