A Short History of the Queens Fourth Ward Memorial Day Parade
Part 4 of the Forgotten and Secret History of Whiting Square
1927 was to be a big year for the veterans of Woodhaven’s Whiting Post No. 59, VFW. Chartered in January 1919, the post spent its first year or so quartered at the Woodhaven Republican Club at the corner of Woodhaven and Jamaica Avenue. In 1920, the post moved to the Hillside Temple on 96th Street, a Masonic hall where it held meetings and socials until 1926. Finding a permanent home had long been a goal of the post, like so many other organizations and groups seeking clubhouse, office, or meeting space in fast-growing Queens. By late 1926, members of the post’s building committee—led by Arthur English—finally had something to show for their efforts, and in early 1927 they closed on a three story building on a double lot in Union Course, not far from what would soon become Whiting Square. After a housewarming party for Whiting Memorial Hall in early February at which English was installed as Post Commander, the next weeks were busy with civic activity at the headquarters and community center they had sought for so long. The flag dedication ceremony on April 3, which featured Arthur’s daughter Kae and to which we will return a bit later, was followed in early May by a “peanut festival” organized by several women and girls from the auxiliary, including Mary English. Mary, perhaps even more than her husband, seemed to have a hand in everything. Soon, however, attention would turn to Memorial Day, the most important day on the veteran’s calendar.
We know from the vantage of nearly one hundred years in the future that the Memorial Day parade in Queens in 1927 turned out to be a disaster. Violence between the Ku Klux Klan, police and parade spectators erupted at several points along the parade route. There were some injuries and arrests. Presumably one of a thousand men who marched in Klan robes that day, Fred C. Trump, the father of the future disgraced president, was detained and then released without being charged. His involvement was big news for a while during the 2016 presidential campaign, then the story disappeared. But Fred Trump—twenty-one in 1927 and four years in the family business of construction and real estate—was a bit player, just a soldier if he had anything to do with the Ku Klux Klan. The tussle over whether he was a member is a distraction from what was a big story in Jamaica at the time and should be now: before they were shooed underground less than a decade later, many young Protestants in the Fourth Ward joined the Klan in the 1920s. One Jamaica klavern, or lodge, had as many as a thousand members. A unit in Richmond Hill had at least half that and there were about a dozen of them in Queens during the 1920s, some operating deep into the 1930s. Despite the national downward trend from a 1924 peak, Klan membership in New York rose in 1927 after the parade and the ensuing controversy. The reverberations of the riot on Hillside Avenue in Jamaica near the end of the Memorial Day parade in 1927, like the way an earthquake can trigger a tsunami, continued for long after and had consequences both for the Klan and for Queens. We’ll sort out all the details about how the Ku Klux Klan came to be involved in the spring of 1927, but first some background about the Memorial Day parade in Queens’ Fourth Ward.
The Fourth Ward of Queens stretched from the more urban Woodhaven and Ozone Park on the west end to more sparsely populated villages east and southeast of Jamaica, with Richmond Hill anchoring smaller districts like Dunton or Westbridge in the middle. In Woodhaven, like the rest of the Fourth Ward, Memorial Day in 1927 was dominated by the large parade that brought together those vastly different communities along a four mile route from Woodhaven to Jamaica.
In late January of that year, as Arthur English and Whiting Post were closing on the 90th Road building that would become their new clubhouse, the Citizens’ Memorial Day Committee of the Fourth Ward held its first meeting for 1927 at Jamaica Town Hall. Completed in 1870, the building was once the seat of government, an opera house, and for years a court building. By 1927 it was also an all-purpose public meeting space and when razed in 1941 Jamaica Town Hall was home to a variety of civic and arts groups.
Since the first parade in 1916, the Citizens’ Memorial Day Committee always held its meetings at Jamaica Town Hall. Each year the intent was to create a parade even bigger than the last, something that required ever more planning and coordination. The work typically began in January or February when the outgoing president of the Citizens’ Committee called the first meeting at Jamaica Town Hall. At that meeting they elected the incoming committee leadership, created subcommittees and conducted other housekeeping business, such as announcing which local Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) member would serve as the Grand Marshal that year. The meetings about the 1927 parade would prove to be some of the most dramatic in the history of the borough.
The Citizens’ Committee saw to the details associated with such a large operation, coordinating with the veterans through the Executive and Memorial Committee of the combined Alfred M. Wood Post No. 368, GAR, and George H. Tilly Camp No. 66 of the United Spanish War Veterans (USWV), both in Jamaica. The Executive and Memorial Committee, especially its GAR members, were the de facto leaders, if not the owners of the parade. It was, after all, their parade. Each year, the commander of the Wood Post formally requested the parade permit from the police commissioner’s office, and reflecting the order of things, they retained the final word on important decisions, a status soon untenable given their aging years and shrinking numbers. Like the shift from “Decoration Day” to “Memorial Day” in every day usage, these dynamics reflected the transition from a holiday focused on the losses of a single war—ideally with nearby graves that can be decorated—to those wars fought at sea, in distant lands or faraway isles, the “foreign wars” from which many did not return.
The original impulse for Memorial Day, institutionally speaking, comes from the Grand Army of the Republic’s national commander Major General John Logan, whose 1868 Memorial Day Order called for a day to decorate the graves of those heroes who died for the Union cause. One original destination for Decoration Day processions was the Union Grounds section of Cypress Hills National Cemetery in Brooklyn, which opened in 1863 and includes many who died in New York hospitals during the war. The first procession to Cypress Hills in 1868, such as it was, reflected how surviving Civil War veterans wanted to observe their fallen comrades. The Brooklyn Union described how the men of the Mansfield Post No. 35 in Brooklyn met at their encampment on Grand Street before convening with at least two other posts at the Armory before proceeding east
“…in the direction of the Cemetery, with wagons loaded with flowers, which they reached about half-past three o’clock. The procession passed through the gate, the band playing an impressive march, and moved through the different avenues until they reached the resting-place of those who had died to defend their country’s honor. The veterans and a number of interested persons surrounded the spot, while groups of persons were scattered here and there upon prominent points to catch a glimpse of the impressive scene.” (Brooklyn Union, 01 Jun 1868, p. 1)
The Union also described the arrival of that first ad hoc procession at the entrance to the cemetery:
“At the gate of the cemetery, the G.A.R., after forming in line, marched by a flank headed by the Fourteenth Regiment band, who patriotically volunteered their services, playing a funeral march. Next came the business wagon and span of Mr. Charles Carroll Sawyer, kindly furnished gratuitously, and containing the Executive Committee of the Ceremonies—“comrades” Dr. James L. Farley, City Auditor James McLeer, Captains Mosscrop, Gilles, Fox and Spooner. Next came the wagons containing the floral tributes, the most conspicuous of which was the large one, drawn by six plumed horses, furnished gratuitously by the Soldiers’ Business Messenger and Despatch Company. Next came the immense concourse of people on foot and in carriages. The scene was impressive as the cortege wended its way among the hills to the graves.” (Brooklyn Union, 01 Jun 1868, p. 1)
The next year, the New York Herald described how with more planning the event was a dramatic success. People went to Union Grounds and began decorating in preparation for the arrival of the procession. The paper noted how observers were touched by the young ages of the men buried there: 18, 17, 16 and even some only 15 years old. Today, the stones marking the graves are impressive if simple and faded from time. But back then men were still being interred there—including those who were initially buried in the South—and the conditions were more primitive, perhaps more urgent. As the Herald tells it:
“The rows of graves, arranged so that they form arcs of a circle, rise one above another very much like the seats in a theatre. The graves are as close one to the other as possible, and each row is separated by a path that barely admits of the passage of a single person. By far the greater portion of them have no mark to indicate who lies below; and there are a few, less than a hundred, which cannot be identified, and will not be until the bodies that are there unearthed shall once more obey the trumpet’s call. There are, however, a few marked with headboards, with painted letters, some of which are already split from top to bottom. A very few more have headstones of marble.”
