Scandal On Plum Island: A Commander Becomes the Accused

By Marian E. Lindberg

The captain wore a see-through dress. No dispute about that. Even the captain admitted that in a certain light, guests at the party could see the outline of his body through the muslin shift. Months later, a lawyer would press for details: Was the dress tied at the waist? What color and length were the captain's socks? Did others treat him "as if you were a woman"?(From Chapter One, "Cross-Dressing For Halloween")

The carefree parties on Plum Island drew the ire of Maj. Benjamin Koehler, yet he would be the man arrested and accused of "immoral conduct" at the end of 1913. Koehler, a West Point alumnus and Philippine War veteran, had been tasked with bringing discipline to the 700 men living at Fort Terry, a sprawling post on a beautiful island off New York's coast. He lived on officers row with his sister, an educated and independent woman who, like her brother, was unmarried. Little did the devoted siblings know that Fort Terry would soon be the stuff of front-page headlines, with Ben Koehler at the center of them--and not for his dutiful service to his country.

The claims that Fort Terry's commander had groped male subordinates shocked the Army and Koehler's supporters, but the accusers were smart, triggering one of the first high-profile instances of federal legal process against a high-level military officer. Well before "homophobia" was a term, Koehler struggled to prove that the accusers were lying in a trial rife with innuendo and ill-informed ideas about how a "homo-sexualist" would behave.

Thoroughly researched, involving historical figures as contrasting as Theodore Roosevelt and Susan B. Anthony, Scandal on Plum Island follows Koehler from respected officer to vilified outcast and turns up provocative information about his defense. His story is set in the context of changing standards of masculinity as the action moves from America's heartland to New York City, the Philippines, San Francisco, eastern Long Island, and government offices in Washington, D.C. In addition to telling a fast-moving and compelling story, Scandal on Plum Island\I speaks directly to modern discussions of gender norms, testimonial injustice, the high cost of stereotypes, and other issues of pressing concern.

• Language: English
• Publisher: East End Press
• Release date: Jun 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781732491281

Book preview

Benjamin Koehler as a West Point cadet.

Courtesy Mary Elke.

SCANDAL ON PLUM ISLAND:

A Commander Becomes the Accused

Copyright © 2020 by Marian E. Lindberg

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by

EAST END PRESS

Bridgehampton, NY

ISBN: 978-1732491274

Ebook ISBN: 97817324912-81

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020904007

First Edition

Book Design by Neuwirth & Associates

Cover Design by Mark Karis

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

An island is one great eye

gazing out, a beckoning lighthouse,

searchlight, a wishbone compass,

or counterweight to the stars.

—Yusef Komunyakaa, Islands

CONTENTS

PART ONE

ONE: Cross-Dressing for Halloween

TWO: Perversion

THREE: Embryo Generals

FOUR: Islands

FIVE: Mock Battle, Real Death

SIX: Three Sons at Risk

SEVEN: Single in San Francisco

EIGHT: Plum Island

NINE: Grudges Take Hold

PART TWO

TEN: A Chill in the Air

ELEVEN: Living with a Man

TWELVE: Ladies Wearin’ Pantaloons

THIRTEEN: The President Disapproves

FOURTEEN: Hatched on Plum Island 93

FIFTEEN: A Hurried Investigation

SIXTEEN: Long Walk from Quartermaster Dock

SEVENTEEN: A March, then a Brawl

EIGHTEEN: Orders

NINETEEN: All Hail Washington

PART THREE

TWENTY: The Meaning of Start

TWENTY-ONE: Unthinkable

TWENTY-TWO: Confusion

TWENTY-THREE: An Old Nemesis Returns

TWENTY-FOUR: Any Such Tendencies

TWENTY-FIVE: A Clever Witness

TWENTY-SIX: Ungrateful Guest

TWENTY-SEVEN: An American Dreyfus?

