The Life and Times of George McClellan Jr.

Continuing on the theme of profiling descendants of prominent Civil War commanders, I wanted to highlight the son and namesake of Union Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan - George B. McClellan Jr. Through the Arlington Cemetery website, I came across this interesting biographical sketch:

"McClellan, George Brinton (November 23, 1865 - November 30, 1940), politician and university professor, was the older of two children and the only son of General George Brinton McClellan and Mary Ellen (Marcy) McClellan. Born in Dresden, Saxony, while his parents were visiting Europe, he belonged to a family whose Scottish forebears had emigrated to New England in the eighteenth century. His grandfather, Dr. George McClellan, was a prominent Philadelphia anatomist and surgeon; his father was the most controversial, if not most effective, Union general in the Civil War. His maternal grandfather, Randolph B. Marcy, was a regular army officer who served as General McClellan's chief of staff from 1861 to 1863.

McClellan's boyhood was spent in New York City, Baltimore, Trenton, New Jersey), and Europe. His early education was entrusted in large part to governesses and tutors, but in 1877 he was sent to St. John's, a boarding school at Sing Sing (later Ossining), New York. In 1882 he entered the College of New Jersey (Princeton). Following his graduation, in 1886, he traveled abroad for two years. Returning to the United States, he became a newspaper reporter, working successively for the New York Morning Journal, World, and Herald. Despite the demands of newspaper work, he found time to attend the New York Law School, and in 1892 he was admitted to the bar.

McClellan's political career began in 1889 with his appointment as treasurer of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge. In the same year he joined Tammany Hall, and by the mid-nineties he was a sachem and one of the organization's most prominent orators. In 1892 he was elected to the presidency of the New York City board of aldermen, and in 1895 he began the first of five terms as a Democratic Congressman. In the House of Representatives he became something of an authority on military affairs, was recognized as a better than average speaker, supported his party's stand on low tariffs and anti-imperialism, and was a member of the Ways and Means Committee. Although McClellan was a man of considerable ability and even distinction, his rapid rise in politics was due almost entirely to Tammany's desire to capitalize on his famous name. For his part, McClellan assured Richard Croker, Tammany's boss in the nineties: "I know that I owe . . . to you . . . everything . . . that I have in politics."

McClellan's career in Congress ended in 1903, when he was recalled to New York by Charles F. Murphy, who had succeeded Croker as boss of Tammany Hall, to run for mayor against Seth Low, the Republican incumbent. He defeated Low with relative ease; two years later he was reelected to a four-year term over William Randolph Hearst, who ran on the ticket of the Municipal Ownership party, and William M. Ivins, the Republican candidate, in one of the closest elections in the city's history. In his first term McClellan was a superior machine mayor who, while making no pretense of being a reformer, was able to keep a restraining hand on the more avaricious members of the organization. Following the election of 1905 he broke with Murphy in a dispute over patronage, and his second term was characterized by a pronounced independence.

Among McClellan's notable accomplishments as mayor was a program of public works that included new bridges across the East River, establishment of municipal ferries, creation of a new and improved system of docks, additional parks and playgrounds, extension of the city's subway facilities, the start of the Catskill water project, and construction of the city's Municipal Building. As mayor, McClellan proved to be an efficient and imaginative administrator, with a wide knowledge of city affairs and an unchallenged reputation for integrity. Even his Republican critics conceded that his intellect and courteous manner gave the office a distinction that it had never known under other Tammany mayors.

When McClellan left City Hall at the end of 1909 his break with Murphy had already precluded whatever chances he might have had for political preferment. For a year he practised law in New York City, but the experience was not a happy one, and in 1911 he welcomed the opportunity to become a university lecturer on public affairs at Princeton. A year later Princeton appointed him professor of economic history. At the outbreak of the first World War he aroused considerable opposition by his outspoken demands for the strictest interpretation of American neutrality. The Heel of War, a collection of essays on conditions in the belligerent countries which he published in 1916, was condemned by most reviewers for what they considered its pro-German bias. Nevertheless, when the United States entered the war McClellan volunteered, became a major in the ordnance department, served overseas, and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Following the armistice he returned to his professorship at Princeton, where he remained until his retirement in 1931.