Nowadays, of course, the graves are uniform and nearly perfectly so, although the Union grave stones are a little fancier than their Rebel counterparts, side by side or not. At the time,
“Notice was taken also of the fact that white and black soldiers lie side by side, but few were disposed to follow their prejudices of caste into the grave. Some of this throng of visitors were those who felt a deeper interest in the occasion than many who come upon horseback, with their nodding plumes and gaudy attire. When these had passed you saw here and there a solitary nameless grave, known to but one of all who looked down upon it, decorated with a tiny flag or a peony or a snow ball, or a scanty bouquet of wild flowers from the adjacent wood.” (New York Daily Herald, 31 May 1869, p. 10)
That first formal procession in 1869 was led by war orphans, followed by the wounded veterans, before others. A half hour before the procession entered the cemetery, the police cleared the hills of the thousands who were there early in order to make room for those about to arrive.
Over the next years as the parades grew, the solemnity of the original impulse for Decoration Day—graveside services—risked being eclipsed by the processions to the cemeteries. Even in the nineteenth century, the procession had become the parade, a more broadly conceived public spectacle. By 1916, the public’s attention had drifted from memorializing sacrifices of long ago, especially as significant threats loomed. Civic leaders worried about generating support for a new round of sacrifice, while the GAR worried about declining interest in remembering their wartime heroes, dead and living. They were very successful. In the last decade of the nineteenth century the Grand Army of the Republic led efforts to install monuments all over the northern United States, including significant monuments in Riverside Park, Brooklyn, but also in faraway Jamaica on Long Island. These monuments added other stops, if not alternate destinations, to enthusiastic patriotic parades in areas that at the time were distinct municipalities. They were public symbolic manifestations of grief and as such subject to interpretation, abstractions when compared to gravesites of those who fell fighting for their country, or for belief in an idea, or who fell with no beliefs as to why.
When those first Memorial Day processions to Cypress Hills were held it was nowhere Long Island. Within a few years, the procession to the cemetery had become something else entirely. As early as 1869, observances included even the arrest of pickpockets, caught applying their trade in the crowds standing amidst the graves, but this is how the conclusion of the 1873 parade was described that year by the Daily Eagle of Brooklyn:
“From East New York out to the entrance of Cypress Hills Cemetery the road this morning resembled the Coney Island road on a grand race day. Carriages, stages, trucks, in fact almost every description of American vehicles, loaded down with occupants, crowded the road. Out at the entrance of the cemetery many of the patriotic citizens of East New York were doing a thriving business in wagons from which they retailed lager beer, peanuts, oranges and refreshments of various kinds. In sweet accompaniment to the mellifluous chatter of their tongues a half dozen or more one-armed organs grinders groundout such lively and appropriate airs as “We won’t go home till morning,” and “Dixie’s Land.” Not twenty feet distant the white headstones of numberless graves gleamed full in their sight, yet the vile hucksters continued to shout out laudations of their wares and continued to indulge in frequent curses and coarse jibes. The entrance, with its crowd of rowdy peddlers, curiosity seekers and itinerant musicians, had all the surroundings of a circus exhibiting in a country town. The spectacle was repulsive, and excited numerous expressions of indignation. When Captain McLaughlin and a squad of sturdy policemen arrived upon the scene, the hucksters were forced to silence, which no doubt proved very irksome.” (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 30 May 1873, p. 4.)
Inside the cemetery it was quieter and more observant of the decorum expected for such an occasion. Still, the crowds came. Packed together in the sloping valley a short walk from the main entrance, five thousand gathered to pay respects to the Union and Confederate soldiers buried there. Some years there were twice as many standing shoulder to shoulder among the dead.
Twenty years had passed when in 1893 train service on the Cypress Hills extension opened to great fanfare. Extending the old Lexington Avenue line to the Cypress Hills Cemetery gates by the Memorial Day holiday had been a promise of the Brooklyn Elevated Railroad Company and its on-schedule performance was followed in the papers. The opening of the extension enabled untold thousands to participate and by all accounts they did. The Cypress Hills stop on the J line remains in use, one of the oldest sections of elevated train in New York.
Little remembered now, Alfred M. Wood Post No. 368 was one of a few Grand Army of the Republic posts in Queens County. Flushing, Long Island City, College Point, and Newtown were represented, and so were Freeport, Hempstead and Glen Cove, as each was then part of Queens County. For years there had been talk of a GAR post in Jamaica, but for whatever reason attempts to formally organize one failed. Other organizations existed at the time, such as the independent Jamaica Veterans Association, but the GAR was the unrivaled national veterans’ group (and lobby) in the 1880s. The rapid growth of the village in the years after the war made it inevitable that Jamaica would be home to a GAR post. Twenty-one years after the first Decoration Day visit to Cypress Hills Jamaica finally received its charter.
“You are invited to attend a meeting of Veterans,” Col. John Fleming, then the District Attorney of Queens County, wrote to prospective members in July of 1889,
“for the purpose of forming a Post of the G. A. R. If you desire to join, or are interested in seeing such organization established in the town of Jamaica, it is in the highest degree necessary that you attend this meeting, and thus aid those who believe that the town should be no longer unrepresented in that body of Veterans.”(A.M. Wood Post 368, G.A.R. Collection, Queens Public Library)
The assembled men voted to request the required paperwork for a charter from the GAR of New York for Jamaica Post No. 368. Though the formal mustering of the unit was not until October 1889, Fleming and others were already acting like a post, having invited the McPherson Post of Brooklyn and Hamilton Post of East New York to join them for a Memorial Day expedition to local cemeteries. “Whenever any organization from this ward has had occasion to spend a holiday with Jamaica organizations as guests,” the Daily Times of Brooklyn wrote in May 1889, “they have always been well treated, and no doubt the same will prove the case in this instance if the invitation be accepted.” By fall there were twenty-two signatures on the application. Many more would join in the 1890s, a period that saw the organization grow to about 50 members by the turn of the century. By then, Fleming would be a Justice in the Court of Special Sessions in Queens.
An Irish immigrant whose law studies were interrupted by the outbreak of war, Fleming was appointed Queens County District Attorney by Governor Grover Cleveland in 1883 and then ran two successful campaigns for re-election before his appointment to the Court of Special Sessions by Mayor Van Wyck. One of the most well-known figures in Jamaica 1880s and 1890s, his reputation was burnished by his takedown of Patrick Gleason, aka “Battle-Axe Gleason,” the corrupt teflon-clad mayor of Long Island City.
After the death of Col. Alfred M. Wood in 1895, and less than a year after he had become a member, Jamaica Post took his name as their own. Col. Wood was the leader of the 14th Regiment of the New York State Militia, known as the “red legged devils” for their attacks at Bull Run, where he was wounded and captured. After the war, Wood served a term as Brooklyn’s mayor before moving out to Jamaica in Queens County. He is buried at Greenfield Cemetery in the town of Hempstead.
