by Theo Emery
In late 1921, public opposition to chemical warfare surged during the Conference on the Limitation of Armament, an arms-control summit held in Washington with representatives from Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States. The conference convened on November 12, 1921, three years and one day after the Armistice. The conference was expected to be short and adjourn by Christmas. Instead, the conference negotiations proved more difficult than expected, lasting more than twice that long.
As the talks over chemical weapons and other armaments dragged on, a reporter went to speak to soldiers still recuperating at Walter Reed Army Hospital about gas warfare. Though not unanimous, many of the injured men felt chemical warfare should be banned. One Rhode Island man called it “the Devil’s perfume.” Another who had lost a leg and an arm in addition to being gassed told the reporter that gas “was born out of a thirst for torture. These guys all went through it,” he went on, sweeping his remaining arm to point at all the other wounded soldiers, some of whom applauded. “They’ll say ‘cut out the gas.’”
The men who fought in the trenches weren’t the only voices raised against chemical warfare. During the disarmament conference, General John J. Pershing, the hero of the Great War, became a vocal opponent of chemical warfare. Though Pershing had supported the establishment of the Chemical Warfare Service and had put Fries into his position, in the war’s aftermath he made clear his personal opposition to gas, views that he had kept silent about during the war. During the disarmament conference, he chaired a subcommittee on land armaments, which forcefully denounced chemical weapons. His words rang with an undisguised moralism all the more striking for the fact that they came from a military man, not a pastor or a pacifist. “Chemical warfare should be abolished among nations, as abhorrent to civilization. It is a cruel, unfair and improper use of science. It is fraught with the gravest danger to non-combatants and demoralizes the better instincts of humanity,” he wrote of the subcommittee’s findings in November 1921.
The conference finished its work in February, drafting multiple treaties over naval power and submarine and gas warfare. The U.S. Senate ratified the gas and submarine treaty in March 1922, banning wartime use of “asphyxiating, poisonous and other gases, and all analogous liquids, materials and devices.” The treaty wasn’t binding, though, without ratification by all participating countries. France subsequently balked, preventing the treaty from going into effect, but it did put the United States on record as opposing chemical warfare.
Major General Sibert was absent from the proceedings. In late February of 1920, Goliath had been relieved from duty as chief of the Chemical Warfare Service and ordered to assume command of Camp Gordon in Georgia. The War Department scuttlebutt was that the demotion was punishment for Sibert’s opposition to Baker and March’s plans to reduce the status of the Chemical Warfare Service, a view that Charles Herty, editor of the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, expounded upon in the journal. The demotion was an unmistakable rebuke, akin to Sibert’s dismissal from France two years before. This time, though, there was no new surprise position—Goliath had been put out to pasture. Rather than bow to this indignation, he retired. He moved to a farm in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he raised hounds and spent his leisure time fishing and hunting foxes. He remarried, wedding a Scottish woman named Evelyn Clyne Bairnsfather as his third wife in 1922. He returned to work for several years in his native Alabama to oversee construction of the port in Mobile but eventually returned to Kentucky. He died at the farm in 1935.
Fries faced no such exile. He replaced Sibert as head of the service, even though he had worked as fiercely to oppose the War Department’s plans in 1919, with now-major Earl J. Atkisson appointed as commanding officer at Edgewood. How exactly Fries avoided the ax and Sibert did not is something of a mystery—one possible reason is that Fries had support from line officers and from Pershing, who replaced Peyton March in 1921 as army chief of staff, despite their opposite views on chemical warfare.
The year 1925 proved to be a turning point for chemical weapons internationally. Wilson was dead, but his League of Nations lived on. That year, the league held its first major arms-limitation talks, the International Conference for the Control of the Traffic in Arms and Ammunition in Geneva. There were forty-three countries at the talks when they opened. The United States proposed a sweeping ban that prohibited not only chemical warfare but also export of chemical weapons agents. Other participating countries protested, pointing out that many common chemicals, such as chlorine and phosgene, had dual uses, for both industrial purposes and warfare. A compromise banned chemical warfare but not development, manufacture, or possession of chemical weapons. It also permitted their use against nonsignatory nations and retaliation against any nation that launched an attack with chemical weapons.
