The Bergdoll Boys, page 42
Anti-Bergdoll fervor would continue for another 20 years in the United States. Still, gradually, as Americans took stock of the mistakes made in the Great War, many people’s feelings toward draft evaders from a war between Europeans began to change.
Unrecognized by the local authorities and the press in the early 1920s, many Philadelphians displayed their first ideology of Bergdollism. They loved Bergdoll beer for the mild, smooth taste of its lager. They envied Emma for her wealth and admired her for her tough earthiness. Gentlemen admired Louis and Charles for their business acumen in automobiles, airplanes, racing development, and their taste in fine architecture. Women adored Erwin and Grover’s handsome athleticism and attractive looks on the race track and for their daring flight. Working women admired Elizabeth for daring to become the first woman to drive a car in Philadelphia, snubbing high society rules, and eloping with her chauffeur. And many people quietly and privately applauded Grover for beating the American draft when so many other boys were killed needlessly in the war.
Still, nationalism remained strong in America three years after the war. But in Europe, the feeling of Bergdollism amounted to a sense of pride that someone had beaten a tremendous military-political machine in the United States, and it happened to be a man of German heritage.
From 1921–1923, it was as easy for German sentiment to turn toward American draft dodger and habitual liar Bergdoll as to the rising popularity of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the Nazis. In Eberbach, a small town of five to eight thousand inhabitants, depending upon how distant from the town center one counted, Grover was perceived as a gentleman who always disbursed cash to the locals in return for favors and protection. He bought meals and drinks for Eberbachers at local restaurants and saloons and spent freely at the local bookshops, appliance and electrical supply stores, gun shops, and automobile garages. He was one of the few who had a car. He leased hundreds of acres of forest for hunting forays where he was not so interested in shooting stag and waterfowl as he was in treating the local constabulary to a day behind the stock of a long gun.
In return, they looked out for Grover; the police were tipping him to new arrivals of American reporters or suspicious characters who might be bounty hunters. One American reporter said Eberbachers were “ignorant” of the circumstances of Bergdoll’s flight from the United States. He said Grover would have been shot if he had fled the Prussian army. The Baden state prosecutor, Trautwein, who handled both kidnapping cases, went so far as to ask an American reporter about all the fuss. “He’s only a deserter,” he said of Bergdoll.
Eberbachers attributed all the Bergdoll fuss to nosy reporters, detectives, or a “Ku Klux Klanner.” During the post-war economic depression and hyperinflation in a great industrial nation, the flip of a gold dollar coin from Grover into a German’s hand was a blessing not to be jeopardized by talking freely to American reporters and French detectives.
Additionally, German newspapers reported that when news of a potential deal had been struck in the United States for Bergdoll to return voluntarily and face a reduced sentence and the return of his assets, the American Legion funded the kidnapping events. An article in a Karlsruhe newspaper was especially critical.
“This chauvinistic organization of former front-line soldiers wanted to thwart the deal favorable to Bergdoll by violent kidnapping and extradition.” The alleged deal, as reported in the American press and spread by Emma in Germany, which may or may not have been confirmed, was only for Bergdoll to return on his own, not as a captive.
Grover first won the support of the German public when he stood up to the Americans during the first kidnapping effort in Eberbach in 1921. From Germany, sympathy for Bergdoll spread through Europe with Bergdollism. The term first appeared in the Chicago Tribune to explain how many Germans felt about protecting him from the Americans.
Grover may have displayed too much showmanship in the first full year he hid from the U.S. Army in Germany; he drove Big Red fast all over Baden and Bavaria, eastern Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and western Austria. Reporters claimed he was so free-spirited and free-spending that he impulsively married a restaurant waitress in Austria. He didn’t.
He did have warrants for his arrest from three nations, the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. America wanted him for escape and military desertion. Canada and the British wanted him for forging crown passports. This is why he remained mainly in Germany, which still had no extradition agreements with the U.S., France, or Britain, because, five years after the last bullet was fired in battle, it was still in a state of war with the adversary nations.