By the time the post was renamed for Wood in 1895, Fleming was leading a subscription campaign to raise funds to pay for a Soldiers’ and Sailors’ monument in Jamaica. His speech at the ceremonial unveiling of the monument on Memorial Day in 1896 was so well regarded that it was published in full in 1916 on the twentieth anniversary. If you are curious, you can read Fleming’s speech in a separate post on this website.
Perhaps not as well known or appreciated today, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Jamaica has been an object of pride for New Yorkers since before it was installed. Its location in the middle of an intersection likely gave it outsized prominence. In early automobile touring guides, and well into the twentieth century, the Jamaica “Peace Monument” was used as a geographical reference point. The first driving route to south shore Long Island towns went through Queens: after crossing the Queensboro Bridge, take Queens Boulevard to Hillside Avenue and turn left, then at the monument turn right onto Merrick Road, which will take you all the way there. Others, especially those who suffered crashes there, saw its location as a dangerous outrage.
When the monument was originally installed in the middle of Hillside Avenue at Bergen Avenue (now known as Merrick Blvd.), Hillside ran along the outer limits of the old village. In the years after, new development was carved out of farmland in every direction, but initially the location of the monument was out of the way. In the last years of the nineteenth century, Bergen was a street lined with large homes on spacious lots. As initially installed, the monument was oriented on Hillside so that it faced Bergen with the barren hills of the soon-to-be Jamaica Hills neighborhood behind it. With the surging popularity of automobiles, the location was an obvious hazard. Even before automobiles, horse-drawn car traffic around the monument had been an issue. Over the years, the idea of moving the monument was raised. The last surviving member of the Wood Post, David Llewellyn, who died in 1937, was instrumental in keeping the statue where it was as he and other veterans stopped attempts to move it to Rufus King Park. But after nearly three decades of debate and discussion, in 1960 the monument was moved to Major Mark Park, just a few blocks east on Hillside.
The Jamaica Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument consists of a ten foot granite pedestal topped by a nearly eleven foot cast bronze figure of Victory with arms outstretched. In her left hand, a wreath of peace; in her right, a palm frond, both symbols of victory and the peace victory brings. It was cast by Frederick Wellington Ruckstuhl, a German immigrant and a founding member of the National Sculpture Society. To this day, Ruckstull, as his name is commonly spelled now, is a widely regarded sculptor whose legacy is complicated by the fact that he did similar monuments in the south celebrating Confederates who died for their cause. The monument in Jamaica would also be the subject of controversy, first in 1926, then for a few years after when the Ku Klux Klan made a cause out of attempts to place a wreath there, as was done by civic, fraternal and religious organizations during patriotic events or on holidays. Although the Klan did this elsewhere in New York, such as in Ridgewood, Queens, at the Nathan Hale statue in Manhattan and in Freeport on Long Island, the monument in Jamaica came to have a special significance to the Klan in New York and it is for this reason, as well as it’s significance to Memorial Day activities in Jamaica and the Fourth Ward in general, that we discuss it here.
As the Town of Jamaica grew into a section of a borough of a modern twentieth century city, exercises on May 30th grew steadily also. Before 1916, Memorial Day exercises in the Fourth Ward were mostly local affairs. Mostly focused on visiting graves of those who died in combat or those survivors interred in cemeteries nearby, ceremonies held in Jamaica were led by the Wood Post and featured invocations and speeches by eminent men like Andrew Magill, the pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Jamaica, Col. Fleming and others. The Jamaica Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument stood at one end of a parade route that passed old Fraternity Hall, a wooden structure on Herriman Avenue (now 161st Street) that housed Jamaica’s first public school and where the Wood Post had an office until the building was torn down about 1926. On Fulton (present-day Jamaica Avenue), the parade would pass Jamaica Town Hall, Grace Cemetery and the Dutch Reformed Church, now home to Jamaica Center of the Arts, before ending up at King Manor, once the home of Declaration of Independence signer Rufus King and currently an active community-oriented house museum. Behind the old home in Rufus King Park, a large open area that was used for patriotic gatherings, speeches and so forth. Sometimes the parade went the other direction. In 1916 and for a time after, the Fourth Ward parade turned off Hillside at Alsop street (that’s 150th Street today) to make this Jamaica circuit, but after a few years organizers dropped that part of an already long parade, instead ending it after the reviewing stand near the monument.
By 1916, twenty years after its installation, the old farm village had grown up around the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument. Conflict in Europe was raging and civic leaders wanted to involve the public in patriotic activity as the nation began the mobilization for war. Woodhaven real estate and insurance man Frank E. Tilly, unrelated—at least directly—to Captain George H. Tilly, namesake of the USWV camp in Jamaica, was the president of Homestead Civic Association in Woodhaven in 1916 when “civic worker” George DeVestern was tapped by the organization to organize a parade committee. With John Hilliker, then the Commander of Wood Post, DeVestern worked to recruit other groups to march. They broke the ward into into sections, each making up divisions of the parade to follow in line in behind the veterans. Woodhaven, Richmond Hill, Jamaica each made up a division, with miscellaneous fast-growing smaller villages, like Hollis, Queens Village (then just known as Queens) and Springfield, grouped together.
Frank Tilly and the other leaders of the Homestead Civic wanted regular citizens to march in support of the GAR and the USWV, not just stand on the sidelines and watch a veterans-only parade as had been the custom. Tilly was quoted as saying at a meeting of the Citizens’ Committee that “I don’t want anyone to be a slacker. Those who can walk, I want in the parade. There should be only a few onlookers.” A “citizens’ committee”—like those that formed in East New York and in north Brooklyn—would help mobilize the public and yet still allow the old veterans to retain control of important decisions.
Ohio-born Hilliker was the first marshal of the parade in 1916 and was the last in that role in 1927. Hilliker served as Grand Marshal six times and Leroy Smartwood, another commander of the Wood Post during those years, also served six times. Hilliker, an active figure in memorial exercises in Queens after joining the Wood Post in 1899, is said to have joined the Union Army twice, once as a drummer boy and again later where he saw significant action and was wounded. He was a dairy farmer in Bushwick when he moved to Queens around 1890 and was an early owner of the Dexter Park property just across the Kings County line, once famous for baseball and pigeon shooting. Hilliker seems to have sold his interest in Dexter Park after he and his family moved east from Union Course to Richmond Hill, where he expanded his dairy enterprise.
When the first Memorial Day parade was organized in Queens’ Ward Four in 1916, the youngest remaining Civil War veterans were in their 70s, their numbers thinning. This decline in membership would continue past 1933, when the 89 year-old Hilliker was buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery, leaving two members of the Alfred M. Wood Post. The creation of a citizens’ committee began a transition amidst already intense change. The old guard GAR leadership of the parade, long the focus of the parade, would soon be succeeded by the “veterans of all wars.” The assertion of public interest in creation of the committee would also require organizing and outreach to engage that very public, whose interest was not guaranteed, especially in an era of new amusements. This transition in leadership, and thus control of the parade, sped up during the war years and was winding down in early 1928 when in a dramatic ceremony during a snowstorm at the Highland Park YMCA in Cypress Hills the leaders of the Wood Post, GAR, passed relics and colors to the Whiting Post, VFW, represented by Arthur English, the outgoing Commander.
In 1916, George DeVestern, at the prompting of Tilly and the rest of the Homestead Civic Association, brought together a large number of civic, social and fraternal organizations to increase public participation in patriotic activity. Working with the Executive and Memorial Committee of the Wood Post and the Tilly Camp, the Citizens’ Committee held winter planning meetings that began with the election of committee officers and then the announcement of the parade’s grand marshal as well as the marshals of each division. Successive meetings over the weeks and months leading up to Memorial Day on May 30 saw the enlistment of organizations to sponsor, participate and otherwise help organize the divisions.
