CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The rivers of Ben Koehler’s adolescence had flowed in one direction, unlike the currents around islands, which moved in more unpredictable ways. Yet even a “Nebraska boy” could see from the ferry as it cut through Buttermilk Channel that Governors Island was no wild place.
Unlike Plum Island, where the shoreline remained natural, encircled by boulders, bluffs, and sandy beaches, Governors Island lay within a newly built wall of cement bricks intended to block waves. On this island, man tried to tame nature. The vast quantities of water being funneled into narrow places did not make for a stable environment—open sea to harbor, harbor to channels, channels to rivers—and yet many humans had decided to live where those water bodies intersected. Hence, the seawall.
The same geologic event created both Governors Island and Plum Island—the retreat of the last ice sheet—and the islands shared a similar history of European occupation. In 1637, the Dutch governor of New Netherland had obtained a deed to Governors Island from the Manahatas tribe in exchange for two ax heads, a string of beads, and a handful of nails.1
After that, the islands’ fates diverged. Plum Island went to seed—literally, as a place for farming—while Governors Island became a trophy for the rich and powerful. The most centrally located island south of Manhattan, and at sixty-nine acres one of the largest, Governors Island offered splendid views of what came to be known as upper New York Bay. The island served as a reserve for the British governor once the British displaced the Dutch as the rulers of New York.
Time brought new rulers, and after the Revolutionary War, when tensions heated up once again between the former colonists and Great Britain, engineer Jonathan Williams of the U.S. Army Corps designed a star-shaped fort in the center of Governors Island, replacing a deteriorating Revolutionary War earthen fort. With a dry moat and twenty-six-foot-high walls of granite and brick, the imposing Fort Jay (then Fort Columbus) was completed in 1809, yet none of its many cannons fired in the War of 1812. Like Fort Terry, the value of Fort Jay and the two other Governors Island forts—South Battery and Castle Williams—was said to be their deterrent effect.
During the Civil War, Castle Williams housed Confederate prisoners. Deaths approached 20 percent due to overcrowded cells and primitive sanitary conditions. Meanwhile, Confederate officers roamed with relative freedom within Fort Jay. Many knew their captors, having been their military academy schoolmates. Inside Fort Jay, honor and class trumped enemy status.
By the time Ben disembarked in December 1913, Governors Island was an administrative center more than a military one. Castle Williams still housed prisoners, mostly deserters, whose escapes supplied the newspapers with colorful copy. The shape and size of the island had changed, too. Using nearly five million cubic yards of landfill from tunnels being excavated in Brooklyn and Manhattan for the new subway system, engineers had more than doubled the size of Governors Island.
That winter morning, the walk from Quartermaster Dock up the hill to headquarters must have seemed unusually long to Ben, the clicks of his heels on the cobblestones sounding ominously like a countdown to a reckoning. With all he had dreamed of and worked for hanging in the balance, he may well have wondered whether he had more in common with the prisoners in Castle Williams than the officers whose homes lined Colonels Row.
General Barry believed the evidence against Ben was strong. That was Mills’s conclusion, and Barry had been relying on Mills’s advice for more than a year, ever since Barry had been relieved as superintendent of West Point and tapped for the prestigious job of leading the Eastern Department. Every day Barry and his family woke up on Governors Island in a large brick house overlooking Buttermilk Channel. The house had a white Greek Revival roof, polished wood floors, and a central staircase curving to the second floor. Its previous occupants had been Leonard Wood and his wife.2
Wood now worked in Washington, having been appointed chief of staff by President Taft. Barry reported to Wood, but his relationship with Mills went much further back. Classmates at West Point, Barry and Mills had known each other for forty years when they were presented with the shocking charges coming out of Fort Terry. Barry also knew Ben, and he had approved of Ben’s assuming Colonel Davis’s duties while a replacement was sought. It was a difficult spot for Barry, and he asked his chief of staff, William Haan, and an officer from Fort Totten, Edwin Sarratt, to question Ben about the charges.
