CHAPTER THREE
Sophia had lived through the Floyd River flood of May 1892, those terrible days when Iowans died and stockyard cattle swam for their lives, but three years later, when she was 18 and about to graduate LeMars High School, she expected nature to provide more favorable conditions for the outdoor celebration she had arranged.
Rowing on the Floyd was the plan, followed by a picnic in her favorite grove, “but it rained so hard the evening before that we couldn’t,” Sophia lamented in her first letter to Roy, then 19, which he received in Blue Hill, Nebraska, where he lived with his family near two of Sophia and Ben’s older brothers.1 Rain had also spoiled Sophia’s post-graduation stay with her cousins in nearby Marcus, Iowa, where her uncle was mayor. She had “such a dull time,” she confided to Roy.
In June, when Sophia wrote her letter, the Floyd was still running high and Sophia doubted her mother would let her handle oars anytime soon, but Sophia let Roy know of other upcoming amusements—a dance and horse races. She flirtatiously suggested that if Roy’s sister visited over the summer, “don’t you think you had better be her escort, she might get lost?” Still, Sophia reserved her strongest enthusiasm for Ben, who “is to be home one week from today” from West Point.
“I am so glad,” she wrote, for Ben had been her anchor after their father died, and she missed him, even though it was unquestionably an honor to have a brother at the United States Military Academy.
This admiration was underscored by The New York Times when it published a photograph of Ben and his sixty-six classmates two years later. The graduates were “embryo Generals” in the unctuous words of the Times, pictured solemnly in dark uniforms of the sort many, including Ben, expected to wear for the rest of their lives.2 Someone with neat penmanship had labored over the photograph, writing a small number in white ink on each man’s chest that corresponded to an index printed below the photo, so that readers could know the names of the men whose years of drills and “practical experience . . . will stand them in good stead should the country ever need their services.”3
Today, the graduating class at West Point numbers more than one thousand, and no newspaper of general circulation devotes enough space to print all those names.
It was different in the late 1800s, not only because of class size. The military formed a large portion of the daily news diet in part because of its role in the recently completed westward drive through Native American land, and also because a major cultural glorification of the Civil War was in progress. Many young adults had grown up hearing their fathers and grandfathers speak of the glory days of the Civil War, mythologized as a time of hardy men of high character willing to die for what they believed. Such “intergenerational storytelling” by veterans, plus a “massive Civil War literary genre [and] widespread production of popular and official historical memory of the conflict” led Americans of the late 19th century to understand the Civil War “as a national treasure,” in the words of historian John Pettegrew.4 The racial cause of the war was downplayed as “popular historical memory of the Civil War fixed on the scale and excitement of battle.”
A number of U.S. senators and representatives were veterans. Joined by younger hawks, and supported by Civil War memoirs that stressed the “man-making power of war,” they propounded the idea of military life and service in war—“the soldierly virtues,” in Theodore Roosevelt’s words—as incubators of strong men and exemplary citizens, in contrast, it was said, to weak men molded by industrial progress, material comforts, women’s influence, and peace.5
Books and articles offered much advice on how teenage boys could attain vigorous manhood as the milestone year of 1900 neared, but for Ben, West Point was the fulfillment of a dream formed earlier—in a boyhood that exposed him to the most illustrious Civil War hero of them all, Ulysses S. Grant.6
Ben spent the first years of his life in Galena, Illinois, which claimed Grant as a favorite son due to his having worked in his father’s store located there. The Grant & Perkins leather goods shop stood down the street from the establishment where Christian Koehler made wagons, and where an employee, Louis Gund, created something else—a lifelong relationship—when he introduced his sister to his boss. Christian Koehler and Margaret Gund soon married after finding that they had much in common, including former lives in Rhineland, Germany. Fate, or an innate desire to replicate the past, had brought them both to the watershed of the Mississippi, a U.S. river that rivaled the Rhine; for Galena’s stately red brick buildings sloped down to a Mississippi tributary, the Galena River.
Ben, the couple’s ninth child, was born on January 1, 1872, during Grant’s first term as president.7
Grant and his wife made annual visits to Galena, feted by marching bands, fluttering flags, and red, white, and blue bunting.8 Ben was the right age to soak up the pageantry, too young to know about either the death and discrimination that lay underneath such heraldic nods to the Civil War, or the allegations of corruption and ineffectiveness that bedeviled Grant’s administration.
Nor did Ben know that Grant had not always been a hero, that he had experienced years of failure after developing a drinking problem while living apart from his wife in an isolated California fort. Grant had resigned rather than face a court-martial, and after several financial missteps, he had reluctantly gone to work in his father’s store in 1860, turning it into “a small hotbed of political debate” until the shelling of Fort Sumter made war a reality.9 After that, Grant’s ties to a U.S. representative, Elihu Washburne, and almost unbelievable fortuity brought his innate military abilities to President Lincoln’s attention and made possible Grant’s transformation from antislavery saddle-seller to head of the Union Army and two-term president.
Later, when Ben faced the loss of all he had lived for, those comeback aspects of Grant’s story likely mattered more than the boyhood idolatry he had felt.
