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RedditOn October 28, 1925, a young legal aide reported to a ramshackle warehouse at the foot of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. He placed a stack of legal volumes on a scarred wooden table, then waited for the court-martial of Army Air Service Colonel William “Billy” Mitchell to begin. William H. Webb was fresh out of law school when chief counsel Frank Reid asked him to join the defense team. Barely mentioned in the hundreds of newspaper accounts of the trial, Webb nonetheless impressed a reporter at the Baltimore Evening Sun, who wrote: “[This] wizard of legal research...cannot be seen as he sits hunched behind a big pillar in the courtroom, and as he seldom even whispers, his presence is unnoticed by spectators; and yet, besides Representative Reid, chief counsel, he is probably the most important personage among the Mitchell warriors at the court-martial.... He is the pivot of the defense, and it was his nimble fingers that thumbed the thick legal volumes that Reid quotes so glibly.”
Recognizing the significance of the trial, young Webb compiled scrapbooks of material about his experience: photographs, newspaper clippings, and courtroom sketches made by an unidentified artist. There’s Major General Douglas MacArthur, looking impossibly young; a frowning Major General William Graves, who fought Communists in Siberia; even a drawing of American humorist Will Rogers, who attended the trial to support the defendant. (Mitchell had given Rogers his first airplane ride, and the two had become friends.) William Webb Jr. remembers his father talking about the court-martial for years afterward. “We would look at the scrapbooks and he would give us a general overview of the trial and the people involved in it.” Webb Jr. donated the collection to the National Air and Space Museum in 1992, seven years after his father’s death. “I just thought that would be the place to put it,” he says. “Anybody who had an interest in the trial could come and look at the pictures, the newspaper articles, and so forth.”
How his father came by the sketches is a mystery. Webb Jr. doesn’t know who drew them, but thinks the artist may have been a woman. “My father was trying to capture as much as he could about the trial, and I think he felt the drawings added a little something to the scrapbook itself, so that’s why he put them in,” he says. Sketched by someone in the courtroom as the trial proceeded, the drawings are intimate snapshots of the participants. They have never been published, and have been seen only by those few who have researched the Museum’s Mitchell collection.
The popular Colonel Mitchell was facing a court-martial for his controversial remarks to the press on September 5, blasting two military disasters: a bungled flight during which three Navy seaplanes failed to make it from the West Coast to Hawaii; and the crash of the Navy airship USS Shenandoah while flying over the Midwest on an ill-advised public relations tour. “These incidents are the direct result of the incompetency, criminal negligence and almost treasonable administration of the national defense by the Navy and War Departments,” Mitchell stated. “The bodies of my former companions in the air moulder under the soil in America, and Asia, Europe and Africa, many, yes a great many, sent there directly by official stupidity.”
Within days, the War Department charged Mitchell with violating the Ninety-sixth Article of War, which covered “all conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the military service.”
At the court-martial, Reid—who took the case for free, hoping it would make him a national figure—argued that Mitchell’s Constitutional right to free speech trumped his duties as an officer. Reid praised his client’s warnings as patriotic, concluding with a flourish, “Rome endured as long as there were Romans; America will endure as long as there are Mitchells.”
The prosecution, however, argued that in the military, free speech would lead to chaos. Claimed the trial judge advocate: “A private can berate his captain before his company, the captain can criticize and ridicule his major before his battalion and the major can lampoon his colonel…. Discipline and control under such a view of law would vanish and the Army become a mob.”
The trial was front-page news. Each morning, nearly 500 spectators lined up outside the warehouse hoping for one of the few courtroom seats reserved for the public. Society matrons, reported the Los Angeles Times, were dismayed at their reception. “Luxuriously equipped limousines drew up along the curbing. Uniformed footmen jumped to open the doors and assist the occupants to the pavement.... The prominent as well as the socially unknown were told in regular doughboy fashion to ‘fall in’ line and await their turn to be admitted.”
Comments
I like reading your stories a lot. One unquie thing about this incident was that in 1942, Billy was cleared of the charges and posthumously promoted to Major General.
Posted by Joseph Randall on May 21,2009 | 06:23PM