CHAPTER FOUR

Islands

Mass fears come and go. In the late 1800s, Spanish ships were poised to enter Long Island Sound, destroy munitions factories in Connecticut, and bombard New York City, according to yellow journalists William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Even The New York Times, the usually less alarmist “gray lady,” joined in.¹ An early casualty of the fear-mongering was New Jersey’s summer rental market, as prospective tenants allowed the known pleasures of sun and surf to be outweighed by the speculative risk of enemy fire.²

Responding to calls for greater preparedness, Congress voted to militarize the wide mouth of Long Island Sound by building forts on islands at its eastern end—Plum, Great Gull, Gardiners, and Fishers. Those sandy islands had been connected for thousands of years by an underwater ridge, and now they were connected above the sea by a political effort to calm anxious citizens.³ The first purchase of land on Plum Island took place in 1897, the year of Ben’s West Point graduation.⁴

The flip side of Americans’ fear of the Spanish was compassion for Cubans being repressed, tortured, and killed for seeking independence. American men and women contributed to food drives and wrote letters urging Congress to intervene, having read articles such as those by Richard Harding Davis, a friend of Roosevelt’s, about the execution of a young Cuban man and the strip search of a Cuban woman.⁵ At home, Geronimo and other Apaches had been relocated against their will to northern Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma. Seminole Indians, considered a deterrent to Florida’s development, were killed or driven into the Everglades over a period of thirty years. But now, one hundred miles south of Florida, Americans were outraged because the Spanish were mistreating Cubans.

The crusading newspapers of Pulitzer and Hearst, engaged in their own war over readership, helped incite the public outcry, but as historian Kristin Hoganson convincingly argues, correspondents for Hearst, Pulitzer, and other publishers wrote about events in Cuba in highly gendered terms, producing “accounts [that] portrayed the entire island as a pure woman who was being assaulted by Spain.”⁶

At a time when American men were anxious about their roles at home, and influenced by Civil War nostalgia linking manhood with martial spirit, the Cuban issue became “nothing less than a test of American manhood.”⁷

Cubans had been seeking independence for years, but the rebellion intensified in the mid-1890s when Spain imposed martial law and forced citizens to live in shanty towns—virtual concentration camps—without proper food or sanitation.⁸ American officials joined the press in depicting the Spanish as decadent and “effeminate aristocrats” and “bestial and unchivalrous” degenerates engaged in abusing docile Cuban women, who were said to want nothing more than to be good wives and mothers—unlike the rabble-rousing New Women in the United States who sought the right to vote.⁹ Cuban men were portrayed as brave heroes fighting for the noble ideal of self-government, in contrast to “sapped” American men who had turned into “money-making machines,” in the words of one member of Congress.¹⁰

As Hoganson puts it, the “tendency to depict Cuban revolutionaries as if they were the heroes and heroines of a chivalric drama” said less about what hawkish American men wanted for Cuba than what they wished for at home: defeat of women’s suffrage and perpetuation of a patriarchal political and social system in which men dominated and women assumed dependent, homebound roles in exchange for “protection.”¹¹ The argument went like this: Women no longer trusted men to lead and protect because men had become weak, but if men were stronger, as they supposedly had been in the Civil War, women would retreat from public life, to the betterment of the nation. War would make men strong again, so war was desirable.¹²

The link between strong men and a strong country was a rallying cry of Theodore Roosevelt, but there were plenty of others who complained that men—especially white middle- and upper-class men—were growing too soft for their own and the nation’s good.¹³

An influential rabbi warned in 1892 that female teachers were feminizing boys, a refrain that would grow louder as the number of women teaching in elementary schools increased.¹⁴ Other factors blamed for the erosion of manly strength included masturbation, insufficient consumption of red meat, the growth of a consumer culture, joyless factory work, nonwhites and women in the workplace, and cities (an “enormity devouring manhood,” said Frank Lloyd Wright). Also blamed were homes “built to meet the needs of women, whose tendency is still to emphasize emotion—to minimize reason,” in the words of Gustav Stickley, the mission-style furniture maker whose “designs, with their disciplined geometry, generous proportions, and sturdiness offered men the possibility of return to their castles.”¹⁵

“The emergence of a visible gay male subculture in many large American cities at the turn of the century gave an even greater moral urgency to men’s flight from being perceived as sissies,” writes Michael Kimmel.¹⁶ Beginning in the 1890s, “fairies” congregated openly in clubs in downtown Manhattan, where they “were the most famous symbols of gay life, and the impression of that life they conveyed was reinforced by the countless other effeminate men who [came to be] visible in the streets of the city’s working-class and amusement districts,” according to historian George Chauncey.¹⁷

In politics, men who opposed intervention in Cuba drew the label of “sissy,” a word that had morphed from meaning “sister” to an effeminate or cowardly male. President William McKinley, who initially resisted the calls for war, found himself characterized in some newspapers as an old woman; for it was clear to the same people who depicted Cuban women as feminine and worthy of rescue that the last person who should be making U.S. foreign policy was a woman.¹⁸ While serving as assistant secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt accused McKinley of having “no more backbone than a chocolate éclair,” and McKinley’s Civil War service was trotted out by his supporters to shore up his image.¹⁹

On hikes outside Washington, Roosevelt frequently discussed his wish to “drive the Spaniard from the Western World” with a man responsible for care of McKinley’s actual backbone. That man was Leonard Wood, the president’s medical adviser, who had won over Roosevelt with his tales of serving in the “inconceivably harassing” campaign to capture Apache leader Geronimo.²⁰ The two spoke of their shared belief, in Roosevelt’s words, that a war against Spain “would be as righteous as it would be advantageous to the honor and the interests of the nation.”²¹ “Honor” in that context was bound up with manly strength, and Roosevelt wrote admiringly that Wood had “qualities of entire manliness.”²²