Ben was four when his parents left Galena with their youngest children to be closer to the older ones, whose aspirations had taken them west. The year was 1876, the nation’s centennial, and Margaret was pregnant. In the spring, the Koehlers crossed the Mississippi into Iowa at Dubuque, passing farms, wide-open vistas, and many a steeple catching the light. They kept on moving past Waterloo, Webster City, and Fort Dodge toward the Midwest’s other Rhine-like river, the Missouri. With about twenty-five miles to go until the Missouri border, they veered northwest to the Floyd River Valley and stopped in LeMars. Other Germans had settled there, and local business leaders were congratulating themselves on their “success and prosperity,” the “exceptionally fine location of the town,” and “the splendid farming country that surrounds it.”10
In LeMars, Christian set up a new wagon business and Margaret gave birth to Sophia. Very soon, different sorts of immigrants began arriving: second and third sons of British aristocrats, born in the wrong order to inherit their family homesteads, sent to Iowa to buy tracts of its fertile farmland, learn farm management, and live like lords for a pittance. Soon after the Koehlers’ arrival, LeMars laid claim to one of the first golf courses west of the Mississippi.11
In the 1880s, LeMars became famous among upper-class Brits, though its name predated the English. In 1869, a railroad builder had arrived with big intentions in what was then called Saint Paul Junction, where two train lines intersected. He invited the women in his party to rename the place. They played around with the first letters of their names—Lucy, Elizabeth, Mary, Anna, Rebecca, Sarah—until the result was articulable, but to say “LeMars” made sense would be a stretch: Ben and Sophia grew up in an Iowa prairie town dominated by Brits bearing the name of the fourth planet from the sun—or the Roman god of war—juxtaposed with a French article.
That was where Ben spent the next twelve years, in “an American town which wasn’t American,” in the words of a prominent anthropologist who grew up in LeMars and credited its “crossing of cultures” for his subconscious sense that “something in my background was different.”12
In 1913, a few men on a small East Coast island would allege that Ben was different in an unmanly way, and some would see as confirmation of that difference Ben’s behaviors that seemed out of step with American practices. Take sports, for example.
“No boy can grow to a perfectly normal manhood today without the benefits of at least a small amount of baseball experience and practice,” according to the wisdom imparted by the American author of Training the Boy.13 In LeMars, however, boys played cricket, not baseball. Apparently, the Brits of LeMars did not believe that baseball was essential to “normal manhood,” nor did Ben and his family.14 Years later, Ben would be the top arbiter of, but not a player in, Fort Terry’s version of America’s pastime—inter-company baseball games—and this would put him in direct conflict with one of his accusers, Austin Frick, who was the fort’s baseball athletic director.
British tastes in sports also left their mark on Sophia. A rower and polo player from Cambridge, England, William Close, first saw the “rolling prairie” of western Iowa in 1876 when a land speculator took him there after he competed in a centennial rowing regatta on Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River.15 Within a year, Close and one of his brothers had bought their first 2,500 acres of Iowa land undervalued due to past grasshopper plagues. The next year, with a third brother and family money, they formed a land company, purchased sixteen thousand acres outside of LeMars, negotiated for another fifty thousand acres, and began promoting the area to “English people of the better class,” leading to “the largest class-based British colony in the West.”16 Bartenders poured Bass ale and Guinness at the House of Lords tavern, and polo matches took place weekly, with women as well as men watching. Sophia and other girls, whether English, German, or Swedish, learned to row and play tennis and golf, while in the rest of the country females were largely excluded from sports. “There was nowhere else like it in the United States,” writes British producer and author Peter Pagnamenta.17
Cricket aside, Ben’s upbringing included activities widely accepted as masculine, such as the excellent horsemanship he learned and the manual labor that went along with prairie life. With few boys his age in LeMars—there was only one other, Ned Sibley, in his high school class—Ben spent much of his adolescence working and studying.18 He tended the family garden, chopped wood, and helped his mother raise his younger brother, Rudolph, and Sophia after their father died and three older brothers, Henry, Barthold, and Edgar, left home. But with its fancy opera house, highbrow forms of entertainment, and commitment to education, LeMars nurtured in Ben an appreciation for classical music, theater, and reading—traits that would be associated with effeminacy as men’s policing of other men’s sexuality increased.19 Ben’s own lawyer would call him “a little bit too refined.”20
While British upper-class norms molded Ben in LeMars, his dream of American military service was kept alive by his brother Louis, nine years older, who had received an appointment to West Point after graduating in the first LeMars High School class. Ben wanted to follow suit, but there was little chance of another Koehler being nominated for a coveted place at West Point by Iowa officials, even though Ben was an excellent student of history, geography, and Latin who gave a scholarly graduation speech on “Historical Turning Points,” prescient in ways Ben never could have imagined.21
To enhance his chances, Ben moved to Nebraska after high school. He went to work for one of his older brothers, Henry, as a bank cashier in Blue Hill, the same town where the Dimmicks lived—a little north of the immigrant farms where, in the words of Willa Cather, “there was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”22
Ben’s bet paid off. His brothers made the right introductions, and Ben did well on the West Point entrance exam. There followed an appointment to West Point from the 5th Congressional District of Nebraska.23 Like his lack of baseball experience, Ben’s shortness was not held against him. One did not need to be tall to be brave and smart or to pull a trigger. Grant proved that, having started at West Point when he stood the same height as Ben—five foot two—though Grant grew to five foot eight.”24
Ben’s short stature was evident to others, but it did not prevent him from having confidence in his abilities.25 He had grown up with two visions of male success on display within his large family: military service and business-building. There was never any question which future Ben wanted. While he would always note his banking background on Army forms, along with fluent German, Ben and the United States struck their first deal when he was 21. He would be a military man and leave civilian life behind.
