PoliticalWarfare.org

Prosecute the prosecutors

Accountability is important for all aspects of government and for the private companies that provide goods and services to government agencies. Wrongdoing at all levels must be investigated where laws may have been broken.

Just as it was necessary to determine if five elite Blackwater security guards broke the law while protecting the lives of US diplomats in Iraq, so it is necessary to determine if Justice Department lawyers violated the Constitution while prosecuting the men.

Federal Judge Ricardo M. Urbina not only threw out the federal government's case against the Blackwater five last week - he ripped the Justice Department in a blistering, 90-page opinion. (Download Blackwater_123109)

The judge's ruling reads like an indictment of the Justice Department lawyers - a damning accusation for which the prosecutors must be held accountable. Judge Urbina denounced lead prosecutor Kenneth Kohl's team as committing a "reckless violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights." (See excerpts, below.)

The Washington Post, which has been no friend of Blackwater by any means, said in a January 6 editorial that the judge's decision was "infuriating" but "correct." According to the Post editors, Judge Urbina "excoriated Justice Department prosecutors who 'knowingly endangered the viability of the prosecution' by flouting legal rules and constitutional provisions that made dismissal of the charges inevitable."

Knowingly flouted constitutional provisions? That's pretty tough talk. Sounds to me like a federal crime. The Post continued, "The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, which polices prosecutorial misconduct, should scrutinize those responsible."

That's a very good point of departure. But scrutiny of the Justice Department lawyers isn't enough. They must be held accountable. They must be publicly identified, publicly made to account for their un-constitutional misconduct, and then be administratively fired from the government, disbarred from the legal profession, and be subjected to any applicable civil and criminal penalties.

A terrible tragedy took place in greater Baghdad's Nisoor Square in September 2007, in which a firefight resulted in many innocent Iraqis being killed. The government was right to investigate and seek justice. But it was absolutely wrong to trample the Constitution and deny the guards their rights. Here's how the Washington Post described the miscarriage of justice:

"The Blackwater contractors were summoned by State Department interrogators shortly after the incident and told they could lose their jobs if they did not cooperate. Because the government was essentially forcing the contractors to give up their constitutional right against self-incrimination, it guaranteed that any information provided would not be used in a criminal investigation."

In fact, as Judge Urbina determined, the information was used anyway - violating the rights of the accused. As the Post put it:

"Rather than remain secret, the Blackwater statements, which included details about which weapons were used and who fired them, were soon widely disseminated. They were shared with the FBI and the Justice Department's Criminal Division; entire statements were leaked to the press and posted on the Internet. . . .

"Prosecutors also failed aggressively to press witnesses on whether their recollections were colored by reading the Blackwater accounts. The Justice Department argued repeatedly that it did not rely on the Blackwater statements to build its case. Judge Urbina painfully and precisely debunked these assertions. the judge also rightly rebuked the Justice team for withholding from a grand jury exculpatory information.

"The murder of innocents should never go unpunished. Justice Department prosecutors were right to investigate" a possible '"criminal event.' They were right to try to build a case despite the enormous hurdles introduced by the immunized statements. But they went terribly wrong when they disregarded the rule of law and focused only on achieving a desired result."

Mary Jacoby adds more to the story in MainJustice.com.

I hope that the five Blackwater men - all military veterans who put their lives on the line daily to protect American diplomats in one of the world's most hostile environments - turn the tables on the people who unethically prosecuted and illegally persecuted them in the name of "justice." 

Blackwater men Donald Ball, Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, Paul Slough and Nicholas Slatten had their day in court and the federal judge threw out the charges. As much as the press and politicians might want to find them guilty, they are innocent in the eyes of the law.

Now it's time to prosecute the prosecutors. Let's start with Assistant US Attorneys Kenneth Kohl and Jonathan Malis, Justice Department trial attorney Stephen Ponticello, and anybody else whom Judge Urbina said willfully violated the Constitution and denied the five accused military veterans their constitutional rights. Just like the Blackwater men and everyone else, reckless prosecutors must be held accountable.

* * *

Excerpts from Judge Urbina's ruling

• "The government attempts to characterize [lead prosecutor Kenneth] Kohl’s failure to heed [a Justice Department advisor's cautionary] directives as a mere 'miscommunication.' Yet to accept this characterization, the court would have to accept the following: that Kohl, a seasoned and accomplished prosecutor, failed" a litany of implausible procedures. (p. 82)
• "These inconsistent, extraordinary explanations smack of post hoc rationalization and are simply implausible. The only conclusion the court can draw from this evidence is that Kohl and the rest of the trial team purposefully flouted the advice of the taint team when obtaining the substance of the defendants’ compelled statements, and in so doing, knowingly endangered the viability of the prosecution." (pp. 82-83)
• "This reckless behavior was in keeping in with the way the prosecution conducted itself throughout the grand jury process, as it withheld the testimony of numerous percipient witnesses who had provided substantial exculpatory evidence to the first grand jury, presented the second grand jury with distorted and self-serving 'summaries' of the accounts of other witnesses and implied to the second grand jury that the defendants had given inculpatory statements to State Department investigators which the government could not disclose to the grand jury because they were given 'in exchange for immunity.'" (p. 83, footnote 63)
• "The government argues that the trial team could not, as a matter of law, have used the defendants’ compelled statements because the statements only contained exculpatory information. . . . Yet, as the court has already observed, in each of the authorities on which the government relies to support this assertion, the determination that there was no Kastigar violation [of the Fifth Amendment to the Bill of Rights] resulted from the fact that the statement was not useful to the prosecution under the circumstances of that case. . . . In this case, by contrast, it is abundantly clear that the defendants’ compelled statements did have a value to the prosecution." (p. 83)
  
  
• "In the face of the unrefuted evidence that the trial team risked the entire prosecution in aggressively seeking out the defendants’ compelled statements, which provided a wealth of valuable information, the government asks this court to credit the conclusory assertions of Kohl and the rest of the trial team that they made no use of these statements to further the prosecution. . . . The government asks too much." (p. 84)
• "It simply defies common sense that the prosecution would go to such incredible lengths to obtain the defendants’ compelled statements, flouting the advice of the taint team and taking actions that even Kohl acknowledged came 'close to the line,' and then make no use whatsoever of the fruits of their efforts." (pp. 84-85)
• "These facts do not describe a case of fleeting exposure late in the game that may have tangentially affected the trial team’s thought processes. . . . Rather, they reveal that the trial team went to great lengths and knowingly took great risks, at the early stages of the prosecution, to obtain statements that provided a wealth of information valuable to the prosecution. Given the prosecution’s early, ongoing and intentional immersion in the defendants’ compelled statements, the government bore the burden of demonstrating that it made no significant nonevidentiary use of the defendants’ statements." (p. 85)
• "Indeed, Kohl testified that until his April 2008 meeting with [a special Justice Department advisor who advised against tainting the prosecution from illegal, compelled evidence], he believed that the September 16 interviews [compelled of the defendants] were 'fair game.' . . . But if Kohl actually believed that the September 16 statements were fair game, it seems highly unlikely that the trial team would not have used those statements in guiding their investigation and prosecution of the case." (p. 85, footnote 64). Here, it appears that Judge Urbina is calling Assistant US Attorney Kenneth Kohl a liar.
• "The government’s utter failure to meet this burden [to protect the defendants' Fifth Amendment rights by building its case free of taint from the compelled statements of the accused] requires dismissal of the indictment against all the defendants." (p. 85)
• "The Government's Myriad . . . Violations Cannot Be Excused as Harmless Error" (p. 88)
• ". . . far from being unimportant and insubstantial, the defendants’ compelled statements pervaded nearly every aspect of the government’s investigation and prosecution, and the government’s use of those statements appears to have played a critical role in the indictment against each of the defendants. Accordingly, the court declines to excuse the government’s reckless violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights as harmless error." (p. 89)
• ". . . the indictment is fatally tainted. . . ." (p. 89, footnote 66)
• "When a judge, upon close examination of the procedures that bring a criminal matter before the court, concludes that the process aimed at bringing the accused to trial has compromised the constitutional rights of the accused, it behooves the court to grant relief in the fashion prescribed by law. Such is the case here." (p. 90)
  

Stability Operations field manual: A good start with lots of room to grow

The US Army's new Stability Operations field manual, FM 3-07, takes warfighting to a new art form, with an emphasis on preventing large-scale conflicts from occurring, and on winning the peace after winning a war.

Lots of political warfare applications here. There's a lot that this book of doctrine doesn't say, but it leaves open a lot of room for our tools of first resort. 

For people who want to make a difference for all the right reasons in the information operations and related fields, the new field manual is a great place to start.

I ran excerpts from the field manual and related commentary in the latest issue of Serviam magazine, insofar as the book relates to the private sector and contracting opportunities:

• "US Army Embraces the Private Sector for Mission Success"
• "Comprehensive Approach: Army's New Field Manual on Stability Operations Stresses the Private Sector"
• "What Army Doctrine Means for Businesses and Charities"

A piece by Maj. John Rose, "Missed Opportunities in the Stability Operations Doctrine," notes how the field manual comes up pretty short on the information operations side of things.

Here's a pdf of the Stability Operations field manual: Download FM3-07.

What Army doctrine means for businesses and charities

By J. Michael Waller *
Serviam magazine, November-December 2008

Businesses and charities involved in the global stability sector will find a lot of opportunity in the Army’s new stability operations doctrine.

The Army wants it that way. Principally designed as a guide for the Army’s senior leadership—officers at the rank of major and above—the Stability Operations Field Manual 3-07 “is also intended to serve as a resource for the other government agencies, intergovernmental organizations, agencies of other governments, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and private sector entities who seek to develop a better understanding of the role of the military in broader reconstruction and stabilization efforts,” according to the preface.