The resulting treaty was the 1925 Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and Bacteriological Methods of Warfare. After the delegates returned to the United States, many of the organizations that fought in 1919 to preserve the Chemical Warfare Service geared up again, this time to convince the U.S. Senate to reject the gas warfare treaty. It took a year for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to take action on the treaty and send it on for a vote by the full Senate. Debate still would not start for months, giving opponents plenty of opportunity to organize. The American Legion distributed some twenty-five thousand pamphlets entitled The Truth about the Geneva Gas Protocol—America Should Reject Stand—Preparedness Essential to Our National Security. A lobbying organization called the National Association for Chemical Defense was also cobbled together in November of 1926 to work against the Geneva Protocol. The organization’s treasurer, John Thomas Taylor, was director of the American Legion’s legislative committee and a close friend of Amos Fries; Fries was also Washington’s district commander of the American Legion. Many other members of the organization were Chemical Warfare Service veterans, such as Wilder Bancroft, Marston Bogert, and Sunny Jim Norris. The American Chemical Society also remained a vocal opponent of gas disarmament and the Geneva Protocol.
Shortly after the Geneva talks, Lewis was recalled to Edgewood for two weeks of active duty. During the disarmament fight, he had spoken out against banning chemical weapons, along with many of his wartime colleagues and fellow members of the American Chemical Society. Lewis and Fries appeared together in September of 1925 at the City Club of New York. Fries spoke of how preparation for chemical warfare was the only way to avoid war. “When we let the enemy know that we are able to pour on him ten tons of chemicals for every one he can pour on us, we won’t have war,” Fries told the audience. Following Fries, Lewis went on to talk about the humanity of gas warfare, an argument he regularly made in speeches, using the surgeon general’s statistics about low fatality rates of gas cases. The back-to-back speeches embodied the contradictions in the arguments of chemical warfare supporters—that gas could be simultaneously the most humane weapon and so awful and barbaric that it could deter future wars.
The lobbying paid off, and the Senate never voted on the treaty. Even General John Pershing, America’s champion of the war, was unable to convince the Senate to approve the treaty, pleading with the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “I cannot think it possible that our country should fail to ratify the protocol which includes this or a similar provision.” The United States was the protocol’s sole holdout. The rejection so enraged Congressman Hamilton Fish Jr. of New York—an opponent of chemical warfare—that he stormed to the House floor to personally excoriate Taylor, the American Legion representative. “I charge him with carrying on a tremendous propaganda financed by the chemical industries to defeat the poison gas treaty in the Senate,” Fish ranted. “I charge him with having bamboozled members of the other body which has to pass on the treaty… .I charge him with misrepresenting the views of the rank and file of the veterans and misleading our colleagues in the other body into believing they will incur the w
rath of the Legionnaires if they vote for the gas treaty.”
The 1920s were lean years for the service. Fries worked to keep the service in the public eye with tours of Edgewood, public demonstrations of gases, and regular speeches about chemical warfare. For a time, he claimed that gas was not just humane but that it was healthy, insisting that sitting in a chlorine-filled gas chamber was a kind of spa-treatment cure for colds and pneumonia, despite doctors’ assessment that this was nonsense. Some of the top scientists at American University and satellite campuses of the Research Division—George Burrell, William Walker, Warren K. Lewis, Yandell Henderson, and others—remained active advisers to the Chemical Warfare Service.
Van Manning never truly gained credit for setting in motion the research that would turn into the Chemical Warfare Service. In fact, he had to fight for the recognition that he felt the Bureau of Mines deserved after the navy took credit for many of the bureau’s discoveries. Manning had stepped down in 1920 to become director of research for the American Petroleum Institute and a consultant to the Cuban government. When President Hoover wrote to thank Manning for his service, the president lamented: “I do not feel that the country can afford to lose you.” Years after the war ended, Manning remained embittered about how little credit the Bureau of Mines received for its efforts. When he died in 1932, the legacy ascribed to him was that he had made helium cheap and plentiful. His role in chemical warfare was scarcely mentioned. A brief burial notice in the Washington Post noted: “During the World War, he established the chemical laboratories at American University.”
