2. Ibid.
3. Washington concluded that L’Enfant had an “untoward disposition.” Report No. 4595 to accompany S. 7081, “Grave of Maj. Pierre Charles L’Enfant,” 58th Congress, 3rd Session, House of Representatives, Feb. 11, 1905.
4. Richard W. Stephenson, A Plan Whol[l]y New: Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s Planning the City of Washington (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1993), 34.
5. Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933), 11: 169.
6. Codington.
7. Codington; Johnson and Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography 11:169; Scott W. Berg, Grand Avenues: The Story of the French Visionary who designed Washington , D.C. (New York: Pantheon, 2007), 244. Berg writes that L’Enfant had claims pending against the federal government at the time of his death; sixteen years later, the War Department awarded L’Enfant’s estate $92.80 for his work on Fort Warburton, later called Fort Washington; see also Jean Jules Jusserand, With Americans of Past and Present Days (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 190.
8. Burnham, who helped raise a new Chicago from the ashes of the 1871 fire, is often credited for saying, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” Whether Burnham actually said it has been disputed, but there is no doubt that Burnham lived by the credo, which has been embraced by generations of architects since his time.
9. After the British torched the White House in 1814, President James Madison and his family took refuge in the Octagon House a few blocks away. It served as the White House until the president’s mansion could be restored.
10. Sara A. Butler, “The Monument as Manifesto: The Pierre Charles L’Enfant Memorial, 1909–1911,” Journal of Planning History, 6, 4 (Nov. 2007): 283–310.
11. Many of the architects and artists contributing to the McMillan Commission later served on the Council of Fine Arts, a federal committee appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt’s order of January 19, 1909. The council was charged with reviewing plans for buildings, statues, or parks in Washington to provide for orderly and aesthetic development. Although Roosevelt’s order was later revoked by President William Howard Taft, Congress reestablished the panel in 1910 as the United States Commission on Fine Arts, which continues to pass judgment on all plans for buildings and parks in the federal city to this day.
12. Report of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia on the Improvement of the Park System of the District of Columbia, U.S. Senate Report No. 166, 57th Congress, 1st Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1902).
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Butler, 293–94; see also Henry B. F. Macfarland to Luke E. White, Dec. 28, 1908, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
16. Berg, 274; see also Congressional Record—Senate, 61st Congress, 1st Session, March 25, 1909, 263–64; “Removal of the Remains of Pierre Charles L’Enfant,” House of Representatives Document No. 214, Jan. 11, 1905, 58th Congress, 3rd Session; Congressional Record—Senate, Feb. 8, 1905, 58th Congress, 3rd Session, 2060.
17. Macfarland to White, Dec. 28, 1908.
18. Murray Nelligan, Arlington House: The Story of the Lee Mansion Historical Monument (Burke, VA: Chatelaine Press, 2005), 143. The quote is not direct but as related by G. W. P. Custis, who was standing with Lafayette at Arlington when the Frenchman is supposed to have said it.
19. Capt. E. H. Humphrey Jr. to D. H. Rhodes, April 11, 1909, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
20. D. H. Rhodes to Maj. F. W. Matteson, June 10, 1930, AHA. According to Rhodes’s account of L’Enfant’s reburial, the cedar that had marked his grave did not go to waste. After the Frenchman’s disinterment, Rhodes wrote, the tree “turned out to be a boon to those most interested, in that it furnished wood for souvenirs that were made into mallets, etc.”
21. “L’Enfant Disinterred,” The Washington Post, April 23, 1909.
22. Rhodes to Matteson, June 10, 1930.
23. “L’Enfant Disinterred.”
24. “Memorial or Funeral Services in the Capitol Rotunda,” U.S. Senate Historical Office, 2005.
25. “Taps for L’Enfant,” The Washington Post, April 29, 1909
26. Ibid.; see also “Bacon Placed Pin In L’Enfant Coffin,” The Atlanta Constitution, April 29, 1909.
27. Ibid.
28. According to Rebecca Cooper, manager of reader services in the library of the Society of the Cincinnati, L’Enfant misjudged the market for the new medals. Having run through the funds provided him to commission medals, L’Enfant dipped into his own pocket and ended up with more badges than he could sell—a precursor of the fiscal exuberance that would finally be his undoing. Author interview, Washington, D.C., July 7, 2008.
