Bergdoll, a member of a wealthy and prominent family that operated one of the largest brewing companies in Pennsylvania, was one of the first 119 people who learned to fly at the Wright brothers’ school for airplane pilots at Huffman Prairie near Dayton, Ohio. Five months after his first flying lessons in 1912, he was awarded a pilot’s license, the 169th person in the U.S. to receive one.
After the sinking of the Lusitania and other U.S. shipping by German U-boats, America declared war against Germany in April 1917. On May 18, Congress passed the Selective Service Act requiring every man between the ages of 21 and 30 to register for possible selection for military service. Bergdoll, complied and duly registered for the draft on June 5. In August, he ignored his draft board’s summons to appear for a physical and disappeared. The draft board declared him to be a deserter in 1918.
Bergdoll was called “America’s most notorious wartime draft dodger” by the New York Times. “Wanted” posters featuring his photo were distributed nationwide.
He eluded capture for more than a year and taunted authorities by sending them insulting and defiant postcards. Grover’s antics generated a great deal of press attention, captivated the public’s interest and provoked national ire.
He was finally caught at his family’s home in Philadelphia on Jan. 7, 1920. Under the rules in place at the time, Bergdoll had been inducted into the Army in absentia, court-martialed for desertion, sentenced to five years in prison to be served at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and jailed on Governors Island, New York. Grover claimed that when he was a fugitive he buried $150,000 in gold coins on a farm in Maryland and his lawyers persuaded military officials to permit a trip for him to retrieve the treasure under guard before his transfer to Kansas.
The ruse worked and Bergdoll managed to escape his guards. Despite a nationwide manhunt, Grover was able to withdraw a large sum of money from his bank, cross into Canada and sail for Germany from Montreal on July 7, 1920. He made his way to the village of Eberbach, located between Frankfurt and Stuttgart, and took up residence in the Hotel Krone Post which was owned by his uncle. Eberbach was also the birthplace of Bergdoll’s mother and the home of several sympathetic relatives.
The Griffis connection
Corliss Hooven Griffis was born in 1895. His father was Eugene S. Griffis, a Hamilton dentist and officer of American Frog and Switch Company, maker of railroad-track turnouts, switches and rail supplies. His mother was Blanche Hooven Griffis, daughter of John C. Hooven, one of the founders of the Hooven-Owens-Rentschler Company, an important Hamilton-based engine manufacturer. Each side of the family had roots in Butler County dating from the early 1800s.
Hooven graduated from Hamilton High School in 1913 and attended Miami University before enlisting in the Army in March 1917. After military training at Camp Sherman near Chillicothe, he went to France to serve with the U. S. Army during World War I and was a member of the 322nd Field Artillery and the 131st Infantry of the 33rd Division. He was wounded in a poisonous gas attack on October 16, 1918, during the Meuse-Argonne offensive shortly before the November 11 Armistice.
Griffis, seen in a photo printed in the Aug. 14, 1923 Dayton Daily News, was honorably discharged with the rank of sergeant Feb. 22, 1919, and was a charter member of the Frank Durwin Post of the American Legion.
After the war, Hooven agreed to write special articles about the post-war situation in Europe for the North American News Alliance, a large newspaper syndicate of 50 major newspapers formed in 1922. He also had volunteered to search for American bodies in Alsace-Loraine area cemeteries for the American Graves Registration Committee. So, on May 5, 1923, Griffis sailed for France. On May 29, the day before Memorial Day, Hooven went to the American cemetery at Meurthe-et-Moselle in Lorraine to decorate the graves of Frank Durwin and Minor Meyer. It was during this activity that Griffis thought of Grover Cleveland Bergdoll.
Hooven devised a plan to hire six men to help him capture Bergdoll at his hotel in Eberbach, transport him to Paris and have American authorities take him back to the U.S. for his long overdue punishment. On Aug. 11, 1923, Griffis and the six men tried to kidnap Bergdoll. The slacker fought back, killing one of the men and seriously wounding another. Hooven and the other three men were arrested by German police.
Griffis and the three co-conspirators were charged with four crimes: assault and battery, breach of the peace, taking laws in own hands, and compulsion. Immediately after Hooven’s arrest, several people expressed their concerns about Griffis having proper legal representation and his safety while being jailed. Efforts by the U.S. War Department, Disabled American Veterans Commanders, the U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, Ambassador to Germany Alanson B. Houghton, and Hamilton American Legion members were started before the end of August.
