by Theo Emery
Of course, the experts who knew the truth weren’t in a hurry to correct the record. The actual efficacy of lewisite remained a deep secret. In March, Sibert warned Dorsey, “There are several subjects, as you know, that we are not publishing in any of our reports, and that we are surrounding with as much secrecy as possible.” As late as 1927, Fries acknowledged in a letter to Lewis that it wasn’t clear how effective lewisite actually was.
The articles about lewisite appeared as Congress was deciding the future of the Chemical Warfare Service. In early August of 1919, the War Department sent over the legislation that would reorganize the army, known as the General Staff Bill. As expected, it reflected the view that the Chemical Warfare Service should be abolished as a free-standing branch of the military and that the work of the gas service should belong to the Corps of Engineers. Whatever chemical warfare work remained would not have the same sprawling wartime scope—it focused on defense, with only enough offensive research to allow a counterattack against a chemical-armed adversary.
The Senate Subcommittee on Military Affairs called General March to testify in early August. March was a trim and vigorous soldier, his uniform dripping with medals and citations, the opposite of the bookish, sclerotic-looking Newton Baker with his starched collars and fussy hair. When asked about the future of the service, March didn’t mince words. “The War Department believes that the Chemical Warfare Service ought to be abolished in warfare,” he said. As he pressed his case to the committee, he warned of the dangers that chemical warfare posed to civilians, such as a child drinking from a poisoned well or a gas cloud that sweeps over noncombatants.
“That is horrible, General, but suppose in order to protect that child and these non-combatants from that sort of warfare, it becomes necessary for us to fight the devil with fire,” one committee member interjected. “Then what?”
“Then we have got to do it,” March admitted.
“The Philistines are still after us,” Fries complained afterward. Chemical warfare had become political warfare. From Fries’s earliest days as chief of the AEF Gas Service, he had had a keen appreciation of the political dimensions of this work and the need to “sell” gas to the army. With the future of the service now in question, he needed to sell it to the American public, too. Doing so required two lines of attack. One was public relations. The other was tilting Congress toward Fries’s goals and using legislation to further his ends. With his typical zeal, Fries zeroed in on Senator Chamberlain, his powerful ally.
In a late-August hearing over the bill, Sibert and Fries pulled chairs up to the committee witness table. With the sympathetic Senator Chamberlain and other members listening, Fries said American ingenuity had given U.S. troops an edge in gas warfare that should not be surrendered. Fries also addressed what he called “the question of humanity” of gas warfare; that is, whether it was a more- or less-cruel kind of weapon than others that were commonly used. It was a question woven into the weft of gas warfare since its earliest inception, and now it was becoming a focus of congressional inquiry as well.
As with most of Fries’s beliefs, he had an unequivocal answer to that question: “It is the most humane,” he told the committee. As the afternoon wore on, Fries’s words became darker. He described an apocalyptic vision of ever-more-savage warfare. When Chamberlain asked if a time was coming when nations would agree not to use gas, Fries responded: “If we could make war so terrible that there would not be any chance for it to last more than five or ten minutes, then they would stop all wars.” In other words, the only way to end war is to make it too barbaric to tolerate, he argued, despite the fact that he posited in the very same testimony that it was the most humane kind of weapon. It was a glaring contradiction, almost absurd in its convoluted logic, and yet it went unchallenged by the committee.
Away from the hearing rooms, Fries worked methodically to channel experts’ voices into opposing the War Department. “Enclosed herewith are some ideas that I think need the attention of all technical societies, journals and individuals in the United States,” Fries wrote to the president of a Los Angeles engineering society. “If you agree with me, get busy and spread the gospel.”
Not every aspect of the wartime work could be publicized or even publicly discussed at all. As debate over the Chemical Warfare Service gained steam, Walter T. Scheele remained quietly bound by his obligations to the government and the threat of punishment over him. By 1919, the government’s investment in Scheele and Levering was no longer certain, and the sheen of promise on the German spy had begun to fade. Over the winter, Bielaski had written to the Military Intelligence Division about the explosive-propelled German torpedoes that Scheele had described, asking if they thought his insights had any value. The chief of the inventions division concluded that Scheele’s information “does not offer anything new or of value to the Department.” This must have been astonishing news to the officers and scientists at Jones Point, given their confidence in his professed knowledge of Germany’s weapons. The exchange so many months into Scheele’s captivity suggests that perhaps Scheele never knew as much about German weapons—chemical or otherwise—as he claimed.
By summer of 1919, Scheele had been at Jones Point for more than a year. Though the war was over, he remained beholden to the government and to Levering under whatever murky arrangement the oilman and the Justice Department had agreed upon. Support from Thomas Edison’s navy-funded laboratory had dried up, and the salary for the chemist Bruce Silver with it. “At last, the Government has brought out its little guillotine! The axe has fallen and if you will look in the basket, you will see your head,” Edison’s assistant wrote to Silver.