That’s a big invitation for private sector involvement. Opportunities are immense. According to the field manual, the new doctrine “addresses military stability operations in the broader context of United States government reconstruction and stabilization efforts. It describes the role of military forces in supporting those broader efforts by leveraging the coercive and constructive capabilities of the force to establish a safe and secure environment; facilitate reconciliation among local or regional adversaries; establish political, legal, social, and economic institutions; and help transition responsibility to a legitimate civil authority operating under the rule of law.”

This fully integrated approach means that businesses and charities that had worked on the purely civilian level may now plan to contract and otherwise collaborate with the military, and vice versa.

Based on the experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan, the new integration combines the vastly increased resources of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other public institutions with the even greater resources of the U.S. military. The successes of both depend heavily on private contractors and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from around the world.

According to the field manual, “This transition is fundamental to the shift in focus toward long-term developmental activities where military forces support broader efforts in pursuit of national and international objectives.” Reverting to the tradition of the great former general and Secretary of State George Marshall, author of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II, much of the assistance will be user-driven: “Success in these endeavors typically requires a long-term commitment by external actors and is ultimately determined by the support and participation of the host-nation population.”

Translation: Pay close attention to the needs and aspirations of the people who live in unstable areas. By tending to those needs and hopes, the doctrine reasons, the United States and its allies can undermine the appeal of political and religious extremism, both violent and subversive, and advance American interests.

Those with their ears closest to the ground in such places will be able to shape the allocation of resources, and so those already working in the field with established track records have a running start. The need is so great, however, that there is plenty of room for new and innovative companies, charities, and NGOs that have yet to be created. And plenty of established groups have yet to get into the game of collaborating with the U.S. military.

The Army doctrine provides the framework for an industry of war prevention that could rival the size of the industry that creates the products and services needed for warfighting. The potential client list is endless.

Nonprofit Advantages

First, nonprofits can stretch their charitable dollars by letting the military pay the huge logistical costs of moving people and supplies from point A to point B. This frees up considerable resources to reinvest in actual relief and development work. Second, those nonprofits can also contract with the military where U.S.-sponsored stability operations are under way. In parts of the world without a U.S. presence, the demand-driven feature of the doctrine also allows nonprofits in remote trouble spots to bring problems and solutions to the attention of American officials.

The doctrine notes that many charities and NGOs believe they function best independently of any affiliation with the U.S. government. That independence can still be an asset, as cooperation can be unofficial and unacknowledged yet mutually beneficial. The Army field manual respects the fact that some humanitarian groups and NGOs will want no involvement of any kind with the U.S. military.

Building Private Sectors

The ground-up philosophy behind the doctrine is premised on protecting and expanding private enterprise in unstable areas. Government intervention is generally seen as a temporary fix in order to protect fragile institutions, which include private business and the government systems that protect enterprise. Stability operations are designed so that the external governmental or military presence will disappear. Their goal is to work themselves out of their jobs.

So the contracting of goods and services—often in the form of joint ventures between American businesses, companies from other countries in an alliance or coalition, and new companies in the host countries—is institutionalized in the new Army doctrine. The challenge for businesses is to prove that they are more cost-effective and politically desirable to provide solutions on contract, as opposed to having governments do the work directly.

Humanitarian Relief

Nonprofit and for-profit humanitarian relief groups will play important roles under the new Army doctrine. Private medical practices, hospitals, ambulance services, and pharmaceutical and equipment providers should find new contracting opportunities globally as the United States and other large powers increase their funding on the humanitarian and health sectors of unstable areas worldwide.

In addition, the infrastructures needed for a healthy society—potable water, sanitation, housing construction, urban planning, energy generation, communication, and transportation systems—are all major growth areas under the stability operations doctrine.

Civil Society

Over the past two decades, a specialized industry in civil society building has sprung up around the world, centered particularly in Washington, D.C., near the hub of U.S. spending on the promotion of pre- and postwar reconciliation, democracy building, rule of law, transparency, and the development of functioning civil institutions around the world. This industry has proven itself indispensable under contracts with USAID, the World Bank, and other multibillion-dollar public organizations.

Having learned from spectacular successes and colossal mistakes in Asia, Latin America, and the countries of the former Soviet Union, as well as Iraq and Afghanistan, the civil society sector is better placed than ever to grow as a service business. Yet the risk of mere marginal success and even total failure remains high, and the sector should police itself more rigorously to preserve the solid reputation it is starting to earn.

Economic Development

Much of the same can be said of economic development, not only in light of today’s global crisis, but also in the context of the often ineptly or corruptly designed and executed schemes that have given market-driven economic reforms a bad name around the world. Dictatorial models offered by the People’s Republic of China offer tempting alternatives to those who saw political reforms collapse under the weight of economic change, and, with more and wealthier economic actors on the world stage, it is up to American, Canadian, British, Latin American, and other market reform businesses to work harder to stay viable over the long term. The Army doctrine offers a way to help make that possible, but the innovations will have to come from the private sector, not the military.

Security Sector

No viable economic system can survive without the legal structures and law enforcement tools to keep people as honest as possible. Economic success depends on well-trained police and security services that operate under efficient and equitable civilian control, with all the requisite accountability measures to ensure against abuse of power.

Tough enough in normal societies, this is a tall order in transitioning countries and places in crisis, and even in stable societies where corruption is the norm. The training and equipping of police and security services by private contractors under license from the provider governments can have an experimental effect beyond the governments’ own resources.

Ideally, the U.S. military will not be primarily responsible for ensuring the security needed for successful humanitarian relief and national development. That job, under the doctrine, should go as much as possible to third parties and host countries, which, in turn, would depend on contracting private companies to do the job of setting up functioning and viable institutions so the U.S. military will not have to do it.

_____

*J. Michael Waller used a pen name, Ann Jocelyn, in the original version of this article.

Congressional study shows how economical private contractors can be

Here's some good news for the taxpayer and the info ops/public diplomacy professionals in the private sector. A study by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows that private military contractors can be more cost-effective than uniformed or government personnel in certain key areas.

The report specifically refers to private security contractors, but I bet a study on private contractors in general could show similar results. I take a look at the issue in Serviam magazine (the byline is "Serviam staff"), and also discuss some methodological differences with the CBO report that, when factored in, should show considerably more cost-savings.

Of course, the info ops private contracting sector is a pretty mixed bag, ranging from the very good to the horrific, and quite a bit of the substandard and overly-expensive contracting work is bound to give a bad name to everyone else. I won't pick fights with individual contracting companies right now, but in future issues of Serviam we'll probably take a look at the best and the worst of contractors in the infosphere. 

Here's a link to download the original CBO report: Download CBO08-12-IraqContractors

Andrew Garfield's comprehensive approach to information operations

Andrew Garfield, the British-American information operations practitioner, has written a multi-part series on information operations for Serviam magazine.

Part 1: Opportunities for International Public-Private Partnership. March-April 2008.

Part 2: Understanding the Human Terrain. May-June 2008.

Part 3: Effective Engagement. July-August 2008.

For information on Garfield's contracting firm, Glevum Associates, click here.

'An ounce of prevention' - Ben Franklin and private fire departments

by J Michael Waller
Serviam magazine, July-August 2008

Out-of-control wildfires out West show the severe limits on government’s ability to protect society from one of nature’s weapons of mass destruction. Federal and state officials waited for more than a half-million acres to burn last June and July before calling the National Guard for help.

With hundreds of homes destroyed among the billions of dollars’ worth of damages, some policymakers and entrepreneurs are considering the revival of private firefighting companies that can be contracted to help authorities battle blazes.

Naysayers call the idea preposterous, denouncing the concept that businesses should profit from other people’s misfortune. But with private ambulance and rescue services, private medical practices, and private hospitals being a firm part of the American tradition, proponents say, private firefighting contractors are an idea whose time has come.

Like so many “new” ideas, private fire departments are an old idea.

Boston’s great fire of 1679 led to the creation of “the first paid fire department in North America, if not the world,” according to the National Fire Protection Association. Though employed directly by the city of Boston, the 12 firemen, like members of the local militia, were essentially private contractors. The colony of Massachusetts was run by a private company at the time.

Firefighting in colonial cities was an ad-hoc affair in the 1600s and 1700s. Some colonial or city governments provided ladders and leather buckets for public use in battling blazes, which were all too common in an age where most urban construction was made of wood. In 1718, the city of Philadelphia bought an English-made pump, mounted on a wagon, to aid in fighting fires.

Franklin’s Union Fire Company

There were still no organized and trained firefighters in America. That changed in 1736 when Benjamin Franklin organized the Union Fire Company in Philadelphia. Franklin had seen the professional firefighters in his native Boston, and he saw the need for a well-trained and organized force in his adopted city. He was worried that untrained firefighters could inadvertently spread or even start other fires. The Union Fire Company is recognized as the first fire “department” in what is now the United States.

We usually think of Franklin from his portraits painted in the later years of his life, when he had become a wealthy and famous statesman. At first glance, the idea of Franklin as a fireman strikes one as odd. Biographer Walter Isaacson estimates that, at just under 6 feet in height, Franklin weighed as much as 240 pounds in his older years, when he suffered from obesity and gout. As a 29-year-old when he first came up with the private fire company idea, Franklin was vigorous and athletic, a barrel-chested man noted for being an excellent swimmer. He once had to jump out a second-story window to escape a house fire.

‘. . . a Pound of Cure’

One of Franklin’s most famous sayings had to do with firefighting. He had seen the city government’s response to the destructive waterfront fire of 1730, in which the old pumper had proven almost worthless. According to the Fireman’s Hall Museum in Philadelphia, the city council authorized the purchase of three more pumpers, 400 leather buckets, and other firefighting gear, but did not organize people to use them.