After Winford Lee Lewis returned to teaching, he became a vocal champion of chemical warfare, a foot soldier in the fight against disarmament. Forever hitched to the substance that bore his name, Lewis spoke frequently and enthusiastically about his wartime service. Both fame and infamy accompanied that association. “I have been accused of inventing a gas so poisonous that one drop on the tongue of a dog would destroy a whole city,” Lewis said in a speech he delivered in 1922 to the City Club Forum in Rochester, New York. “Forsworn to silence by the War Department, I have been cussed and discussed by my colleagues and cajoled and flattered and upbraided generally.”
The War Department had initially refused to allow Lewis to publish articles about lewisite, but after a British journal printed a step-by-step process for producing lewisite, Lewis published his own article in 1923. He retired from teaching in 1924 to work for a trade group, the American Meat Institute, where he worked until ill health forced him to retire in 1941. Some of that ill health was certainly the result of his war work—he almost completely lost his voice late in life because of the toxic fumes he had inhaled. In January of 1943, Myrtilla found Captain Dad unconscious on the snowy driveway beneath a second-floor porch. He had apparently tumbled from the porch after he slipped or suffered a heart attack. He died in the hospital a day later, on January 20, 1943.
The consummate deal maker Richmond M. Levering had no second act to his brief tenure with the Chemical Warfare Service. In late January of 1920, when the influenza pandemic surged in a lethal wave across the country and the world, New York City reported 2,855 new flu cases on a single day and 386 pneumonia cases, an alarming outbreak for the city’s public health officials. Levering, who was living in an apartment on East Fifty-Sixth Street, was one of those cases. Despite his temperance and his relative youth—he was only thirty-nine years old—he died of pneumonia within a few days, on Wednesday, January 28, 1920.
Had Levering lived longer, he might have left a more precise account of his wartime activities and his arrangement with Walter Scheele. Even the Department of Justice couldn’t complete the puzzle of Levering. In an investigation of Levering and Bielaski’s relationship in late 1919, the lengthy report concluded that “there is not much material in the files to denote Levering’s activities.”
Scheele continued to work for Levering until December 1919. On December 9, Scheele applied for four patents. All four were variations of a familiar “incendiary mixture”: two parts sodium peroxide and one part hexamethylenetetramine that produced a “mixture or composition of matter well adapted for use as material in warfare when filled into aero bombs or incendiary shells.” It was, in other words, the combination of chemicals that he had used to try to set cargo ships afire.
Scheele would have one more moment in the sun. On September 16, 1920, a bomb exploded on Wall Street, an act of terrorism that has never been solved. Bureau of Investigation Chief William J. Flynn, the man who replaced A. Bruce Bielaski, asked Scheele to analyze the composition of the explosives. His report identified blasting gelatin as the explosive. Reporters were perplexed by the report authored by the former ship bomber. The New York Times attempted to prove that the government witness was the same Walter Scheele who had tried to blow up merchant ships. The secrecy around his case extended even to federal agencies he worked for. Just before the Wall Street bombing, a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy trying to sort out the unpaid Nyack Hospital bills from Scheele’s hospitalization wrote to Thomas Edison’s assistant asking who Scheele was. Edison’s assistant provided a synopsis of how Scheele came to work at Jones Point. “Dr. Scheele was a German spy,” the assistant wrote. “Scheele was a fine Chemist.”
Five years after his indictment, Scheele’s criminal case came to an end. On February 25, 1921, the chemist stood before Judge Julius M. Mayer in U.S. District Court and pleaded guilty to the 1916 charges. Then the judge sentenced Scheele to one day in the custody of the U.S. marshal. The light sentence resulted from the prosecutor’s statement that Scheele had turned informant after his arrest and had aided the War and Navy Departments. The prosecutor provided scant details, saying that he did not know the specifics of Scheele’s services. Few people did.