Even though Scheele was out of the public eye, his name unexpectedly surfaced again in the news. During a conference of the National Cotton Manufacturer’s Association, a Department of Justice official named Francis P. Garvan delivered a stem-winding speech leveling a new accusation against Scheele. Garvan, whose job as alien property custodian allowed him to seize German assets, talked about the “master spy” Hugo Schweitzer, the Bayer Chemical Company chemist who had been Scheele’s partner in espionage before Scheele was pressed into service making his cigar bombs. And then Garvan dropped a bomb of his own: that Scheele was the inventor of mustard gas. “This is the mustard gas which laid low your brothers on the plains of France.”
Newspapers across the country published the electrifying claim. It was a sensational allegation, and it was also dead wrong. The chemical compound had been discovered in 1886 in Germany, not in 1913 in New Jersey. Despite Garvan’s claim that the formula was discovered in the suitcase that Scheele had left with family friends when he fled to Cuba, an inventory of the suitcase’s contents turns up no mention of mustard or its composition.
Nonetheless, the statement spread quickly. Bruce Silver grilled Scheele until he was satisfied that the claim was false. Nevertheless, in June, Garvan repeated the claim to a congressional committee, and eventually published a book making the accusation again. At least one chemist tried to refute Garvan’s claim with a letter to the Times, to no avail. Perhaps the claim was a preemptive effort from the Justice Department to smear Scheele so indelibly that it would drown out any complaints he might make about his wartime internment.
Scheele’s imprisonment came to an end on June 4, 1919, when the phone rang at Jones Point. Agent Victor J. Valjavec, who had taken over as Scheele’s minder, answered the phone. It was the Bureau of Investigation’s assistant division superintendent, calling from Manhattan. Valjavec listened. Then he hung up the receiver, went to find Scheele, and told him to get ready to leave. Scheele had a bail hearing that afternoon in federal court in Manhattan.
Valjavec brought Scheele down to the pier. Together, they boarded Levering’s launch and sped across the Hudson to Peekskill. From there, they went by car to Manhattan. Ever since he had gone on the lam in 1916, Scheele had been a hunted man, always running, always in the shadows. He was about to get his first taste of independence in four yea
rs. The car made its way through the city streets to the Park Row Building in Lower Manhattan, near City Hall Park and across the street from the federal courthouse where Scheele would be expected later in the day. Before going to the courthouse, though, Agent Valjavec brought Scheele to the Bureau of Investigation office.
Most likely the reason for bringing Scheele to the bureau office, and not to the courthouse, was to keep him off the streets and out of the public eye. Two days earlier, anarchist bombs targeting judges and prosecutors had exploded in eight cities around the country, including one that ripped through the Manhattan home of a judge on East Sixty-First Street and another targeting the Washington, D.C., home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The whole country erupted in fear and fury, with banner headlines screaming from the top of every newspaper in the country. The last thing the bureau agents needed was for the infamous ship-bomb plotter to be recognized on the streets of Manhattan.
The court postponed the bail hearing until late afternoon. The hours dragged by until finally Judge John Knox called the case at 4:00 p.m. By that late in the day, the courtroom was probably empty, the other cases dispatched. The judge set Scheele’s bail at ten thousand dollars. Scheele paid it himself, most likely with cash from Marie, who had received a sizable inheritance from her foster father. Then he walked out of the courtroom a few minutes later. Reporters remained in the dark about the sudden reappearance of the long-absent chemist; newspaper briefs two days later misidentified the date of his hearing. With that, the chemist with the face webbed with scars slipped from the headlines once again. But the chemist did not vanish completely. As part of the conditions of his release, he informed the court that he would have a job: he would be going to work for Levering.
He continued to work for Levering until at least December of 1919, when an agent reported that Scheele—whom he misidentified as Carl von Scheele—“now is in the employ of Richmond Levering & Company who have provided von Scheele with a laboratory in which to conduct his experiments, which they are financing.”
Scheele had good reason to keep a low profile, but his former handler, Richmond Levering, had no such need. Since the war ended, Levering had not been idle, jumping immediately back into business. Using his formidable powers of persuasion, he coaxed several wartime colleagues to join him as peacetime partners. George A. Burrell, the former chief of the Research Division, was one. Though he insisted on being addressed as “Colonel” for the rest of his life, Burrell made a swift exit from the military in mid-January of 1919 to go into the oil business with Levering. Within days, he applied for a passport to travel to Tampico, Mexico, and Cuba on behalf of Levering & Company. His goal was to build three oil-refining plants in Tampico that would have a combined capacity of 5.4 million barrels. Levering himself wrote a letter to the State Department on Burrell’s behalf, urging a speedy approval of the passport.
Levering’s former boss at the Bureau of Investigation, Chief A. Bruce Bielaski, also joined forces with Levering. The chief, who had been both Levering’s supervisor and bulwark against accusations of wrongdoing, left the Bureau of Investigation in January of 1919 to become vice president of Levering & Company. If Bielaski’s Justice Department colleagues harbored any ill will over his going into business with Levering, they didn’t show it—in late February, his former staff bought him a car as a goodbye gift.
At the same time that he launched his new business enterprise, Levering also stayed involved with the Chemical Warfare Service. Early in 1919, war veterans revived the American Legion, which had been a prointervention “preparedness” association before the war but disbanded when the United States entered. The legion would become one of the war’s most important veterans’ organizations, serving as both a social organization and a lobbying voice in support of the military. In July, Chemical Warfare Service veterans formed their own post within the legion with Levering as the president and Burrell as vice president. Sibert accepted a charter membership.