Early in 1735, Franklin wrote a letter under a pseudonym to his own newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, about the need to train citizens in basic firefighting techniques. He had been publicly urging action for a few years. This time, he referred to the practice of safely cleaning ashes out of a fireplace with a shovel, or carrying a bed warmer or warming pan from the fireplace to the bedroom on cold nights. The pan consisted of a shallow, long-handled metal box that contained hot embers from the fireplace. A hinged lid kept the burning coals safely in the box, which was placed between the cold blankets of the bed. Even small children knew how to carry warming pans, he said, using basic fireplace safety as an example of how a firefighter must be trained.

Franklin wrote: “In the first Place, as an Ounce of Prevention is worth a Pound of Cure, I would advise ‘em to take care how they suffer living Coals in a full Shovel, to be carried out of one Room into another, or up or down Stairs, unless in a Warmingpan shut; for Scraps of Fire may fall into Chinks and make no Appearance until Midnight, when your Stairs being in Flames, you may be forced, (as I once was) to leap out of your Windows, and hazard your Necks to avoid being oven-roasted.”

Everyone at the time knew that residue buildup inside chimney flues also caused fires, but not all were good about cleaning the shafts regularly, and even those who were often used the dangerous cleaning practice of burning soot out of chimneys. Given urban population density, in which one person’s carelessness could cause the loss of other people’s homes, Franklin urged Philadelphians to follow Boston’s example of using chimney sweeps, licensed and regulated by the city, to reduce the likelihood of chimney fires. Building in an accountability measure, Franklin argued that the city should hold chimney sweeps liable for the quality of their work.

With Franklin as its chief, the Union Fire Company was a volunteer organization, independent of the city government. Its members were civic-minded men who took no pay. So many locals volunteered that Franklin urged them to set up their own fire companies in their neighborhoods.

Civic-Minded Businessman

Volunteer firefighters respond to a house fire.

Throughout his long life, Franklin combined his spirit of public service with private entrepreneurship. He arrived in Philadelphia as a teenager with nothing and became wealthy through a seemingly endless range of business ventures, all the while using his daring and his wit to improve the lives of others.

Years later, in 1752, Franklin founded the city’s first insurance company, in partnership with several members of other local private fire companies. The for-profit venture was known as the Philadelphia Contributionship for the Insurance of Houses from Loss by Fire. “This was a mutual company organized to offer its members monetary compensation in the event of fire,” according to the Fireman’s Hall Museum. “Premiums varied depending upon the type of structure, the materials used, and the thickness of the party walls. The Deed of Settlement further stipulated that every insured house be equipped with a trap door to the roof and iron rails to facilitate fire fighting.”

This idea led to the widespread practice of private fire companies that were funded not by taxpayers but by subscriptions. For a regular fee, individual citizens or businesses would purchase firefighter protection from specific fire companies so that, in the event of a blaze, the company would come and put out the fire. To mark their buildings as protected under the policies, owners would attach cast iron “firemark” symbols, usually oval or rectangular markers with the name or recognizable symbol of the respective fire company, to the front wall facing the street.

The private fire companies were not liable to extinguish fires at properties of nonsubscribers, much as insurance companies do not pay damages to those who do not buy their financial protection. Insurance companies would later own or fund fire companies as a means of protecting their investments. The practice all but died out with the rise of full-time municipal and volunteer fire departments, some of which still refer to themselves or their units as “fire companies.”

Today in the western United States, the American International Group (AIG) offers subscribers an option for intervention in the event of wildfires. AIG is the largest insurance company in the world. Its Mobile Wildfire Protection Unit doesn’t put out the fire if the home is being destroyed, but it does spray the home and surrounding vegetation in advance of the flames to spare the insured property from destruction.

Legacy of First Responders

Franklin’s private firefighting system served Philadelphia for 135 years, until the city—much larger and more prosperous than ever—created the Philadelphia Fire Department in 1870. The department recognizes Franklin as its ultimate founder.

The International Fire Chiefs Association calls Franklin “a prime contributor to the wealth of tradition that symbolizes the fire and emergency service worldwide.” The association’s most prestigious annual award is the International Benjamin Franklin Fire Service Award for Valor.

_______
From the July/August 2008 issue of Serviam.

by J Michael Waller
Serviam magazine, July-August 2008

Out-of-control wildfires out West show the severe limits on government’s ability to protect society from one of nature’s weapons of mass destruction. Federal and state officials waited for more than a half-million acres to burn last June and July before calling the National Guard for help.

With hundreds of homes destroyed among the billions of dollars’ worth of damages, some policymakers and entrepreneurs are considering the revival of private firefighting companies that can be contracted to help authorities battle blazes.

Naysayers call the idea preposterous, denouncing the concept that businesses should profit from other people’s misfortune. But with private ambulance and rescue services, private medical practices, and private hospitals being a firm part of the American tradition, proponents say, private firefighting contractors are an idea whose time has come.

Like so many “new” ideas, private fire departments are an old idea.

Boston’s great fire of 1679 led to the creation of “the first paid fire department in North America, if not the world,” according to the National Fire Protection Association. Though employed directly by the city of Boston, the 12 firemen, like members of the local militia, were essentially private contractors. The colony of Massachusetts was run by a private company at the time.

Firefighting in colonial cities was an ad-hoc affair in the 1600s and 1700s. Some colonial or city governments provided ladders and leather buckets for public use in battling blazes, which were all too common in an age where most urban construction was made of wood. In 1718, the city of Philadelphia bought an English-made pump, mounted on a wagon, to aid in fighting fires.

Franklin’s Union Fire Company

There were still no organized and trained firefighters in America. That changed in 1736 when Benjamin Franklin organized the Union Fire Company in Philadelphia. Franklin had seen the professional firefighters in his native Boston, and he saw the need for a well-trained and organized force in his adopted city. He was worried that untrained firefighters could inadvertently spread or even start other fires. The Union Fire Company is recognized as the first fire “department” in what is now the United States.

We usually think of Franklin from his portraits painted in the later years of his life, when he had become a wealthy and famous statesman. At first glance, the idea of Franklin as a fireman strikes one as odd. Biographer Walter Isaacson estimates that, at just under 6 feet in height, Franklin weighed as much as 240 pounds in his older years, when he suffered from obesity and gout. As a 29-year-old when he first came up with the private fire company idea, Franklin was vigorous and athletic, a barrel-chested man noted for being an excellent swimmer. He once had to jump out a second-story window to escape a house fire.

‘. . . a Pound of Cure’

One of Franklin’s most famous sayings had to do with firefighting. He had seen the city government’s response to the destructive waterfront fire of 1730, in which the old pumper had proven almost worthless. According to the Fireman’s Hall Museum in Philadelphia, the city council authorized the purchase of three more pumpers, 400 leather buckets, and other firefighting gear, but did not organize people to use them.

Early in 1735, Franklin wrote a letter under a pseudonym to his own newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, about the need to train citizens in basic firefighting techniques. He had been publicly urging action for a few years. This time, he referred to the practice of safely cleaning ashes out of a fireplace with a shovel, or carrying a bed warmer or warming pan from the fireplace to the bedroom on cold nights. The pan consisted of a shallow, long-handled metal box that contained hot embers from the fireplace. A hinged lid kept the burning coals safely in the box, which was placed between the cold blankets of the bed. Even small children knew how to carry warming pans, he said, using basic fireplace safety as an example of how a firefighter must be trained.

Franklin wrote: “In the first Place, as an Ounce of Prevention is worth a Pound of Cure, I would advise ‘em to take care how they suffer living Coals in a full Shovel, to be carried out of one Room into another, or up or down Stairs, unless in a Warmingpan shut; for Scraps of Fire may fall into Chinks and make no Appearance until Midnight, when your Stairs being in Flames, you may be forced, (as I once was) to leap out of your Windows, and hazard your Necks to avoid being oven-roasted.”

Everyone at the time knew that residue buildup inside chimney flues also caused fires, but not all were good about cleaning the shafts regularly, and even those who were often used the dangerous cleaning practice of burning soot out of chimneys. Given urban population density, in which one person’s carelessness could cause the loss of other people’s homes, Franklin urged Philadelphians to follow Boston’s example of using chimney sweeps, licensed and regulated by the city, to reduce the likelihood of chimney fires. Building in an accountability measure, Franklin argued that the city should hold chimney sweeps liable for the quality of their work.

With Franklin as its chief, the Union Fire Company was a volunteer organization, independent of the city government. Its members were civic-minded men who took no pay. So many locals volunteered that Franklin urged them to set up their own fire companies in their neighborhoods.

Civic-Minded Businessman

Volunteer firefighters respond to a house fire.

Throughout his long life, Franklin combined his spirit of public service with private entrepreneurship. He arrived in Philadelphia as a teenager with nothing and became wealthy through a seemingly endless range of business ventures, all the while using his daring and his wit to improve the lives of others.

Years later, in 1752, Franklin founded the city’s first insurance company, in partnership with several members of other local private fire companies. The for-profit venture was known as the Philadelphia Contributionship for the Insurance of Houses from Loss by Fire. “This was a mutual company organized to offer its members monetary compensation in the event of fire,” according to the Fireman’s Hall Museum. “Premiums varied depending upon the type of structure, the materials used, and the thickness of the party walls. The Deed of Settlement further stipulated that every insured house be equipped with a trap door to the roof and iron rails to facilitate fire fighting.”

This idea led to the widespread practice of private fire companies that were funded not by taxpayers but by subscriptions. For a regular fee, individual citizens or businesses would purchase firefighter protection from specific fire companies so that, in the event of a blaze, the company would come and put out the fire. To mark their buildings as protected under the policies, owners would attach cast iron “firemark” symbols, usually oval or rectangular markers with the name or recognizable symbol of the respective fire company, to the front wall facing the street.

