On Hallowed Ground

by Robert M Poole

  The light was fading when the caisson rolled up to Capitol Hill, where body bearers stepped forward, shouldered the Unknown’s remains, and trudged up the marble steps. Inside, under the soaring Rotunda dome that had sheltered Lincoln, L’Enfant, McKinley, and other honored figures lying in state, the Unknown’s comrades eased him down for the night, with his head pointed toward France, his feet toward Arlington.95

  From his arrival in Washington, he would never be alone. Sentinels stood watch through two nights, relieved at regular intervals by their comrades. President Warren G. Harding brought flowers, as did Chief Justice and former President William Howard Taft, Vice President Calvin Coolidge, General Pershing, and other dignitaries. Some came bearing fresh roses from England; some, poppies from the bloody soil of Flanders. King George V of Britain sent a wreath with a biblical inscription on the ribbon: “As Unknown, yet well known; As dying, and behold, we live.”96

  When the Rotunda’s massive bronze doors opened on the morning of November 10, thousands of ordinary citizens poured through to pay their respects, bringing so many flowers that the growing mountain of blossoms had to be carted off to make way for more visitors and more flowers. The weather cleared. The silent crowds edged four abreast past the Unknown’s casket and streamed out of the Rotunda at the rate of a hundred a minute. Soldiers old and young came to honor one of their own, followed by mothers in black, wearing the gold star of those who had lost their sons to war.97

  Because the Unknown had no name, no home, no rank, and not a scrap of evidence suggesting his identity, he could be claimed by everyone. Mothers who had never recovered their sons from Europe allowed themselves to think that the boy in the casket was theirs.98 Rich and poor embraced him, as did small-town shopkeepers from the flatlands and farmers from the hills. African Americans, wondering if he had been a brother, came bearing a wreath for him.99 Some ninety thousand to one hundred thousand made the effort to give their thanks or say farewells in person. A blind man, led by a child, paused before the casket, listened for a whispered cue, and crossed himself. Wounded French soldiers struggled by on crutches and canes, which echoed harshly under the dome; old men and women shuffled between rope lines. Many lingered at the bier, made to move off, and turned for a last look at the flower-covered casket and the fresh-faced guards with heads bowed around it, lit by pale sunlight slanting in from high in the dome. Many left the Rotunda with tears coursing down their faces.100

  Those planning the funeral march from Capitol Hill had intended for General Pershing, the Army’s new chief of staff, to lead mourners through the city and across the river to Arlington on horseback, as grand marshal of ceremonies. He would have none of that. Pershing insisted on walking behind the caisson, content to cover the five miles on foot. At precisely eight a.m. on November 11, 1921, pallbearers emerged from the Rotunda on a mist-shrouded day, brought the Unknown down the Capitol steps, and loaded him on the caisson, just as a field artillery battery, positioned near the Washington Monument, commenced firing the gun that would mark each minute throughout the day, pausing only for the traditional two minutes of silence at eleven a.m.101

  Rank upon rank formed behind Maj. Gen. Harry H. Bandholtz, commanding the Military District of Washington, who nudged his horse and led the way down Pennsylvania Avenue, followed by the Army band, a drum corps beating quick time, a foot regiment, a mounted filed artillery battalion, a squadron of cavalry, and four clergymen. Then came the caisson bearing the Unknown, who was accorded the final honors reserved for a general.102

  President Harding and General Pershing strode behind the caisson, followed by the Supreme Court, the cabinet, governors, columns of senators and House members, Congressional Medal winners, and white-haired sailors, soldiers, and marines from the old wars. As the cortege turned downhill from the Capitol, former president Woodrow Wilson joined the line, riding in an open horse carriage with Mrs. Wilson and drawing cheers from thousands of spectators lining the streets. He had not been seen in public since March, when he and Harding had ridden along this same street at the latter’s inauguration. The once-proud figure, now pale and broken, was a reminder that the casualties of war were not limited to those in uniform. The public obviously appreciated Wilson’s gesture, brief though it proved to be. When the procession reached the White House, Harding and Wilson tipped hats to each other and the Wilsons were driven home. Harding peeled off from the parade at this point, along with cabinet officers, Supreme Court members, and other luminaries, who intended to drive to Arlington later.103