Sustaining the parade in every community in the Fourth Ward took support from as many groups and businesses as possible. In the weeks before May 30, local theaters held fundraiser events for the parade. A 1922 advertisement for the Merrick in Jamaica, “Long Island’s Finest Theatre,” reveals that motion pictures shot along the parade route on Memorial Day were shown the very next week. The shorts were screened before the main feature, a lost silent film called “My Old Kentucky Home,” staring Monte Blue. “See yourself as the others saw you while you were marching along,” the ad says.
The emerging fixation on the selfie did not include cultural self-awareness, for the week before Memorial Day a parade fundraiser minstrel show was held at the Roosevelt Theater. Perhaps as it might in a small town, the Roosevelt played an active role in the community, hosting events such for groups like the PTA of PS 97. The minstrel show in the 1920s was still a very popular form. Even as attitudes changed, it survived at church fundraisers from Jamaica to the Bronx well into the 1960s.
The Chat helped out by putting notices of the Citizens’ Committee fundraiser minstrel show on its front page. While the show was mentioned in other newspapers, the Chat was the most supportive of the local newspapers, publishing announcements of the meetings of the Citizens’ Memorial Day Committee, running front-page stories about guest speakers and what was discussed. Given what we learned about Mary English’s involvement with community programming for local radio, it’s very likely that the parade was a constant source of discussion on local broadcasts that engaged civic and patriotic topics.
The parade grew to be one of the largest Memorial Day parades in the city and the largest in Queens. It was fundamentally an organizing effort, and much of it was done by the first chief of staff of the parade, George DeVestern. When he took up the work of forming a committee to organize broader community involvement in Memorial Day exercises, George DeVestern was fresh off his work for the Richmond Hill Civic Association. An early member and president of the RHCA, in 1915 DeVestern began a drive to increase membership, going from 300 to over 1000 in just a few months. DeVestern utilized the newspapers to great effect, arranging extensive coverage of the drive and of the RHCA in general in the Richmond Hill Record, the Chat and other papers.
Born in Brooklyn in 1881 and raised in its Greenpoint neighborhood, George DeVestern married Lillian Davis in 1905 and the couple had four daughters, the last born in the family living room in Queens during a gathering on Christmas Eve in 1914. In Greenpoint, DeVestern had been active with Orchard Primitive Methodist Church on Oakland Street (now known as McGuinness) and he was a popular adult Sunday School teacher there before moving to new construction in Richmond Hill around 1913. In 1910, he listed his occupation as salesman of dry goods on the census; in 1920 it was wholesale sales and by 1925 he was a sales manager, joining the Baldwin Bond and Mortgage Company in Jamaica in that capacity when it formed that year. Over the next years, he would serve as a director and treasurer at the company.
DeVestern was a popular figure and his success growing the membership of the Richmond Hill Civic Association was noticed by the Homestead Civic in Woodhaven. At the time, there were other civics in that section, such as the Union Course Civic Association, the West End Citizens’ League and the Forest Park Taxpayers’ Association. It would prove to be a golden age of homeowner and neighborhood civic associations—to say nothing of political clubs and fraternal organizations—and George DeVestern was a big part of it in central Queens. When Frank Tilly and others from Homestead saw what he had done for Richmond Hill, they asked him to join their organization to help accomplish similar ends. DeVestern agreed to join, launching a campaign that was underway when they asked him to establish a citizen’s committee that would take up what the aging veterans of the GAR could not—a mass mobilization of the public to participate in a large parade encompassing the entire Fourth Ward.
That first year, Devestern, working with Hilliker of the GAR and others from the Tilly Camp of the USWV, recruited an army of other organizations—civic, social and fraternal—to march in line behind the veterans. Described in the printed program was the “Citizens’ Escort Honorable Committee of One Hundred,” led by its chairman State Supreme Court Justice James C. Van Siclen. Among the many veteran, civic, fraternal, there were many youth groups represented, including the Boy Scouts, the Girls’ First Aid Corps Company, the Ottilie Orphan Asylum Band and others, such as the United Boys’ Brigade of America, a militaristic Christian youth organization. The UBBA was represented at different levels in the hierarchy by two of the Wagner brothers, whom we will meet more fully later. That first year DeVestern claimed there were 10,000 marchers, with five times that watching along the route. At the time it was described as the largest parade ever held in Queens County.
When planning began early in 1917, there was rising anxiety about the war in Europe. With the declaration of war in April of that year, the war effort demanded the patriotic commitment of everyone. Memorial Day that year drew another long line of marchers—it was said the parade took an hour and a quarter to pass. The Fourth Ward Memorial Day Parade was followed by the national draft “Registration Day” on June 5 and some of the same organizations and people worked to help make the conscription drive a success. By August, those who had not claimed exemption were being called to service. George DeVestern and others from the committee worked to organize “send off” events. To show support for the departing conscripts, residents were encouraged to decorate their homes; events were held at schools and meeting halls featuring patriotic songs and speeches before draftees were driven in a parade of decorated automobiles to Jamaica station for the ride to Camp Upton at Yaphank in Suffolk County.
During the preparations for the 1918 Fourth Ward Memorial Day Parade, reports of the first casualties hailing from Queens County were coming in from the battlefields of France. Behind DeVestern, their unanimous choice to lead the committee as president, the Memorial Day committee sought to bring 1500 active duty soldiers from Camp Upton. According to the Chat, DeVestern went to “see the powers that be” about getting some boys in khaki sailors for the parade and he was “given assurance” that there would be plenty. It’s not clear that any soldiers from Camp Upton participated, but the General Orders issued in the days before the parade included a mention that “Regular U.S.A.—Navy and Marine Corps.—N.Y. Guard as Honorary Escort will assemble on Jamaica Avenue and Forest Parkway, Woodhaven.”
The next year, DeVestern was again the parade committee chief of staff when he published an open letter in the Chat. Thanking the community for their support, DeVestern claimed that 19,000 people had marched with the GAR, including:
“the United Veterans of the Spanish War, Foreign War Veterans, World War Veterans, Our Heroes from Overseas, Blue Jackets, 13th Regiment, Coast Guard Artillery, N. Y. N. G., Sons of Veterans, Letter Carriers, Veteran Firemen, Red Cross Societies, Boy Scouts of Queens Borough, 12th Regiment, Police Reserves, and the combined church, patriotic, civic, fraternal, political organizations, public and parochial schools, from Jamaica, Hollis, Queens, Bellaire, Springfield, St. Albans, Cedar Manor, Woodhaven, Richmond Hill, Morris Park, Dunton, Glen Morris, Kew Gardens, Forest Hills and Ozone Park.”
The 1919 parade was the first after the armistice and after American service members began returning home, a process that would continue for long after. It was also the first Memorial Day since Woodhaven’s Whiting Post No. 59 of the VFW was chartered that January. The Whiting Post marched in the first division of the parade, behind the Tilly Camp and the Wood Post, but before the World War Veterans, the Sons of Veterans, the Boy Scouts, the letter carriers and the American Red Cross. If before the war there had been an ever-fewer number of veterans to cherish and shower with gratitude, suddenly there was a flood of them.