The private fire companies were not liable to extinguish fires at properties of nonsubscribers, much as insurance companies do not pay damages to those who do not buy their financial protection. Insurance companies would later own or fund fire companies as a means of protecting their investments. The practice all but died out with the rise of full-time municipal and volunteer fire departments, some of which still refer to themselves or their units as “fire companies.”

Today in the western United States, the American International Group (AIG) offers subscribers an option for intervention in the event of wildfires. AIG is the largest insurance company in the world. Its Mobile Wildfire Protection Unit doesn’t put out the fire if the home is being destroyed, but it does spray the home and surrounding vegetation in advance of the flames to spare the insured property from destruction.

Legacy of First Responders

Franklin’s private firefighting system served Philadelphia for 135 years, until the city—much larger and more prosperous than ever—created the Philadelphia Fire Department in 1870. The department recognizes Franklin as its ultimate founder.

The International Fire Chiefs Association calls Franklin “a prime contributor to the wealth of tradition that symbolizes the fire and emergency service worldwide.” The association’s most prestigious annual award is the International Benjamin Franklin Fire Service Award for Valor.

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From the July/August 2008 issue of Serviam.

Contractors cut Cuba cable

by Aaron Linderman
Serviam magazine, May-June 2008

Though it took place more than a century ago, the Spanish-American War was the occasion for a sophisticated communications and information strategy employed by the United States through undersea telegraphic cables. The Navy relied heavily on the private sector. The U.S. government tapped the advice of industry experts, used machinery provided by leading corporations, chartered civilian vessels, hired civilian telegraph operators, and even benefited from the use of a Chicago newsman’s private yacht.

When war with Spain broke out in 1898, the telegraph was just a half-century old. The first telegraphic message went from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., in 1844; the first transatlantic cable was laid in 1858. In spite of these developments, the telegraph was an underappreciated method of military communication until Ulysses S. Grant, whom military historian John Keegan calls “a master of telegraphic method during the Civil War,” took command of the Union armies in 1864. Britain soon ran with the idea, laying cables to the distant corners of the Empire. By 1900, the French government would observe that “England owes her influence in the world perhaps more to her cable communications than to her navy.”

Thus, when the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, and the United States found itself at war with Spain, it was logical that laying and cutting cables would be a part of the ensuing military campaigns. The American military leadership understood that a physical blockade of Cuba, which would prevent the landing of food and munitions, would be incomplete without an information blockade. Thus, early on, as war chronicler Herbert Wrigley Wilson wrote in 1900, “the Americans were anxious to cut the… telegraph cables which… kept up communication between Havana and Spain.”

The U.S. Navy contracted the privately owned passenger liner SS St. Louis to cut wartime undersea cables to Spain. Later during World War I, the Navy would requisition the ship outright as the SS St. Louis.

The U.S. military, however, was wholly unprepared to conduct oceanic cable operations at the outbreak of war. Col. James Allen, chief signal officer of the Army of Puerto Rico, noted in an official report at the time, “There was no cable ship under the American flag, and efforts to procure a suitable foreign ship were unavailing. The stock of available deep-sea cable in the United States was limited to small amounts held by different companies for repairs, and the cable factories were all working to their full capacity on orders already given by the War Department.”

The government turned to the private sector. James A. Scrymser, a telegraph baron with connections to several major companies, received a wire from a government official in Washington asking for a meeting the very next morning. “I found the high official very much excited,” Scrymser wrote in his 1915 memoir. “He told me that the Army was about to be dispatched from Florida to Santiago [Cuba] and that the President had no means of communicating with it when it reached there. He confided to me that the Government had thought of the possibility of using the British cable…. ‘In this emergency,’ said my distinguished visitor, ‘the Government has given me authority to purchase the British cable outright.’ I listened until he had fully outlined the Government’s plans and then was obliged to point out to him the fact that inasmuch as the cable in question was a British-owned cable, it would be a distinct violation of neutrality for the United States Government to make use of it, even should the Government buy every share of the British Cable Company…. My visitor saw the truth of this contention and, in desperation, asked me if I could not solve the problem.”

As it turned out, Scrymser could. He knew of a French cable running from New York to Santiago via Haiti. As an industry insider, Scrymser also knew that American policy required foreign cables landing in the United States to give reciprocal usage rights to American companies. Instead, the French Cable Company had exclusive rights to the West Indies and, as a result, had been brought to court by the Grover Cleveland administration. The French, however, had deftly covered themselves, setting up a dummy American company, the United States & Hayti Cable Company, incorporated in West Virginia, to which ownership of the cable had been passed. Thus, Scrymser recommended that the U.S. government seize the cable, which it did. The French ambassador protested this violation of neutrality, only to be shown an affidavit from the prior court case, testifying that the cable was owned by an American company. This still left a minor problem—the fact that Santiago, the southern end of this cable line, was in Spanish hands. However, the cable could be cut offshore of Santiago and brought ashore to wherever American troops landed, thereby putting them in touch with Haiti, New York, and Washington.

Businessman Helped Disrupt Cable to Philippines The same businessman who helped the U.S. military cut Spanish access to cables to Cuba also assisted on the Philippine front. Telegraph baron James A. Scrymser provided intelligence and operational support to isolate Spain from its Southeast Asian colony. Commodore George Dewey, famous for the Battle of Manila Bay, believed that he had cut the cables to the Philippine capital, but a short time later Scrymser’s Galveston manager reported that Spanish instructions for a privateer to raid American vessels had passed from Manila through Galveston to Valparaiso, Chile. The cable had not been cut after all. Scrymser, according to his memoirs, notified Washington and explained that Dewey had probably inadvertently picked up the small Manila-Cavite cable instead of the Manila-Hong Kong cable. It would now, however, take a week or more to reach Dewey, an unacceptably long time. The government asked Scrymser what could be done, and once again, the businessman had the answer. “I suggested that the simplest and surest way was to officially protest to Great Britain against this violation of neutrality on the part of Spain and this Washington did at once. Within 48 hours the seals of Her Britannic Majesty’s Government were placed on the Hong Kong end of the cable and the danger of Spanish communication with the world was stopped.”

Shortly after war broke out, the commercial passenger liner SS St. Louis was in Southampton, England. She was chartered for American naval service and was “specially outfitted with heavy drag lines in order to destroy undersea cable communications,” according to the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. In May 1898, she moved into action, cutting cables between San Juan, in Spanish Puerto Rico, and St. Thomas, in the Danish West Indies (the future U.S. Virgin Islands). The liner would go on to cut cables between Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica, often under enemy fire.

At the same time, Col. Allen chartered and equipped the privately owned SS Adria in New York, a job that would earn him the Distinguished Service Cross. Through the Western Union Company, Allen was put in communication with Scrymser, who placed all of the Mexican Telegraph Company’s machinery at the colonel’s disposal. This equipment was installed on the Adria under the direction of Mexican Telegraph officials. Cables themselves were acquired in Boston and New York.

Leading much of the work was Maturin Hellings, who had been a Mexican Telegraph Company engineer for many years. The Army gave Hellings, a civilian, the rank of lieutenant “in order that he might have authority over the soldiers and might not be interfered with,” according to Allen, who credited Hellings’ “experience and skill and untiring energy, under dangerous and difficult circumstances” for the success of the operation.

When the crew of cable hands that had originally been hired for the expedition got cold feet, Col. Allen acquired 10 volunteers from the First Artillery at Key West Barracks to replace them. This would be a major headache for Col. Allen, since these men lacked the technical expertise of the previous civilian crew: none of the 10 had seen a cable before and only one had ever been to sea. In spite of this setback, the Adria, like the St. Louis, would go on to cut a variety of cables, often under heavy fire and susceptible to attack by torpedo boats.

By June the American invasion of Cuba was imminent, and the U.S. military was now interested in establishing communications—its own—rather than destroying the enemy’s. Allen wrote in his report that he traveled to Haiti “to arrange with [the] French Cable Company for instruments to open an office at Guantanamo.” Over the next several days he went back and forth across the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti, eventually acquiring the right equipment. It took one week to repair the Guantanamo-Haiti cable, which the St. Louis had cut just a short time before. The line was reopened in time to carry a report to Washington about the arrival of General William Rufus Shafter’s army.

When U.S. forces landed at Ponce, Puerto Rico, they were followed shortly by Col. Allen, who reported, “The [enemy] cable was cut and instruments placed on both lines.” Once again, the military tapped the commercial sector to run the new American communications hub; Allen sailed to St. Thomas to arrange for the West India & Panama Corporation to open an office in Ponce. The deal was agreed, but only one operator could be spared from St. Thomas, so it was decided to find another in Santa Cruz, Mexico. Rather than sending any official government personnel, Henry B. Chamberlain of the Chicago Record volunteered to go to Santa Cruz on his personal yacht, dropping off the West India & Panama operator at Ponce on his way.

By August, the thoroughly defeated Spanish sued for peace. In December, the formal treaty was signed and Spain lost the last vestiges of her colonial empire.

Throughout the telegraphic cable operations, the private sector played a leading role. James Scrymser’s expert advice, the physical machinery provided by Western Union, the private ships (St. Louis and Adria) chartered by the Navy, the services rendered by West India & Panama telegraph operators, and the personal assistance provided by Henry Chamberlain of the Chicago Record all contributed to the successful communications strategy of the American forces. Though the Adria’s crew may have been squeamish about participating in the actual expedition to Cuba, not all civilians were. In his report, Col. Allen wrote that “Mr. E. H. Strickland, an expert operator of the Western Union Telegraph Company, is entitled to great praise for valuable services rendered at Key West and during the entire expedition.” Several journalists helped the Signal Corps in the war effort. Allen also praised Chamberlain and reporters from the Associated Press, New York Sun, and New York Herald, probably owing to their practical experience with cabling messages.

