The Admiral and the Ambassador (42 page)

The academy had been established in 1845 at Fort Severn in Maryland, on a small rise overlooking the confluence of the Severn River and Chesapeake Bay. As time passed, the land around the fort had been expanded through levies and fill. Wooden buildings were added as needed, though little thought was given to the design of the grounds or the buildings, let alone maintenance and upgrades. A special naval Board of Visitors commission, chaired by academy graduate and Manhattan industrialist Robert M. Thompson, investigated conditions at the academy and issued a report in 1895 faulting the complex as unsafe and unsanitary. The Thompson report was followed by an internal investigation by five naval officers that reached the same conclusion. The reports spurred the navy to draw up plans for a modern facility, but the deterioration outpaced the planning. In November 1897, one of the campus's main buildings, a recitation hall used by some 250 cadets a day, was found to be so compromised that it was deemed too dangerous to enter. Engineers, in fact, feared it could collapse at any moment and damage nearby buildings as well. Under emergency orders, workers razed the hall, and Congress was asked for $5,000 to replace it. That was just the first of a series of discoveries of compromised buildings at the academy. The walls of several, in fact, were held in place from the outside by wooden beams jammed at an angle into the ground.

McKinley's assistant secretary of the navy at the time was Roosevelt, who reported to navy secretary John Long that the US Naval Academy was both an embarrassment to the navy and a threat to its cadets. Roosevelt noted that George Bancroft had founded the academy in 1845 with no map in mind and that “it has grown little by little in an almost haphazard way … so that the only note of harmony among them is their condition of utter decay and of unsuitableness for the purpose for which they are used.” The secretary forwarded Roosevelt's report to Congress after adding his own voice:

If they were merely unsuitable; if it were merely desirable that they be replaced by others built in accordance with a general scheme to turn the Annapolis Academy into what it should be as a training school for the nation's naval officers, it might be advisable to wait before seeking to reconstruct them. But it is not possible to wait, because the buildings are not merely unsuitable, but are for the most part in the last stages of decay.
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Long asked Congress to do something bold. Rather than embark on a regimen of emergency repairs to buildings that weren't worth saving, he suggested they completely rebuild the academy. He recommended a massive project be undertaken—requiring maybe a decade or more of work—to create a campus “made primarily for use and not show, and yet one in which the nation can take the heartiest pride because it will in every way be a fit training school for a naval service as ours.” The most pressing needs were for “an armory, a boathouse, and a power house,” but also new officer quarters because the existing ones would be razed to make way for the new armory. And Long asked that the bay be dredged and a new seawall built to accommodate a training ship and torpedo boat. Other buildings needed replacing, as well, including dilapidated dormitories with a kitchen and bathrooms in the basement and upper-level floors of small rooms holding three cadets each. The first phase would cost about $1 million, Long estimated. The whole project would cost some $6 million (later increased to $10 million, or about $225 million in today's dollars).

Puffed up by Dewey's victory over the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay just a month earlier, Congress agreed in June 1898 to the first phase, which architect Ernest Flagg had begun designing two years earlier, after the Thompson commission assessed the dire state of the buildings and grounds.