Grover’s safest hideaway remained his family’s homeland in Baden, where his German father and grandfather were still idolized for their success, wealth, beer, and charity. If Grover left Germany of his own will, he could quickly be arrested in certain European nations, extradited, and sent to America for trial, conviction, and prison.
By June 1921, however, while Grover felt lofty about beating the kidnapping attempt, he also felt the financial pinch. On May 27, 1921, Vincent A. Carroll, the Philadelphia attorney for the United States Alien Property Custodian, sent a certified letter to Emma advising her that she must vacate the Wynnefield mansion by October 31, 1921. And this date was no Halloween trick or treat. The custodian had confiscated Grover’s estimated $749,889.72 in assets, and, at the time, the Wynnefield mansion with a value of $81,000 was in his name. It also seized his Louis J. Bergdoll Brewing Company stock worth $336,000, his Broomall farm and Eagle Field worth $100,000 (purchased from brother Charles in May 1917), his apartments and mortgages payable worth $225,000, and tangible property (cars and airplane) that if sold might generate cash to fuel his flight. The legal action also seized a note payable to Charles Brawn of $15,000. The attachment to Charles was enough, temporarily, to reunite the disenfranchised son with Emma to fight the seizure. The letter described Grover as an “enemy.” There was no mention of the gold.
Emma fought the seizure with attorneys in Philadelphia and Washington. In one notable appearance in Equity Court in Washington, as Emma was suing the United States to release the asset seizure, she gained public sympathy when she suffered a mental breakdown in court. Emma had a propensity for talking loudly and disrespectfully in public, and the strict confines of a courtroom did not change her habits. During Charles’ hearing to recover rights to collect his $15,000 note, Emma pushed forward and spouted loudly to the judge. When told to shut up, she refused and was fined $50. The bailiff removed Emma from the courtroom, and when she was called back to testify on her attorney’s arm, The Washington Herald reported, “she was sobbing, and almost hysterical.” Even though the judge sympathetically canceled the fine when told that Emma was given such court privileges in Philadelphia, the Herald reported that Emma was later observed sitting on the granite steps outside the courthouse where “she sobbed pathetically.”
When Americans read about Emma’s mental anguish, they couldn’t help but feel sorry for the old woman, no matter what they felt about Grover and Erwin.
Many years later, Bergdollism gained more momentum in the United States, despite the refusal of President Roosevelt (and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt) to address the issue of forgiveness.
In the Philadelphia region by 1930, many people held firmly to their war-era patriotism about how Bergdoll thumbed his nose at the government agents’ attempts to capture him. Then came a startling announcement from the man who organized the criminal investigation division for the Department of Justice in Philadelphia and who spearheaded the Philadelphia German Tageblatt investigation and managed the federal investigators when Grover was captured in the window box of his Wynnefield mansion.
Frank L. Garbarino left his government post around 1925 and organized a private investigator’s office in Atlantic City, New Jersey. In April 1933, as president of the World Association of Detectives working with Philadelphia liquor and beer retailers to control racketeering with the repeal of Prohibition, he turned about on the fugitive he captured and said Grover ought to be forgiven.
He said the government should think of aging Emma, spending time and money hoping her favorite son would be able to return home.
“If he comes back,” Garbarino declared, “the sentence of five years should be suspended, and he should be placed on parole in the custody of his mother. The war is over. We have forgiven Germany. Why hold prejudice against an individual? We had thousands [of draft dodgers] during the war, and nothing ever happened to them.”4
Garbarino said Grover was more of a bad boy than a slacker. He said he and his men thought Grover was more courageous than others.
“The government is to blame. It made a bad boy of him when it labeled him a slacker,” Garbarino said.
Continuing his comments about Grover at a time when the press reported on leniency for all other war deserters except for Bergdoll, Garbarino lamented, “times were tense then. The notoriety given to his (Grover’s) many daring escapades turned public sentiment against him. He would have served in any capacity other than bearing arms against his kinsmen. Bergdoll said, at the time, he saw no reason why he should shoot his cousins.”