Why this high degree of public-private cooperation? First, America’s entire system of cable communications at the time of the war depended upon the private sector. In his Personal Reminiscences, Scrymser wrote, “The Mexican Telegraph Company and the Central & South American Telegraph Company, comprising altogether a system of nearly seventeen thousand miles and connecting Washington, telegraphically, with Mexico and all of the Central and South American Republics, have given to the Government, gratuitously, an all-American cable system, the value of which is inestimable. I say ‘gratuitously,’ for the United States Government has never contributed one cent to the establishment of this great system to the South of us.” Thus, both knowledge and equipment relating to international cable communications abounded in private hands and were placed at the disposal of the U.S. military.

Second, is the traditional American approach to war. Typically, the United States has engaged in a massive buildup at the beginning of a war and an extensive demobilization at its end. Though the Spanish-American War was much smaller and shorter than the American Civil War or World War I, the same basic model was followed. There is much to criticize about this approach, but there is much that recommends itself, not least of which is low peacetime costs. However, the result is that the U.S. military often needs a helping hand from the private sector when new conflicts arise, where specialists carry out operations for which the military is not trained or equipped.

Aaron Linderman is a historian pursuing a doctoral degree at Texas A&M University. He holds a Master’s Degree in Statecraft and National Security from the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C..

_______
From the May/June 2008 issue of Serviam.

by Aaron Linderman
Serviam magazine, May-June 2008

Though it took place more than a century ago, the Spanish-American War was the occasion for a sophisticated communications and information strategy employed by the United States through undersea telegraphic cables. The Navy relied heavily on the private sector. The U.S. government tapped the advice of industry experts, used machinery provided by leading corporations, chartered civilian vessels, hired civilian telegraph operators, and even benefited from the use of a Chicago newsman’s private yacht.

When war with Spain broke out in 1898, the telegraph was just a half-century old. The first telegraphic message went from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., in 1844; the first transatlantic cable was laid in 1858. In spite of these developments, the telegraph was an underappreciated method of military communication until Ulysses S. Grant, whom military historian John Keegan calls “a master of telegraphic method during the Civil War,” took command of the Union armies in 1864. Britain soon ran with the idea, laying cables to the distant corners of the Empire. By 1900, the French government would observe that “England owes her influence in the world perhaps more to her cable communications than to her navy.”

Thus, when the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, and the United States found itself at war with Spain, it was logical that laying and cutting cables would be a part of the ensuing military campaigns. The American military leadership understood that a physical blockade of Cuba, which would prevent the landing of food and munitions, would be incomplete without an information blockade. Thus, early on, as war chronicler Herbert Wrigley Wilson wrote in 1900, “the Americans were anxious to cut the… telegraph cables which… kept up communication between Havana and Spain.”

The U.S. Navy contracted the privately owned passenger liner SS St. Louis to cut wartime undersea cables to Spain. Later during World War I, the Navy would requisition the ship outright as the SS St. Louis.

The U.S. military, however, was wholly unprepared to conduct oceanic cable operations at the outbreak of war. Col. James Allen, chief signal officer of the Army of Puerto Rico, noted in an official report at the time, “There was no cable ship under the American flag, and efforts to procure a suitable foreign ship were unavailing. The stock of available deep-sea cable in the United States was limited to small amounts held by different companies for repairs, and the cable factories were all working to their full capacity on orders already given by the War Department.”

The government turned to the private sector. James A. Scrymser, a telegraph baron with connections to several major companies, received a wire from a government official in Washington asking for a meeting the very next morning. “I found the high official very much excited,” Scrymser wrote in his 1915 memoir. “He told me that the Army was about to be dispatched from Florida to Santiago [Cuba] and that the President had no means of communicating with it when it reached there. He confided to me that the Government had thought of the possibility of using the British cable…. ‘In this emergency,’ said my distinguished visitor, ‘the Government has given me authority to purchase the British cable outright.’ I listened until he had fully outlined the Government’s plans and then was obliged to point out to him the fact that inasmuch as the cable in question was a British-owned cable, it would be a distinct violation of neutrality for the United States Government to make use of it, even should the Government buy every share of the British Cable Company…. My visitor saw the truth of this contention and, in desperation, asked me if I could not solve the problem.”

As it turned out, Scrymser could. He knew of a French cable running from New York to Santiago via Haiti. As an industry insider, Scrymser also knew that American policy required foreign cables landing in the United States to give reciprocal usage rights to American companies. Instead, the French Cable Company had exclusive rights to the West Indies and, as a result, had been brought to court by the Grover Cleveland administration. The French, however, had deftly covered themselves, setting up a dummy American company, the United States & Hayti Cable Company, incorporated in West Virginia, to which ownership of the cable had been passed. Thus, Scrymser recommended that the U.S. government seize the cable, which it did. The French ambassador protested this violation of neutrality, only to be shown an affidavit from the prior court case, testifying that the cable was owned by an American company. This still left a minor problem—the fact that Santiago, the southern end of this cable line, was in Spanish hands. However, the cable could be cut offshore of Santiago and brought ashore to wherever American troops landed, thereby putting them in touch with Haiti, New York, and Washington.

Businessman Helped Disrupt Cable to Philippines The same businessman who helped the U.S. military cut Spanish access to cables to Cuba also assisted on the Philippine front. Telegraph baron James A. Scrymser provided intelligence and operational support to isolate Spain from its Southeast Asian colony. Commodore George Dewey, famous for the Battle of Manila Bay, believed that he had cut the cables to the Philippine capital, but a short time later Scrymser’s Galveston manager reported that Spanish instructions for a privateer to raid American vessels had passed from Manila through Galveston to Valparaiso, Chile. The cable had not been cut after all. Scrymser, according to his memoirs, notified Washington and explained that Dewey had probably inadvertently picked up the small Manila-Cavite cable instead of the Manila-Hong Kong cable. It would now, however, take a week or more to reach Dewey, an unacceptably long time. The government asked Scrymser what could be done, and once again, the businessman had the answer. “I suggested that the simplest and surest way was to officially protest to Great Britain against this violation of neutrality on the part of Spain and this Washington did at once. Within 48 hours the seals of Her Britannic Majesty’s Government were placed on the Hong Kong end of the cable and the danger of Spanish communication with the world was stopped.”

Shortly after war broke out, the commercial passenger liner SS St. Louis was in Southampton, England. She was chartered for American naval service and was “specially outfitted with heavy drag lines in order to destroy undersea cable communications,” according to the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. In May 1898, she moved into action, cutting cables between San Juan, in Spanish Puerto Rico, and St. Thomas, in the Danish West Indies (the future U.S. Virgin Islands). The liner would go on to cut cables between Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica, often under enemy fire.

At the same time, Col. Allen chartered and equipped the privately owned SS Adria in New York, a job that would earn him the Distinguished Service Cross. Through the Western Union Company, Allen was put in communication with Scrymser, who placed all of the Mexican Telegraph Company’s machinery at the colonel’s disposal. This equipment was installed on the Adria under the direction of Mexican Telegraph officials. Cables themselves were acquired in Boston and New York.

Leading much of the work was Maturin Hellings, who had been a Mexican Telegraph Company engineer for many years. The Army gave Hellings, a civilian, the rank of lieutenant “in order that he might have authority over the soldiers and might not be interfered with,” according to Allen, who credited Hellings’ “experience and skill and untiring energy, under dangerous and difficult circumstances” for the success of the operation.

When the crew of cable hands that had originally been hired for the expedition got cold feet, Col. Allen acquired 10 volunteers from the First Artillery at Key West Barracks to replace them. This would be a major headache for Col. Allen, since these men lacked the technical expertise of the previous civilian crew: none of the 10 had seen a cable before and only one had ever been to sea. In spite of this setback, the Adria, like the St. Louis, would go on to cut a variety of cables, often under heavy fire and susceptible to attack by torpedo boats.

By June the American invasion of Cuba was imminent, and the U.S. military was now interested in establishing communications—its own—rather than destroying the enemy’s. Allen wrote in his report that he traveled to Haiti “to arrange with [the] French Cable Company for instruments to open an office at Guantanamo.” Over the next several days he went back and forth across the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti, eventually acquiring the right equipment. It took one week to repair the Guantanamo-Haiti cable, which the St. Louis had cut just a short time before. The line was reopened in time to carry a report to Washington about the arrival of General William Rufus Shafter’s army.

When U.S. forces landed at Ponce, Puerto Rico, they were followed shortly by Col. Allen, who reported, “The [enemy] cable was cut and instruments placed on both lines.” Once again, the military tapped the commercial sector to run the new American communications hub; Allen sailed to St. Thomas to arrange for the West India & Panama Corporation to open an office in Ponce. The deal was agreed, but only one operator could be spared from St. Thomas, so it was decided to find another in Santa Cruz, Mexico. Rather than sending any official government personnel, Henry B. Chamberlain of the Chicago Record volunteered to go to Santa Cruz on his personal yacht, dropping off the West India & Panama operator at Ponce on his way.

By August, the thoroughly defeated Spanish sued for peace. In December, the formal treaty was signed and Spain lost the last vestiges of her colonial empire.