When Levering offered himself up as president of the Chemical Warfare Post of the American Legion, it’s possible he did so out of patriotism and a heartfelt desire to defend chemical warfare. But as always with Levering, there may have been another reason. Keeping the Chemical Warfare Service separate from the engineers and other military branches could have insulated Levering’s business enterprises from the upper tiers of the War Department. The very arrangement he had so vociferously denied in 1918—that he had a business deal with Scheele—had proved true in 1919. He had also hired the chief chemist of the Chemical Warfare Service and the top lawman in the federal government. As with many other aspects of Levering’s business undertakings, these actions may have been entirely legal. But certainly there was a whiff of insider dealings and self-promotion. Of banking on public trust. Of using patriotism for personal gain. Keeping the service independent might have been good for the service, but it was probably good for Levering, too.
On August 30, the American Legion flexed its muscles over chemical warfare. With congressional hearings about the army reorganization bill just days away, Levering’s Chemical Warfare Post urged Congress to maintain the service as an independent branch of the military as Fries and Sibert wanted. With a goal of a million members, the American Legion was a voice that was impossible for Congress to ignore.
With so many business undertakings, Levering would resign from the American Legion in the fall because of his other obligations. In addition to his plans for Tampico, he was building a new business headquarters a few blocks from Wall Street. The federal government was investigating him yet again, this time for his relationship with Bielaski, and the old lawsuit from the Metropolitan Petroleum Corporation shareholders still staggered on. But before he stepped down, he had another obligation to the Chemical Warfare Service, this one in Philadelphia.
When the music swelled from the stage in the ballroom of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, so many chemists crushed through the doors that there was nowhere left to sit. The blue-and-gold banner of the American Chemical Society hung from the balcony of the hotel, announcing that the association’s annual meeting had begun on September 2, 1919. Billed as both the “victory meeting” and the “peace meeting,” it was a riotous event. The chemists’ war had transformed a fusty scientific field into a cutting-edge frontier of military science. This event was their moment in the sun. The organizers planned an 800-seat banquet, but almost 1,700 chemists attended. Hundreds more showed up without bothering to register. Bewildered officers calculated the actual attendance as more than 2,000, with Philadelphia chemists among the most shameless gate-crashers—only 150 registered, but two to three times that number actually attended. For the first time in the society’s history, the organizers set up a pressroom for their own in-house publication and a second room for reporters. A row of typists hammered away at abstracts and resolutions and transcripts. A coat-check room was turned into a kind of post office, the cubbies assigned to reporters and filled with updates from the meeting. The publicity committee gloated that news from the meeting was appearing in newspapers across the country.
Chemical warfare was front and center. The 13,500-member American Chemical Society had been an aggressive advocate of chemical warfare from its inception. Now with the future of the service in doubt, the society was pushing even harder. In the September issue of the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, the lead editorial was entitled “Beware the Ide[a]s of March!” In other words, the army chief of staff was a devious Brutus to the Chemical Warfare Service, ready to plunge his knife into the backs of the patriots congregating in Philadelphia. Charles Herty, the journal’s editor, warned that the War Department’s plan to abolish the service “bodes ill for the future safety of this country and possibly for the peace of the world.” In the months preceding the meeting, the journal had published article after article about gas warfare, the wonders of Edgewood, the achievements of the First Gas Regiment, and technical aspects of the work. The organization also sided with Fries on
the question of the service’s continued existence, passing a unanimous resolution urging President Wilson and Congress to maintain the Chemical Warfare Service as an independent branch of the military and to develop and maintain a chemical arsenal. The letter went to Baker just two days after Germany finally signed the Treaty of Versailles, which prohibited Germany from importing or producing chemical weapons and required disclosure of all explosive and chemical production to the Allies.
The September meeting was a show of muscle for the chemists, but it was also a reunion for service veterans. Amos Fries made the trip from Edgewood; Levering came down from New York, along with his new business partner George Burrell.
The general membership meeting got under way in earnest on the morning of September 3 in the hotel ballroom. When the music began, the crowd flooded into the ballroom. Scarcely a seat remained, and the chemists streamed up the sweeping staircases to pack the galleries above. A hearty rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” filled the ballroom, and then the hall quieted. The president of the society, William H. Nichols, spoke first. It was a long speech, and quite boring. It was the next speaker on the program who would grab the headlines in the morning papers.
To veterans of the service watching that day, the figure in the stiff collar ascending to the podium was a familiar ideological adversary. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker had received the society’s resolution in support of the Chemical Warfare Service and replied with a cordial response and nary a word of criticism. Now he was here to address the chemists in person. He earned polite applause as he took to the stage. He was there not because he had anything to contribute to their field, Baker said, joking that there was “scarcely anyone who would be less competent” than he to discuss even the most elemental aspects of chemistry. No, he said, he was there to thank them. The War Department owed a debt of gratitude to the nation’s chemists, “to which I want to give the most formal public expression.”