Emotions that spring were high. The loss of life experienced locally was only coming into view. The mothers of the 120 soldiers from the Fourth Ward who did not return rode in the parade that year, escorted by veterans from the American Expeditionary Forces. Mary Immaculate Hospital in Jamaica linked a fundraising campaign to build an addition to the memory of the 120, dedicating new buildings in their honor. Interest in the parade in 1919 was never higher. Even the old timers were swept up by the occasion, as the Daily Press put it in a 1931 look-back:
“It was the first of the Fourth Ward celebrations to include veterans of three wars.
“Pershing’s veterans marched—tanned, hard, tough, fresh from the mud and blood of France.
“Veterans of Cuba and the Philippines, less young, not quite so fit as the doughboys just back from victory, marched.
“Even the blue clad vets who had campaigned in the South during the Civil War were marching—spurning automobile rides on the long tramp from Woodhaven to Jamaica. Caught in the mob spirit of a community freed from war they marched the long route; the eternal determination to prove themselves as good as ever, forcing their old legs to keep in step with the killing pace of the newer generation.”
At a meeting in May 1919, the Whiting Post conferred honorary membership on Dewitt Clinton Whiting, the father of the post’s namesake, Lt. Clinton Lowden Whiting. They gave honors to veterans and recruited heavily for new members. Commander William Dineen even went to Camp Upton to spread the word about the new organization in Woodhaven that would support them when they came home.
The needs of the returning soldiers, who suffered not only close encounters with death, but injury, devastating influenza, and a range of unbearable traumas, were also on the mind of community leaders in Woodhaven in the spring of 1919. At a meeting of the Woodhaven Memorial Hall Association about three weeks before Memorial Day, Association member Rev. Roy L. Minich of Christ Congregational Church said veterans were owed something while they were still alive: a place to go. The needs of the community for a community hall for meetings, with club rooms and an auditorium, not unlike Jamaica Town Hall, were matched by the needs of living soldiers who would now need to integrate back into everyday life. As Rev. Minich said that day:
“We have come to the time when we consider a memorial to the dead most fitting when it is also a blessing to the living. We need a place in every town and city where the soldiers of every war may meet together. It is one of the shames of the past that the street corner or back of a saloon were all too often the only place in which veterans had to meet. A place ought to be provided for the meeting of veterans, not only that they should enjoy the advantage of fellowship, but also that some of the excellent work begun in the army might continue to be carried on. Many of the excellent work began in the army of the educational efforts familiar to the service might be continued in a building of this kind. Next to a man’s sense of duty to his God stands this sense of duty to his country. The ever-present symbol of man’s relation to God is the church, which is seen everywhere. But where is there a visible symbol of man’s relation to his country. What we need is a Temple of Patriotism. Why should the relation of man to his country be left to be formed by chance utterances on the street, or to an occasional lecture in the public schools. The only preparation which our country made for the late war was to teach all men to love their country. It proves more efficient than the military machine which Germany spent 40 years in creating. By teaching men to love their country, we prepare ourselves for any emergency in the future.”
William Dineen, vice-president of the Woodhaven Memorial Hall Association and the first Commander of the Whiting Post, had this to say:
“The soldier does not desire a monument or a shaft. A university or a hospital will be no memorial for him or his future generations. If it is the real desire of the residents of Woodhaven to erect a “Memorial” for the local boys, make it a memorial for the living soldier and sailor also, so that they may enjoy the fruits of a just reward as well as in commemoration of the dead, a monument that would be most fitting and forever commemorating the valiant services rendered by “our Boys,” one that would be most lasting and beneficial, of utility and value, beauty and splendor. It would be sacred to all hearts, a pride to our locality, and which every one of our boys would point to with pleasure and happiness. To expend a sum of money for the erection of monuments in a graveyard, or to seize upon the public fancy to add wings to hospitals are acts wholly apart from the desires of men and boys who ‘ask for bread and receive a stone,’ and as such would not be in keeping with the true Woodhaven spirit. Erect such a memorial as will be of actual benefit to the present as well as future generations. Erect a memorial in the form of a building that will be to the delight and satisfaction of the ‘boys’ we profess to honor, not an inactive or dead piece of rock or a massive load of useless brick, which would be used mostly by those who know little and care less as to who built it, or why it was built. Erect a memorial building in which to care for the relics and trophies of war, create therin a museum for all such, a historical room, a house continuing the standards and flags of the various veteran organizations formed by service men of the last and other generations of fighters. Tablets of bronze could be placed in the corridors enumerating the campaigns, together with names of those who died in defense of the flag. Such a memorial is the choice of all soldiers and sailors, and if it is the soldier, sailor or marine that you wish to honor and have no desire to drag in enterprises with a view to commercializing their patriotism and sacrifice, then heed the plea.”
The Woodhaven Memorial Hall Association did not manage to reach its goal to build such a broad-minded public resource, its effort collapsing within the next year, possibly because some of the groups involved in the Association changed course and planned to purchase or build a building of their own. Some of the same figures involved in the Memorial Hall Association were involved in bringing a Carnegie-funded library to Woodhaven, as well as in efforts to upgrade or build new schools in the area. In 1921 there was a push to secure funds for a home for the Woodhaven Post No. 118 of the American Legion, commanded at the time by a young civic worker and lawyer named James Pasta. In Richmond Hill, the American Legion Post No. 212 was also seeking clubhouse space. Others in that section pushed a plan for a museum containing historical relics, natural history, and more, to be located on the ridge overlooking Jackson Pond near the Myrtle Ave entrance to Forest Park, but that also did not come to pass, even though it was supported by the Gold Star Mothers Association and its leader Mathilda Burling, Borough President Maurice Connolly and many others. Church groups had the luxury of established meeting space, but others used club rooms, social halls, or fraternal clubhouses for their meetings. Even the Richmond Hill and Jamaica chapters of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan had building committees or were otherwise seeking clubhouse spaces of their own, as they rented space from the Masons, the Odd Fellows, or elsewhere. For many years the main Brooklyn unit of the Klan (Brooklyn No. 2) met at the Traffic Court building in Brooklyn, while the Glendale-Ridgewood Klan No. 78 met at the Yale Republican Club in Ridgewood before moving to a church room in Glendale.
The population of Queens’ Fourth Ward grew exponentially in the postwar years, and membership in veterans organizations grew with it. Because of this, organizers from the Citizens’ Memorial Day Committee managed to increase the size of the parade every year. This drive—to hold a parade even bigger than the last—was supported by various committees or subcommittees of the larger General Committee. Not only were there neighborhood committees, such as for Richmond Hill, Woodhaven and Jamaica, there was a membership committee, a press committee, as well as a speakers committee. Planning meetings were held weekly and in addition to various reports the meetings featured speakers invited by the speakers committee. Often these speakers were of great interest, including figures such as Congressman Charles Pope Caldwell, former Mayor Hylan and many others. The meetings, the invited speakers and the topics they discussed were publicized in and covered by local newspapers. The meetings became a regular feature of spring in the Fourth Ward. The intensive planning, however, took energy away from local efforts, sometimes pushing graveside remembrances to the weekend before Memorial Day.
The 1920 parade was again billed as the largest yet, remarkable given that the Chat reported that “high officials” claimed the 1919 Fourth Ward parade was the largest in the “greater city.” 1920 was the first year the parade was organized by an expanded Veterans’ Committee. Still the nominal leaders and cherished centerpiece of the parade, the thinning ranks of the Albert M. Wood Post 368 Grand Army of the Republic were again joined by the George H. Tilly Camp 66 of the United Spanish War Veterans. But in the year since demobilization began, the old-timers were joined by a large influx of World War vets who boosted the numbers of Whiting Post No. 59 and Richmond Hill’s Frank J. McConnell Post No. 229, of the VFW, as well as the following posts from the American Legion: John W. Mark Post No. 142, Corporal John Ruoff Post No. 632, Queens Post No. 302, and Richmond Hill Post No. 212.