Throughout the telegraphic cable operations, the private sector played a leading role. James Scrymser’s expert advice, the physical machinery provided by Western Union, the private ships (St. Louis and Adria) chartered by the Navy, the services rendered by West India & Panama telegraph operators, and the personal assistance provided by Henry Chamberlain of the Chicago Record all contributed to the successful communications strategy of the American forces. Though the Adria’s crew may have been squeamish about participating in the actual expedition to Cuba, not all civilians were. In his report, Col. Allen wrote that “Mr. E. H. Strickland, an expert operator of the Western Union Telegraph Company, is entitled to great praise for valuable services rendered at Key West and during the entire expedition.” Several journalists helped the Signal Corps in the war effort. Allen also praised Chamberlain and reporters from the Associated Press, New York Sun, and New York Herald, probably owing to their practical experience with cabling messages.

Why this high degree of public-private cooperation? First, America’s entire system of cable communications at the time of the war depended upon the private sector. In his Personal Reminiscences, Scrymser wrote, “The Mexican Telegraph Company and the Central & South American Telegraph Company, comprising altogether a system of nearly seventeen thousand miles and connecting Washington, telegraphically, with Mexico and all of the Central and South American Republics, have given to the Government, gratuitously, an all-American cable system, the value of which is inestimable. I say ‘gratuitously,’ for the United States Government has never contributed one cent to the establishment of this great system to the South of us.” Thus, both knowledge and equipment relating to international cable communications abounded in private hands and were placed at the disposal of the U.S. military.

Second, is the traditional American approach to war. Typically, the United States has engaged in a massive buildup at the beginning of a war and an extensive demobilization at its end. Though the Spanish-American War was much smaller and shorter than the American Civil War or World War I, the same basic model was followed. There is much to criticize about this approach, but there is much that recommends itself, not least of which is low peacetime costs. However, the result is that the U.S. military often needs a helping hand from the private sector when new conflicts arise, where specialists carry out operations for which the military is not trained or equipped.

Aaron Linderman is a historian pursuing a doctoral degree at Texas A&M University. He holds a Master’s Degree in Statecraft and National Security from the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C..

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From the May/June 2008 issue of Serviam.

The contract flyers of World War I

by J. Michael Waller
Serviam, March-April 2008

With war raging on the other side of the world, Charlie Meyers left his home in Brooklyn and headed for Canada. Not to avoid a military draft, but to go and fight. The United States had not yet entered World War I, and Meyers (pictured), a young flier during the dawn of military aviation, wanted to battle the enemy. So he offered his flying and mechanical skills to Canada, which was already deeply in combat as part of the British Empire, and was promptly assigned to the Royal Flying Corps in England.

“Charles W. Meyers was not a tall man. He was, in fact, rather short. One comes to realize this only in retrospect, because you would never notice it in his presence,” Joe Christy and Leroy Cook wrote in American Aviation: An Illustrated History (McGraw-Hill, 1994). “There was something about Charlie—an indefinable something that caused the world to stand aside while he passed. He was a man of courage and talent; he was a man of the sky."

Meyers had designed and flown his own gliders as a teenager and worked for a small aircraft manufacturer. In 1916, at age 20, with about 12 hours of flying time under his belt, he volunteered for the U.S. Army Signal Corps, which had a 40-plane fleet. The army didn’t need him. So Meyers went to Canada. His 12 hours in the air were more than almost anyone alive had at the time, and the Royal Flying Corps commissioned him as an officer after he flew another 105 minutes. Meyers spent the rest of the war in England as an instructor for British and American pilots.

Other Americans volunteered to help France. They were American pilots and crew who flew for foreign militaries in time of war, but few people ever called them “mercenaries.” Though far more served with the British, it is the American volunteers in France who have become better known in history.

American volunteer pilots served in the French Air Service from the beginning of World War I in 1914. In April 1916, two Americans, Edmund Gros and Norman Prince, persuaded Paris to recruit American volunteers into a single unit, the Escadrille Américaine.

Gros, a physician from Princeton, headed a nongovernmental organization (NGO) called the American Ambulance Service, which ferried wounded French soldiers and civilians from battlefields. As Jon Guttman wrote in SPA124 Lafayette Escadrille: American Volunteer Airmen in World War I (Osprey, 2004), Prince was from a wealthy industrialist family with an estate in France, and the young man developed a strong attachment to the country. He had already learned to fly and when the war broke out in 1914, Prince and a friend thought of setting up an all-volunteer American aviator force to fight for France. Early in 1915, he sailed across the Atlantic, brought his idea to a skeptical French War Department, and joined the Foreign Legion.

One of Prince’s aviator friends, Frazier Curtis, was wounded and ultimately discharged from the French Army.He introduced the American escadrille concept to Gros, who helped persuade the French military to accept the idea. Other American fliers had thought along similar lines. Part of the purpose of an American escadrille, Gros and Prince reasoned, was to generate publicity and inspire Americans to persuade President Woodrow Wilson and Congress to abandon neutrality and aid the French and other allies.

The name Escadrille Américaine, however, posed a problem for the United States, which was not in the war at the time. Germany had filed a diplomatic protest with Washington. So the flyers took the name of the French general who had been so valuable to the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, and they became famous as the Lafayette Escadrille.

Prince and others recruited young, new volunteers as well as a few seasoned American aviators already flying for France to join the Lafayette Escadrille. The commander, ground crew, Nieuport aircraft, and even some pilots were French. The Americans wore French military uniforms. Deployed in time for the Battle of Verdun, where they were both admired and criticized for a “cowboy” mentality, the small squadron’s core group of 38 pilots shot down 41 enemy planes during the war and lost nine of their own men.

A total of 265 Americans served in a larger Lafayette Flying Corps, which supported the Lafayette Escadrille and prepared the volunteers to join other French units. Overall, 63 volunteers in the Lafayette Flying Corps reportedly died during World War I.

In the big picture, the Lafayette Escadrille’s military contribution was modest. After the U.S. joined the war, the Lafayette Escadrille was placed under American command as the 103rd Pursuit Squadron of the U.S. Army Air Service, with its French Nieuports and crew transferring out to American aircraft and mechanics.

Credit for the Lafayette Escadrille’s fame in popular culture goes to veteran William A. Wellman of Brookline, Massachusetts. His father, he said, “didn’t have enough money for me to become a flier in the regular way, through private lessons.” So in 1915, at age 19, Wellman joined the French Foreign Legion to become an aviator.

Wounded in France, Wellman returned to Massachusetts, where he campaigned for citizens to enlist in the war effort and to support the American Red Cross. He wowed a group of freshly minted U.S. Navy aviators taking courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, prompting one, Ensign Roland W. Waller (a cousin of Charlie Meyers, serving in England), to lament in a letter to his sweetheart that the military couldn’t speed him more quickly to fight in France.

Wellman moved to California, and in early 1918 the U.S. Army Air Corps recruited him to train new pilots in combat air tactics. Wellman went on to become a successful movie director and producer, developing the military genre with such huge productions as “Wings” (Paramount, 1928), about World War I fighter pilots, and giving future superstar Gary Cooper one of his first movie roles. “Wings” was the first film to win an Oscar for Best Film.

Wellman’s last film, aptly titled “Lafayette Escadrille” (Warner Bros., 1958), was about his old unit. The movie featured a new actor who would go on to make many successful military pictures, Clint Eastwood. Nearly a half-century later, the movie “Flyboys” (Twentieth Century Fox, 2006) would take inspiration from Wellman.

The American volunteer pilots’ combat experience proved invaluable to the United States once Congress declared war in 1917. The United States had no seasoned combat pilots as it went into World War I. David Putnam of Massachusetts, a descendant of Revolutionary War General Israel Putnam, had joined the French Air Service at age 18 and was already an ace by the time he flew for Uncle Sam. Flying with the U.S. 139th Aero Squadron in September 1918, Putnam met his end at the hands of German ace Georg von Hantelmann.

Meyers, who had been working as a mechanic for the British Royal Flying Corps, transferred to the U.S. military in 1917 as a seasoned technician to keep American warplanes flying.

_______
From the March/April 2008 issue of Serviam. J. Michael Waller wrote under the pen name Ann Jocelyn in the original version of this article.

by J. Michael Waller
Serviam, March-April 2008

With war raging on the other side of the world, Charlie Meyers left his home in Brooklyn and headed for Canada. Not to avoid a military draft, but to go and fight. The United States had not yet entered World War I, and Meyers (pictured), a young flier during the dawn of military aviation, wanted to battle the enemy. So he offered his flying and mechanical skills to Canada, which was already deeply in combat as part of the British Empire, and was promptly assigned to the Royal Flying Corps in England.

“Charles W. Meyers was not a tall man. He was, in fact, rather short. One comes to realize this only in retrospect, because you would never notice it in his presence,” Joe Christy and Leroy Cook wrote in American Aviation: An Illustrated History (McGraw-Hill, 1994). “There was something about Charlie—an indefinable something that caused the world to stand aside while he passed. He was a man of courage and talent; he was a man of the sky."

Meyers had designed and flown his own gliders as a teenager and worked for a small aircraft manufacturer. In 1916, at age 20, with about 12 hours of flying time under his belt, he volunteered for the U.S. Army Signal Corps, which had a 40-plane fleet. The army didn’t need him. So Meyers went to Canada. His 12 hours in the air were more than almost anyone alive had at the time, and the Royal Flying Corps commissioned him as an officer after he flew another 105 minutes. Meyers spent the rest of the war in England as an instructor for British and American pilots.

Other Americans volunteered to help France. They were American pilots and crew who flew for foreign militaries in time of war, but few people ever called them “mercenaries.” Though far more served with the British, it is the American volunteers in France who have become better known in history.

American volunteer pilots served in the French Air Service from the beginning of World War I in 1914. In April 1916, two Americans, Edmund Gros and Norman Prince, persuaded Paris to recruit American volunteers into a single unit, the Escadrille Américaine.