Back in Iowa, Sophia had her own dreams for the future. “One of my girl friends left his morning for [the University of] Nebraska,” she informed Roy. “How I wish that it was me, but then I think that it won’t be long before I can go.”26 Sophia signed her letter, “I am as ever, ‘The Bum,’” an ironic word choice given the emerging association between hoboes—or “bums”—and male-male sexual promiscuity.27 Presumably, Sophia was using the word to mean a loafer or transient, but even that description bore little relation to her circumstances. She would never again sign her letters to Roy so flippantly.
In the Times photograph of the West Point class of 1897, Ben is seated in the first row, his lean body angled so that only one side of his face is visible, drawing attention to his aquiline nose—or “large nose,” as a newspaper would put it in 1914.28 The blond hair of his youth is gone; it is brown now. Like some other cadets, Ben is gazing downward, solemnly. In his youth, Ben posed cockily for family photos with his hand on his hip, but in the West Point photo his posture is perfect: erect shoulders, straight back. To his right stands Andrew Moses, one of Ben’s good friends, blond even in his twenties and boyish compared to the sterner-looking Ben.
Appearances notwithstanding, the two had much in common, Moses being from a pioneer family and an accomplished rider like Ben. Neither man anticipated on this occasion of pride that in seventeen years they would assume markedly different roles on a small island, Ben as the accused and Moses as a key witness, asserting that Ben could not possibly have groped a sergeant as alleged, for Moses had sat in the same small room, a few feet away, the whole time.
Now, the graduates focused on securing favorable assignments. According to the Times, “never was the survival of the fittest better exemplified than in the class of ’97,” described as “superior” in athletics, academics, and discipline.29 More than fifty entrants had “dropped by the wayside,” but Ben was one of the survivors, having persevered despite intestinal upset, boils, and eye infections. Graduating with a class rank of forty-six, “sound and normal” muscle systems, and 20/20 vision, Ben, at 25, was older than many of his classmates.30 He was single, but so were they all, marriage being prohibited for cadets.31 Indeed, there were some who proclaimed that an Army man had only one true life partner, and it wasn’t a human being.
Henry Koehler, the banker, advocated for his younger brother, writing to the Army that Ben “is a Nebraska boy and of course we all feel very proud of him and feel that in the distribution of the good assignments that [sic] Nebraska boys should not be neglected.”32 Two weeks later, another letter arrived in Washington from the bank’s vice president, a former Civil War colonel.33 He sought the help of Nebraska Senator John Thurston, who forwarded the letter to the assistant secretary of war with his own brief and pointed note: “This young man is from our State, and he ought to be looked after.”34
The senator’s request was soon granted. In July, the newly minted Additional Second Lieutenant of Infantry Benjamin Martin Koehler signed his first oath of office, in elegant script, and moved to Fort Logan in Colorado—but not for long.35 In the late 1890s, it was not only wind and salt air that seas brought to land, nor immigrants to its increasingly crowded coastal cities. Fear lapped at the shores of the United States, fear of an attack by Spanish ships. The Indian Wars had been fought in deserts and canyons west of the Mississippi, but now newspaper reports of misery and violence in Cuba under Spanish rule—fanned by those who favored war—turned attention to the country’s coastline, which suddenly seemed too easy a target.
Ben would be swept up in the current of fear, while from across the Atlantic came hints of a different factor that would influence his life. A famous man had been released from prison a few weeks before Ben’s graduation. The man had served two years, the maximum sentence under British law for sodomy, though the judge would gladly have made the term longer, calling it “totally inadequate for such a case as this”—“the worst case I have ever tried.”36
The convict’s name was Oscar Wilde, the Irish playwright and wit who was greatly damaged physically and emotionally by his imprisonment and died three years after his release. As Ben would later do, Wilde had ignored signs of his vulnerability to legal process instigated by someone willing to use a charge of homosexuality to get what he wanted.37
“[W]hat is said of a man is nothing. The point is, who says it.” That was one of many aphorisms Wilde left behind.38 Eventually, Ben would learn how much the wrong words from the right people could hurt a man, but first, as a young officer, he faced the threats of war and earned the praise of generals. In the years immediately following Ben’s West Point graduation, the words of others seemed to be his allies, not the vectors of mutiny they would become.