The trial for the four men began in Mosbach, Germany, on Dec. 6, 1923. All four were found guilty and sentenced to prison terms by the court on December 7th. Hooven and Frenchman Karl Sperber were sentenced to 21 months imprisonment, Russian Faust Gargarin received a term of 8 months and Eugene Nelson was given a 3 month sentence for being the get-away car driver. All sentences were reduced by 3 months for time served.
During the trial, Griffis was asked why he attempted to return Bergdoll to the United States. He told the judge, “I felt it was my patriotic duty—the thought came to me while touring the cemeteries in France where American soldiers are buried, surrounded by the thousands of white crosses in all directions. This inspired me more than anything else to try and get Bergdoll to face trial.”
On Dec. 9, two days after Hooven was sentenced, a national Committee to Effect the Release of Lieutenant Griffis was formed in Chicago. The committee, headed by Dr. James Whitney Hall and made up of U.S. Senators, generals, cabinet officials, prominent citizens and commanders of the American Legion, began collecting signatures for a petition “From the American People” to be given to the German government.
The committee solicited the participation of major newspapers across the country in the effort. The form was printed in the Journal-News daily beginning Dec. 17. By Dec. 20, it was estimated that more than 5,000 people had signed the form printed in the local paper.
The committee accepted signatures for the petition until Jan. 16, 1924. A total of 2,086,764 signatures including 19 governors of states, 117 members of Congress, 208 city mayors, 416 members of state legislatures and 20 department commanders of the American Legion were spread over a 23-mile reel of paper. A delegation headed by Illinois Sen. William B. McKinley and former servicemen presented the spooled petition to Otto Wiedfeldt, the German Ambassador to the United States in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 28. A cable summarizing the count of signatures was sent to German President Gustav Ebert that day.
The petition clearly achieved the desired effect because two days later, on Jan. 30, 1924, Griffis was released from the German prison and ordered to immediately leave the country. He was being deported as an “undesirable.” Interestingly, the German government provided Hooven with an excellent first-class railroad room and one of the best deluxe suites on the Albert Ballin, the 1,650 passenger ocean liner that carried him from Stuttgart to New York.
Griffis’ steamer arrived at New York on Feb. 11, 1924. He was met by his parents, sister Dorothy, and James Whitney Hall, chairman of the national petition committee. A procession of sailors, soldiers and police escort marched up Broadway from the Battery to City Hall. Mayor William Collins praised Hooven for his effort to capture Bergdoll. In a brief reply, Griffis said: “I took a chance but failed, but perhaps it is better that I failed. If Bergdoll had come back and gone to prison it would have all been forgotten in a week, but now a wave of patriotism has swept over the country, and if that spirit has been made possible by anything I did then I have served my purpose.”
Hooven and his family went to Chicago the next day where they received a rousing welcome. A parade took the family from Grand Central Station to the national petition committee’s headquarters at the Great Northern Hotel. After three days of festivities, the Griffis family left for Hamilton.
On Feb. 15, 1924, Hooven finally returned to his hometown. He was greeted by hundreds of people, the Hamilton High School band, Mayor Howard Kelly, Police Chief Frank Clements, Chamber of Commerce officials, newspaper men, newspaper and movie photographers and dozens of friends and relatives. A parade moved from the train depot across the Main Street Bridge to the Griffis home on B Street where another large crowd greeted the returning hero.
Once settled into his home, Hooven said, “I attribute my release to the efforts of the American press, led by the Hamilton Journal. The united power of public opinion which was thus created was felt across the ocean and was really the cause of my release.” He added that he intended “to be as good an American as I can be and live quietly in my own country.”
Griffis was the first Adjutant for Hamilton’s Frank Durwin Post of the American Legion. He also was commander of the S. Rankin Drew Post in New York City for four years. In 1951, he was a major in the Army Air Corps at Olmstead Falls, Pennsylvania. He was living at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Dayton when he suffered a fall and taken to General Hospital in Cincinnati where he died Jan. 1, 1963 at the age of 68.
Bergdoll, at the age of 33, married an 18-year-old German girl in 1926. Over the years, he managed to enter the United States twice for extended stays, once from 1929 to 1933 and again from 1935 to 1938, hiding in plain sight at the Bergdoll home in Philadelphia with his wife and seven children and never being caught. In 1939, Grover surrendered at the American consulate in Stuttgart and after another court-martial, was sentenced to serve his original term plus three years for the escape and long evasion of justice. He was in prison until 1944.
Bergdoll and his wife divorced and the most famous World War I slacker spent the last years of his life in guardianship at the Westbrook Psychiatric Hospital in Richmond, Virginia where he died on Jan. 27, 1966 at the age of 72.
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