Who says life has to be fair? The rise and fall of broadcasting’s Fairness Doctrine

Presented to the Club on Monday evening, January 14, 2019, by Brad Spear



The headline in the Saturday, December 22 Washington Post article said it all, “‘This Is Tyranny of Talk Radio Hosts, Right? ‘: Limbaugh and Coulter Blamed for Trump’s Shutdown of Portions of the Federal Government.” Here we are 23 days later, and the “partial shutdown” of the federal government continues.



Two days before, conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh and conservative podcaster Ann Coulter separately ridiculed the President over a compromise that had been reached with Senate Democrats to avoid a government shutdown by partially funding the construction of a wall at the Mexico-US border. Upon hearing the ridicule, Mr. Trump suddenly reversed his position, thereby closing the federal government on Friday, December 21. According to the Post article, CNN commentator Jeffrey Toobin was quoted as saying, the reason for the President’s reversal of position was because Limbaugh and Coulter “had questioned his manhood.”



Have these two pillars of right-wing talk radio always had such sway over the nation’s affairs? The answer is “no;” at least not until the repeal in 1987 of a longtime tenant of American broadcasting: the Federal Communications Commission’s “Fairness Doctrine.”



As a graduate student at Syracuse between 1973 and 1974, I and my classmates in the graduate program spent many an hour in class learning the niceties of the (then current) Fairness Doctrine…along with the significance of the personal attack rule (and the right of broadcast reply) that arose from a judicial ruling known as the Red Lion case and the equal time provision accorded qualified political candidates in Section 315 in the amended version of the Federal Communications Act of 1934. But rather than focus on dry case law and an examination of a section of a federal act no longer in effect, I’d rather turn your attention to the birth, the life, the death and the current impact that the Fairness Doctrine has had over the years.



Wireless radio (and its offspring, television, delivered over the air, via cable, satellite, or streamed over the internet) is barely 120 years old. Guillermo Marconi, with the backing of the British Royal Post Office, began transmitting wireless messages over a 12-mile span of British countryside in 1897.



By the early 1920s radio broadcasting had developed in earnest worldwide. In 1927 Congress made a fateful determination: like publicly owned grazing lands out West, the entire radio spectrum within the confines of America’s borders was the property of the American people. And the administration of this public property through the issuance of time-limited broadcast licenses was given over to an entity dubbed the “Federal Radio Commission.”



The purpose of this commission, first and foremost, was to assign frequencies and allocate transmission power limits that would prevent one station interfering with the reception of a distant station on the same frequency. This recognition of the technical limitations of the medium established an important principal: that of scarcity.



In the beginning the Federal Radio Commission had no charge toward reviewing the content of programming, other than reviewing during the license renewal process after the fact the performance of the licensee in presenting programming that served the public’s “convenience, interest, and necessity.”



With the advent of the Roosevelt Administration in 1932, Congress in 1934 transformed the Federal Radio Commission into the Federal Communications Commission. One of the FCC’s first actions was to respond to a federal court finding that the Mayflower Broadcasting Corporation of Boston had failed to serve the public’s interest through the broadcast of nothing but conservative viewpoints on issues of public importance. According to the first chairman of the FCC, radio’s dependence upon the sale of advertising as its sole source of support was causing the medium to become overly commercialized and biased toward business-friendly conservative viewpoints.



As a result, the FCC issued the “Mayflower Doctrine,” which required broadcasters “to allot a reasonable amount of time to…controversial issues and…to seek (and) provide…all responsible shades of opinion.” It also went on to prohibit radio broadcasters from issuing editorials. The radio industry howled and insisted that the Mayflower Pronouncement was a violation of statutory prohibitions against censorship. But it stuck.



The second world war came, and the FCC policies and practices became nearly unassailable. By war’s end the American public had been exposed to the power and influence that government-produced domestic media had had on pre-war Germany. Josef Goebbels’ polished single-point-of-view manipulation of Germany’s radio and film industries contributed to the loss of millions of lives.

Regardless, the broadcasters began to push back, insisting that the Mayflower Doctrine was an infringement of their First Amendment rights. Defenders, on the other hand, considered it a necessary safeguard for society.



After three years of unrelenting industry pressure, the FCC agreed to hold hearings on the legitimacy of the Mayflower Doctrine. In late March and early April of 1948, forty-nine witnesses appeared to testify either for or against the doctrine. The FCC waited over a year to issue a subsequent ruling. In June of 1949, the Mayflower Doctrine was repealed.