  Pershing, his uniform unadorned except for a single Victory Medal, closed ranks with hundreds of others remaining in the cortege and marched out the length of Pennsylvania Avenue, through Georgetown, over the old Aqueduct Bridge into Virginia, and slowly up the long hill to Arlington, reaching the new Memorial Amphitheater at eleven fifteen a.m. To the strains of a hymn, the casket team gathered up the Unknown, marched him into the apse of the amphitheater, and, while the audience rose in silence, positioned his casket on a bier piled high with flowers. Pershing filed in. War mothers took their places on marble benches. Nurses in gray helped wounded soldiers into seats of honor. Marshal Foch of France, his chest gleaming with war medals, found his place, followed by Britain’s Admiral Lord Beatty, Belgium’s General Baron Jacques, Generalissimo Diaz of Italy, former British prime minister Arthur J. Balfour, French premier Aristide Briand, and Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow Nation.104 Technicians fussed with wires behind the podium, nervously testing amplifiers and microphones for the first presidential speech ever broadcast across the country—which brought the Arlington service to thousands of far-flung Americans in New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco at the same time.105

  President Harding, caught in traffic jamming the Potomac River bridges, took his place in the amphitheater at eleven fifty a.m., just in time for opening ceremonies. With visible emotion, he stood beside the flag-covered coffin and called for an end to war—just as his predecessor had done on previous occasions at Arlington. “Ours are lofty resolutions today,” Harding said, his words crackling from loudspeakers set around the amphitheater, “as with tribute to the dead we consecrate ourselves to a better order for the living. With all my heart, I wish we might say to the defenders who survive, to mothers who sorrow, to widows and children who mourn, that no such sacrifice shall be asked again … Standing today on hallowed ground, conscious that all America has halted to share in the tribute of heart and mind and soul to this fellow American … it is fitting to say that his sacrifice, and that of the millions dead, shall not be in vain. There must be, there shall be, the commanding voice of a conscious civilization against armed warfare.”106

  After leading the crowd in the Lord’s Prayer, Harding gathered up the Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Service Cross, stepped over to the Unknown’s casket, and pinned them there. These honors were followed by one after another—from Belgium, France, Italy, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland. Admiral Lord Beatty came bearing the Victoria Cross, never before awarded a foreigner.107

  When ceremonies in the amphitheater were done, body bearers hoisted the Unknown onto their shoulders for the last time, marched a hundred yards east to the plaza overlooking the green hills, and situated his casket over the sarcophagus. They stepped back and straightened. The burial service was read. General Pershing walked across the terrace and tossed a handful of soil into the tomb, saluted, and stepped back. Chief Plenty Coups ceremoniously removed his war bonnet, placed it on the tomb, and expressed his hope “for peace to all men hereafter.” He was answered by three salvos booming from the saluting battery. Pallbearers stepped forward and tenderly lowered the Unknown into his crypt, where he would rest in French soil brought over on Olympia. Monsieur Brasseur’s roses remained with him. A bugler sounded Taps, and as the final note died, the artillery spoke for the last time, shaking the hills of Arlington with a resounding twenty-one-gun salute for the soldier “known but to God.”108

  9

  A TIME TO BUILD UP
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br />   NOTHING COULD REDEEM a young life lost to war, but the rituals at the Tomb of the Unknown helped ease the grief for mothers such as Mrs. Emmett Digney of White Grange, New York, who took solace from the artillery salutes, the majestic old hymns offered up by brass bands, and the outpouring of sympathy from thousands of ordinary citizens who converged on Arlington in November 1921 to pay tribute to those who never returned from World War I.