TWENTY-EIGHT: Irregularities

TWENTY-NINE: A Fake Letter Makes the Rounds

THIRTY: A Little Shutter and a Green Shade

THIRTY-ONE: So Much Talk about Fat Boys

THIRTY-TWO: Psychology Makes an Appearance

THIRTY-THREE: Female Advocates

THIRTY-FOUR: Details, Details

THIRTY-FIVE: The Accused Speaks

THIRTY-SIX: Manliness

THIRTY-SEVEN: Deliberations

THIRTY-EIGHT: Speculation

PART FOUR

THIRTY-NINE: Smear

FORTY: Hawarden

FORTY-ONE: Federal Action

FORTY-TWO: A Home at the Prince

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

CHAPTER ONE

Cross-Dressing for Halloween

The captain wore a see-through dress. No dispute about that. Even the captain admitted that in a certain light, guests at the party could see the outline of his body through the muslin shift.

Months later, a lawyer would press for details: Was the dress tied at the waist? What color and length were the captain’s socks? Did others treat him as if you were a woman?¹

But on this night, the night of November 1, 1913, a carefree party was in progress on an island with spectacular sea views, whose sole inhabitants, except for the lighthouse keeper, were employees of the U.S. Army and their families. Peace prevailed on Plum Island, as in the rest of the nation, allowing late Halloween revelry to be the order of the evening for some.

Cold winds off the Atlantic announced the approach of winter, but conditions were more enticing inside Captain Philip Worcester’s spacious two-story house. Dance tunes from a player piano set a high-spirited tone, and a basement furnace supervised by an Army private kept the rooms warm—warm enough for the host to wear a light dress with little underneath.²

Worcester would later say he had borrowed an old, loose dress of my wife’s.³ The highest-ranking officer at the party, Major Benjamin M. Koehler, found that hard to believe. Mabel Worcester was petite, nothing like her husband—the six-foot, athletic new leader of the 100th Company at Fort Terry, a sprawling coast defense post off eastern Long Island.

Worcester, 34 years old, also bore little resemblance to Major Koehler, Fort Terry’s commanding officer, who stood at best five foot three. Koehler, 41 and single, had gained weight since his West Point days and service in the Philippines, where food was both scarce and vile. A live-in cook prepared his meals now, and there was a slight bulge between the fourth and fifth buttons of his uniform, in contrast to Worcester’s toned physique.

Worcester’s leadership of the 100th Company had taken effect the day of the party. Come midnight, guests could also toast the Worcesters’ first wedding anniversary. Though he claimed the party was his wife’s idea, Worcester certainly acted like a celebrant. He led the dancing, gestured gaily with his arms, and greeted guests in mock flirtation with a fling of his skirt.

Yet the host’s cavorting belied a deep resentment over his new place of residence. Geologically, 840-acre Plum Island was a marvel, the outer lands of a glacially created moraine with seventeen soil types and a freshwater wetland supporting many species of plants and birds.⁴ To the Worcesters, though, the island was a backwater, an earthen slab with more gulls than people—and a five-hour trip by boat and train if Mabel wanted to see her family in New York City.

Major Koehler, the watchful leader of the island’s seven hundred soldiers, did not make Worcester any happier about his new assignment. In a mere three months, the two had differed several times, from a dispute over a private labeled the major’s pet by one of Worcester’s friends to Worcester’s dancing and kissing parties, which Koehler considered not respectable.⁵

It had been a long day for Koehler, cantering around the island to monitor the monthly exchange of soldiers. A book, a cocktail, and his favorite chair would have made for a perfect evening, but fatigue was no match for the persuasive powers of his younger sister, Sophia, who lived with him on Officers Row in a shingled house just like the Worcesters’. When Koehler had arrived home, Sophia was dressed up to go to the party and she wanted me to go, Koehler later said.⁶ Sophia assured her brother that he could leave early and he agreed to accompany her, surprising no one by showing up in his dress uniform rather than a costume.

Not so for Captain Richard Ellis, who tied a ribbon around his neck and came as the cartoon character Buster Brown—a wealthy boy with long blond hair, pantaloons, Mary Jane shoes, and other feminine features. Lieutenant John Smith also cross-dressed for the occasion, but Worcester went the furthest. In addition to the diaphanous dress, he wore a bonnet pinned with a fake braid of hair, and he periodically raised his hands to his face, curtsied, and affected shyness, supposedly imitating the behavior of a country girl, in his words.⁷