Flagg was one of the era's most celebrated—and controversial—designers of Beaux Arts—style buildings. His portfolio included the Scribner Building and St. Luke's Hospital in Manhattan and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, among others. Yet most of his commissions were won through the favors and influences of friends—he was a cousin to the Vanderbilt fortune. Flagg was brought into the academy project by Thompson, the kind of connection that made Flagg the subject of professional envy among East Coast architects. His abrasive personality did little to help his
reputation. Neither did revelations that his older brother, who had been his business associate in controversial speculative building deals in Manhattan, was running a whorehouse, a sideline that cost the brother a month in New York's notorious Tombs jail. That Flagg had already drawn up a redesign for the academy by the time the navy was prepared to make a decision spawned another round of criticisms about favoritism, just when the federal government was moving to a system of competitive bidding for government contracts.
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Flagg later wrote that he was surprised by how indiscriminately the existing academy grounds had been laid out, roughly on a quadrilateral facing the river, and with no consideration given to the flow of people around the campus. Cadet housing was far from the marching field and the armory, for instance, necessitating long walks to change for drills. He drew up plans that sought to make more efficient use of the space, while preserving a couple of key aspects: The integration of village streets, through gates, into the academy, and a parade ground, like a village square, serving as a commons near the riverbank. The main entrance to the grounds, Maryland Street, crested the highest elevation, some thirty feet above sea level. “Here seemed the best place for the chapel, which from its height would be the dominating feature of the design,” Flagg wrote. And it would face the commons to the northeast, with a marine basin and the Severn River in the distance, the entrance marked by twin lighthouses. (The basin eventually became sports fields.)
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Flagg, for reasons he didn't detail publicly, had John Paul Jones's body in mind when he designed the chapel. “I have always been a great admirer of John Paul Jones, and when I made the first rough sketch for the rebuilding of the academy in 1896, I had in mind that the Chapel should be his burial place, if his remains could be found,” Flagg wrote in a 1908 magazine article. He met with Long, the navy secretary, in 1900, and told him that he had included space for a crypt in the basement of the chapel and suggested “that a search be made in Paris for the body.” Flagg didn't mention Porter's 1899 announcement that he believed he had found the cemetery. And Flagg didn't claim to have instigated the search. Yet Flagg's prescience was uncanny given that in 1896, when Flagg drew up his initial plans, the commodore was, for most Americans, little more than a forgotten hero of the past.

Work on the chapel began on June 3, 1904, with the ceremonial laying of the cornerstone by Admiral Dewey. A time capsule was embedded containing signed photos of President Roosevelt and other dignitaries of the day, including Flagg and Dewey.
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Work then progressed very slowly. And since Jones's body wasn't recovered until April 1905, there were no approved plans for finishing the crypt in the basement. Navy officials had hoped the chapel would be finished and Jones's body placed in the crypt in October 1905. But even before the body arrived, there was talk of delaying the interment until the following spring in hopes the building would be completed then. By the time Jones's body arrived in July 1905, the building was only partly built, and a design for the main doors wouldn't be selected until May 1906. More delays ensued. And more.

Flagg began lobbying for the contract to complete the design of the crypt. He had an ambitious vision of a national shrine for naval heroes, with Jones's sarcophagus in the middle of the circular room and niches for the remains of other heroes built into the walls, all beneath a crystal dome diffusing electric light into the room. A few days after Porter announced in Paris that he had found the body and before Roosevelt had decided where it would be interred, Flagg lobbied for his plan in a letter to Captain Willard H. Brownson, who was just finishing a stint as the academy's superintendent:

I know that you agree with me that the crypt of the new Chapel of the Academy should be [Jones's] final resting place. What more appropriate than that the ashes of the founder of the American Navy should repose in the midst of the institution, which is the cradle, so to speak, of the navy. If the crypt is made a place of sepulture by depositing these remains there, then the Chapel will become what it ought to be, and what I have always hoped it would be, the Pantheon or West Minster of the Navy…. Representing the academy as you do it seems as if you are the proper one to call attention to the fact that the Crypt of the Chapel was arranged with this very contingency in view from the start; that here is already at hand a most suitable burial place for this great hero. I fear that unless some one speaks at once, Arlington may be selected as there has already been talk of that.
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Plans for the crypt had not advanced since then, and the chapel itself would not be completed in time (it would finally open in May 1908). Amid the uncertainty, Porter, navy officials, and Roosevelt began discussing alternatives. On July 20 Roosevelt wrote to Charles J. Bonaparte, his new navy secretary, that he wanted the public celebration to be held on September 23, the anniversary of Jones's victory over the
Serapis
—a date for which Porter had been heavily lobbying. Bonaparte asked his subordinates for a report on whether that would be feasible; he was told that the crypt—which had not yet been designed, or even approved by Congress—would not be completed in time. That raised the question of whether they should hold the ceremony in the fall and then schedule another ceremony for when the crypt was done.