  “Our government does not know what it has done for the thousands of bereaved mothers in the United States,” said Mrs. Digney, president of the National American War Mothers, after the Arlington ceremonies. “I know how I felt when I viewed the bier of the man who represented all of America’s fallen sons … The thought came to me that in the coffin … of one American soldier the hearts of every mother who lost her boy were carried to the final resting place … Every mother whose boy died on the field of battle and whose body was interred in a foreign land must feel that the body interred today is that of her boy and glean comfort from that thought.”1

  The world stopped to pay attention at Arlington that day, providing a sense of closure for Mrs. Digney, as it did for thousands of American families reduced by war. For others, though, the flag-waving speeches and the flash of swords had the opposite effect, rekindling memories of brutal fighting, pointless casualties, and comrades gone forever. The burden of remembrance fell especially hard on Lt. Col. Charles W. Whittlesey, thirty-seven, who as an army major had lost more than half of his battalion in the American offensive at Argonne Forest in October 1918. Driving deep into German-held territory, troops from the 308th Infantry Regiment outran their own lines and endured five days of merciless bombardment and machine gun fire—some of it from their own compatriots. Germans offered Whittlesey the chance to surrender; he declined, maintaining his forward position until reinforcements broke through. When the smoke cleared and the roll was called on October 6, the reckoning showed 356 of the unit’s 554 soldiers killed, wounded, or captured. The survivors, celebrated by Damon Runyon and other war correspondents, won fame as the “Lost Battalion.” Whittlesey was promoted to lieutenant colonel and won the Medal of Honor for gallantry and intrepidity.2

  After the war, the reluctant hero returned to practice law in New York City, quietly resuming civilian life until November 1921, when he was summoned to Washington to march with fellow Medal of Honor laureates at ceremonies for the Unknown. He fell in with old comrades tramping through the chill streets of the capital and across the river to Arlington, where he saw the honored warrior lowered into the earth, felt the familiar shudder of artillery once more, and heard the silver notes of Taps ringing among the tombstones for the last time.3

  The sensitive, bespectacled Whittlesey returned to New York, booked passage on the S.S. Toloa for Havana, and, when well out to sea at night, leaped overboard to his death. He left letters for family and friends, named an executor, and finally put the war behind him. His body was never recovered.4

  The war had broken Whittlesey, just as it had wiped out a generation in Europe, brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia, shattered old alliances, and redrawn political boundaries from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. Within the peace terms imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty were imbedded the irritants that would animate Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and, all too soon, lead to the next global conflagration.5

  In the meantime, however, world leaders did what they invariably do after a war: they picked through the ruins, buried their fighting men, welcomed their returning veterans, and struggled to restore some semblance of hope for the future. On the day after ceremonies for the Unknown at Arlington, President Harding convened an international disarmament conference in Washington, where nine leading nations met to stave off the sort of arms race that had helped to spark World War I.6

  On the eve of the conference, even Gen. John J. Pershing—that most unbending of soldiers, now Army chief of staff—endorsed the peaceful aims of the international gathering. He called for a ban on chemical weapons, which he termed a “cruel, unfair and improper use of science.” He favored a limit on arms production, as long as the terms applied to all sides proportionately. And he warned about “nations striding up and down the earth armed to the teeth … we may well ask ourselves whether civilization does really reach a point where it begins to destroy itself.”7

  With Europe weary of fighting, most diplomats expected the next war to break out in Asia, where seafaring powers would likely shape the course of events—thus, the emphasis on reducing naval arms among the United States, Great Britain, Japan, France, and Italy. After months of intense discussion in Washington, the five major powers agreed to scuttle their older capital vessels—those battleships and cruisers with the heaviest armor and the biggest firepower—and to limit production of new ones at an agreed-upon ratio. Another treaty called for the United States, Britain, France, and Japan to consult before taking any military action in East Asia, where the world’s commercial powers were maneuvering for a share of the China trade. Signed by President Harding and ratified by the Senate in 1923, the treaties briefly accomplished their purpose, providing a decade of peace before the world took up arms and resumed fighting in the 1930s.8

  The pause between wars at Arlington provided another opportunity for rebuilding and refining the cemetery, which continued as a work in progress as the twentieth century gathered steam.