Yet “entire manliness” as a governing paradigm was threatened by women’s growing participation in public life, especially in cities. Women worked in the labor force in increasing numbers, rallied for local reforms, testified at congressional hearings, participated in the trade-union movement, and advocated for international arbitration with Spain rather than war.²³ Through their involvement in the temperance movement, women were telling men to stop drinking, and women had secured voting rights in four states by 1896: Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah. They nearly won in California, but for heavy opposition by liquor interests.²⁴ In the 1896 presidential campaign, women “attained new heights of political visibility,” attending conventions, holding candidate forums, and distributing campaign literature.²⁵

Ben Koehler did not have to look far for evidence of strong women. His sister Lizzie taught school and approved of western states’ progressive attitude toward women’s suffrage.²⁶ While Sophia was less political, she expressed her opinions, aspired to attend college, and enjoyed the company of male friends, including her partners in the mixed doubles tournaments she often entered and sometimes won.²⁷

Ben’s sisters gave him reason enough to respect women as independent beings, but he gained a ringside seat to the struggle for women’s rights when his older brother Louis married Susan B. Anthony’s niece, Maude Anthony, during Ben’s final year at West Point. The couple met when Louis was stationed in Leavenworth, Kansas, where Maude’s father, Daniel Read Anthony, played an outsized role. The owner of a local newspaper, he had come to Kansas from the Anthony farm near Rochester, New York, to oppose slavery. His maverick life in Kansas included duels, whippings, burning buildings owned by Confederate sympathizers, and being shot by a rival newspaper owner in the Leavenworth Opera House.²⁸

“She has a lot of Anthony in her and is a bright girl,” Susan B. Anthony wrote proudly of her niece.²⁹ By the time Louis married Maude, he was a well-regarded captain in the cavalry with a strong personality himself. Perhaps Louis was drawn to a woman raised to stand up for principles—as Louis would later do against Leonard Wood, in a controversy that landed on Roosevelt’s desk with no good outcomes for anyone, least of all Ben Koehler.

When Louis and Maude married, he was 33, she 31—“what the world calls late,” Susan wrote to Maude, “yet I think plenty early.”³⁰

“Well it makes me happy to feel that you & he are happy,” Susan wrote on the occasion of the couple’s first anniversary. Susan referenced Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley for the idea “that a marriage would be happy provided that after the delusions & illusions of love had passed—there were real character left in each on which could be founded a true & lasting friendship.”³¹

“A true [and] lasting friendship” between husband and wife was a radical idea at a time when some men warned against too much contact with women lest it cause a man to become homosexual, and men who supported women’s rights were likely to find their manhood questioned.³² Women, too, were beginning to emphasize their differences from men in positive, political ways.³³

Circumstance had provided Ben with unusual influences. First there were the Brits, who gave Ben an English pedigree in education and habits, and now his brother’s spouse meant that Ben’s family-by-marriage included a top leader of the National Woman Suffrage Association and a strident opponent of racial inequality. First and foremost, however, Ben Koehler was a skilled artillery officer, a disciplined young man whose high school motto had been “duty before position.”³⁴ In the late 1890s, “duty” was rapidly leading him and many other American men toward war.

President McKinley, trying to appease both hawks and proponents of arbitration, sent the U.S.S. Maine to Cuba at the end of 1897 for the vague purposes of protecting American interests and showing strength.³⁵ Less than three weeks after the Maine’s arrival in Havana Harbor, the ship exploded, killing 267 American soldiers.

“MAINE EXPLOSION CAUSED BY BOMB OR TORPEDO?” screamed the banner headline of The World, Pulitzer’s paper, even though the cause of the explosion was far from clear.³⁶ The New York Journal did not bother with a question mark, proclaiming on its front page “DESTRUCTION OF THE WAR SHIP MAINE WAS THE WORK OF AN ENEMY.”³⁷ Spain denied responsibility, asserting that an accident must have taken place on the ship, but few listened. A writer in Harper’s opined that “a nation needs a war from time to time to prevent it from becoming effeminate.”³⁸

As Pettegrew puts it, “personal concern over proving one’s manhood” was being effectively joined “with the foreign-war-making interests of the United States.”³⁹

After the Maine’s explosion, McKinley still urged restraint, but Congress voted to expand the military, including the creation of two new Coast Artillery divisions. Army headquarters telegraphed instructions that “desirable men” should be selected to fill the new divisions.⁴⁰ One man deemed “desirable” was Ben Koehler, and so Ben left the inland location his brothers had helped secure and traveled to Fort McHenry in Baltimore to join the new 6th Artillery Division as a second lieutenant.⁴¹ He remained short in stature and romantically unattached, but apparently no one in the Army thought him a sissy.

On April 13, a brawl occurred in the House of Representatives between the war and peace factions.⁴² McKinley told Spain to leave Cuba, to which Spain responded with a declaration of war against the United States. The next day, April 25, Congress declared war on Spain.

The hawks had won, and the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines would all be transformed in ways still playing out today.⁴³ The war sent American ships across multiple seas, and in 1898, less than a year after his graduation from West Point, the Army dispatched Ben Koehler, eager to prove his worth to his country, to some of the most valuable real estate on earth—and then to some of the poorest.