Porter, after his luncheon with Roosevelt at Sagamore Hill, had joined up with his friend and fellow Son of the American Revolution, Frederick W. Vanderbilt, for an Eastern Seaboard cruise aboard Vanderbilt's yacht
Warrior,
a 239-foot white-and-green-hulled steamship that held Vanderbilt's luxurious quarters (including a piano), and six other guest suites. Porter wrote Bonaparte from the “floating palace”
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on July 25 that the president had settled on the September ceremony. “The disagreeably hot weather is generally over by that date and the weather favorable for an outdoor large gathering.” Porter also noted that Roosevelt had unspecified plans for October that would preclude him from attending a ceremony then. Porter said Roosevelt wanted him, Bonaparte, and Maryland governor Edwin Warfield to oversee the planning, which would be carried out by Rear Admiral James H. Sands, the new academy superintendent. Excitement was already building. “The patriotic societies, with all of which I happen to be connected, are already beginning to organize delegations to participate in or be present at the ceremony. They will represent more than half the states, I should think.”
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Two weeks later, Porter was staying with his friend Morris K. Jesup at the financier's Stonecliffe summer house in Bar Harbor, Maine. He wrote Bonaparte again, telling the navy secretary that Roosevelt was insisting “the celebration be held this fall. Would there be any objection to holding it a week after the anniversary of the Naval Battle [September 23] if the midshipmen are off their annual leave? I hate to break up their annual leave, and yet I would like to have them there when we hold the celebration.”

Roosevelt was also writing to Bonaparte, part of a regular correspondence about naval affairs. The president took an unusual interest in the Jones ceremony planning, involving himself in a surprising level of minutiae, including ensuring that the academy's midshipmen would be on hand for the ceremony. “But do write to General Porter first to find what he thinks,” Roosevelt wrote.
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The president saw the event as a chance to enhance the academy's image to the nation. “I would like to turn this celebration into something of actual benefit to the navy.” In another letter to Bonaparte, Roosevelt indicated that Sands was somewhat resistant to the idea of calling the midshipmen back early from their leave. “I leave it to your judgment, though I should suggest your consulting Porter, as to whether we can defer the celebration two weeks to have the midshipmen back, or whether we should get them back and then add on just so much to their leave, which can be done perfectly by Admiral Sands if he is ordered to do it,” Roosevelt wrote on August 3. “He will grumble, but he will do it and not the slightest damage will follow.”

Two days later, Roosevelt wrote that September was out and the ceremony would be held in the spring. The determining factor was arranging to have French warships take part in the celebration, a diplomatic project that would take more than six weeks to pull off. Roosevelt asked Bonaparte to tell Porter, but then sent off a letter himself to the former ambassador.

Porter deferred to his president and to Bonaparte. “You have many means of judging of all the circumstances of the government's participation which I have not, and I acquiesce fully in the views you express for the reasons given.” Porter then offered a suggestion that would prove to be the final date: April 24, 1906. If they could not time the ceremony to mark the anniversary of Jones's most-famous sea victory, then they could tie it to “the anniversary of Paul Jones' next greatest victory, the capture of the Drake.”
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Roosevelt's affinity for the navy extended to the midshipmen of Annapolis. He impressed upon Bonaparte that he wanted as many of the student officers to witness the ceremonies as possible, along with active seamen in port. “I very earnestly hope that you will make some provision by which my speech in the occasion of the Paul Jones ceremonies shall be listened to by some of the enlisted men from the ships. I feel very strongly, as I know you do, that in every ceremony of this kind we should include a good proportion
of the enlisted men and make them understand that they are just as much a part of the business as the officers.”
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