Worcester’s manner of feigning a country girl disgusted several women present, including Sophia, especially when she saw the sheerness of the dress in the bright light of the basement, where a dinner of ham, peas, and beans was served. Pillars created a nook in which the Worcesters placed a tablecloth on the floor, surrounded by seats of sandbags and straw, cornstalks, pumpkin lanterns, and witches cut from black cloth. The decorations may have been appropriate, but the host’s costume was not. Sophia called it indecent.⁸

Guests descended to the basement by means of a cobweb game. As Koehler described it, "each person was given a piece of ribbon or string and we were told to follow that out and see what was the end of it and these strings went into different rooms and up the stairs and circulated around and finally lead [sic] to the basement, where we had supper."⁹

Both Koehler and his sister remembered guests dancing before the game, passing time until everyone arrived. Sophia recalled that Mabel insisted upon my going into the parlor where they were dancing, because I had on a zerape, and she wanted them to see it.¹⁰ Worcester, in contrast, said no one danced until after dinner.¹¹

Whenever it occurred, the dancing was another strike against Worcester, who had a very peculiar way of holding one, in the first place, and then he sort of wiggled, according to Sophia, who found it not at all pleasant to dance with him. It was vulgar.¹²

At one point, Worcester danced the Highland fling, a Scottish reel that originated to mark battle victories and later came to serve as a test of men’s stamina. While the performance of a dance signifying masculine strength by a man dressed as a woman may have seemed like a parody, the scene was more like a warning, for Worcester would soon be claiming that one of the men at the party deserved to be thrown out of the Army and imprisoned as a traitor to his gender.

Ben Koehler did not dance at the party, neither the fling nor the turkey trot, and certainly not the hoochie-coochie, a Middle Eastern import that Worcester demonstrated by gyrating his hips in imitation of the belly dance made famous by Farida Mazhar, a star of the Chicago World’s Fair known as Little Egypt.¹³

Koehler said he left the party to walk home around ten o’clock. He’d had enough of Worcester’s brand of merriment. According to Koehler, as he walked toward the smoking room after dinner, Worcester was jumping along towards me with his hands up to his face, sticking his stomach out.¹⁴ I said ‘Worcester, suck up your stomach. It looks as if you were in a family way,’ Koehler recalled. Koehler claimed he told Worcester, You have not enough clothes, and said he struck him in the stomach with his thumb to make his point.¹⁵

In a few weeks, Worcester would paint a very different picture of what had happened in the basement between the two men. He would make the long trip to New York City not to visit his in-laws but to meet with leaders of the Army’s Eastern Department on Governors Island. Sitting in a neo-Gothic brick building designed to exalt order and discipline, Worcester would tell of scandalous behavior at his party—but having nothing to do with his dress, his dancing, or any kissing.

Rather, Worcester would say, it was when his commanding officer grabbed him by the testicles—not once, but twice.¹⁶

CHAPTER TWO

Perversion

Worcester’s accusations came like a thunderbolt from a clear sky in the words of Charles Sloan, a Nebraska congressman who knew Koehler’s pioneer German family and backed Koehler’s denials, declaring it impossible that he had groped another man. ¹

The charges also shocked the leaders of the Army’s Eastern Department, who had only a month earlier selected Koehler to be acting district commander, a move understandably seen by him as proof of his bosses’ approval and worth to the Army. I considered him an unusually good officer, wrote one colonel, saying he would hold that opinion [i]n the absence of any official or definite knowledge on the subject [of the charges].²

By 1913, gay subcultures existed in America’s large cities, though [s]exual attraction to a person of the same sex was considered a disorder of gender, closer to what we today think of as ‘being transgender’ than ‘being gay.’³ Homosexual men were defined by outsiders almost entirely in terms of their masculinity, or rather, in terms of its absence.⁴ Plucked eyebrows, powdered faces, and falsetto voices were some of the styles associated with so-called fairies, who constituted the dominant public image of the male homosexual, visible on the streets of some neighborhoods, seen in clubs and shows, and referenced in newspapers.⁵

Ben Koehler, who wore his uniform to a party where other men dressed in drag, could hardly be taken for a fairy or effeminate male prostitute—men who, according to a New York investigator testifying in 1899, get up and sing as women, and dance; ape the female character; call each other sisters and take people out for immoral purposes.⁶ Koehler had not swished his skirt or danced the hoochie-coochie at Worcester’s party.

