Glory & Disgrace

ARMY & NAVY

In Washington one day last week Assistant Secretary of the Navy Henry Latrobe Roosevelt and the U. S. Navy Band helped dedicate a tablet to the late, great Historian George Bancroft, who, as President Polk's Secretary of the Navy, defied Congress in 1845 by setting up without its authority a Naval School which became the U. S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. Next day Assistant Secretary Roosevelt motored over to Annapolis to help celebrate its goth anniversary of that event. From far & wide gathered thousands of old Navy men who with their families strolled the quiet, trim, tree-lined yard in a sunny haze of good fellowship and sentiment. The Founder's grandson, Wilder Dwight Bancroft, famed Cornell chemist, made a speech. From a fleet of submarine chasers and launches a "White"' force of midshipmen swept up the Severn to rout "Blue" defenders in a re-enactment of the capture of Veracruz. In the afternoon Navy's football team beat University of Virginia's, 26-to-7. In the evening the Academy's superintendent, Rear Admiral David Foote Sellers, addressed by radio the entire U. S. Fleet. The day ended with The Star-Spangled Banner and many a proud salute to the Navy's glorious past.

Meantime in Chicago that same day an oldster from the other branch of the Service was reviving a part of its past which the Army would like to forget. In 1897 Captain Oberlin Montgomery Carter of the Corps of Engineers was on the upswing of what promised to be an exceptionally brilliant career. Graduated from West Point with one of the most brilliant records in Academy history, he had eight years later been put in charge of important harbor improvements at Savannah. To professional distinction he added the social prestige of marriage to the daughter of a rich onetime business associate of the Vanderbilts. In 1897 President McKinley appointed him Engineers' Corps representative on the American Canal Commission and military attache at the Court of St. James's. Few weeks later his career was ended abruptly by a scandal which humiliated the Army, filled the Press for months.

In Savannah, Captain Carter's successor began an investigation resulting in charges that he had conspired with the harbor contractors to mulct the Government, by shoddy work and extravagant prices, of some $1,800,000. Summoned from London, Captain Carter was court-martialed, cashiered from the Army, sentenced to five years at hard labor in Leavenworth Prison, fined $5,000. His crime & sentence were ordered published in his home town (Patriot, Ohio) newspapers for one year. After 17 months President McKinley approved his sentence and he was clapped into Leavenworth. The contractors were also sentenced to prison, fined $575,000. In a civil suit Carter's personal fortune of some $500,000 was awarded to the Government as compensation for its loss. After serving out his sentence, the disgraced soldier dropped into obscurity in Chicago as a consulting engineer.

During trial, Captain Carter vigorously protested his innocence, claimed he was the victim of a base conspiracy. In 1908 he published a 115-page pamphlet entitled: "The Essential Facts Concerning My Unjust Condemnation and Subsequent Vindication." He had been out of prison more than a quarter-century before some newspaper friends persuaded a highly-placed official to listen to his story. Last session that listener, Illinois' Senator J. Hamilton Lewis, put through Congress a resolution to investigate Carter's claim that he was a "U. S. Dreyfus." Last week Oberlin Carter, still erect at 79, marched into a Chicago hotel room to present the case for vindication of his honor and recovery of his fortune to Wisconsin's Senator F. Ryan Duffy, as chairman of a sub-committee of the Senate Military Affairs Committee.

Three factors were responsible for his conviction. Oldster Carter told the Senator. One was his Savannah successor's jealousy of his social success. Another was the fact that he had favored construction of a canal through Panama, thus incurring the wrath of New York's onetime Senator Warner Miller, head of the Maritime Canal Co. of Nicaragua. Lastly, said he, the late, great Republican Boss Mark Hanna had persuaded President McKinley that if he failed to approve Carter's conviction he would, in the coming election, lose Ohio and the Presidency to Admiral Dewey.

Oldster Carter explained his fortune as the gift of his rich father-in-law, explained the fact that his father-in-law had refused to testify at his trial and fled to Europe by suggesting that that relative might have been in cahoots with the grafting contractors. "I have tried for years," he concluded sadly, "to get a hearing before all the wit nesses died, as they now have." The official record of Carter's case occupies 55,000 pages in the archives of the Departments of War and Justice. Senator Duffy reserved decision.

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