The Admiral and the Ambassador (45 page)

The sweep of skepticism, from the jokes in Paris to Benjamin's piece to the Houdon biography, is worth considering. But it dissolves under close scrutiny. That the average citizen of Paris didn't believe an alcohol-pickled corpse could be so well preserved after a century underground does not mean that it could not be so. The Paris medical experts who examined the body and conducted the autopsy had exemplary credentials, and no whispers are found about their integrity as men of science. While the corpse wasn't photographed in the moments after the coffin was opened, when it was at its best preserved, the autopsy reports are quite detailed, and some of the methods Porter and the doctors used to identify the corpse—including matching photographs of the corpse against the busts—were path-breaking techniques in forensics. Later examinations of the reports raised no fresh questions, and academics revisiting the evidence as recently as 2004 came to the same conclusion: the body was Jones's.
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Part of the problem for skeptics has been that much of the evidence was circumstantial. Jones had never had any reported injuries, and the corpse bore no scars. His height, set at five feet seven, came from a source—a biography by A. C. Buell—that was later found to have been heavily fabricated. In life, Jones was described as being diminutive, and biographer Samuel Eliot Morison, in his Pulitzer Prize—winning
John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography,
estimated he was only five feet five. A 2004 review by forensic experts found, after an exhaustive review of the evidence and the questions of the identity, that estimates of Jones's height and that of the corpse were consistent. Benjamin's point about the accuracy of the Houdon bust was also dismissible, since “Houdon described himself firstly as an anatomist and secondly as an artist.”
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Houdon took great pride in delivering precisely accurate sculptures of his subjects, and Jones was so taken with his that he had at least eight copies made and sent to friends. Jones's contemporaries, including Thomas Jefferson, described the bust as a perfect likeness. And while there were quibbles about the measurements of the face compared with the bust—deteriorated flesh versus stone depicting the full-fleshed head—those too were dismissed, since the measurements recorded at the time of the autopsy were based on bone structure. And no one has
questioned a subtle but crucial match: the unusual shape of Jones's earlobe, which those present at the exhumation said was visible on the corpse and matched a malformation depicted on the Houdon sculpture. Unfortunately, photos of the corpse did not show the earlobe.

While individual bits of evidence cited to identify the body as that of Jones might be challenged, all of the evidence taken together is convincing. The coffin was found where the historical record suggested it would be; the autopsy remains unindicted; the identified manner of death was consistent with Jones's reported final ailments; the physical resemblance between corpse and bust were persuasive to those who viewed them. There is no reason, more than a century later, for significant doubt. To tweak an old joke about one of Porter's other projects: if asked who is buried in John Paul Jones's tomb, the answer surely is John Paul Jones.
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When acting navy secretary Charles H. Darling sent his order in July 1905 to the Naval Academy that it “maintain, night and day, a guard over the remains until the final interment takes place,” he doubtless didn't envision the guard would be on duty for seven years.
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But Congress would not be moved. The original budget for the chapel called for leaving the crypt as a roughed-out space of “exposed concrete and brick work” for future completion. And that future was coming quickly, Bonaparte wrote to Congress two days after the April 1906 Annapolis ceremony. The crypt needed to be finished—and soon. He asked for $135,000 to cover the design costs—Flagg, at the navy's request, had already done preliminary designs—and construction. Bonaparte pointed out that Porter had spent $35,000 of his own money to find and identify Jones's body, and he relayed the news that the former ambassador had rejected plans to reimburse him with the suggestion that Congress spend the money on the crypt instead. Naval officials had initially thought $100,000 would be enough to do the job but were revising their estimates upward, and even with Porter's act of generosity, “this sum, it is believed, is barely sufficient to complete the work in a simple but suitable and substantial manner,” Bonaparte told Congress.
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Bonaparte's request met a chilly reception in Congress, which should not have come as a surprise. As the dig was underway in early 1905, President Roosevelt had asked Congress to pay for the search and recovery of the body, a request that died without action, leading Porter to forge ahead on his own. Later bills submitted by sympathetic congressmen had died at the committee level in successive Congresses. This lack of support had continued once the body was tucked away under the staircase in Bancroft Hall. In session after session, the navy and the White House had requested money to finish the crypt. The US Senate had managed a vote on the measure, approving it, but the legislation died when the House failed to vote on a parallel measure.

Porter's letter in December 1910 was part of a coordinated campaign that seems to have come together after an article appeared in the April 9, 1910, issue of the mass market magazine
Collier's.
The piece was by artist and navy reserve officer Henry Reuterdahl, who two years earlier had roiled the naval bureaucracy with a scathing article about ship designs crafted amid an inflexible bureaucracy. The earlier article, in
McClure's
magazine, had sparked investigations and, eventually, changes in how the navy designed its ships.

In his new piece, Reuterdahl again sought to spur the recalcitrant into action. And the article should not have caught navy officials by surprise. In February, two months before the piece was published, Reuterdahl wrote to navy secretary George von Lengerke Meyer asking if it was true that Jones's coffin was still resting “upon two wooden horses back of the stairs in Bancroft Hall, at the Naval Academy at Annapolis, and that no money is available for the proper interment of his remains.”

