CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
At nine o’clock on Friday morning, Kirby officially opened the court’s last session and promptly asked all to leave except the jurors. Ben walked back to his house an unsatisfied man.
On the table in front of Kirby sat a typed, four-page verdict sheet prepared by Mayes. The pages listed all thirty-three charges. Kirby signed the form and asked Mayes to enter the room. Mayes reviewed the form and signed his name. By ten o’clock, it was all over. Kirby told the weary jurors they were free to leave Plum Island. Some would never return.
There were bags to pack and a steamer to board—but first “all the court officers filed down to Major Koehler’s residence, and after chatting with him a few minutes shook hands with him,” reported the Times. Their goodbye was so “hearty” that Ben put aside his earlier trepidation and felt elated, sure of his acquittal. The scene prompted “jubilation on the part of Major Koehler’s adherents.”1
Of all the men who had spent weeks together inside the small library, only Ben would remain on Plum Island, still wearing a uniform but stripped of all duties—walking, eating, and sleeping in a kind of purgatory—yet he was reported to be in “happy spirits,” awaiting news of his vindication. Everyone else left for an awkward ride across the Sound, the jurors and Mayes knowing the verdict, Hawthorne and Hudson in the dark.
According to Saturday’s Tribune, Mayes seemed “pleased at the outcome.”2 As Mayes actually knew the verdict, his mood was perhaps more telling than Ben’s, but the press had made mistakes throughout the trial. Articles had cited the closing of the officers’ club as the reason for anger toward Ben, for example, but that event played little part in the testimony.
Over the weekend, other papers declined to speculate, reporting only that a verdict had been reached and would be kept secret pending review by Garrison and Wilson. Two weeks passed, cherry blossoms bloomed in Washington, and finally reporters had more than handshakes and demeanor on which to base a prediction.
“KOEHLER VERDICT IN; GUILTY, IS THE GUESS,” read a headline in the Sun on April 12. The “guess” was that of a reporter who learned of the trial record’s arrival at the War Department. As the reporter theorized, “Had there been a verdict of acquittal, announcement would have been made by this time at the headquarters of the Department of the East and it would not have been necessary for the case to be sent to Washington for review.”3
That was not necessarily true, as someone else named Koehler well knew. Louis’s acquittal had not been announced by Taft and Roosevelt until several months after the jury vote. Taft’s conclusion in Louis’s case, that the president could not convert an acquittal into a conviction, remained the law. To that extent, the Sun reporter drew a reasonable inference. Wilson had four options: accept the verdict and sentence, change conviction to acquittal on the ground of insufficient evidence, reduce the recommended penalty, or nullify the trial.
Other papers ran the same story as the Sun, but in a matter of days, Garrison ended the need for any more guesses.
“Guilty” was the verdict, Garrison confirmed. At least six officers on the jury had sided with the men above and below Ben who wanted him gone, and they imposed the sentence he most feared: expulsion from the Army, dishonorably, though without a prison term.
But guilty of what? Garrison used the same words as Mills: “immoral conduct.” Garrison said the findings and sentence were still subject to review by Crowder, the chief of staff, and himself before they went to the president.4
It was unusual for a statement to be issued about a verdict that was not yet final, but this was an unusual case, and Leonard Wood wanted to move on. Five days after Garrison’s statement, Wood vacated the office of chief of staff. He had stayed in Washington just long enough to see the curtain close on all the marionettes whose strings he had pulled.
In LeMars, where Ben’s youngest brother and elder sister still lived, the local paper reported on the fate of its former resident, whose pioneer parents lay buried in a hallowed spot in the middle of town. The paper observed that the trial “was one of the most sensational military proceedings ever held in the east. Because of the prominence of Major Koehler, as well as the serious nature of the charges, the case excited interest.”5
The LeMars Semi-Weekly Sentinel also reprinted a curious dispatch from Hastings, Nebraska. The article pointed out that Ben had spent considerable time in Blue Hill where, it was stated, “he was noted for manliness as a boy and his friends there are convinced he is the victim of a conspiracy.”6
“Manliness as a boy?” What exactly did that mean, and how would a boy have shown it? By using guns, riding well, and playing sports (though perhaps not cricket)? By breaking chicken’s necks, instead of raising them for eggs? By flirting with girls, not seeming to avoid them? The paper did not explain, but the excerpt spoke volumes about the era’s fixation on manliness, starting with a boy’s training and socialization. Ironically, Ben had the kind of upbringing that the Boy Scouts manual lamented the passing of, given how “the hardships and privations of pioneer life . . . did so much to develop sterling manhood.”7 By the time of Ben’s court-martial, the pioneer life was a memory being recreated in fiction, along with the rise of the cowboy as male hero, and exhortations for men to get outside—all fantasy stand-ins for the real things Ben had lived, but which did him little good on the East Coast in 1914.8
It seems that the case of Major Benjamin Martin Koehler had become a referendum on his manliness after all. As if it wasn’t enough that nearly every aspect of Ben’s Army life had been raked over for signs of “perversion,” now his childhood was being brought into it.
Fortunately for Ben, a few people wanted to focus on the specific charges of which he had been convicted. One was Charles Sloan, the congressman who had intervened with Garrison in January. Sloan, an attorney, took umbrage at the way the government had treated a “Nebraska boy.” He obtained a copy of the transcript and the more he read, the more he saw gross injustice. He intervened once again, asking Garrison to slow down the train that was speeding away with Ben’s future. As far as Sloan was concerned, Ben Koehler may have been convicted, but he was not “dead morally” yet.