Garbarino also provided some inside information from his years as a federal detective. Despite Emma’s feigned efforts to get Grover back home, Garbarino declared that Grover remained in Germany at Emma’s insistence. She was not comforted by any sense of Bergdollism. Emma feared that if her boy returned home, he might get something worse than prison.
Then, smiling toward an assemblage of newspaper reporters, Garbarino finished his statement. “You know Grover was her favorite son,” he said.
Grover tried to exploit Bergdollism in Europe and the Roosevelt administration’s frustration with the Nazi military buildup in the 1930s. He typed a letter for Emma to send to Eleanor Roosevelt in January 1933, begging for a pardon. And he laid on the compliments in his prose as only Grover in the family could do.5
“Knowing you to be a woman of great intelligence and justice-loving, I am presenting the case to you so you can put it before your husband,” he wrote. Grover’s letter, for Emma to send to the Roosevelts, blamed England for his refusal to report for military duty. He reminded the Roosevelts that President Grover Cleveland (his namesake) was a “slacker” during the Civil War. He said Europeans had forgiven their draft dodgers from the world war and that Americans should do the same. He included a legal brief prepared by General Ansell, who wrote the wartime draft legislation claiming Grover was improperly tried for desertion. And then Grover’s prose, imitating his poor 72-year-old mother who would not have written such words, grabbed at Eleanor Roosevelt’s heartstrings.
“I know that only a mother can understand a mother’s love, and I hope you will try and help me get my boy back again.”
In the letter, signed by Emma and sent to Mrs. Roosevelt, Emma [Grover] said she had just listened to a radio commentary by Lowell Thomas and that the President and First Lady were “standing the strain of your superhuman work, in great shape. You both must be veritable powerhouses of energy and have steel nerves to keep up such a pace!”
This letter was very unusual in that it suggested a pardon for Grover so Emma could repay a $70,000 loan from the Bergdoll Brewery. She wanted the President to authorize the Alien Property Custodian to release Grover’s assets so she could borrow money from Grover, repay the loan and restart the brewery (with the repeal of Prohibition), and “put hundreds of men to work.”6
The letters, purporting to be written by Emma, were pure nonsense. The fact that they were typewritten in elaborate cohesive sentences by an intelligent American-educated person with vast knowledge of the legal events facing Grover indicates that Grover wrote them himself and had Emma sign them. He hid on the third floor of his Wynnefield mansion in early 1933. He occupied his time listening to Lowell Thomas on the radio and dreaming up concepts of freedom by tip-tapping away on his typewriter, praising the only man who could wheel up to his inkwell, sign an order, and set Bergdoll free.
While Emma kept a large framed photograph of President Roosevelt in the drawer of a table in the Wynnefield mansion parlor nearest the front door for when reporters and photographers were present, she did not speak, write, or even think in the method of prose that Grover put down on paper for her signature.7 She wanted everyone to believe she corresponded with Roosevelt, but it mainly was Grover’s writing. This became even more evident after Grover returned to Germany in May 1933. He wrote again to President Roosevelt; this time, his letter was referred to the Department of Justice. He appealed to Roosevelt’s “Christian spirit,” saying that despite being deprived of the rights of American citizenship, “I still feel of myself as an American, and could never swear allegiance to any other country. I always preferred being a man without a country rather than become a citizen of a foreign country.”
This letter, sent from Weinsberg in March of 1934, displayed the first hint from Grover that he was concerned about his children being raised in Germany.8
Berta Bergdoll (Grover’s German wife) had checked into a hospital in Heilbronn to await the birth of their son, Erwin Richard Bergdoll. Grover and Alfred did not go with her. Instead, they took Grover’s new Hudson Essex-Terraplane automobile shipped to him by brother Erwin (who had a matching car in the United States). They drove south to Bodensee (Lake Constance), where by day, they walked the deserted shores and spent nights in a modest hotel where blinking lights through the windows kept Alfred awake. They returned to Weinsberg only after baby Erwin was born on March 27, 1934.
Then, the Nazi Gestapo appeared at Berta’s parents’ apartment building in Weinsberg, looking for Grover and Berta.