  The old Lee mansion, still the cemetery’s most imposing landmark, had fallen into a state of neglect by the end of World War I. Stripped of furniture and paintings, its rooms were for the most part empty, given over to the utilitarian functions of cemetery administration. Arlington’s durable gardener and disinterment specialist, D. H. Rhodes, had commandeered one room for office space; in another, the cemetery superintendent received visitors and kept burial records, while a third downstairs chamber was cluttered with battle flags and unsorted mementos from the Union’s Civil War campaigns. Little thought was given to preserving the distinctive character of this historically significant structure—a state of affairs that prompted an influential writer to call attention to the matter in her Good Housekeeping column, “Letters from a Senator’s Wife.”9

  “What ever our opinions and traditions may be,” Frances Parkinson Keyes wrote in the August 1921 issue of the magazine, “we all realize now that Robert E. Lee was one of the greatest generals and one of the noblest men who ever lived. To every American woman the abuse of his home must seem a disgrace; to every Southern woman it must seem a sacrilege.” Although married to Sen. Henry Wilder Keyes, a New Hampshire Republican, Frances Keyes was a devoted Virginia native and admirer of the Confederate general. She took inspiration from the recent restoration of George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate, just down the Potomac River from Arlington. The success of that initiative, organized by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, encouraged Mrs. Keyes to propose similar renovations for the Lee family’s homestead. She used her Good Housekeeping column to generate interest in the project, and her husband’s position on Capitol Hill to recruit an able ally, Rep. Louis C. Cramton, to carry it forward.10

  Cramton, a Michigan Republican whose father had fought as a Union soldier against Lee, took up the case for Arlington in May 1924, when he introduced legislation to restore the house to its pre–Civil War condition. “The exterior of the mansion is as it was in the old days,” Cramton explained in congressional hearings that spring. “The interior is barren and naked. Whenever I have taken any friends … I have felt obliged to apologize to them for the condition of the interior, in its barrenness and unattractiveness.” Cramton made it clear that he not only hoped to return the mansion to its former glory but also shared Mrs. Keyes’s regard for Lee, whom he called “an American who occupies a very high place in our history and in the hearts of our people.” Creating a Lee memorial at Arlington “would be tangible recognition by the country, North and South, that the bitterness of other days is entirely gone.”11

  That bitterness had moderated, to be sure, but i
t was not entirely gone. More than fifty years after his death, Robert E. Lee still exerted a strange power among many who remembered—and could not forgive—his Civil War performance. The prospect that Arlington might be established as a shrine to the Rebel general spurred Sen. Porter H. Dale, a Vermont Republican, to propose that Lee’s home be converted into a museum for displaying “trophies and emblems of the Union Army and Navy of the United States during the Civil War.” Dale’s legislation, supported by the aging veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic, also called for keeping the cemetery’s administrative offices in the mansion. After some lively discussion, Dale’s bill was referred to the Senate Committee on Military Affairs in February 1926. It disappeared there.12

  A more serious threat to the Lee memorial came from Charles Moore, the influential chairman of the National Commission of Fine Arts, a federal advisory board of painters, sculptors, architects, and landscape gardeners established in 1910 to evaluate the design and site selection for new buildings and parks in the capital region. Although the board had no real authority, it was soon established as the final arbiter of taste for buildings and grounds in Washington, where commissioners sought to enforce a particular aesthetic, incorporating open spaces, long views, a horizontal construction scheme, and simple, classical lines for buildings—in short, the look that Pierre Charles L’Enfant had in mind when he sketched out plans for the federal city in 1791.13