However, not long thereafter the FCC issued a report entitled In the Matter of Editorializing by Broadcast Licensees. The report led the FCC to reaffirm its authority to protect the public’s “convenience, interest, and necessity” through both the medium of radio and the growing new medium of television. In early 1950, the FCC established the Fairness Doctrine, which required radio and television broadcasters to present issues of controversial importance and have all sides fairly represented in their presentation (akin to the Mayflower Pronouncement). But the Fairness Doctrine went on to grant broadcasters the right to editorialize for the first time, so long as editorials were identified as such.



In reviewing the renewal applications of broadcasters every three years, the FCC determined whether the licensee had been proactive and had exercised good judgment in selecting representatives from all sides in the presentation of controversial issues. After all, the stated purpose of the Fairness Doctrine was to stimulate fair debate and to help create a well-informed electorate.



Over the next 35 years the Doctrine and other practices of the FCC were the subjects of considerable debate at the Congressional level. The National Association of Broadcasters, an interest group representing both radio and television owners, grew wealthy as their constituents grew wealthy. The question of deregulating the whole of American industry arose in earnest during the Carter administration, and broadcasting was part of the discussion, as well.



And along came the Reagan Administration.



Ronald Reagan had risen in the 1940s as a B-movie leading man. A confirmed Democrat, he served as the president of the Screen Actors Guild, one of the film community’s labor unions, from 1947 to 1952 and again for another eight months from 1959 to 1960. During that same period, he served as a public spokesman for General Electric, for his film career was in decline. He left the Democratic Party in 1962, declared himself a conservative Republican, and worked diligently to support the presidential run of Barry Goldwater in 1964. When that failed, he succeeded the Old Ranger as the host of a TV western anthology series, “Death Valley Days.” After only a year, he left the show to run for governor of California. There he succeeded, serving in that capacity from 1967 to 1975.

When Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter’s re-election bid in 1980 and became President of the United States, he brought to the White House a sizeable group of supporters who had made their individual fortunes in the booming California real estate business. One of the first places the effect manifested itself? At the FCC of all places.



Before the Reagan Administration (as mentioned earlier) a broadcast license required renewal every three years. In addition, there were limits on the number of radio and television licenses any entity could own: 5 AM and 2 FM licenses, and 5 VHF (channels 2 to 13) and 2 UHF (channels 14 to 83 — and an entity could own only 1 TV license, 1 AM license, and 1 FM license in any market). At the time the income from these licenses, strategically located in in the nation’s top 10 markets, provided enough revenue to underwrite the cost of CBS, NBC, and ABC’s network functions, including their national and international news operations.



Before the advent of the Reagan Administration, trying to sell a broadcast license required a considerable commitment of time and resources; it was a lawyer’s field day. The sale of Hartford’s WTIC-AM and FM and its VHF television license by the Travelers Insurance Company in 1974 to the Washington Post broadcast division required three years to complete: one year for the television license to be sold to the Post, and another two years for the AM/FM license to be transferred (at the FCC’s insistence) to a locally controlled entity known as the 1080 Corporation.



The FCC under Reagan in 1981 reduced the amount of time and expense required to sell a broadcast license to roughly six months, which introduced a “real-estate” style of property speculation that had characterized the boom years of the California real estate business: buy a run-down station, fix it up, build its audience, sell it at a considerable profit, and enjoy the capital gain. With Reagan’s FCC raising the TV and Radio ownership cap to 12, so long as the total national viewership of the 12 TV stations did not exceed 25% of the national audience, building wealth through capital gains has been the name of the game in broadcasting ever since.



The Reagan FCC also in 1981 lengthened the time a television license could be held from three to five years and the length of time an AM or FM radio license could be held was stretched to seven years. Later, during the Clinton Administration in 1996, both TV and radio licenses were lengthened to eight years.



Today the FCC does not limit the number of TV stations a single entity may own nationwide so long as the stations collectively reach no more than 39% of all US TV households. An entity can own more than one TV station in a market so long as 8 independently owned stations remain after the combination is made.



In those markets with at least 20 independently owned “media voices,” full power radio and TV stations, the cable system in the market, and a major newspaper, any entity can own either two TV stations and six radio stations or one TV station and seven radio stations. Smaller markets have smaller ownership caps.