Gros, a physician from Princeton, headed a nongovernmental organization (NGO) called the American Ambulance Service, which ferried wounded French soldiers and civilians from battlefields. As Jon Guttman wrote in SPA124 Lafayette Escadrille: American Volunteer Airmen in World War I (Osprey, 2004), Prince was from a wealthy industrialist family with an estate in France, and the young man developed a strong attachment to the country. He had already learned to fly and when the war broke out in 1914, Prince and a friend thought of setting up an all-volunteer American aviator force to fight for France. Early in 1915, he sailed across the Atlantic, brought his idea to a skeptical French War Department, and joined the Foreign Legion.

One of Prince’s aviator friends, Frazier Curtis, was wounded and ultimately discharged from the French Army.He introduced the American escadrille concept to Gros, who helped persuade the French military to accept the idea. Other American fliers had thought along similar lines. Part of the purpose of an American escadrille, Gros and Prince reasoned, was to generate publicity and inspire Americans to persuade President Woodrow Wilson and Congress to abandon neutrality and aid the French and other allies.

The name Escadrille Américaine, however, posed a problem for the United States, which was not in the war at the time. Germany had filed a diplomatic protest with Washington. So the flyers took the name of the French general who had been so valuable to the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, and they became famous as the Lafayette Escadrille.

Prince and others recruited young, new volunteers as well as a few seasoned American aviators already flying for France to join the Lafayette Escadrille. The commander, ground crew, Nieuport aircraft, and even some pilots were French. The Americans wore French military uniforms. Deployed in time for the Battle of Verdun, where they were both admired and criticized for a “cowboy” mentality, the small squadron’s core group of 38 pilots shot down 41 enemy planes during the war and lost nine of their own men.

A total of 265 Americans served in a larger Lafayette Flying Corps, which supported the Lafayette Escadrille and prepared the volunteers to join other French units. Overall, 63 volunteers in the Lafayette Flying Corps reportedly died during World War I.

In the big picture, the Lafayette Escadrille’s military contribution was modest. After the U.S. joined the war, the Lafayette Escadrille was placed under American command as the 103rd Pursuit Squadron of the U.S. Army Air Service, with its French Nieuports and crew transferring out to American aircraft and mechanics.

Credit for the Lafayette Escadrille’s fame in popular culture goes to veteran William A. Wellman of Brookline, Massachusetts. His father, he said, “didn’t have enough money for me to become a flier in the regular way, through private lessons.” So in 1915, at age 19, Wellman joined the French Foreign Legion to become an aviator.

Wounded in France, Wellman returned to Massachusetts, where he campaigned for citizens to enlist in the war effort and to support the American Red Cross. He wowed a group of freshly minted U.S. Navy aviators taking courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, prompting one, Ensign Roland W. Waller (a cousin of Charlie Meyers, serving in England), to lament in a letter to his sweetheart that the military couldn’t speed him more quickly to fight in France.

Wellman moved to California, and in early 1918 the U.S. Army Air Corps recruited him to train new pilots in combat air tactics. Wellman went on to become a successful movie director and producer, developing the military genre with such huge productions as “Wings” (Paramount, 1928), about World War I fighter pilots, and giving future superstar Gary Cooper one of his first movie roles. “Wings” was the first film to win an Oscar for Best Film.

Wellman’s last film, aptly titled “Lafayette Escadrille” (Warner Bros., 1958), was about his old unit. The movie featured a new actor who would go on to make many successful military pictures, Clint Eastwood. Nearly a half-century later, the movie “Flyboys” (Twentieth Century Fox, 2006) would take inspiration from Wellman.

The American volunteer pilots’ combat experience proved invaluable to the United States once Congress declared war in 1917. The United States had no seasoned combat pilots as it went into World War I. David Putnam of Massachusetts, a descendant of Revolutionary War General Israel Putnam, had joined the French Air Service at age 18 and was already an ace by the time he flew for Uncle Sam. Flying with the U.S. 139th Aero Squadron in September 1918, Putnam met his end at the hands of German ace Georg von Hantelmann.

Meyers, who had been working as a mechanic for the British Royal Flying Corps, transferred to the U.S. military in 1917 as a seasoned technician to keep American warplanes flying.

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From the March/April 2008 issue of Serviam. J. Michael Waller wrote under the pen name Ann Jocelyn in the original version of this article.

Private ships of war and the American maritime tradition

by J. Michael Waller
Serviam, January-February 2008

Privately owned warships are so deeply at the heart of American maritime tradition that a reference to them is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. With their own contract crews who rushed to the fight for independence during the American Revolution and in defense of the nation during the War of 1812, the private warships successfully waged naval guerrilla warfare against the world’s most powerful fleet. Private warships also fought the Barbary pirates in the nation’s first foreign war.

The privateers of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 were much different from the private military contractors (PMCs) and private security contractors of today. They operated as independent businesses, chartered by Congress and bonded to ensure observance of the law, but, unlike PMCs, they were free of the military chain of command. They served the national interest not as government contractors, but made their profits by attacking enemy shipping—especially commercial shipping, on which the enemy’s economy depended. Those on the receiving end viewed privateers as glorified pirates. But the U.S. government viewed them as legitimate weapons against the commercial engine that fueled the enemy’s armed forces. Several European powers also used privateers at sea.

By necessity, American naval warfare at the time was asymmetrical against the overwhelmingly superior Royal Navy. From the very beginning, the leaders of what would become the United States of America turned to the private sector to do cost-effectively and efficiently what the government could not do at all. Before independence, in April 1776, the Continental Congress voted to issue commissions for “private ships of war” to attack the British. Borrowing from established French and British practices, the Continental Congress authorized the issuance of “letters of marque and reprisal” for the owners and captains of private warships to attack enemy vessels. In one of the Founding Fathers’ earliest regulations of private business, the Continental Congress legislated how the private naval forces and their commanders and crew would conduct themselves, and required privateer owners to post bond to guarantee compliance.

The “letters of marque and reprisal” language appears in Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 11 of the Constitution.

The 13 colonies had only 31 ships among them for the Continental Navy in 1776. According to a history written by a Merchant Marine veteran, the Continental Navy had 64 ships during the Revolution. The privateers numbered 1,697. Total guns on the Continental Navy vessels: 1,242. Total guns on the privateers: 14,872. The Continental Navy captured 196 enemy ships, while the privateers captured 2,283.

During the war, George Washington, who paid close attention to his business affairs while serving as general, invested in at least one privateer. On November 14, 1777, he wrote his stepson, John Parke Custis, concerning the sale of one of the vessels: “It is perfectly agreeable, too, that Colonel Baylor should share part of the privateer. I have spoken to him on the subject. I shall therefore consider myself as possessing one fourth of your full share, and that yourself, Baylor, Lund Washington, and I are equally concerned in the share you at first held.” Baylor was Washington’s former aide de camp and an escort of Martha Washington; Lund Washington was the general’s cousin and business manager.

Private warships remained a vital component of early American seapower into the early 1800s. They served the United States in the nation’s first foreign war, from 1801 to 1805, against the Muslim Barbary pirates of the Mediterranean who plundered U.S. merchant ships and sold American crewmen and families into slavery. Though the new frigates like the USS Constitution are best remembered for fighting the Barbary wars, the privateers were also decisive.

Privateers attacked the lifeblood of the enemy’s economy while the Navy’s frigates fought the Royal Navy. North Wind Picture Archives

“With the implementation of the Jeffersonian gunboat diplomacy, an historic American fear of a standing military force and its attendant officer class, a dislike of taxation combined with a dependence on militia, any hope for a moderately strong navy on the eve of the War of 1812 was highly unrealistic,” writes privateer scholar Jerome R. Garitee in his 1977 book, The Republic’s Private Navy. “The government’s only realistic alternative to the path it actually followed would have been to adopt the concept of a naval commerce raiding force sooner than it did.”

The United States declared war on Britain in 1812 after the Royal Navy had kidnapped thousands of American sailors and impressed them into military service for the crown during its war with France, and attacked neutral American commercial shipping to choke off U.S. trade with Britain’s enemy. Britain had also provided military support for Indian tribes in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. Wealthy states like Massachusetts, however, withheld funds from the national government out of opposition to the war.

By 1813, despite the magnificent victories of the USS Constitution and other frigates, the American Navy was mostly flattened. Privateers were no match for Britain’s powerful ships of the line, but by focusing on attacking British merchant vessels, they still fought with great effect. First, the privateers forced the Royal Navy to protect its vital trading interests and divert its fleet away from attacking the U.S. Navy and American port cities. Second, the privateers wreaked financial ruin on British merchants and industrialists who had supported the war against the United States in the first place.

This type of economic warfare placed immense pressure on the British government to end the war once it was clear by 1813 that the price for victory would be too high. Soon, British businessmen were losing an average of more than one ship a day to the privateers. Shippers, merchants, and insurers bore the cost of their government’s war—a cost that deepened after the privateers took the war to British shores and even targeted vessels in the English Channel, according to Garitee.

“The success of American privateers in the Irish Sea had made shipping rates three times higher than they were during the war with Napoleon,” historian Robert Leckie writes in The Wars of America. Garitee says, “Whether they would have done more damage to Britain than one frigate is debatable, but the Baltimore schooners were still operable at war’s end and the Navy’s frigates were not.”

Henry Adams, great-grandson and grandson of the two Adams presidents, noted, “American privateer vessels, the nation’s greatest success in 1814, contributed more than the regular navy to bring about a disposition of peace in the British classes most responsible for the war.”

Historian Bradford Perkins observed that private armed warships “strengthened [President James] Madison’s hand as his armies and navies could not.” The great naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, though no fan of privateers, admitted that private warships in the War of 1812 “cooperated powerfully with other motives to dispose the enemy to liberal terms of peace.”

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J. Michael Waller wrote under the pen name Ann Jocelyn in the original version of this articleFrom the January/February 2008 issue of Serviam.