29. “Taps for L’Enfant.” As with other controversies in L’Enfant’s eventful life, there is confusion regarding his reburial in 1909. The Washington Post account has Sen. Bacon giving his Cincinnati medal to L’Enfant at the Arlington graveside; an account from The Atlanta Constitution, also printed on April 29, 1908, has Bacon transferring the medal during ceremonies at the Capitol Rotunda. The Post’s account contains more detail and seems more credible, but either version may be correct.
30. Col. George Ruhlen, assistant quartermaster, to Jacob M. Dickinson, secretary of war, Nov. 16, 1910, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
31. Butler, 299–300.
32. Butler, 301–303.
33. Ruhlen to Dickinson, Nov. 16, 1910.
34. Ibid.
35. “Honor to L’Enfant,” The Washington Post, May 23, 1911.
36. Butler, 300. In his ill-fated design, submitted in March 1909, William Welles Bosworth correctly listed L’Enfant’s birth year as 1754; this was changed to 1755 during the process of review and revision.
37. Butler, 305.
38. “American Revolutionary War Veterans Interred at Arlington National Cemetery,” Arlington National Cemetery,www.arlingtoncemetery.org; see also “Interim Special Report: Revolutionary War Veteran Gravesites in Virginia,” Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission of the Virginia General Assembly, House Document 91, Feb. 15, 2000.
39. Although the War of 1812 occurred long before the creation of Arlington National Cemetery, it provided new burials for the nation’s graveyard. Working at the Marine Barracks in Washington in 1905, a construction crew discovered a mass grave containing the remains of fourteen unidentified sailors and marines from the War of 1812. All were reburied under a stone tablet in Section 1.
40. Ella Loraine Dorsey, “A Biographical Sketch of James McCubbin Lingan, one of the Original Proprietors,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society of Washington, D.C., 13 (1910): 1–48; Johnson and Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 11: 107–8; Anthony S. Pitch, The Burning of Washington : The British Invasion of 1814 (Annapolis: The Naval Institute Press, 1998), 1–12.
41. Ibid.; James Edward Peters, Arlington National Cemetery: Shrine to America’s Heroes(Bethesda, MD: Woodbine House, 2000) 126–28.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. “Honors to Peary,” National Geographic, January 1907.
45. Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2001), 8.
46. Peary’s North Pole claim, controversial in his own time, has since been questioned by scholars who suggest that he came very close to his goal but provided insufficient proof to validate his claim.
47. Johnson and Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 10:183–88. Some mystery still hovers over the remains General Porter recovered in 1905. Following a documentary trail to a tiny Protestant cemetery outside of Paris, Porter cracked open three lead-lined coffins before he found one with no identifying plaque. He was convinced that Jones, preserved in alcohol, was in this coffin. Using a forensic technique familiar to modern scientists, Porter compared the high cheekbones, arched eye, and other features of the corpse to contemporary likenesses of Jones and pron
ounced a match. Subsequent investigators are less confident of Jones’s identity. Joseph E. Callo, “Sea Power Visionary,” Military History, July/Aug. 2008.
48. Robert M. Poole, Explorers House: National Geographic and the World It Made(New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 65–66.
49. “Removal of the Remains of Pierre Charles L’Enfant,” House of Representatives Document No. 214, Jan. 11, 1905, 58th Congress, 3rd Session; Congressional Record— Senate, Feb. 8, 1905, 58th Congress, 3rd Session, 2060.
50. Rhodes to Matteson, June 10, 1930; see also Jennifer Hanna, Cultural Landscape Report: Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Mansion (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2001), 120–22.
51. “History of Government Furnished Headstones and Markers,” Department of Veterans Affairs, July 9, 2008,www.cem.va.gov/cem/hist/hmhist.asp.