And radio-only ownership restrictions are similar and based on a sliding scale that varies by the size of the market. For instance, in a market of 45 or more stations (Boston, the tenth largest market is home to 45 commercial and non-commercial AM and FM signals), a single entity can own up to eight stations (with neither AM nor FM ownership exceeding 5).



With the advent of digital television broadcasting and HD radio on both AM and more widely on FM, each broadcast license is now capable of generating up to three sources of programming on radio and up to 7 on TV. While ownership has become more concentrated, the capacity of each medium has expanded considerably.



Throughout the Reagan Administration, broadcasters began to lobby for the dissolution of the Fairness Doctrine. With their newly expanded licensing periods, a sense of entitlement began to develop among broadcasters and the license renewal process by a more laissez faire FCC became less feared. The nation’s passion for deregulation had firmly taken hold at the FCC, which in 1985 issued an order raising two significant questions: would the marketplace become sufficiently competitive with the anticipated development of cable-only television services (consider outside the purview of the FCC) to permit the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, and had previous enforcement of the doctrine actually chilled rather than encouraged free speech?



The FCC noted that as media outlets of any sort proliferated, the constitutionality of the Fairness Doctrine as applied to the scarcity of broadcasting outlets was becoming increasingly suspect. Was the enforcement of content fairness and balance with one among many new voices not subject to license renewal, a service or disservice to the general public?



Reagan’s FCC also examined the effect of Fairness Doctrine enforcement on the behavior of radio and television broadcasters. Under previous administrations most cases had concentrated on whether broadcasters had failed to present all valid viewpoints on a controversial issue. The Reagan Administration contended that broadcasters had figured out a way to beat the system. You wouldn’t suffer the expense of having to defend your license if you simply avoided raising controversial issues in the first place. Was the enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine having a detrimental effect on the amount of time dedicated to the coverage of controversial issues?



Raising these issues at the FCC led John Dingell, a Democratic representative from Michigan, and Fritz Hollings, a Democratic senator from South Carolina, to introduce legislation in their respective chambers that would codify into law the basic provisions of the Fairness Doctrine.



In response the FCC declined to repeal the Fairness Doctrine in 1985, electing instead to wait for further guidance from Congress. The Dingell-Hollings bill eventually passed both the House and the Senate in early 1987 and landed on President Reagan’s desk in late June. He promptly vetoed the measure, stating he considered the Fairness Doctrine unconstitutional. Neither the House nor the Senate could muster the votes necessary to override the veto.



The regulations at the FCC pertaining to the Fairness Doctrine stayed on the books unenforced from that day forth. Today the regulations no longer exist. They were swept off the books by a larger effort during the Obama Administration to decommission regulations at all federal agencies that were no longer being enforced.



From time to time, voices in Congress will raise the cry, “Bring back the Fairness Doctrine!” Questions worth pondering: do we need a new iteration of the Fairness Doctrine? Has our current marketplace of ideas become so skewed and riven with strife to merit such a move?



Since the Reagan Administration, I have long thought that we needed a new Fairness Doctrine, one applied to all media voices that depended upon the people’s spectrum to deliver its programming (even though cable delivered programming has long been exempt from FCC oversight, the entire cable delivery system, from TV studio to your living room television, utilizes terrestrial microwave and C or Ku band satellite transmission, all FCC licensed components, and all subject to renewal on a regular basis).



But late last fall, while watching an MSNBC evening broadcast by Rachel Maddow and thinking about the topic of this paper I’m delivering tonight, a thought struck me: the model of Maddow’s presentation is so very close to that of her radio antithesis, Rush Limbaugh. There was Rachel, making some point that I agreed with (I’m certain of it), but where was the counterpoint?

Right wing broadcasting, despite their claims to the contrary, attracts a remarkably small audience. An evening of prime-time programming on Fox New Channel attracts an average audience of 2.42 million viewers; the average audience for an hour-long episode of “Wait, Wait; Don’t Tell Me” on public radio every weekend is over six million listeners. Fox News Channel, it appears, is a notably small giant among midgets.



Likewise, the weekly audience for Rush Limbaugh, the radio commentator whose visceral reaction to Trump’s compromise with House Democrats led to the shutdown of the federal government, is 13 million. The weekly audience for NPR’s Morning Edition? 13 million.



Maybe Reagan’s FCC was right. The proliferation of channels might obviate the need for a new Fairness Doctrine.