Nor did Koehler fit the profile of an invert, pervert, or degenerate, as those terms were used by federal bureaucrats newly concerned with keeping pederasts or sodomites out of the United States based on a 1909 report about same-sex promiscuity in Europe.⁷ Koehler was not foreign, poor, uneducated, or lazy, the characteristics immigration officials initially linked with men who exhibited gender inversion, had anatomical defects, or engaged in sodomy.⁸

It may have been acceptable for sponsors of the 1893 World’s Fair to import sexually provocative Little Egypt for patrons’ amusement, but the population, government, and concerns of the United States had grown since then, and the head of the Bureau of Immigration now worried about a new species of undesirable immigrant not heretofore met with in the enforcement of the immigration law—people inclined toward nonconforming sex acts.⁹ Their bodily practices might corrupt Americans, not merely entertain them.

The 1909 report is one of the earliest pieces of evidence to document federal-level concern with homosexuality, according to historian Margot Canaday.¹⁰ Lacking laws that expressly matched that concern, officials used what they had: authority to exclude or deport foreigners likely to become a public charge or guilty of crimes of moral turpitude.¹¹ The latter regulation was fairly simple to apply. The public charge clause, in contrast, was "a status charge—it required no evidence that a crime had been committed, but only that a person seem to be something (likely to be poor)."¹²

Accordingly, while Ben Koehler drilled soldiers on Plum Island to repel foreign threats that might arrive by ship, immigration inspectors worked at Ellis Island to exclude individuals on moral and economic grounds—the specious but largely unchallenged legal justification being that a sexual deviant would or could not hold a job and would become a public charge. Fusing moral deficiency and economic dependency, and applying the idea that sexual deviance in men was caused by or associated with effeminate traits, immigration inspectors looked for such signs as deformed genitals, lack of muscle tone, high-pitched voices, or atypical gait and clothing.¹³

The Bureau of Immigration was the first federal agency to target suspected homosexuals as a class.¹⁴ In 1917–18, the Army would follow suit, instructing draft boards to watch for male recruits who ‘present the general body conformation of the opposite sex, with sloping narrow shoulders, broad hips, excessive pectoral and pubic adipose deposits, with lack of masculine [hair] and muscular markings.’¹⁵

In 1913, however, the worlds of Plum Island and Ellis Island seemed quite separate—until Worcester leveled charges against his boss, a respected officer with sixteen years of service.

Back in 1908, the Army had considered Koehler such a good judge of men’s fitness for military service that it assigned him to manage recruitment in Brooklyn, then Manhattan. Between fifteen and thirty applicants stripped naked for his inspection every day to see that there were no defects, according to a sergeant who worked with him.¹⁶ Based on praise for his performance in that job, the Army promoted Koehler to major and commander of Fort Terry in 1911.

Koehler’s education, family prosperity, whiteness, and years of employment contradicted the Immigration Bureau’s early homosexual paradigm, but the Army did not need to find someone a public charge to declare him unfit. A mere six weeks after Worcester’s tell-all trip to Governors Island, the Army proposed to court-martial Koehler as a man whose sexual desires are reversed, [having] the same desires toward men that normal men have towards women, in the words of the Army prosecutor assigned to the case. He called Koehler a homo-sexualist, underscoring the newness of the term homosexual.¹⁷

Court-martialing a senior officer for homoerotic acts was also new. No laws passed by Congress and no administrative regulations explicitly prohibited homosexual conduct in the military, and New York’s sodomy law did not apply to groping.¹⁸ What the Army did have was an archaic code called the Articles of War, imported from Great Britain in 1775-76 and virtually unchanged since 1806. One section prohibited conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. Another proscribed actions to the prejudice of good order and military discipline.¹⁹ Those broadly worded clauses had been interpreted to allow prosecution of an officer for almost any improper or irregular act or behavior disapproved by superiors.²⁰ Army leaders planned to use those clauses to court-martial Koehler—but there was pushback.

Worcester said he complained about Koehler in order that the Army should remain clean,²¹ but Koehler’s supporters claimed Worcester was throwing dirt for the sole purpose of ridding himself of a strict boss. Koehler was the true victim, his defenders maintained, not Worcester and the other men who told an Army inspector that Koehler had groped them, too.