Clara Barton and the American Red Cross: A private volunteer serves with the US Army

by J Michael Waller
Serviam, November-December 2007

First Sergeant Roland Williston lay on a gurney in the 100-degree Virginia heat, with gangrene consuming the amputated stumps of his shattered left hand and leg. The 26-year-old barber from Holyoke, Mass., had been among the first volunteers to answer President Abraham Lincoln’s call to save the Union. Now, in the sweltering humidity of a sick bay swarming with flies, he knew he would never see home again.

Williston’s unit, the Second Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, was the last federal force left standing on that terrible day of August 9, 1862, when ill-prepared Union troops engaged a superior Confederate force at Cedar Mountain near Culpeper, Va. The only Civil War engagement in which Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson would draw his sword, the battle was in part the product of the Union army’s own poor planning.

The battle also marked the start of something new—something that would bring relief to the sick and wounded and hope to the hopeless millions of times over. It marked the first time that Clara Barton, who would found the American Red Cross, ministered to soldiers in the field, becoming a harbinger of today’s global stability industry.

Barton was a true pioneer in getting more efficient, private-sector support to the military, as she was in advancing the cause of women’s rights. A 40-year-old U.S. Patent Office clerk in Washington, D.C., when the war began in 1861, she was horrified at the plight of the wounded young men flooding the nation’s capital from the battlefields. The Army Medical Department, she noted, was terribly unprepared to treat casualties.

Inspired by her father, who urged her to devote her life to patriotic and charitable causes, Clara Barton lobbied the army for months to allow her to go directly to the front with her own medical supplies. The army wouldn’t hear of it. Finally, in April 1862, after the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas), Gen. William Hammond issued her a pass to travel with wounded soldiers in army ambulances.

But she was still not allowed in the combat areas. In those times, few single women of good repute traveled with the rough and lonely soldiers. Military camps were no place for ladies. Barton and her volunteers, though, were undaunted. By summer, thanks to the intervention of Senator Henry Wilson of her home state of Massachusetts, the army relented.

Sgt. Roland Williston: Clara Barton was there as he lay dying of his wounds.

Barton, her volunteers, and their small mule train of supplies reached Culpeper, Va., four days after the Battle of Cedar Mountain. With army surgeons and medics grotesquely overworked and lacking many of the most basic supplies, the Barton group spent two days and two nights tending to wounded and dying Union soldiers, stopping later to tend to Confederates as well. When they could do nothing to heal the wounded or lessen their pain in the stinking heat, they comforted them as best they could, washing them, listening and talking with them, and singing or praying as they closed their eyes to fall asleep or die.

The military was already experiencing technological advances, from using the telegraph and railroads for rapid communication and logistics to employing new classes of rifles, artillery, and other industrialized products on the battlefield. Barton was another aspect of that change: Her nongovernmental organization outside the military chain of command would now play an important role in warfare and its aftereffects. She would revolutionize how the U.S. military took care of its wounded, its veterans, and its dead.

Barton and her volunteers were present at Second Manassas, the carnage at Antietam, and Fredericksburg. At Antietam, a bullet ripped through her sleeve, killing the man she was assisting. By 1863, the Army Medical Department was better equipped to meet the needs of the military, and Barton’s efforts were tiny in comparison. She remained on the fronts. In 1865, Barton started a nationwide campaign to identify missing soldiers, helping with the identification of 13,000 Union unknowns buried at the Andersonville, Ga., prison camp.

An innovation that began as an unwanted intrusion on the military is now a national institution.

She went to Europe on doctors’ orders, only to be convalescing at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Back in action, Barton assisted with the French relief effort, where she discovered the volunteers of the Red Cross, a charitable group that had been founded in Switzerland while she was working in the battlefields of the American South.

Returning to the United States, she started organizing the American chapter of the Red Cross in 1873. Congress recognized the American Red Cross in 1881 as a private aid provider in time of disaster. Industrialist John D. Rockefeller provided the resources to buy a parcel of land one block from the White House and build a magnificent marble headquarters building.

In 1905, Congress chartered the American Red Cross to “carry on a system of national and international relief in time of peace and apply the same in mitigating the sufferings caused by pestilence, famine, fire, floods, and other great national calamities, and to devise and carry out measures for preventing the same.” In World War I, the surgeon general enlisted the American Red Cross to set up 58 base hospitals in Europe. The American Red Cross recruited more than 104,000 registered nurses to serve in military hospitals. The group served similarly in the Korean War, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War, Somalia, the Balkans, and the Middle East, and continues to assist today in Afghanistan and Iraq.

At home, the American Red Cross responds to more than 70,000 disasters a year, from house fires to hazardous waste spills, from tornadoes to earthquakes. It provides 3,000 American hospitals with blood and blood products and assists 1.4 million active duty military families and 1.2 million members of the National Guard and Reserves. An innovation that began as an unwanted intrusion on the military is now a national institution.

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From the November/December 2007 issue of Serviam.

by J Michael Waller
Serviam, November-December 2007

First Sergeant Roland Williston lay on a gurney in the 100-degree Virginia heat, with gangrene consuming the amputated stumps of his shattered left hand and leg. The 26-year-old barber from Holyoke, Mass., had been among the first volunteers to answer President Abraham Lincoln’s call to save the Union. Now, in the sweltering humidity of a sick bay swarming with flies, he knew he would never see home again.

Williston’s unit, the Second Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, was the last federal force left standing on that terrible day of August 9, 1862, when ill-prepared Union troops engaged a superior Confederate force at Cedar Mountain near Culpeper, Va. The only Civil War engagement in which Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson would draw his sword, the battle was in part the product of the Union army’s own poor planning.

The battle also marked the start of something new—something that would bring relief to the sick and wounded and hope to the hopeless millions of times over. It marked the first time that Clara Barton, who would found the American Red Cross, ministered to soldiers in the field, becoming a harbinger of today’s global stability industry.

Barton was a true pioneer in getting more efficient, private-sector support to the military, as she was in advancing the cause of women’s rights. A 40-year-old U.S. Patent Office clerk in Washington, D.C., when the war began in 1861, she was horrified at the plight of the wounded young men flooding the nation’s capital from the battlefields. The Army Medical Department, she noted, was terribly unprepared to treat casualties.

Inspired by her father, who urged her to devote her life to patriotic and charitable causes, Clara Barton lobbied the army for months to allow her to go directly to the front with her own medical supplies. The army wouldn’t hear of it. Finally, in April 1862, after the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas), Gen. William Hammond issued her a pass to travel with wounded soldiers in army ambulances.

But she was still not allowed in the combat areas. In those times, few single women of good repute traveled with the rough and lonely soldiers. Military camps were no place for ladies. Barton and her volunteers, though, were undaunted. By summer, thanks to the intervention of Senator Henry Wilson of her home state of Massachusetts, the army relented.

Sgt. Roland Williston: Clara Barton was there as he lay dying of his wounds.

Barton, her volunteers, and their small mule train of supplies reached Culpeper, Va., four days after the Battle of Cedar Mountain. With army surgeons and medics grotesquely overworked and lacking many of the most basic supplies, the Barton group spent two days and two nights tending to wounded and dying Union soldiers, stopping later to tend to Confederates as well. When they could do nothing to heal the wounded or lessen their pain in the stinking heat, they comforted them as best they could, washing them, listening and talking with them, and singing or praying as they closed their eyes to fall asleep or die.

The military was already experiencing technological advances, from using the telegraph and railroads for rapid communication and logistics to employing new classes of rifles, artillery, and other industrialized products on the battlefield. Barton was another aspect of that change: Her nongovernmental organization outside the military chain of command would now play an important role in warfare and its aftereffects. She would revolutionize how the U.S. military took care of its wounded, its veterans, and its dead.

Barton and her volunteers were present at Second Manassas, the carnage at Antietam, and Fredericksburg. At Antietam, a bullet ripped through her sleeve, killing the man she was assisting. By 1863, the Army Medical Department was better equipped to meet the needs of the military, and Barton’s efforts were tiny in comparison. She remained on the fronts. In 1865, Barton started a nationwide campaign to identify missing soldiers, helping with the identification of 13,000 Union unknowns buried at the Andersonville, Ga., prison camp.

An innovation that began as an unwanted intrusion on the military is now a national institution.

She went to Europe on doctors’ orders, only to be convalescing at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Back in action, Barton assisted with the French relief effort, where she discovered the volunteers of the Red Cross, a charitable group that had been founded in Switzerland while she was working in the battlefields of the American South.

Returning to the United States, she started organizing the American chapter of the Red Cross in 1873. Congress recognized the American Red Cross in 1881 as a private aid provider in time of disaster. Industrialist John D. Rockefeller provided the resources to buy a parcel of land one block from the White House and build a magnificent marble headquarters building.

In 1905, Congress chartered the American Red Cross to “carry on a system of national and international relief in time of peace and apply the same in mitigating the sufferings caused by pestilence, famine, fire, floods, and other great national calamities, and to devise and carry out measures for preventing the same.” In World War I, the surgeon general enlisted the American Red Cross to set up 58 base hospitals in Europe. The American Red Cross recruited more than 104,000 registered nurses to serve in military hospitals. The group served similarly in the Korean War, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War, Somalia, the Balkans, and the Middle East, and continues to assist today in Afghanistan and Iraq.

At home, the American Red Cross responds to more than 70,000 disasters a year, from house fires to hazardous waste spills, from tornadoes to earthquakes. It provides 3,000 American hospitals with blood and blood products and assists 1.4 million active duty military families and 1.2 million members of the National Guard and Reserves. An innovation that began as an unwanted intrusion on the military is now a national institution.

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From the November/December 2007 issue of Serviam.