Also, consider the fact that most of our media resources are slowly gravitating to a single, unregulated means of delivery, the internet. Given the global reach of the internet, soon it will be nigh unto impossible to regulate content. At this very moment, the signal of a locally broadcast right-wing radio station from any given market is competing over the internet with a direct feed from London of the BBC World Service. Correspondingly, the internet streaming of the TV signal for Fox News Channel is competing with the streamed signal of RT (Russia Today).



Given the political divisions that exist in the United States today and given the Republic Party’s historical animosity toward the Fairness Doctrine, the notion of reinstating the doctrine through either regulation or legislation is little more than a wishful fantasy.



There are measures, however, that might stimulate more balanced coverage both in the short and in the long run. Return to the ownership limitations of an earlier era: one owner per station per market, either TV or radio, and a maximum of five radio stations and and/or five TV stations nationwide. Given recent technical developments in digital TV and HD radio broadcasting, each TV station has the potential of broadcasting seven video signals, and each radio station has the potential of broadcasting three audio signals. Just how many stations in each market controlled by one owner is enough? Decentralize the program decision-making by reducing the concentration of ownership. The Rush Limbaughs will still be there, but many more station programming executives will have to be convinced to broadcast the program.



Also reduce the length of the license period for both TV and radio to the original three years, and in doing so, at license renewal time require the licensees to demonstrate that they have been operating their broadcast station in the public’s convenience, interest, and necessity.



The broadcast industry will certainly oppose such measures. But expanding the marketplace of ideas is something both political parties have supported in the past. The NAB, the lobbying arm of American commercial radio and TV broadcasters, wields considerable political clout. But as alternative sources of content arise, the NAB’s influence will no longer be what it once was.

American radio and TV’s contribution to our politically divided electorate won’t be staunched by reinstating the Fairness Doctrine but by busting up the concentration of media ownership. More programming decision makers are needed in our increasingly interconnected media environment, not fewer — all in the name of the public’s convenience, interest, and necessity.



Photo Credit: Scales of Justice by Michael Coghlan, used under Creative Commons License.

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The most hated man in America

Presented to the Club on Monday evening, March 4, 2019 by Martin C. Langeveld



During much of the time between the two World Wars, if you had asked an average person on the street, or the average journalistic pundit, who they considered to be the most hated person in America, ranking high among the possible answers would have been the name of Grover Cleveland Bergdoll. But why?



Grover Cleveland Bergdoll, the playboy scion of a Philadelphia family of beer brewers with German roots, was born in 1893. After the Wright brothers set up their first school for airplane pilots, at Huffman Prairie near their home base of Dayton, Ohio, Grover enrolled in April, 1912 and became one of the first 119 people who learned to fly there. Once proficient, he purchased from the Wrights a 40-horsepower Model B flyer, for the sum of $5,625 (nearly $150,000 in 2019 dollars). (The young man, just 18 years old and a student at the University of Pennsylvania, had been receiving a $5,000 allowance annually since he was 15.) The Model B was the first Wright plane to have wheels, enabling it to take off on its own rather than with the catapult system used until then.



Within a few months, Grover was entertaining large crowds in Philadelphia by making exhibition flights. At the time, flying was quite a hazardous pursuit. In 1910, the Wright Brothers had assembled a team of nine expert exhibition pilots to demonstrate their planes around the country — by the end of 1912, six of the nine had been killed in airplane crashes. But Grover was not only fearless but highly proficient. While still working to qualify for a pilot’s license in the spring of 1912, he was offering rides to friends, buzzing crowds, reaching altitudes of 2,000 feet, and staying aloft as long as 34 minutes. That summer, with a passenger on board, he flew from the suburban air field to Philadelphia’s downtown City Hall, circled the statue of William Penn atop its dome three times, and flew low over a westbound train for 22 blocks before revving his engine and passing it. In August, he flew from Philadelphia to Atlantic City, reaching altitudes over 7,000 feet, the first flight between the two cities. After more flights, in September, just five months after his first lessons, Grover passed the necessary trials and was awarded a pilot’s license. He was the 169th person in the U. S. ever to receive one.





Meanwhile, and even before getting into aviation, Grover had owned some fast automobiles and was known for his reckless speeding and risk-taking on the road. By late 1912, the same year he bought an airplane and became a pilot, he had some 30 arrest warrants outstanding for various driving offenses. In December, he got into a serious accident, was arrested, brought to trial, and eventually sentenced to three months in jail, in the process demonstrating considerable disdain for the legal process and continuing to drive even though his license had been revoked. He would go on, over the next few years, to wreck several more cars, both on the public highways and on a closed-course track in San Francisco where he was practicing for a motorcar race.