Though he remained a significant figure in the parade each year, the 1920 parade was the first where George DeVestern no longer served either as president or chief of staff. DeVestern had been president of the Richmond Hill Civic Association since his election in 1918. Stepping away from a leadership role in the parade committee, during the next years he held various less prominent positions, such as aide to the chief of staff, and acted as a kind of booster, speaking out in support of the Richmond Hill contingent or the parade more generally. He continued serving on fundraising committees and the like but not as the executive organizer of the parade as he had been. After the launch of the Queens County Grand Jurors’ Association, which he founded in 1925, DeVestern remained broadly popular in the Fourth Ward. The Grand Jurors’ Association would play a role in the Klan affair after the Memorial Day fracas in 1927, as would DeVestern, largely due to his longtime association with the parade he founded in 1916.
As the parade got ever larger, so did the publicity and hype involved. Demands to engage every civic, social, fraternal, and religious entity to participate grew more fervent. DeVestern was less of a factor, but new leadership emerged to pick up where he left off.
In 1921, Frank Tilly, no longer president of Homestead Civic, was elected president of the parade committee. Tilly was well known in Woodhaven social, fraternal and political circles. His name appears in the paper hundreds of times before his death in 1926. Among the many positions he took on the issues of the day included his advocacy for the proposed widening of Woodhaven Avenue into a boulevard. Widening Woodhaven was almost universally opposed by neighborhood civic workers. Arguments in favor held that widening Woodhaven Avenue was good for economic growth, while opponents were mostly those who stood to lose their property, were otherwise impacted by the changes or worried about the changing character of what was once a sleepy village. Still others opposed not the widening but the assessments demanded of local property owners, something they felt should be borne by the whole city, a city that stood to benefit from the opening of a more capacious thoroughfare. The encroaching city and the anxieties it produced in the first generations after consolidation were the basis of many of the challenges faced by the old farming villages of Queens County, a dynamic that accelerated during the 1920s.
But Frank Tilly was just one of many who played significant roles in planning the parade. Some of the names belonged to well known public officials who lent their status to the effort as honorary figureheads, such as State Supreme Court Judge Van Siclen and Jamaica Postmaster Skidmore Petit, Jr., while other, lesser-known civic workers did a lot of the hands-on work. Captain Arthur Lowe, a Spanish War veteran who was the adjutant for the Wood Post, joined civic workers like Mae Reynolds, Harry Herzog, and many others in planning the parade after the war years. The roster of the executive leadership of the parade committee, as well as the division marshals, aides to the chief of staff, and representatives from myriad local organizations, is a who’s who of Fourth Ward civic and social circles in the 1920s.
The Chat reported that 25,000 were in line in 1922 when “the request for more marchers than watchers met a liberal response.” That was the year the Merrick Theater in Jamaica showed reels from the parade, allowing some in the parade to “see yourself as others saw you.” But the next year the Brooklyn Standard Union said 15,000 marched. Although modern readers should read such figures with skepticism, filtered as they are through pre-parade hype and post parade spin, what is clear is that the fervent community response of the immediate postwar years was followed by a falling-off of interest even as there was more organizational involvement.
The hype, spin, and the enthusiasm for what was by all accounts an enormously successful parade year after year, largely masked bickering behind the scenes, such as the inevitable clashing of egos of individual organizers. There were conflicts between neighborhoods and between some organizations but most of it is murky and nearly impossible to decipher from what’s reported in the newspapers. In 1923, parade president and former Queens County Sheriff William N. George had to shoot down rumors of a conflict between the military and civil sides of the parade, denying that veterans planned a separate ceremony. Some neighborhoods, like Morris Park, now considered part of Richmond Hill, held their own events at recently established memorials. Others withheld support until the last minute, or threatened to.
In 1924, Mrs. Wesley Hall (aka Lydia Hall) was elected president of the Citizens’ Memorial Day Committee, and thus was the first woman to “boss a parade in southern Queens,” as the Daily Eagle in Brooklyn put it. The Daily Times said Mrs. Hall “has been one of the hardest workers in the arrangements for the affair.” She and her husband were known for their support of causes like campaign to build Jamaica Hospital. Her name first appeared in the parade program in 1920 when she was the marshal for the Richmond Hill-Woodhaven Association. In 1923, she was listed as a guest on the reviewing stand just before the monument on Hillside Avenue. When asked if she would find it hard to be in charge of so many men, she exclaimed, “I should say not,” the Eagle reported. “They can’t do too much for me, and they’re so much easier to work with than women that I’m afraid when it’s all over I’ll be spoiled.”
As no traces of the inner workings of the committee are known to survive, we have to rely on newspaper accounts, which contained little of the behind the scenes drama that would spill out into the open in 1927. Some years some papers carried a few details of the workings of the Citizens’ General Committee, and 1924 is one of those years. Just a few, though. It’s not clear whether some of the lack of cohesion in planning the parade was due to the usual clashing personalities and behind the scenes intrigue, or if it was rooted in any acrimony towards Mrs. Hall—because she was a woman, or for some other reason. As a matter of human nature, it’s likely that beefs simmered in the background all along.
Sometimes the conflicts were larger, like that same year when Woodhaven’s businesses refused to support the parade and the chair of the Woodhaven parade committee, Emil Rosenbaum, announced after a meeting in early May that Woodhaven would not participate. Woodhavenites were upset that their calls to have the parade terminate at Forest Parkway, or just across the county line in Brookyn’s Cypress Hills National Cemetery, were ignored by the parade planners. Rosenbaum, who as marshal for the Woodhaven division was also chair of the neighborhood parade committee, announced a week later at the next meeting of the full Fourth Ward parade committee at Jamaica Town Hall that local leaders had reversed course. Woodhaven might be perhaps a little backward, Rosenbaum suggested, but people there were very patriotic and would turn out as they always had. Magistrate John Kochendorfer, a prominent Republican Party leader in Queens, speaking at the meeting pointed out that it was the wishes of the GAR veterans to have the parade conclude at the Jamaica Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument. Given that the old veterans were “for whom the celebration was held,” that was the end of that.
At the same time, the Richmond Hill Post No. 212 of the American Legion also refused to march in the parade. They took umbrage at disparaging remarks about the American Legion by a few members of the the parade’s Veterans Committee, although what was said was not printed in the papers. John A. Meyer, commander of Richmond Hill Post 212, in response to the hubbub about their withdrawal put out a statement calling out those who would “inject animus into the proceedings” and asserting that the disrespect of the Legion wasn’t new. The decision not to participate was taken as affront to the GAR, who were down to just a few members in the Fourth Ward. Meyer challenged that conclusion, claiming that the parades were not a proper means of remembering the dead. He announced that Richmond Hill Post No. 212 would hold its own Memorial Day ceremony in Forest Park—at the same time as the Fourth Ward parade. They invited Brooklyn Congressman David J. O’Connell to speak and called on civics and other Richmond Hill groups to join them. Sharply criticized, they agreed to change the time so their service would not conflict with the parade. But, as far as marching, they did not change course and were not included in the line of march as they had been for the last four of the parade’s eight years. (The next year, however, they were back in line.)