It happened one day in April or May 1934. Alfred briefly described the Gestapo visit in his diary-manuscript from his father’s telling of the events. It was soon after little Erwin’s birth, and the infant boy still needed constant care and feeding from Berta. The Gestapo officers told Grover and Berta that they had been denounced as Communist agents by the U.S. Consul at Stuttgart, but, fortunately for the Bergdolls, they did not believe it. Alfred said it led to complaints about a consular official being withdrawn. Grover didn’t go much deeper into explaining to his son why Gestapo officers came calling on the most notorious American fugitive hiding in Germany. It was unusual that Alfred used only a few lines of his diary to describe it.
From this point onward, however, it appears the Nazis left Bergdoll alone, partly because, at this time, he was not drawing much publicity, and he was often gone from Baden, secretly living instead in Philadelphia. He was also busy with his typewriter. Emma, and Grover’s sister, Elizabeth, called Aunt Betty by the kids, often sent Philadelphia and other East Coast newspapers to Grover in Weinsberg so he could keep up with the news on the criticism of his actions and the government’s failure to capture him.
He felt compelled to answer his critics and supporters. In July 1934, the Boston Herald Traveler published an editorial about the government’s inaction and suggested Grover had the foresight to stay out of a war many later realized was futile. They also listed his Weinsberg address, opening a small floodgate of letters to the newspaper and Grover from Americans. One man responded to the editorial that perhaps Grover’s reasons for not wanting to go to war were justifiable. He declared that Americans, in 1934, were becoming aware that “had the United States adhered to the essence of the Monroe Doctrine, 78 thousand of America’s best manhood would still be lending stronger fiber to our great country instead of fertilizing the fields of a foreign land. Bergdoll has suffered plenty.”9
Grover claimed he received 87 letters in Weinsberg from the Boston area due to the editorial. He replied to a man in Somerville, Massachusetts, claiming that 86 of the letters he received supported a pardon, while one threatened his life if he returned to the United States. It contained the symbol of the Black Hand, the secret Serbian society that planned the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The letter recipient, Henry R. Chetham, whose family arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1634 and who served in the U.S. Navy during the war, promptly sent Grover’s letter to the Boston newspaper, writing, “I am not of German descent, but I feel that after all these years, Bergdoll deserves a pardon.”10
Grover also found his supporters in Philadelphia and its suburban Main Line. One man, Isaac R. Pennypacker of Ardmore (Grover’s old speeding grounds), a noted historian, magazine, and newspaper journalist, and the brother of former Governor of Pennsylvania Samuel W. Pennypacker, wrote to his former newspaper employer, The Inquirer, in July 1934 that President Lincoln and his War Secretary Edwin Stanton arranged for Quakers, Mennonites, and Dunkers to avoid the draft in the Civil War by funding nurses in soldiers’ hospitals. “Governmental action in the Civil War, when the nation was in real, not a propagandist danger, appears statesmanlike; the attitude towards the Bergdolls petty,” Pennypacker charged.
Pennypacker’s comments fell on deaf ears, and he died the following year from a fall that broke his hip and led to a heart attack.
Some of the letters sent to Weinsberg supported both Grover and Emma. They agreed with The Inquirer’s stance on leniency. Ida Thoene Pfeil of Camden, New Jersey, who, along with her late newspaper editor husband, was of German descent, said, “I think as you do. Bergdoll has been punished enough, and my heart goes out to that poor old mother of his. For, after all, he was a victim of venom.”
Letters of support probably inspired Grover to continue his letter-writing campaign. In a two-page letter sent by Berta to President Roosevelt but typewritten in Grover’s unique prose in December 1936, they proposed the President pardon Grover in return for a “fine” of $100,000 and Grover revealing secret information and “four radical innovations” developed by the German war factories. Grover claimed that he learned of these war machine inventions only because of his “knowledge of mathematics and mechanics.” He suggested he had known of new artillery designs increasing shell velocity and range, a new anti-tank weapon, a faster warplane, and “a novel offensive weapon (never before used in war).”