His continuing reckless behavior — what I’ve described only scratches the surface of his exploits — caused his brother Charles to go to court to have Grover declared insane, in order to prevent him from getting control of a $900,000 inheritance. But Grover’s mother Emma, quite a battle-axe herself, stood by him and eventually mother and son prevailed after a sensationalized trial. Charles was so disgusted he legally changed his name from Bergdoll to Brawn in order to disassociate himself from the family.



By this time, 18 months after the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife had been assassinated in Sarajevo, the European powers were embroiled in the Great War, but the United States had been sitting out the conflict. While Britain and France were America’s natural allies, there was considerable support in the U. S. for the Central Powers, particularly among the German-Americans, including Grover and his mother Emma.



Shortly after the war began, Grover visited the German Consul in Philadelphia and offered his services as an aviator for Germany, including the use of the Wright Model B. He was told that as a citizen of a neutral country he could not enlist in the German armed forces, and moreover, that the U. S. would certainly not permit the shipment of his airplane. Perhaps more interested in getting into military flying than in supporting Germany, Bergdoll later offered his flying services to General John J. Pershing when Pershing led an expedition into Mexico to pursue the revolutionary Pancho Villa, who had attacked a U.S. border town. But he was told Pershing would not be using airplanes.



Following the sinking of the Lusitania and continued harassment of U.S. shipping by German U-boats, the U. S. declared war against Germany in April, 1917. Within weeks, the Selective Service Act was passed, requiring the registration of every man between the ages of 21 and 30. Grover, now 23, duly registered, listing his occupation as “farmer and manufacturer of automobile parts” — the latter an allusion to the Bergdoll Motor Car company, an enterprise launched by his brothers that had closed up shop by then. The “farmer” part was derived from a 24-acre field owned by Grover, where he supposedly grew beans. Being a farmer, it was thought incorrectly, might qualify a man for an exemption.



In August, Grover was summoned to appear at the local draft board for a physical, but failed to show up. Instead, he withdrew a substantial sum of cash from his bank account and disappeared. The draft board listed him as a deserter.



The secretary of the draft board, John P. Dwyer, was a neighbor of the Bergdolls, and quite familiar with Grover’s history of reckless driving and run-ins with the law. There was also a story, told years later, that Dwyer’s children had gotten into a cherry tree on the grounds of the Bergdoll mansion, and that Grover had spanked the kids. Supposedly, when Dwyer showed up to protest, Bergdoll said, “You get off my property or I’ll hit you, too.” Dwyer was the editor of the Philadelphia Record, and used the power of the press to single out Grover in particular, even though he was one of many no-shows.



Through his mother, Grover offered to return from hiding if he would be permitted to enlist as a flight instructor, but the draft board refused to entertain any special treatment. To complicate matters, Grover’s brother Erwin decided to defy his own draft board and joined his brother on the lam (but surrendered soon after). Under the rules in place at the time, refusing to show up for induction meant that Grover was automatically inducted into the Army. This happened on August 13, 1918, just a few months before the end of the war.



Three million men, about 11 percent of the eligible pool, had failed to register for the draft or refused to be inducted. With hundreds of thousands of men now serving in the trenches or in support roles, naturally there were efforts to round up the so-called “slackers.” But Grover was singled out for pursuit and notoriety, because of his wealthy background, his prior recklessness on the road and run-ins with police, and his status as a fugitive. His “most hated” reputation was getting under way. “Wanted” posters featuring him as “a notorious draft evader and deserter” were distributed nationwide. Philadelphia authorities began receiving postcards from him, and after this fact was publicized, postcards began arriving from all over the country, many likely sent by sympathizers, leading police into some dead-ends.



Grover eluded his pursuers for more than a year before being caught at home in Philadelphia, where Emma had evidently sheltered him and Erwin for extended periods.  The drama of the arrest included Emma holding off the authorities for a time with a .38-caliber revolver, which led to her own arrest as well. A “veritable arsenal” of weapons was discovered in the house, it was reported.