“I didn’t see the charges, but they would ask me whether I ever knew a certain man, giving his name,” according to Ben, who said that Sarratt and Haan had a “little memorandum” on which they based their questions.3
The meeting lasted two hours. No lawyer accompanied Ben, but he did not need an attorney to understand one fact clearly: The only commissioned officers among the accusers were Worcester and Frick. Just about everyone else making a claim of unwanted touching served under them or socialized with them. They were, as Sophia would write, members of a “clique.” Ben and Sophia knew that, but Barry, Haan, Sarratt, and Mills did not.
In addition to their claims of groping, some of the men who spoke to Mills had portrayed Ben and Sophia’s home as a place where Ben invited soldiers to drink, fraternize, and, they implied, engage in sexual relations.
Ben denied the allegations, but it was one man’s word against the word of many others. How could he prove anything sitting in a room on Governors Island without dates or details? Just as Mills had done, Sarratt and Haan asked Ben to consider resigning, and Barry told Ben the same thing.4 They all mentioned their concern about publicity if Ben did not leave quietly.
“They put it in that way,” Ben later said, “that there was nothing to be gained; if I won it would be the publicity and if I did not the publicity would hurt my family, and they thought as long as I was a bachelor that I ought to consult my family or their interests.”5
Why did it matter that Ben was unmarried, and why was his bachelor status called out? Wasn’t the most important issue regarding Ben’s resignation the impact it would have on Ben himself, whether or not he had a conventional family as Barry, Haan, and Sarratt did? Would each of those men have asked his wife to decide whether he should give up the profession he loved, in the prime of his career, without an opportunity to rebut the accusations against him? And while it was true that publicity would be embarrassing for all concerned, if Ben was acquitted, the publicity would be far worse for the Army, which was the employer of multiple people who in that event would be found to have lied.
The choice presented to Ben made sense only if the accused man knew he was guilty. Then, he might deserve to lose everything for which he had worked and should not drag his family through a public disgrace. Then, the man ought to give great weight to the interests of his spouse, or in Ben’s case, his siblings. Yet Ben was proclaiming his innocence. It may be inferred that Barry, Haan, and Sarratt, like Mills, believed otherwise.
Military law might salute the presumption of innocence, but nothing prevented senior officers from believing that Ben was guilty. They had seen McKinley depicted as short, paunchy, old, and female back when he was accused of insufficient manliness for opposing war with Spain. Now, a short, paunchy man in his forties was sitting in front of them accused of a much more scandalous kind of unmanliness. A less than virile appearance did not help either McKinley or Ben, but it had been understood that McKinley’s accusers were operating in the arena of politics, whereas Ben’s accusers were specific people, specific Army men, telling of acts they said actually happened.
Come 2017 and 2018, the #MeToo movement and hearings on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court would make sexual predation a household topic in America, and some Kavanaugh defenders would claim that untruthful allegations of sexual misconduct were being used for political purposes. Indeed, the planting of doubts about the credibility of women as accusers of men grew throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, requiring state legislatures to intervene by passing rape shield laws and spawning a field of analytical philosophy known as testimonial injustice. By 2019, the idea that an accuser of sexual misconduct might be lying was so topical, even in a homosexual context, that The New York Times reported on a male artist’s lawsuit alleging that his ex-lover was attempting to extort money by “threatening to portray their consensual sexual relationship as a case of sexual harassment.”6
It must be remembered that in 1913, such a backdrop of suspicion about sexual accusers did not exist, especially when the accuser purported to uphold heterosexual values against an alleged homosexual. After World War I, in 1919, Sherwood Anderson would publish a story about an unmarried teacher beloved by his students who was beaten and run out of town after a “half-witted boy of the school . . . imagined unspeakable things” and made “[s]trange, hideous accusations” against him.7 In 1934, Lillian Hellman would write a play about a teenage girl who made false claims about “unnatural” acts by two women who ran a school, resulting in one’s suicide and the other’s broken engagement.8
No similarly popular literary treatment comes to mind from pre–World War I America questioning the veracity of an accusation of homosexual advances. Historian Jonathan Katz has reported on an early legal case, in 1846, in which a police officer said he was wrongly accused of sexual advances by a man he arrested.9 After a hearing, the police officer lost the case and his job. A 1910 textbook on criminal law included “threatened prosecution for the crime of sodomy” as a criminal tactic a person might use against another, describing a case in which one man threatened another with prosecution for sodomy if money was not paid.10
For the most part, however, the Army was in new territory. The Articles of War listed rape as a crime but only in times of war, and there was no mention of sodomy or attempted sodomy. While the Manual for Courts-Martial recommended dishonorable discharge and five years’ hard labor as punishment for a soldier convicted under a state sodomy law, Ben was not accused of having had anal or oral sex with anyone.11 He was accused of groping and making lewd comments, and no policy determinations regarding those acts had been made as to the boundaries between legal and illegal conduct, and no rules had been promulgated to curb arbitrary decision-making. It was unclear whether Ben’s alleged acts were considered a problem in and of themselves—because of assumed impacts on the victims and Army morale and discipline—or because they indicated a man acting like a homosexual, who might therefore be a homosexual, contrary to prevailing standards of masculinity that posited heterosexuality as “normal.”