52. 1st Lt. Frank P. Lahm, Chief Signal Officer, U.S. Army, “Proceedings of the Aeronautical Board for the Purpose of Investigating and Reporting on the Cause of the Accident to the Wright Aeroplane Which Resulted in the Death of First Lieutenant Thomas E. Selfridge, First Field Artillery,” Sept. 18, 1908; Dr. George A. Spratt, “Proceedings of the Aeronautical Board,” Appendix 1, Sept. 18, 1908; “Fatal Fall of Wright Airship,” The New York Times, Sept. 18, 1908; “Airship Falls: Lieut. Selfridge Killed, Wright Hurt,” The Washington Post, Sept. 18, 1908; “Aviation: From Sand Dunes to Sonic Booms: Fort Myer Historic District,” The National Park Service, July 28, 2008,www.nps.gov/history/nR/travel/aviation/ftm.htm.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid.
8: KNOWN BUT TO GOD
1. John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 362; Keegan, The Second World War (New York: Penguin Books, 2005) 17–18; Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1996), 235–236.
2. Caroline Alexander, “Faces of War,” Smithsonian, February 2007.
3. Tuchman, 235–236.
4. Keegan, A History of Warfare, 360–361.
5. Woodrow Wilson, “Abraham Lincoln: A Man of the People,” in Abraham Lincoln: The Tribute of a Century 1809–1909, Nathan William MacChesney, ed. (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1910), 14.
6. Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933), 20:353.
7. “Address of President Wilson at Arlington,” May 30, 1914, WWL.
8. Davis’s birthday was actually June 3, so the Confederates celebrated a day late.
9. Laura Wheeler, “Confederate Dead Are Still Remembered at Arlington,” The Washington Post,June 14, 2007.
10. “Gray and Blue Join,” The Washington Post, June 5, 1914; “Address of President Wilson Accepting the Monument in Memory of the Confederate Dead at Arlington National Cemetery,” June 4, 1914, WWL.
11. Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1988), 174.
12. Geoffrey Barraclough, ed., The Times Atlas of World History (Maplewood, NJ: Hammond Incorporated, 1979), 252–53.
13. Edward J. Renehan Jr., The Lion’s Pride: Theodore Roosevelt and His Family in Peace and War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 97; Barbara Tuchman, The Zimmermann Telegram (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1966) 118–19.
14. John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 136.
15. John Laffin, ed., Letters from the Front1914–1918 (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1973), 8.
16. Renehan, 97–98.
17. Letters, 24–25.
18. Ibid., 31–32. Chapin’s letter was written on September 24, 1915, two days before he died in battle.
19. “United States Must Act at Once on Lusitania, Says Colonel Roosevelt,” The New York Times, May 10, 1915.
20. Renehan, 104.
21. Even though Wilson pulled back from war after the Lusitania sank, the stern tone of his diplomatic note to the Germans was too much for Vice President Bryan, who felt that it threatened the nation’s neutral stance. He resigned.
22. “Address of President Wilson at Philadelphia,” May 10, 1915, WWL. Germany rationalized its attack by saying Lusitania had been armed, which made it a warship. In addition, it was later established that the ship had been carrying contraband—4,200 cases of Remington rifle cartridges, 1,250 cases of shrapnel shells, and 50 cases of explosive powder.
23. Edgar E. Robinson and Victor J. West, The Foreign Policy of Woodrow Wilson, 1913–1917 (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1918), 329–330.
24. Tuchman, Zimmermann, 195–97.
25. “Address of the President of the United States, Delivered at a Joint Session of the two houses of Congress,” April 2, 1917, WWL.
26. Keegan, First World War, 372.
27. Donald Smythe, Pershing: General of the Armies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 33–34. Colonel Stanton’s quote, “Lafayette, we are here!” is often misattributed to Pershing.
28. Ibid.
29. Keegan, First World War, 372–77.
30. Ibid., 373.
31. All of Roosevelt’s sons felt duty-bound to enter the war. Ted junior became a major of infantry, Archie served as an infantry captain, and Kermit as an artillery captain. Both Ted junior and Archie were severely wounded in the fighting.