Since Grover had been inducted into the army in absentia, he was turned over to military authorities to be court-martialed for desertion, and incarcerated at Fort Jay on Governors Island, New York. He hired a top-talent team of lawyers, but after much legal wrangling he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison, to be served at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. This transfer was stalled using a variety of appeal tactics, and then in the middle of this maneuvering, Grover made a startling claim to his defense team: during his time as a fugitive, he had buried $150,000 in gold coins on a farm in Hagerstown, Maryland. He asked the lawyers to get the Army authorities to permit him to travel to that location, under guard, retrieve the coins and deposit them in a bank. Otherwise, he feared, someone else might find them during his imprisonment.



While the legal team had its doubts about the story, they managed to convince the Army brass at Fort Jay to permit an expedition. Grover would be required to cover all costs. Two sergeants, John O’Hare and Calvin York, were assigned to guard Grover during the trip, which was to take no more than five days. Grover’s attorney David Gibboney would meet the group in Philadelphia and then travel with them essentially as tour guide, because the sergeants were not even told about the destination or the gold. John Hunt, commandant of the disciplinary barracks, told the sergeants not to handcuff Grover — he didn’t want to attract public attention to the group as they traveled by train to Philadelphia, where they would use a Bergdoll automobile to proceed to Hagerstown. To further camouflage the mission, Grover was issued an actual army uniform. The result quickly turned into an episode worthy of the Keystone Cops (the original silent film episodes of which had ended just a few years earlier, in 1917).



Meeting the group at the Philadelphia train station were the attorney, Gibboney, Grover’s friend Eugene Stecher — a mechanic who would be driving the car, a Hudson — and James Romig, a family friend who, incidentally, had met up with Grover several times while he was a fugitive. As they set out, the Hudson immediately started acting up, “knocking to beat the band.” It was decided that rather than risking the trip to Hagerstown, they would head for the Bergdoll mansion in West Philadelphia, where repairs might be made.



There, the sergeants became houseguests. They enjoyed lunch, then dinner, and then Romig suggested going out for some entertainment, so they all went to the Gayety Theatre and took in a burlesque show. On the way home from there, they decided to stop at a saloon. (Prohibition had gone into effect during Grover’s court-martial, but speakeasies were not hard to find.) After a few drinks, they headed back to the mansion and went to bed, Grover sharing a room with O’Hare, who somehow was able to sleep with one eye shut and keep a watch on Grover with the other.



Not long after their arrival, Grover slipped a note to Stecher indicating that he intended to escape, and wanted Stecher to go with him. Stecher confided this intention to Emma, who said, “For Christ’s sake, go with him. If you don’t go with him, he is going to shoot one of those fellows,” meaning the sergeants. This threat had some credibility, because Emma was still known to keep numerous weapons around the house. While Stecher continued to tinker with the engine, Grover, Romig and the sergeants played pool in the third-floor billiards room. After lunch, a bottle of gin appeared in the room. While Sgt. O’Hare was a teetotaler, Sgt. York took a sip from time to time. Grover entertained the group for a time by reading from a book of Shakespeare’s poems. Finally at some point, Grover entered the adjacent bathroom. Apparently, this bathroom had a second door into a bedroom, from which, unseen by the pool players, he made his way downstairs and out to the garage, where Stecher had the Hudson running. Perhaps, there was never anything mechanically wrong with it to begin with. The sergeants and others present discovered soon enough that Grover wasn’t in the bathroom anymore, but wasted time searching the mansion instead of alerting police; then they called Gibboney, Grover’s attorney, who suggested that maybe Grover had just gone out for a ride with Stecher to check out how the car was running. By the time the authorities were alerted, considerable time had passed, and roadblocks were ineffective. The pair had gotten clean away.



Grover’s original period as a fugitive and his arrest, trial and conviction had garnered plenty of press attention, and this new escape and disappearance made even more headlines and inspired editorial writers throughout the country.  “Wanted” posters went up again; various sightings, from Boston to Florida to Texas, were reported but proved spurious.



In reality Grover and Stecher were heading northwest, toward Minnesota. They didn’t bother with disguises and continued driving the same car, only replacing the Pennsylvania license plates with a pair purchased at a junkyard in Indiana. When they arrived at the border town of St. Vincent, Minnesota, they put the car in storage at a garage, and asked the garage owner where they might buy some whiskey. He suggested a pub on the Canadian side, and provided them with convenient  directions for skirting the customs post on the main road. Once in Canada, they bought train tickets to Winnipeg, where they began to make plans to travel to Germany by steamship. With the benefit of some lax procedures on the part of the Winnipeg steamship agent and local authorities, they managed to obtained Canadian passports under false names. They continued by train to Montreal, where they got their passports endorsed by the Belgian, Swedish and Swiss consulates, and on July 7, 1920, they embarked for Europe on the Canadian Pacific steamship Victorian, bound for Liverpool. From there, they traveled to London by train, and obtained more passport endorsements from the German and Dutch consulates, crossed the North Sea on a Dutch ferry, and took a train into Germany, where they made their way to the village of Eberbach, located between Frankfurt and Stuttgart. This was the birthplace of Grover’s mother Emma, and still the home of numerous sympathetic relatives.