Throughout his life McClellan was a knowledgeable student of art and history. An incorporator and vice-president of the American Academy in Rome, he was also a member of several organizations of artists and architects in the United States. One of the few Americans of his time who was an authority on Italian history, he was the author of The Oligarchy of Venice (1904), Venice and Bonaparte (1931), and Modern Italy (1933). In addition he wrote numerous newspaper and magazine articles on both current affairs and history.

In 1889 McClellan married Georgiana Louise Heckscher, a niece of the wealthy New York capitalist August Heckscher. McClellan and his wife shared many interests, particularly their affection for Italy, which they visited almost annually. They had no children. Following McClellan's retirement from Princeton they moved to Washington, and it was there that he died. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

McClellan's life was compounded of paradoxes. He was an ultra-conservative in a period of far-reaching reform, an avowed aristocrat who welcomed the chance to become a Tammany sachem, and a cynic who consistently sought the prizes he professed to scorn. He joined Tammany partly to serve his own ambitions, but partly because he felt that citizens of the "better type" should take part in such an organization. As a young man he had been determined to avenge his father's failure in politics, but he too failed. Like his father before him, he never forgave the American people for refusing to bestow on him the rewards that he thought he deserved."

World War I is finally over for the Germans

This weekend, Germany will make its last war reparation payment to the Allied governments it fought in the First World War. The reparation process has taken over 90 years to complete. Here is an article about it from CNN.com:

"Germany and the Allies can call it even on World War I this weekend.

On Sunday - the 20th anniversary of East and West Germany unifying about a year after the Berlin Wall fell - Deutschland will make the last in a series of reparation payments that has spanned more than nine decades.

The final payment is £59.5 million, about $93.8 million, reported London's Telegraph newspaper. Germany had to pay Belgium and France for material damages and the rest of the Allies the costs of fighting the war.

The initial tally in 1919, according to the German magazine Der Spiegel, was 96,000 tons of gold but was slashed by 40 to 60 percent (sources vary) a few years later. The debt was crippling, just as French Premier Georges Clemenceau intended.
Germany went bankrupt in the 1920s, Der Spiegel explained, and issued bonds between 1924 and 1930 to pay off the towering debt laid on it by the Allied powers in 1919's Treaty of Versailles.

Under the treaties of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Trianon, other Central Powers, namely the Austro-Hungarian empire, were forced to cede significant territory to Poland, Italy, Romania, then-Czechoslovakia and various other Slavic nations.

Germany thought U.S. President Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points" would provide the foundation for a future peace treaty, but Great Britain, France and Italy were still bitter, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

France had been the most devastated by the war, and Clemenceau feared Germany might attack France again if it recovered, so he and other European leaders sought to stifle the nation's economic recovery, and in effect, its ability to rearm, the museum said. Restrictions were placed on its army and navy, and it was forbidden to have an air force.

The Treaty of Versailles not only forced Germany to give up territories to France, Belgium, Poland, the Czechs and the League of Nations, but it also included a "War Guilt Clause" forcing Germany to accept responsibility for the war, thereby making it liable for the damages.

Britain's John Maynard Keynes felt the treaty's demands were too steep and resigned in 1919 after warning, "Germany will not be able to formulate correct policy if it cannot finance itself."

As Keynes predicted, the plan backfired. While Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria all violated the terms of their accords, mainstream voters flocked to Germany's right-wing parties and Adolf Hitler's Nazis rode to power on a wave of resentment over the Treaty of Versailles' terms, according to the Holocaust museum.

World War I historian Gerd Krumeich told Der Spiegel that Hitler's message of tearing up the treaty and restoring Germany to greatness resonated with the country.

"There was tremendous frustration in Germany in the 1920s - this conflict that cost 2 million lives and left 4 or 5 million wounded is supposed to have been in vain, and it was all our fault?" Krumeich told the magazine. "The reparations payments compounded everything. Not only was Germany given the moral blame, it was also supposed to pay an outlandish sum that most people had never even heard of."

Germany discontinued reparations in 1931 because of the global financial crisis, and Hitler declined to resume them when he took the nation's helm in 1933, Der Spiegel reported.

After reaching an accord in London in 1953, West Germany paid off the principal on its bonds but was allowed to wait until Germany unified to pay about 125 million euros ($171 million) in interest it accrued on its foreign debt between 1945 and 1952, the magazine said.

