The Forgotten and Secret History of Whiting Square (Part 2)
Besides the unique feature embedded in the street grid discussed in Part 1 of this story, another reason Whiting Square exists where it does is because half a block away at 80-34 90th Road was Whiting Memorial Hall, the clubhouse of the Lt. Clinton L. Whiting Post No. 59, Veterans of Foreign Wars. Whiting Hall, which opened in 1927, and the Whiting Square war memorial dedicated the following year, were the most visible and enduring projects of the Whiting Post 59 of Woodhaven. Unlike Whiting Square, which still exists even if most people don’t know what it is or why it is there, Whiting Hall and the VFW post associated with it are gone without a trace.
The clubhouse, the VFW post and the square are all named for Lt. Clinton L. Whiting, but who was he? And why was Lt. Whiting chosen for the honor of having the VFW post named for him when there were dozens of local boys who could have received the distinction? Brooklyn’s The Chat newspaper, which also covered Union Course and Woodhaven news and social life in a Queens edition, published the answer in 1927:
“The selection of the name of Lieut. Whiting for the Post was made after a careful canvass of names suitable to the conditions governing the Post membership, so that the selection should embody Spanish as well as World War traditions; the selection was made after the ancestry of the standard bearer showed not alone Spanish and World War service, but as far back as the Revolutionary War the name Whiting is inscribed upon the pages of American history.”
Forgetting for a moment that the VFW reserved for its post names only those fallen heroes with the most exclusive service pedigree, Lt. Whiting’s story bears repeating and should be required reading in the community surrounding this forgotten memorial.
Born on July 15, 1894 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Clinton Lowden Whiting was the son of Lida Frances (Lowden) and Dewitt Clinton Whiting, president of Private Estate Coffee Co. in Manhattan. Clinton Whiting had a younger sister, Jean, whose first semester at Smith College in 1918 was marred by flu, quarantine, and her brother’s death in a hospital in France. The family and a servant lived at 373 Parkside Avenue in Flatbush, just two blocks from Prospect Park.
Whiting was a graduate of the Nazareth Hall Military Academy and also attended Brooklyn Polytechnic. He had been active in the Crescent Club and was employed for a time at Private Estate Coffee. With two years of service in the New York National Guard behind him, Whiting started officer training school and in the spring of 1917 was at Plattsburgh when he registered for the draft just weeks before his 23rd birthday. Initially commissioned as a second lieutenant, Whiting was sent to Long Island’s Camp Upton, near Yaphank (now the site of Brookhaven National Laboratory). There he trained with the 308th Infantry Regiment of the 77th Infantry Division, or the Metropolitan Division, mostly local boys colloquially known as “New York’s Own.” The 308th worked in the sandy fields of Camp Upton until April 1918 when they received their orders to head overseas.
After a raucous farewell celebration at the camp, the soldiers of the 308th were transported to Long Island City for a ferry ride around the Battery to the docks along Manhattan’s west side. There they boarded the steam powered ocean liner SS Lapland. Once the gem of the Red Star Line, the Lapland was commissioned for the war effort and converted into a troop transport ship. The two week journey was not without risk of attack by German submarines and according to Joseph Demaree’s History of Company A (308th Infantry) of the Lost Battalion, they passed some tense nights before they rendezvoused with eight British destroyers which escorted them to the safety of friendly waters.
In England, the 308th trained under British direction before heading to battle that summer. In early September, New York Herald correspondent Don Martin described the chaotic fighting that awaited the 308th upon their arrival in France:
“Just before daybreak this morning, I met a long line of Americans, mud-bespattered and wet, on their way to the front line. For hours they had been marching, and it is these marches which test the spirit of soldiers. But when I saw them swinging by, many of them were singing softly, for there was happiness in the heart of every man of them. They were confident of themselves and of victory. Enemy shells were falling now and then in a field nearby, for the Germans were firing at the roads in our area. But our marching men paid no heed to this strafing, and as they marched along they met another line—a thin one, made up of slightly wounded men on the way back from the front to the dressing stations. I saw a lad going forward to the fray lift his steel helmet and wave it at the men upon whose bodies marks of conflict was still fresh, and I saw the wounded men wave back. Then the first streaks of dawn came into the sky and the sun nosed up out of the east. It was a picture worth seeing.”
In a series of dispatches from the front, Martin, a veteran New York political reporter, narrated the war, forging memories for those back home that still persist in contemporary imaginations:
“For three three hours previously our artillery had crashed, thundered and rumbled, awakening countless echoes among the trees. The Hun positions were drenched with gas, but their machine gun positions in the depth of the forest seemed to survive and their machine gunners were there, waiting to receive our infantry.