Meanwhile, of course, there were repercussions for all who played a role in permitting the escape. The sergeants, York and O’Hare, were tried but acquitted by the army. The Fort Jay commandant Col. John Hunt, was also tried and acquitted, but then immediately retired from duty. Three of Grover’s lawyers, including Gibboney, were found by a grand jury to be not criminally liable, but they were censured for arranging the expedition. Grover’s brother Erwin, who had also resisted the draft and joined Grover during his first period on the lam, was court-martialed, found guilty of desertion, and sentenced to four years at Fort Leavenworth. There would be no treasure hunting expeditions for him. Emma, Romig, Grover’s brother Charles Brawn, and two family friends were put on trial for helping Grover escape. They were all found guilty, with Brawn, Emma and Romig convicted on the most serious charges. They could have drawn long prison terms, but ultimately were all just issued hefty fines, totaling $23,000 for the five. Although Emma at first swore that she’d go to prison rather than pay up, she soon paid the full $23,000 covering all five defendants.



While Grover was settling down in Eberbach, sustained by funds wired by Emma, the U. S. House of Representatives set up a special committee to examine the entire affair. Over a period of three weeks in the spring of 1921, they heard from many of the players, including military officials, lawyers for the Bergdolls, and Bergdoll family members. Occasionally, committee members as well as newspaper editorialists and the American Legion would focus on Grover’s name, saying that referring to him as Grover Cleveland Bergdoll besmirched the name of the president, and that they should just call him Grover or G. C. Some even suggested that he should be forced to change his name. Toward the end of the hearings Emma deflated this entire idea when John H. Sherberne, special counsel for the committee, inquired, “Mrs. Bergdoll, how did you happen to name Grover for a former President of this country, who was perhaps best known for his warlike spirit?” Emma replied, “He was not a warlike spirit, he was a draft dodger himself. Grover Cleveland was a draft dodger in the Civil War, and paid $200 fine for a man.” (Recall that it was possible during the Civil War for a man to pay a substitute to serve in his place when he was drafted.)



The Bergdoll saga now settled into a long stalemate that was to last nearly two decades. Eberbach was not in territory occupied by the Allies, and in the absence of diplomatic relations between the United States and Germany, extradiction was out of the question. This didn’t prevent at least two attempts to kidnap Bergdoll and return him to American custody.



In the first of these, in 1921 two American soldiers stationed at the American occupation force’s headquarters in Coblenz, Carl Naef and Franz Zimmer, took it upon themselves to travel to Eberbach, where they tracked down Grover and Stecher as they happened to be driving a young engaged couple to meet their wedding party at the railroad station. Stecher managed to gun the car to a getaway, but shots were fired at them and the prospective bride was shot in the hand. A crowd of citizens and police surrounded the kidnappers, who were arrested, brought to trial and jailed, later to be released. A few years later, in 1923, another kidnap attempt, again unsuccessful, was organized by one Sergeant Corliss Hooven  Griffis. This time, Grover was better prepared, and managed to get six shots off at two of Griffis’s co-conspirators when they attacked him at a hotel. One was killed, another seriously wounded, and Grover received a head wound requiring five stitches. Grover was held blameless by the German government, which was rightfully concerned by both kidnap attempts on its sovereign soil by U.S. citizens. Griffis and three of his co-conspirators were found guilty and sentenced to prison terms by a German court. Two of them were also fined two trillion marks — this was during the German post-war period of hyperinflation — which converted to about 50 cents American for each. After a few months, an American petition with more than two million signatures, including 19 state governors, 117 members of Congress, and 208 mayors was presented for the release of Griffis. The German government relented and expelled the prisoners without pardoning them. Griffis was welcomed home by New York’s mayor and a crowd of thousands.