Meyer responded that the body was being properly treated. “No criticism of this location was offered by any of the distinguished visitors present on that occasion (when placed), who included among their number those most actively interested in the return of the Body to this country from its original burial place; nor, until the receipt of the attached communication, has any hint of such criticism reached this office.”
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Reuterdahl was unswayed. Under the headline J
OHN
P
AUL
J
ONES, OUR
G
RAYELESS
H
ERO
, Reuterdahl drew a picture of the chapel and a second illustration of Jones's casket under a starred banner beneath the grand staircase at Bancroft. The article offered a survey of Jones's importance to US
naval history and then finished with a public lament at the ingratitude of a nation. “His earthly remains are not properly cared for by the nation. It is over a century since Paul Jones died, and his body has not yet found its final resting place.” The US Senate, he noted, had approved spending $135,000 to complete the crypt. “It remains for some patriot in the House of Representatives to make its members understand that it is a national shame that the founder of the American navy has not what is accorded to every decent citizen—the right to a final resting-place.”

Over the next few months, members of the Sons of the American Revolution began lobbying Congress to allocate the money to build the crypt. The Vermont legislature, two weeks after Porter sent his letter, passed a resolution urging Congress to act.
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Porter also wrote an appeal to Congress on May 28, just six weeks after Reuterdahl's article was published. “Many promises were made by the Government that the body of Paul Jones should be given a decent sepulcher, but not withstanding the urging of our Presidents, Secretaries of the Navies, 19 patriotic societies, Paul Jones clubs, and public press, etc., there has been no step taken even to place it in some consecrated place…. His poor body was probably better off during the 113 years of neglect in Paris, for at least there it reposed in consecrated ground.”
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The campaign finally gained some traction in early 1911 when the House's navy committee once again sent an expenditure measure to the full House. But this time it recommended a lower amount—up to $75,000, instead of the $135,000 the navy had been pushing for. Even that amount found deep resistance. Illinois Republican representative James Robert Mann pointed out that the navy wanted Congress to pay for designing and building the crypt without seeing what those plans would be. He wondered “if it would be better to properly authorize the Secretary of the Navy to have estimates, plans, and specifications prepared and submit them to Congress before acting upon this?” His Democratic colleague, Augustus Stanley of Kentucky, was even more direct and skeptical. “I am surprised and grieved at the wanton and reckless expenditures by the Committee on Naval Affairs,” he said on the floor of the House. “Of all the bills that ever came before the House, it strikes me that this one is the most reckless in regard to expenditure of the dear people's money. Now, you have proposed
the erection of a building not only to take care of all the live people in the Navy, but you are building a gilded mausoleum for people who are not yet dead and you do not know when they are going to die…. You do not know how much it will cost, how many are going to be buried there. You just know you are taking the people's money to start a kind of military graveyard.” Besides, he said, “nobody knows whether it is John Paul Jones or John Paul Jones's coachman; but that does not keep the Committee on Naval Affairs from throwing away money like a drunken sailor.”
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Despite the resistance, the House finally approved the expenditure, and the project let out for bids. Flagg, the original designer of the new Annapolis, had hoped to design the crypt but found himself on the outs with the navy after his lawyers filed a court claim for additional fees for the work already done. Flagg's bid for finishing the crypt died, and the project eventually went to Grand Central Terminal architect Whitney Warren and his “less imaginative design” (in the words of Flagg biographer Mardges Bacon).

Work proceeded relatively quickly, and the unfinished concrete basement was transformed into a mausoleum, minus some of the grandiosity of Flagg's vision. Given the lower budget, the skylight effect of the original plan was scrapped. Warren went with eight Doric dark marble pillars encircling the crypt, and a twenty-one-ton sarcophagus of Grand Antique des Pyrénées marble resting on the backs of swimming dolphins. The names of Jones's navy ships—the
Ranger, Alliance,
and
Bonhomme Richard
—were inlaid in the floor, made from Knoxville and Tennessee marble. The limestone-faced wall ringing the sarcophagus was set aside for displays and other memorials—but not the niches for heroes that Flagg had wanted.
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Finally, in January 1913, the crypt was ready for Jones, bringing the story of the search for an American hero to its end. This fourth and final funeral was also the least elaborate. Meyer, the navy secretary, accompanied by Porter, the man who had rescued the body from beneath Mme Crignier's Parisian buildings, led a small entourage on a train trip from Washington, DC, on the morning of January 26, an unusually springlike day in Annapolis. They watched as a small contingent of seamen retrieved Jones's coffin from its sawhorse bier beneath the staircase and carried it outside to a caisson, which was wheeled through the treed park to the chapel, where the pallbearers carried the coffin down the short flight of stairs to the waiting sarcophagus. After a brief prayer service in the chapel, the attendees filed downstairs to the basement crypt and became the first tourists to visit the final resting place of John Paul Jones.