No one was more upset than Sophia, who had left a pleasant midwestern life of tennis matches and dinner parties to live at Fort Terry and was now in her third winter of providing the Army with free labor as a hostess and operator of the post’s Sunday school. She was fiercely loyal to her brother, signified by something they had in common from the earliest moments of their lives: Both had been born on New Year’s Day, five years apart.

Some scoundrels have been making trouble for Ben, she wrote to a longtime friend, Roy Dimmick. A couple of officers whom Ben has had occasion to correct have gotten a dozen or more soldiers to swear to a lot of lies.²²

The other officer Sophia referred to was Second Lieutenant Austin G. Frick, a friend of Worcester’s. Young, tall, and single, Frick had befriended Sophia upon her arrival, playing cards and tennis with her, but just as quickly, he began to collect reprimands from Ben.²³ Now, all the tennis balls Sophia had hit with Frick and their hands of bridge seemed like a long warm-up to betrayal, for Frick told the Army inspector that Ben tried to kiss him one evening in 1912 when the Koehlers invited him to stay for dinner, as well as grabbing his testicles at a dance in the spring of 1913.²⁴

He is entirely innocent of their charges, Sophia lamented to her friend, but they are of the character that is most difficult to fight—They couldn’t bring a decent charge but had to resort to things no man with any manhood would even think of—

Sophia may have graduated college and resisted social pressure to marry, but her iconoclasm only went so far. Her words intoned the era’s cultural preoccupation with male strength that underlay much of the ramped-up hostility toward men suspected of homosexuality. Yes, manhood was important. Yes, her brother had it.

Sociologist Michael Kimmel has written that the story of America [is] a story of proving and testing manhood.²⁵ In the 1800s, it could be unmanly to support abolition and women’s rights, and unmanly not to, for, in the words of historian Stacey Robertson, various notions of manhood became representations of larger competing ideologies.²⁶

The manhood fixation changed as America changed, economically and socially, with old hierarchies declining, former slaves obtaining the right to vote, and women advocating for rights as never before. The result as America entered the twentieth century was one of those moments of crisis when masculinity was seen as threatened and people worked hard to try and salvage, revitalize, and resurrect it.²⁷ New standards of masculinity were emerging, including a hyper-masculinity focused on the body—how it looked, and how one used it.

During the Civil War, Walt Whitman openly kissed and hugged injured soldiers.²⁸ His actions were considered tender, not perverted.²⁹ Through most of the 1800s, young men expressed intimacy with their close male friends in physical ways, such as holding hands.³⁰ Men shared beds, including Abraham Lincoln with a close friend when he was in his late twenties.³¹ As historian E. Anthony Rotundo has written, In the absence of a deep cultural anxiety about homosexuality, men did not have to worry about the meaning of those moments of contact.³²

By 1913, at least in middle-class culture, those days were gone.³³ Toughness was now admired, while tenderness was cause for scorn, according to Rotundo, who coined the term passionate manhood to denote that aggressive male traits, previously considered socially undesirable and warranting restraint, were now seen as virtues, particularly in the view of younger men—such as Worcester and Frick.³⁴

On their surface, the charges against Koehler revolved around specific acts and whether or not they occurred. As Sophia alluded to, answering that question took one into spongy he said–they said terrain. That was an unstable place from an evidentiary standpoint, potentially allowing could he have done it? to eclipse did he do it?—especially given the vagueness of the articles under which Ben would be prosecuted.³⁵ Sophia went straight to Ben’s manhood to rebut the charges, but that was not a stable defense either. Was it the manhood of a brave soldier—a late nineteenth-century standard Ben could easily satisfy—or the newer passionate manhood that focused on personal traits such as toughness, muscular appearance, and obvious sexual interest in women?³⁶ The latter test posed a problem for a middle-aged, short, and stocky bachelor who lived with his sister on a remote island.

When Sophia wrote to Roy Dimmick in January 1914, both she and Ben were on edge, awaiting a report that could exonerate Ben and end the threat of a court-martial. A second investigation had taken place, ordered at the urging of Representative Sloan and an influential senator based on Ben’s claim of a plot involving Worcester, Frick, and men in their clique.

Every one in the post outside the clique is for Ben, Sophia informed Roy.³⁷

That was the status she was accustomed to—people being for her beloved brother, not against him.

CHAPTER THREE

Embryo Generals

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