Meanwhile the US was moving toward concluding a final peace treaty with Germany. As this was being crafted, some Congressmen demanded a clause requiring Germany to return any draft evaders, a provision aimed squarely at Grover’s rendition. In the end, a specific extradiction clause was omitted, but the treaty did specify that “nothing herein contained shall be construed to terminate the military status of any person now in desertion from the military or naval service of the United States, nor to terminate the liability to prosecution and punishment under the Selective Service Law,” a provision certainly meant to cover Bergdoll. Meanwhile, under laws providing for the seizure of property of “enemy aliens,” Bergdoll assets valued at more than $800,000 were seized. The national convention of the American Legion in 1921 passed a lengthy resolution demanding that the government do all in its power to secure the return of “Grover C. Bergdoll, a notorious service slacker,” adding that “his escape and the failure to apprehend this arch slacker will remain a blot upon the war records of this nation until judgment is done.” At the same time, of course, the government was still doing virtually nothing to pursue the hundreds of thousands of other, less flamboyant cases of draft evasion that had happened during the war.



In 1926, during an elopement to Leningrad, the 33-year-old Grover married Berta Franck, who was 18 at the time. Over the years, they would have seven children together.



By 1939, war clouds were again emanating from Germany, and Grover, now 46 years old, concluded that facing justice in the United States was preferable to having his family spend the war in Germany. Over the years, Grover had actually managed to enter the United States twice for expended stays totaling seven years, never being caught. The second of these stays began in 1935, with the entire family hiding in plain sight at the Bergdoll mansion in Philadelphia. They returned to Germany in 1938; Grover informed officials at the American consulate in Stuttgart in early 1939 that he intended to surrender without conditions, and the entire family then returned to the U. S. for good. While Grover was traveling home, efforts were made in Congress to craft legislation that would strip citizenship from deserters and exclude them from entry into the country under certain circumstances. Again this was aimed purely at Grover, but Grover’s lawyers managed to delay action on the measure long enough for Grover to arrive in New York City, which made the legislation moot. Upon arrival, Grover was taken into custody and jailed back at Fort Jay on Governors Island. After another court-martial, he was sentenced to finish his original prison term plus three more years for the escape and long evasion of justice, and issued a dishonorable discharge from military service. With time off for good behavior, he was released about five years later, in 1944, despite further protests from veterans’ organizations.



Grover died in 1966 at the age of 72. His later years were not free of drama. His son Alfred, in 1948, repeated his father’s refusal to be inducted. He was sentenced to five years in Lewisburg Prison (where, incidentally, he befriended the accused Soviet spy Alger Hiss). Of course Alfred’s case occasioned renewed coverage of his father’s saga. Later, Grover became abusive of his family, including Berta. They separated and divorced; he began to exhibit more and more psychotic behavior, and was committed to a psychiatric hospital where he spent his final few years. He had lived his entire life on the proceeds of the estates of his grandparents and parents, and never worked seriously for a living. He left his still-substantial estate to his daughter Katharina, whom he had grown to favor toward the end of his life, and provided just $20 each to his other estranged children and his wife. Katharina quickly arranged for the will to be voided, so that an equalized distribution could be made among Berta and all the children. Berta died in 2001 at the age of 93.



Despite voluminous documentation deriving from the various trials, Congressional inquiries, correspondence, and an unpublished biography penned by Alfred, the son who dodged the draft himself, it is difficult to fully understand what motivated Grover to go on the lam for so long and to frequently thumb his nose at the authorities pursuing him. Given his institutionalization late in life, it is certainly possible that a psychiatric condition, such as an antisocial personality disorder, was present early on. Much of his behavior is consistent with such a diagnosis. But other factors may also have influenced him. His German heritage may have played a role in not wishing to take up arms. He occasionally suggested he was a conscientious objector, and it’s possible that this was influenced by Emma during his youth, but he never made a formal claim of conscientious objector status. But at the end of the day, Grover continued to flaunt the authorities for decades during which he could have could have resolved his problems at any time and avoided the problems he continued to put his family through.



Grover’s airplane, the Wright brothers model B, had been placed in storage before his first disappearance. In the 1930s, it was discovered by a group of aviation enthusiasts, and Grover agreed to donate the plane to them. It was fully restored, flown once more in 1934, and then put on display in the Aviation Hall of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia — one of just eight surviving Wright brothers planes.



Now a full disclosure: my son Dirk Langeveld wrote a book called “The Artful Dodger,” a biography of Grover from which I have derived the bulk of the facts in this paper.

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