British physician Havelock Ellis wrote in the early 1900s that same-sex attraction, which he called “inversion,” “is a psychological and medico-legal problem so full of interest that we need not fear to face it, and so full of grave social actuality that we are bound to face it.”12 Other doctors may have agreed, especially ones interested in the new field of psychology, but there is no evidence that the Army undertook to “face” the issue of homosexuality by seeking to determine, in any methodical and thoughtful way, whether a man’s sexual interest in other men truly presented a “problem” in the context of military service, rendering him less brave, less honorable, or less efficient than a heterosexual man, and if so, why, when, and how.
At the local level, around the same time that Ben was being asked to resign, anti-vice crusaders in New York City were relying on “a patchwork of laws against vagrancy, disorderly conduct, solicitation, obscenity, prostitution, and being a public nuisance” to harass and prosecute people whose sexual practices they wanted to stop.13 Like immigration officials, the anti-vice campaigners were stuck with old laws that did not line up with their present moral outrage. But if the broad wording of the Articles of War offered the Army more flexibility on the surface, below the surface was a most uncomfortable situation for Barry, Haan, and Sarratt: Ben’s case pitted presumptively credible men against a man who until very recently had been considered enormously credible, too. Ben was one of them—or had been.
The pressure placed on Ben to resign instead of defending himself showed a paramount concern with fixing a problem quickly and avoiding adverse publicity by an institution that placed a strong premium on conformity. Unlike the Bureau of Immigration, the Army was an actual institution with an image to protect, such that “If the Bureau of Immigration failed to detect perverts, it might look ineffective; when the military failed, it looked queer.”14
The reaction of the Eastern Department’s senior officers to the conundrum Ben presented—an excellent officer by objective measures now said to be a sexual deviant—reflected an unspoken and largely unexamined discomfort with homosexuality that would take many forms over the course of the twentieth century, reaching an apex of ugliness and hostility after World War II15 before morphing into the 1990s policy of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which persisted until 2011.16
The problem in Ben’s case was that the “telling” had been done only by others. Ben denied that he had made advances toward any man, but in Haan’s and Sarratt’s reference to Ben’s bachelor status, one can discern that his not having married was perceived as doing its own telling, silently admitting what Ben verbally denied. Ben’s marital status was the same it had been since he graduated West Point in 1897. What had changed was the cultural importance placed on marriage as a signifier of a man’s heterosexuality.
Rather than wait for a court-martial, Ben offered a strategic compromise. He agreed to resign, but only after a leave of absence. He asked for two months so that he would have time to see Louis, his most important confidant, in Puerto Rico. Ben was appearing to go along, but it was actually a form of resistance for he believed he could revoke the resignation and request a trial before the leave ended.17
That evening, in the apartment he had once shared with Kenly, Ben wrote two documents: an application for leave and a resignation to take effect “upon expiration of so much leave.”18 He submitted them the next day, December 14, and Barry approved the arrangement.
Having bought himself some time, though little peace, Ben left Governors Island for the long trip back to Plum Island, that wild place where Sophia had expected to be happy. There, in the quiet house he shared with his sister, which others were now portraying as a meeting place for homosexual liaisons, Ben waited for the Army’s next move.