When Emil Rosenbaum was named the marshal for Woodhaven in 1924, he replaced Henry Wenzel, who only a week after being named marshal had to step away due to business. In the same April 26 edition of the Chat that reported these parade planning updates was an unrelated notice that “K.K.K. crosses burn in Richmond Hill Section” on Easter, the Sunday before. It was the second flaming cross attributed to the Klan in Richmond Hill in two weeks. Both seemed focused on frightening members of two area Catholic parishes. A review of the parade’s committee, the section marshals and all of the various staff, aides and supporting groups, shows a few Richmond Hill Klan members operating at all levels of the parade leadership. Of all the names mentioned so far, can you tell which are members and which are not?
For the next two years, things were as they had been—notable and respected leaders from the community were tapped to head the Citizens’ committee and others helped organize the divisions. Andrew K. Johnson, eventually the chief highway engineer for Queens, was the president of the parade committee both of those years. 1925 was billed as the largest parade yet. 600 students were enlisted from Richmond Hill High School, though there is no record of how many actually marched. There were 10,000 marchers expected from Richmond Hill alone. In the Chat, Captain Edward Patterson, commander of the Woodhaven Post No. 118 American Legion and marshal of the Woodhaven contingent, promised a thousand marchers from that section. Reports later put the parade at 7000 total in-line and 300,000 along the route. It was described in the Chat as the largest parade the borough had seen, taking an hour and a quarter to pass. But if the number 7000 is accurate it would have been the smallest Memorial Day parade since the first parade in 1916. Again, it is hard to take these numbers too seriously—40,000 were said to have marched in Brooklyn parades in those years and by the Chat’s own reporting 19,000 marched two years earlier. 300,000 spectators anywhere is impressive, but there is no way to verify the numbers. Suspiciously, they contradict the official worry that the public was losing interest. Remarkably, the parade as an institution seemed to get bigger even while the numbers seemed to be shrinking.
In early April 1926, George DeVestern and Edward J. Kiely, long a regular of the parade committee leadership, were speakers at the regular meeting of the Citizen’s General Committee. In his speech, DeVestern urged Woodhaven to get in line—they had yet to select a marshal for their division. Disappointed by the lack of flags displayed in the business districts along Jamaica Avenue in previous years, DeVestern urged property owners along the parade route to display the flag. As to the public’s waning interest, Edward Kiely had this to say:
“Residents used to come to our meetings because they were assured of a good debate. It seems to me that although American do take active part, they do not enlist until the last few days. There has to be a crisis to make the American people wake up. Although there are only eleven veterans of the Civil War left, there should be a larger parade than when 100 of them marched. By having larger parades children will learn this historical event quicker and better than by reading literature on the Civil War. I am glad that we are now marching along Hillside avenue. A few years ago there were but three American flag displayed on Jamaica avenue, from Town Hall to Grand street. Former parades were great advertisements for the stores, which did not co-operate with the parade committee by placing out our country’s flag.
“Today the marchers would rather go along unpaved streets, where flags are displayed, then march where there are no American flags…”
The discouragement about growing apathy was not total. At the meeting, DeVestern gave praise to the patriotism of Jamaica’s Black community, which had turned out for the parade in 1925. Addressing the Town Hall crowd, Mrs. Phoebe Brewster spoke with pride for being the first woman of color to bring organizations in line. Starting in 1923, Household of Ruth was represented in the parade as part of the Jamaica division. Brewster, a longtime resident of Queens County who was said to have moved to Jamaica about 1910, was a member of Household of Ruth, an auxiliary of the Grand Order of Odd Fellows. The GOOF was an African-American fraternal organization, distinct from the more well-known Independent Order of Odd Fellows, which did not allow Black members until 1971. By 1924, Phoebe Brewster’s name was listed in the parade program along with several other civic, social and church groups from Jamaica’s Black community. When she passed away at 55 in 1929, she left her estate, including her home on 160th street, to family and friends and organizations such the Household of Ruth and the Allen A.M.E. Church of Jamaica.
Despite the tireless push to hold the greatest parade the borough had seen, the 1926 parade took place in torrential rain. The Daily Eagle put the best possible spin on it:
“It was not, they said, the largest or most colorful of its kind held in these parts, but it was one which gave a real demonstration of the strength of the local residents’ patriotism. The marchers fairly swam for the entire five miles, the downpour of rain falling continuous and heavy.”
Besides the weather, and whatever dynamics may have caused a fraying of cohesiveness, the length of the parade was a source of concern also. The parade route was a substantial one, about four miles, not the five stated in the Eagle, but more than long enough for most participants. Beginning at Forest Parkway and Jamaica Avenue in Woodhaven, the parade headed east on Jamaica Avenue through Richmond Hill, where it turned onto Park Street (now 117th street) to Hillside Avenue where it continued past the reviewing stands and the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ monument to Grand Avenue (now 168th St), where it turned right and paraders would disperse. One year, in 1923, the parade skipped most of Hillside Avenue, which at that time was a mix of businesses and residences, and followed Jamaica Avenue to 162nd Street, then called Union Avenue) before turning to meet Hillside just before the monument. Nevertheless, a long walk and a lot to ask, especially of the hundreds if not thousands of children who were enlisted to bulk up the parade’s numbers. Among those who raised this issue was Mathilda Burling. A constant presence at patriotic events in Richmond Hill, and a leader in the Gold Star Mothers’ movement, Burling had been an instrumental figure in the installation of the “My Buddy” monument at the Myrtle Avenue entrance to Forest Park in 1925, near where a the ill-fated Memorial Hall and museum was to be located.
It is in the context of these organizational challenges that the 1927 parade planning began in January of that year with the announcement that a new organization, the Citizens’ Memorial Day Association, had been formed to continue the work of the committee as a permanent entity. The many moving parts of such a big operation would better handled by an organization that operated year-round. For example, each year the committee had to coordinate the building of a grandstand big enough to hold 1000 guests and dignitaries. Appeals to support for the work of planning the parade brought in donations from the public, but if the Fourth Ward parade was to receive the support from the city that parades in other boroughs received, a more stable organization was needed to facilitate logistical and financial operations.
At the February 8 meeting preparations began in earnest with the election of officers and approval of the constitution and by-laws. Harry Herzog was elected president; John M. Tiedemann, a sometimes marshal for Richmond Hill, first vice-president; Joseph P. Conlon, second vice-president; Daniel A. Clarke was recording secretary, Mae Reynolds, corresponding secretary and Jamaica Postmaster Skidmore Pettit, Jr., treasurer. John Hilliker would serve as the parade’s grand marshal—as he had in the first Fourth Ward parade in 1916. Conlon would serve the marshal for the Jamaica division, Alfred J. Phillips for Richmond Hill and C. Viola Lack for Woodhaven. All were well known “civic workers,” community leaders who had been regularly involved in planning the parade. The new Memorial Day parade association’s bylaws were written by Daniel Clarke, who would later lead an association of civic groups in central Queens. The new Memorial Day Association’s preamble was published in the Daily Times of Brooklyn:
“The Citizens’ Memorial Day Association is a union of men and women organized to cherish the memories of the Grand Army of the Republic and the veterans of all wars; to stimulate love for our country and the flag; to defend the honor, integrity and supremacy of our National Government, and to encourage and assist in the holding of patriotic celebrations, especially on Memorial Day of each year.”
We can only imagine how the broader scope of the new organization would have been received, or what the reaction was when it arrived a fait accompli. Parade organizers seeking to overcome concerns about waning interest in memorializing America’s war dead promised larger and larger parades and 1927 was no exception. The “veterans of all wars” would be cherished along with the fading Grand Army men, but another stated aim was to “stimulate” patriotism and nationalistic celebrations, “especially on Memorial Day.”
