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.