Lasting wounds of war
Robert Beveridge is identified by an “X” above his head in this section of a photograph of his unit in the U.S. Army Coastal Artillery Corps taken in 1914 at Fort Caswell on Oak Island, N.C.
Robert Beveridge in the 1920s
A colleague of mine looked at a sepia tone photograph taken a century ago of my paternal grandfather and said, “Looks like he’d seen things.”
Robert Beveridge’s stern expression in the image makes him appear both deep in thought and unhappy, which wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination because he served two tours of duty and survived the bloodiest of battles of World War I.
He suffered from exposure to enemy mustard gas attacks in Europe. He survived several encounters with German troops, including the infamous Meuse-Argonne offensive in September and October 1918, his honorable discharge from the U.S. Army stated. He later claimed in his 1934 appeal for military disability that his service in the war left him with high blood pressure and headaches and fatigue associated with an emotional disturbance.
The Meuse-Argonne offensive, which helped to bring an end to the war, was the deadliest series of battles in U.S. history, according to the National Archives online. More than 26,000 soldiers were killed, and another 95,786 men were injured in the offensive.
The operation was bolstered by relocating troops from the St. Mihiel Salient in western France under the logistics of Col. George C. Marshall of Uniontown, who also led the rebuilding of Europe following World War II. My grandfather was among those who were transferred from St. Mihiel to Meuse-Argonne, his military records indicate.
I speculate he was among the most patriotic men of his era as he enlisted both times, first in the U.S. Army Coastal Artillery Corps in 1914, three years before the United States entered World War I, and then again in 1918 in the U.S. Army.
He suffered a stroke and died in 1941 at the age of 49. His death came 15 years before I was born, and not long after the government denied his application for disability payments.
He left behind few mementos. There were just several photographs of him, one of which stretched five feet wide and showed him posing with his CAC unit at Fort Caswell, N.C. He also held onto his well-read, khaki, government-issued Bible that carried a July 23, 1917, inspirational message on the back of the cover from then-President Woodrow Wilson.
Robert Beveridge also was a journalist, according to oral history. My father, James, said he wrote stories for which he was paid by a man who came to his home for them and slipped away under the cover of darkness.
There was an assumption he dabbled in socialism before the war and likely wrote under a nom de plume about the struggles of industrial workers during the 1920s and 1930s.
Many soldiers shunned socialism during the war. Its members were seen as un-American because they protested U.S. involvement in European affairs, said Laura Tuennerman, a history professor at California University of Pennsylvania.
Socialism in the early 1900s was championed by progressive reformers who “embraced it to make the world better,” Tuennerman said.
“That really appealed to the working classes because of the growing distance between the wealthy and them,” she said. “Looking back, we have a view of socialism that is somewhat tainted.”
Many steelworkers like my grandfather, who eventually settled in the Charleroi area during the Great Depression, would turn to labor parties or become Democrats at a time when unions were not recognized by the government.
We believe he wrote for a newspaper that took the side of the working class. He reviled Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, Pittsburgh industrialists whose rejection of unions led up to the Homestead Steel Strike in 1892, which ended in a bloody battle between Pinkerton guards and steelworkers.
My grandfather would have been angered by the mistreatment of labor when big corporations knew if a steelworker died from an injury at work there would have been a line of other men waiting for his job.
“It would have been a substantial concern,” Tuennerman said.
“He probably had seen things that he felt very right about,” she said.