In 1990, Germany began paying off that interest in annual installments, the last of which will be distributed Sunday."

The attached image is a painting of Germany's top military commanders during World War I, Paul von Hindenburg (seated) and Erich Ludendorff.

An Attack on New York decades before 9/11

We are all unfortunately quite familiar with the tragic 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001. However, few know about a massive attack that took place near the city roughly 85 years before. In its "Jersey City: Past and Present" webpage, Carmela Karnoutsos with New Jersey City University provides a thorough description:

"On Sunday morning, July 30, 1916, at 2:08 a.m., Jersey City residents were awakened by a major explosion and a succession of explosions that lasted for several hours, sending shock waves as far as ninety miles away. The explosions occurred at Black Tom Island--a misnomer for a mile-long pier on landfill that connected the one-time island with the Jersey City waterfront near Greenville. The name "Black Tom" is said to come from a "dark skinned" fisherman who lived on the island for many years. Owned by the Lehigh Valley Railroad Company, it filled in the marshland between Black Tom and the mainland; it was then used as a work yard where the National Dock and Storage Company had warehouses.

The pier stood opposite the Statue of Liberty in the New York Harbor in the Greenville section of Jersey City and today is along Morris Pesin Drive at Liberty State Park in the vicinity of the Park Administration Building and Flag Plaza.

Prior to American entry into World War I, war materiel manufactured in the northeastern states was sent to Black Tom for transport to the Allied Powers of England, France, Italy and Russia. The Allies were engaged in World War I against the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. President Woodrow Wilson had declared neutrality, but American rights to "freedom of the seas" were affected by British naval control of the Atlantic sea-lanes. According to Jules Witcover in Sabotage at Black Tom: Imperial Germany's Secret War in America, 1914-1917, this situation resulted in the work of German saboteurs to prevent British receipt of munitions from the US (257, 266-267).

Black Tom was only one of a number of homeland attacks in retaliation to the British naval blockade of Germany. In New Jersey, on January 1, 1915, a fire took place at the Roebling Steel foundry in Trenton. And after the Black Tom incident, on January 11, 1917, a fire took place at the Canadian Car and Foundry plant in Kingsland. These facilities had contracts for goods being sent to the Allies. The US entered the war on the side of the Allies in April 1917, after numerous claims of German espionage and violations to American neutrality.

On the evening of the Black Tom incident, barges and freight cars at the depot were reportedly filled with over two million pounds of ammunition waiting to be shipped overseas. The munitions at the depot included shrapnel, black powder, TNT and dynamite. The Johnson Barge No.17, for example, held some one hundred thousand pounds of TNT. Given these incendiary devices, the Black Tom facility was not securely gated to safeguard the nearby civilian population from the potential of foul play.

Shortly after midnight on Sunday morning, small fires on the pier were discovered and the eight guards on duty gave flight. One of the guards, however, sounded the fire alarm alerting the Jersey City Fire Department. The fires gradually set off a succession of exploding shrapnel shells. After the terrifying 2:08 a.m. blast, the well-stocked arsenal was ablaze, even casting the barges at Black Tom afloat in New York Harbor. Pieces of metal from the explosion struck the Jersey Journal building clock tower at Journal Square, stopping the clock at 2:12 a.m.

During the explosion, Jersey City residents took to the streets and gathered at the waterfront to witness the ongoing fire works. Emergency vehicles in the city responded to alarms without full comprehension of the emergency and a disruption in telephone service created an information blackout. Witcover reports: "The blast jolted the Hudson Tubes [PATH system] under the river connecting Lower Manhattan with Hoboken and Jersey City . . . . in the Bay View and New York Bay cemeteries monuments and tombstones toppled and some vaults were jolted askew" (13). A larger than usual number of worshippers had turned out for the six o'clock morning mass at the Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary (today Holy Rosary Church at Sixth Street).

Witcover also writes that Frank Hague, the commissioner of public safety in Jersey City, was informed that Barge Johnson 17 "had tied up at Black Tom to avoid a twenty-five dollar towing charge--false economy, he noted . . ." (22). Hague and Hudson County prosecutor Robert S. Hudspeth agreed that the presidents of the Lehigh Valley Railroad Company and the Central Railroad of New Jersey had violated the twenty-four hour time limit for storing dynamite and for keeping railroad cars with explosives at the terminal. The conditions at Black Tom had placed the civilian population in Jersey City and elsewhere in immediate danger.