“Shrouded by the thick mist, our men in their trenches waited the zero hour with the calmness of veterans, for they had acquired great confidence in their recent victories over the Hun. When they went over the top, one of the most glorious chapters in the annals of our army was made.
“They went over in a dash that was a race and in that race were men of Irish, of Italian and of Jewish blood. They plunged into the forest just as our forefathers did when they won our land from the red men and they fought Indian fashion. It was a guerilla warfare, wherein small groups of our men scouted forward, dodged from tree to tree and crawling on their bellies. They sniped machine gunners or they crawled up close enough to the machine guns nests to bomb the gunners. Indeed, it was something like the old time east side gang fighting where ambushes were laid and victory went to their craft.”
Martin’s American style—racist tropes accompanying a point about diversity—was of course pitched at his stateside audience. The composition of the 77th Metropolitan Division, like the 42nd Rainbow Division, was an important component of the American mythos. The image of East Side boys and their uptown brothers going over the top united as one while fusillades of “whizz-bang” artillery land all around them is a staple of American propaganda, even though the reality was much darker. The Chicago Defender so aggressively pursued complaints of abuse of black soldiers by white officers that the paper was the subject of a military intelligence investigation. Richard Slotkin points out that that the battalion commanders, mostly white Protestants, did not appreciate the polyglot nature of the troops and there was bullying and tribalism throughout the ranks. From the beginning, the officer training school was “the business men’s camp,” where the wealthy executives and politicians undertook civilian military training before it was converted to handle developing officers in far greater numbers in preparation for the war.
Nevertheless, it was Martin’s reporting from the front that first brought Lt. Whiting to the public’s attention. Martin’s September 2 story, published stateside about a month later, after Whiting had been promoted to first lieutenant, included a vivid quote from Whiting at the front:
“There isn’t much to say about it,” Lieut. Clinton L. Whiting, of New York, who is one of the many heroes who had part in it, told me, “The Germans placed hundreds of machine guns in the trees and thickets, which were intricately stewed with barbed wire. When we would come close to them, they would blaze away at us. That’s about all there was to it. A rapid advance was impossible under the circumstances. We surrounded a few enemy outfits and took prisoners. All of my men stuck to the job to the finish and showed splendid courage.
“If you are writing the story for Americans tell the folks there that we did about all that could be done. Give them the details after we have licked this bunch of barbarians.”
It’s not hard to see how Whiting’s patriotic narrative caught the eye of Americans seeking meaning in a bitter and brutal conflict far from American shores. Whiting would be forever associated with that decisive period of the conflict and the Battle of the Argonne and the incident that gave the Lost Battalion its name in early October of 1918 are legendary events in the annals of war, recounted in countless books and movies. To tell it short, Company A was among those that inadvertently advanced beyond enemy lines into a ravine before they were circled by German troops. They suffered for several days under intense shelling, for a while shelling from American forces too, before they were able to get word out, miraculously, by a carrier pigeon named Cher Ami. The story went viral, as much as any story could in 1918, through syndicated wire reports and intense public interest. Many of of the men who survived even played themselves just a few months later in the 1919 silent film The Lost Battalion.
The diverse urban warriors who made up the 308th were a special point of pride in the borough of Queens, a borough as much marketed for its inclusion as its exclusivity. There are many myths associated with the Lost Battalion, and far more men told stories about having been there than were actually there, the power of association so profound in the years after the war. The events of the Meuse-Argonne offensive and the sacrifices involved were even memorialized by Borough President George Upton Harvey in a WPA-era community center in Rego Park, Lost Battalion Hall. Ten years before he was elected the first Republican Borough President of Queens, an anti-graft reformer, Harvey was commander of Company A from its earliest days at Camp Upton. By the end of September, Company A all of its officers had been removed from the battlefield and Harvey was no exception, wounded by shrapnel early in the Meuse-Argonne campaign. Demaree reports Harvey’s bravery, as well as his men’s affection for him. He later received the Distinguished Service Cross for his heroic elimination of a machine gun nest. When Harvey came home from the war he took over his father’s publication International Confectioner though as early as 1917 had been publishing a series of books associated with the war effort, including a collection of ballads and military instructional material. He was the publisher of Joseph Paxton Demaree’s History of Company A in 1920.
But it was Lieutenant Clinton Whiting who was commanding Company A on September 28th when they were ordered to advance on an entrenched German position. Demaree is the source for what happened next:
“This attack, against a concealed and entrenched enemy, was full of dreadful possibilities, but it was carried out with the most dauntless courage. That the main body of the enemy had withdrawn was proved by the absence of all resistance except machine guns, which opened upon us at the moment of advance. With stealth and cunning, crawling sometimes from tree to tree, caught often in the hidden wire and finding protection in the sunken ground, we reached our objective, captured a number of machine guns, and, as we had expected, found the Germans had withdrawn. The price paid for this ground seemed heavy indeed.”