But again the many constituencies made it a challenge to get “everyone in line,” including Woodhaven, where some wanted to focus on local gatherings as some other neighborhoods were inclined. The big Fourth Ward effort exported organizational energy at a time when those localities were reaching residential critical mass. Smaller events were held by some smaller communities, like the parade in South Richmond Hill, or the Morris Park observances at the memorial at Lefferts Boulevard and Atlantic Avenues. Since the conclusion of the war, there were Forest Park observances at the “Buddy Monument” in Richmond Hill and at the tablet holding the roll of honor listing Woodhaven’s war dead near the Forest Park Golf Clubhouse, now known as Oak Ridge. The memorial trees on the park roadway by the clubhouse were decorated each year. Down the hill from the park, Woodhaven didn’t commit to participating in the Fourth Ward parade until well into April. In April, the Whiting Post was proudly planting a flag in the yard of their still-new clubhouse.
While it was the pride of the Fourth Ward, the demands of the big parade pushed some of the solemnity of the holiday—veterans honoring fallen comrades at their gravesites—to the weekend before and the waning emphasis on graveside remembrances, which had been central since 1860s, rankled some in the Queens County leadership of the GAR. Perhaps in response to developments on the civilian side, in April representatives from veterans groups in the Fourth Ward came together to create the Allied War Veterans’ Association of the Fourth Ward of Queens County. According to the Chat, this organization would cooperate with the civilian side, “in all ways in which the Citizens Memorial Day Committee is interested.” David Llewellyn of the Wood Post, and the first commander of the new organization, suggested that the 1927 parade would be among the largest ever staged in the borough. The creation of the AWVA suggests a coordinated effort was needed among veterans in the Fourth Ward. Although the Allied War Veterans played an important role in carrying out observances after the Klan debacle made 1927 the last of the Fourth Ward parades, not much is known about them.
Despite the ongoing drama, for the first few months of 1927 everything seemed normal. The English family began preparing for the Memorial Day season. Arthur was the Commander of Whiting Post—his first and only time marching as Post Commander—and Mary was an active member of the auxiliary and its elected secretary, so would also march.
The weekend before Memorial Day the observances began. As she had been since the show opened in February, Kae English was busy performing on Broadway in the Ziegfeld production Rio Rita. On Saturday, May 28, she made an appearance selling poppies at a temporary exhibition of war memorabilia and relics curated by the Whiting Post at 94-02 Jamaica Avenue, the location of an Auburn and Stutz automobile showroom. The exhibition of relics on display included helmets, gas masks, machine guns and rifles from the war with Spain. Greeting those who stepped inside was a large wreath, a gift of the Woodhaven Democratic Club. The “Buddy Poppy” program, launched by the Veterans of Foreign Wars in 1922, gave employment opportunities to wounded or struggling veterans who made the symbolic red poppies. The poppies were then sold by the VFW to benefit veterans in need—a program that continues. Kae’s appearance at the exhibition and her efforts to raise money by selling poppies was not her first Memorial Day service, but it may have been her last. There is no mention of her volunteering on behalf of the post after a VFW armistice ball in November 1927.
On Sunday, May 29, the day before Memorial Day, members of the Whiting Post visited local cemeteries to decorate the graves of veterans. They gathered at their headquarters on 90th Road early in the morning before piling into a dozen autos for for the ride to area cemeteries. The first stop was the memorial in Forest Park, by the golf clubhouse, where Past Commander Philip Reilly said a prayer and Commander Arthur English placed a flag and a wreath made of poppies in front of the monument. Bugler Arthur Skinner sounded Taps before a firing squad fired three volleys in salute. The veterans then departed for local cemeteries. Observances were held at Maple Grove Cemetery, St. John’s, Lutheran, Calvary, Mt. Olivet, Holy Trinity, Greenwood Evergreen and Cypress Hills. They decorated about forty graves and visited Clinton L. Whiting’s memorial tree on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.
Even with the long march from Woodhaven to Jamaica, Memorial Day in 1927 brought some excitement and anticipation to the men of the Whiting Post and their families. It was the first Memorial Day where the at the end the men could return to their own quarters and not the rented rooms of the Hillside Temple on 96th Street.
But as Memorial Day neared, something else was happening, something invisible to the casual observer. For reasons we will explore and involving characters you will soon meet, that spring there arrived in Queens figures associated with the Ku Klux Klan. More specifically, figures associated with the Atlanta-based national Klan organization known as Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc. At some point in April or early May, either welcomed by those on the inside whom we know were members, or emboldened by a conducive environment for radical Protestant organizing, the Emmitt D. Smith Klan No. 38 in Jamaica, the largest and by 1927 the most aggressive of the Queens klaverns, applied to march and were granted permission to do so by the parade committee, a decision that went to the executive committee and lead to great controversy.
In May, rumors circulated that the Klan would be marching. A meeting of the Citizens’ Memorial Day Association erupted when it was revealed. It was not, as some have suggested, a matter of the Klan crashing the parade and surprising everyone. The shock conveyed in the newspapers may have been authentic in some instances, but to some, such as Brooklyn Tablet editor Patrick Scanlan, it surely rang hollow. Their participation as the sole organization in the parade’s seventh and last division was published in the parade program. Even the names given for the marshal of the Klan contingent, Col. Edward A. Watkins and his aides Albert Meadows and Albert Whitsu, were published in the papers.
While there was nothing new about the Klan in New York in 1927, the arrival of Klan organizers—Kleagles, Klokards and those who called themselves “field organizers”—coincides with an uptick in Klan activity in Queens in the months and weeks before Memorial Day.
First there was a meeting at the Triangle Ballroom in Richmond Hill. Held on George Washington’s Birthday, the event was in honor of the late Emmitt D. Smith, King Kleagle of New York, for whom Jamaica No. 38 was renamed. Featured was Atlanta-based Imperial Wizard Hiram W. Evans and other figures associated with state and national Klan. 1500 Klansmen heard Evans rail against Governor Al Smith, the presumptive nominee for president on the Democratic Party ticket in 1928. New York had long been in the sights of Klan leadership and the strength of the units in Queens and on Long Island made it a natural hub for their war against Smith.
Then in late March the Klan threatened two local theaters for planning to show a film starring Charlie Chaplin. The Klan was successful in having the theater change the picture, but even more successful at getting publicity as the story was picked up by the national wire services. The work of one of two Richmond Hill klaverns, the attack on the theaters was inspired by a newcomer to the area whose tactics in the past had involved violence and threats of violence. In fact, he was a fugitive from justice when he arrived in Queens, shuttled out of Pennsylvania after finally making bail.
In April, a meeting of the Klan in Suffolk County drew 10,000 and there a well-known Klan lecturer known as the Human Dynamo again went after Gov. Smith. By then, the Klan’s campaign to go to war with Smith had been covered in national newspapers. At some point that month, the Klan applied to the Citizens’ Memorial Day Association to march as an organization. In May the controversy grew, and supporters and opponents took sides at the meetings held at Jamaica Town Hall. The tension grew as newspaper reports went from weekly updates to daily ones, as the conflict reached the office of Police Commissioner Joesph Warren and Mayor Walker.
By the time the parade happened on Memorial Day, no one who had been reading the newspapers, listening to the radio, going to church, temple or mass should have been surprised by what transpired.
In the next installments of this series, we will slow this down, and you will see exactly how it happened, and why.