Accounts of the total number of fatalities differ, but it is known that a policeman, a guard at Black Tom, and the barge captain of the Johnson Barge No.19 were killed; a ten-week old infant was thrown from his crib. Hundreds of individuals were injured. The reported property damage was over $20 million. The Black Tom depot with its freight cars, warehouses, barges, tugboats and piers was completely destroyed. In the nearby harbor, the Statue of Liberty sustained $100,000 in damages from the spray of shrapnel, and newly-arrived immigrants at Ellis Island had to be evacuated for processing at the Immigration Bureau at the Battery in New York City. Some five hundred people living on houseboats and barges in the harbor also required evacuation.

Across the river, windows blew out in lower Manhattan and windows panes shattered in the Times Square area. Repercussions from the explosions were reported along the Jersey shoreline from Hoboken to Bayonne and over to Staten Island and Brooklyn and from as far away as Philadelphia.

After World War I, the Lehigh Valley Railroad, who owned Black Tom, and others, brought charges of German sabotage before the Mixed Claims Commission under the 1921 Treaty of Berlin between the United States and Germany. The commission questioned the origins of the Black Tom explosion. Had the fire begun as a result of "spontaneous combustion," carelessness of one of the employees or guards, or German sabotage?

A suspect in the incident was Michael Kristoff, a 23-year old immigrant living with relatives in nearby Bayonne and a former employer at the Tidewater Oil Company. Kristoff is said to have started the fires at Black Tom with incendiary devices in exchange for five hundred dollars. Kristoff died in a Staten Island hospital in 1928. On one side, officials at Black Tom were charged with "criminal and gross negligence" and on the other, documentation was found regarding German espionage at the time, but no one was found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In 1939 after seventeen years of deliberation, the German-American Mixed Claims Commission claimed Germany responsible of sabotage. Germany was ordered to pay reparations of $50 million to all claimants, but the restitution was not paid due to the intervention of World War II. After the war, Germany agreed to settle on outstanding war claims that included those related to the Black Tom explosion and they were paid in 1979."

References:

"Black Tom Blasts of 1916 Recalled." New York Times 31 July 1966.
Lender, Mark E. One State In Arms. Trenton, NJ: The New Jersey Historical Commission, 1991.
Wagen, Irv. "Black Tom--The Blast That Made History." Jersey Journal 18 April 1978.
Witcover, Jules. Sabotage at Black Tom: Imperial Germany's Secret War in America, 1914-1917. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1989.

http://www.njcu.edu/programs/jchistory/Pages/B_Pages/Black_Tom_Explosion.htm

By: Carmela Karnoutsos
Project Administrator: Patrick Shalhoub

Researching a World War I Ancestor

"Tidewater Historian" is back from a longer than anticipated hiatus (a result of time limitations brought on by graduate school coursework and job responsibilities). Lately, I've been researching my ancestors who served during World War I. Interestingly, I have four great-granduncles (all brothers) who served in the U.S. Military during its involvement in the war - Bill, George, Roy, and Millard. All of them were Xenia, Ohio natives with Bill, George, and Millard entering the Army while Roy enlisted in the Navy. It appears that all of the brothers except Millard (shown here) served stateside during the war. Bill and George served at U.S. Army installations in Ohio while Roy served at the Norfolk Navy Base. Tragically, he died of pneumonia. Consequently, his mother (my great-great-grandmother) was a "Gold-Star" mother.

Enlisting on July 1, 1917, Uncle Millard (born in 1897) joined Co. I of the 148th Infantry Regiment, 37th Infantry Division and received training in Ohio and Alabama before shipping out to serve in the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in France. Promoted to Corporal in May 1918, Uncle Millard later served in the famous Meuse-Argonne Offensive from September to November 1918. Although it was one of the last campaigns of the war, it was also one of the bloodiest, with over 117,000 U.S. casualties - the highest casualty count of any single engagment in U.S. military history. Fortunately, Uncle Millard made it out O.K. and recieved an honorable discharge in September 1919. He later married, started a family, and lived a relatively long life. Uncle Millard was definitely one of the lucky ones! Fortunately, I possess some of his original wartime letters and other WWI-era historical documents belonging to his brothers. It all makes for fascinating reading!