Lt. Whiting took machine gun fire in the chest and was evacuated from the battlefield. In the preface to Demaree’s History, Major Charles Whittlesey described the heroism of his friend:
“When Lieutenant Whiting was shot through the lungs at the cemetery in the Argonne, and was being sent to the hospital from which he never returned, I told him how splendidly I felt he had done. Up to that time he had been smiling in spite of pain, but there were tears in his eyes and a sob in the words as he choked out his short good-bye: “Oh, Whit, I don’t want to leave the men.”
From the hospital, Whiting wrote his father back in Brooklyn a letter that was excerpted in a coffee industry trade magazine:
“Just a note as I am in a field hospital and cannot be moved for at least two weeks to the base, so this may get to you as quickly as the cable I will send then. Was wounded last Saturday, Sept. 28, at noon. A bullet in the left chest. They operated Saturday night, but could not get it out, as it had penetrated the lung. Am fairly comfortable now, however, and the wound is not infected, so it is just a question of time and no need for worry. Will be all well again in a month or two.”
Armistice was declared on November 11. There was optimism back in Brooklyn but no further word from the injured soldier. Then it was reported in the days before Thanksgiving that Whiting had succumbed to his wounds at the end of October. By that time, stories of the Lost Battalion were circulating across the globe. Official notification did not reach his parents until December 30. The following text was sent up the chain of command from the field and was included when he was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross:
“Clinton L. Whiting, first lieutenant, Company A, 308th Infantry. For extraordinary heroism in action near La Harazee, France, September 26-28, 1918. During the advance in the Argonne Forest, Lieut. Whiting exposed himself fearlessly to enemy machine-gun and sniper fire while leading his men and consolidating his position, which was in a marsh covered with wire grass and stunted brush. He continued to lead his men with utter disregard for personal danger until he fell seriously wounded by a machine-gun bullet on the afternoon of September 28 near Binarville.”
Demaree’s History of Company A is dedicated to Lieutenant Clinton Lowden Whiting and includes a picture of him as a frontispiece.
In January 1919, only a few weeks after Whiting died from his wounds and was buried like thousands of others in French cemeteries, veterans, friends and relatives associated with the Veterans of Foreign Wars began pushing for a post in Woodhaven to be named for Clinton Whiting, the fallen hero from nearby Brooklyn whose story had been reported in the newspapers. After the VFW Post was chartered in Whiting’s name later that month, membership grew quickly as soldiers began returning from Europe to the fast-developing fourth ward of Queens. The Chat in 1927 published a brief account of the formation of the Whiting Post:
“During the latter part of 1918 the initial steps for the formation of the Post were taken by a group of ex-service men who had participated in overseas service in the war with Spain in 1898, the Philippine Insurrection in 1902 and in the war with Germany in 1917-18. The preliminary meetings were held at the homes of post members until the date of the institution, when quarters were secured at Woodhaven and Jamaica avenues, where the Post remained until its membership passed the 100 mark, when new quarters were secured at Hillside Temple, where the headquarters still remain.”
The Chat does not say it, but the quarters secured by the Whiting Post at the corner Woodhaven and Jamaica for those first few years were at the Woodhaven Republican Club, where meeting rooms were made available to veterans groups. After holding their second officer installation ceremony in January 1920 at the much larger Masonic Hillside Temple on 96th St, the post began holding dances and other events at the temple and within a few months, once their membership surpassed 100, they held their meetings there too. Opened in 1914, Hillside Temple had a lodge meeting room on the upper floor and a banquet hall in the basement. In addition to Masonic activities, during the years the Whiting Post held socials and meetings there, the Hillside temple was used for meetings and social events by the Homestead Civic Association, the Prosperity Lodge, the Junior Order of American Mechanics, and other civic and fraternal groups (including a unit of the Ku Klux Klan).
The first Commander of the Whiting Post 59, William J. S. Dineen, was installed at the first regular meeting held on January 17, 1919. Dineen was a veteran of the Spanish-American War, where he served in the hospital corps. Active in veterans’ affairs immediately upon returning to New York, he lived in Windsor Terrace before following the eastward development of new housing at the turn of the century to Cypress Hills in eastern Brooklyn then Richmond Hill in Queens. By the end of 1918 when news of Clinton Whiting’s death in a French hospital was starting to sink in, Bill Dineen was already an established national officer of the Spanish War Veterans (SWV). In fact, he was the national historian for the SWV, and his name appears in the papers not only for his work for that organization, and later for Whiting Post 59 of the VFW, but because for many years he would feed tips to columnists in the local papers. He wrote many letters that were published in newspapers in support of benefit claims or regarding other issues faced by veterans and their families. In 1945 he was among a very small number of veterans to receive their “25 year bars” of service to the organization. Dineen died in 1954 after living out his retirement years in Huntington in Suffolk County.