32. Paul Duggan, “World War I Soldier Repatriated at Long Last,” The Washington Post, Sept. 25, 2006.
33. Combat deaths were staggering, with Germany losing 1.95 million men; France, 1.8 million; Russia, 1.7 million; Austria-Hungary, 1.05 million; Britain, 1 million; Italy, 533,000; the Ottoman Empire, 325,000; Belgium, 41,000; Serbia, 322,000; and others some 200,000. Most of the 116,516 American combatants who died were victims of the great influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919, which claimed some 60,000 U.S. troops and killed 20 million to 40 million worldwide.
34. Michelle May, “He Died Fighting,” Aviation History, January 2008; Renehan, 193–94; Andrew E. Woods, “World War I Soldier Repatriated After 88 Years,” Cantigny First Division Foundation, Wheaton, IL.
35. Jeremiah M. Evarts, Cantigny: A Corner of the War (New York: The Scribner Press, 1938), 85–96.
36. Woods; Duggan.
37. Duggan; “A Doughboy Killed in Action is Home at Last,” The New York Times, Sept. 24, 2006.
38. Florence Cannon, “Our Honored Dead,” Quartermaster Review, May-June 1952.
39. “Lieut. Roosevelt Falls in Air Fight; Believed Killed,” The New York Times, July 18, 1918.
40. Renehan, 198.
41. Ibid., 5–6.
42. Ferdinand Cowle Inglehart, Theodore Roosevelt: The man as I knew him(New York: The Christian Herald, 1919), 271; “A Solution Perhaps Acceptable,” The New York Times, Jan. 1, 1919. After resting near Chamery for almost three decades, Quentin Roosevelt’s body was removed to the American cemetery at Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer in 1945, when he was buried beside his brother Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who died of a heart attack after the Normandy invasion of 1944. Ted junior was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. Renehan, 239–40.
43. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed The World(New York: Random House, 2002), 3–4.
44. Erna Risch, Quartermaster Support of the Army, 1775–1939 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 1989), 599–694; Edward Steere, “National Cemeteries and Memorials in Global Conflict,” Quartermaster Review, Dec. 1953, 23–25; statement of Brig. Gen. Peter C. Harris, House Committee on Military Affairs, Feb. 1, 1921.
45. According to ancient tradition, Athenians carried their honored warriors home for burial, but they made an exception after the great battle at Marathon, where Thucydides wrote that the dead “were interred on the spot where they fell … for their singular and extraordinary valor.” This was the standard Theodore Roosevelt cited for leaving his son Quentin buried in Europe.
46. Memorandum of Adj. Gen. Robert C. Davis
for the Commander in Chief, GHQ, 4th Section, G.S., May 6, 1919, NARA RG 407, File 293.8 to 293.9. Testifying at congressional hearings in February 1921, Maj. Gen. John A. Lejeune, commandant of the Marine Corps, provided stark testimony about the dehumanizing effect of battle conditions. After the fight for Soissons in July 1918, “a number of men killed could not be identified,” he told the House Committee on Military Affairs. “This was due to several causes, the most frequent being the rending apart of men’s bodies by high explosive shells, so that in many instances only small bits or pieces or fragments of a body could be found. In one case, I remember particularly, a man was wounded and left in a shell hole and when they went to find him there was nothing there but some small pieces of flesh. A shell had made a direct hit and torn the body into a thousand pieces.”
47. Ibid.
48. Memorandum of Brig. Gen. Peter C. Harris, June 4, 1919, NARA RG 407, Box 566, File 293.8 to 293.9.
49. Letter from Maj. Gen. Frank McIntyre for War Department News Bureau, July 25, 1919, NARA RG 407, Box 566, File 293.8.
50. Mrs. L. Mantel to Secretary of War Nelson A. Baker, Dec. 10, 1919, NARA RG 407, Box 565, File 293.8.
51. G. Kurt Piehler, “The Dead and the Gold Star: American Commemoration of the First World War,” in John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Prince ton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 174.
On Hallowed Ground Page 39