Eventually, Scheele opened a new chemical laboratory in Hackensack, New Jersey. He bought advertisements in the city directory that read simply “Dr. Walter T. Scheele, Research Laboratories.” He and Marie moved into a nearby home. Perhaps Scheele strolled the 1.5 miles from the house to the laboratory, as he had in Bushwick years earlier, hat cocked on his head and chomping on a cigar, just an elderly man with a scarred face and an accent, ambling to work.
In 1921, the U.S. Patent Office approved Scheele’s applications for his incendiary mixtures, as well as two other patents. The following year, he died of pneumonia at age sixty-two, two weeks after he applied for U.S. citizenship. His four-sentence obituary in the Washington Post stated that he had been imprisoned in Atlanta for the war’s duration.
Fries remained a staunch defender of chemical weapons long after public opinion had turned against them. He left his position as chief of the Chemical Warfare Service in 1929. Rather than accept a reduced rank, he retired from the army. But there was no quiet retirement for Fries. Over the next several years, Fries became increasingly vociferous in his support of gas, lashing out at those he saw as enemies of gas warfare and condemning critics as Bolshevik lapdogs. His conservatism found other outlets as well—he became a virulent critic of labor unions, particularly those in Washington, D.C., schools. He championed legislation that forbid even the mention of communism in public schools. In his view, anyone who opposed chemical warfare was a subversive or a Communist seeking to undermine America. The Ku Klux Klan invited him to apply for membership. As World War II began, he predicted that chemical weapons would be a part of that savage war as well.
Fries was only partially correct. Chemical weapons were never launched on the battlefield in World War II. No nation wanted to be first, which would have permitted adversaries to respond in kind under the Geneva Protocol. President Franklin Roosevelt was also a fierce opponent of chemical warfare, calling it “inhuman and contrary to what modern civilization should stand for.” While the Nazis technically abided by the Geneva Protocol, they wielded gas in another horrifying fashion: killing untold numbers of Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, using hydrogen cyanide, or Zyklon B. It was also known as prussic acid, one of the discoveries of Carl Wi
lhelm Scheele, the chemist that Walter Scheele claimed as his relative. In an unspeakable irony, Fritz Haber had a role in that horror as well; the lab of the Jewish chemist had helped develop Zyklon B. The Nazis also had scientists at work on new, still more powerful compounds, as permitted under the Geneva Protocol. After World War II ended, the extent of the Nazi gas program became clear with the discovery that Germany had developed the nerve gases sarin and tabun. Historians have speculated on why the Germans never used chemicals on the battlefield. One hypothesis is that Adolf Hitler may have had an aversion to chemical warfare, having been gassed himself near Ypres in 1918, as he described in Mein Kampf. After the war, the secret U.S. Nazi relocation program, Operation Paperclip, brought German chemists to work on the American chemical warfare program.
Though chemical weapons were not used on the battlefield in World War II, the U.S. chemical weapons program in World War I was in many ways a dry run for another weapon program. James Bryant Conant, the shy chemist sent to Willoughby, had gone on to a professorship at Harvard. He became the university’s president in 1933. As World War II loomed, President Roosevelt named him as chemical adviser to the National Resources Defense Council; he became chairman the next year. Named to the Military Policy Committee the year after, he became a prime architect of the Manhattan Project, and he personally participated in making the decision of where to drop the atom bomb on Japan.
Fries never abandoned his views that gas warfare was a more humane type of warfare because it only debilitated enemies and rarely killed them. Politics and dogmatic ideology laced his arguments. Enemies of America—pacifism and communism—lurked behind the efforts to ban gas warfare. He also maintained a sincere, if disturbing, belief that America needed to be prepared for an apocalyptic warfare in which gas steeped the battlefield. In his unpublished memoir, he wrote,