It was in May 1919 that Commander Dineen first expressed the need for Whiting Post to have a building of its own, when at a meeting of the post he announced the formation of the Woodhaven . In those years, finding a suitable space to rent or or own had been a preoccupation of many other civics and clubs. For example, the Woodhaven Republican Club moved from a spot on Yarmouth Street (85th) to the corner of Woodhaven and Jamaica before moving to another spot at the corner of 87th and Jamaica, all within a few years. To support their effort at finding a suitable clubhouse, the Whiting Post and its Auxiliary held fundraising events to raise money under the auspices of the Whiting Memorial Hall Association Inc., a separate entity organized for the purposes of building or obtaining a clubhouse and meeting hall on behalf of the VFW post.
It took seven years but in 1927 the Whiting Post finally opened Whiting Memorial Hall, a building on a double-lot located at 80-34 90th Road in Union Course. Built in 1920, it stood taller than every other house on the block and was just 350 feet from the oddly-configured and unnamed intersection in the middle of 84th street that would become Whiting Square the next year.
Whiting Memorial Hall had been planned from the start to be not only the Whiting Post’s headquarters, but a community center as well, with a library and reading room with “literature and sources of information as to economic and and commercial conditions.” While it’s not known that a library was included, a community hub was needed in Woodhaven, so the directors of the Whiting Hall Association made it clear there would be space available for community use. Positioned as “a pioneer and leader in every progressive movement, not alone in the field of welfare for former service men, but also in the social, patriotic and civic work of the community,” the Whiting Post saw this relation to the broader community as essential to their work.
The articles of incorporation included the following purposes, quoted in the Leader-Observer in Woodhaven:
“To accomplish the association of citizens, business and professional men of Woodhaven, and the adjoining neighborhoods, for the purpose of having frequent discussions of matters pertaining to civic improvements, and of promoting patriotic and social activities in those sections.
“To provide a place without charge for citizens, business and professional men, patriotic societies, civic associations, boards of trade and other organizations of Woodhaven, and the neighborhoods adjacent thereto, for the purpose of conducting patriotic meetings and exercises in commemoration of Independence, Memorial, Armistice and Flag days and other national patriotic holidays.
“To provide and maintain a library and reading room, etc., and suitable literature and sources of information as to economic and commercial conditions.
“To conduct at stated intervals, without fee, public classes on citizenship, etc., for the purpose of teaching those desirous of becoming naturalized.”
“The Whiting Memorial Hall, Inc.,” The Brooklyn Daily Times wrote, “will welcome the assistance and encouragement of organizations as well as that of the citizens of the community. Since the memorial hall stands for the same ideals for which many of the boys of these communities made the supreme sacrifice it will be as a monument to their memories, and will be used as a community house at different times for the objects for which it was incorporated.”
The completed renovations included a “spacious meeting room and social hall, officers’ quarters, a dining room and rooms for the Ladies Auxiliary.” Four years earlier, plans for the hall included a bowling alley, billiard tables and a pool, but in the beginning they had hoped to build a clubhouse, not buy a building and convert it. The next year, Whiting Post members chipped in for materials and labor, including to convert the raw cellar into “The Trench,” a social room with a billiard table that opened in the fall of 1928.
In addition to the display of war trophies inside, outside side of the building in the empty side lot there would be a tablet bearing the “names of all who gave their lives for their country” under a flag. The initial announcement of Whiting Memorial Hall also included the request that “all those knowing any resident of Woodhaven who lost his life in any of the wars will please communicate with the president of Whiting Memorial Hall, Inc., Arthur C. English, 9115 92nd street, Woodhaven.”
On the night of Saturday, March 12, the Whiting Post No. 59, V.F.W. held a neighborhood dance after distributing 300 invitations to neighbors to come check out Whiting Memorial Hall, their new community center. The following Thursday, they held a St. Patrick’s night dance, giving prizes for the best costume and charging twenty-five cents for the coat check. Even after moving into Whiting Memorial Hall, they continued to hold larger events at more spacious venues, such as Trommer’s Hall, a brewery and restaurant on Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn, or the Triangle Ballroom in Richmond Hill. Still, Whiting Hall was an active venue throughout the years of the Whiting Post. In addition to VFW and auxiliary events, such as Bunco parties, the Whiting Hall meeting room was used by the Union Course Civic Association, the Woodhaven Patriotic League, the Woodhaven Improvement Committee and others. Social organizations associated with the V.F.W., like the Community Boys and the local “Pup Tent” of the Military Order of the Cooties held meetings and events there, as did fraternal groups like the Woodmen of the World.
Founded sometime around 1910, Union Course Civic Association, like the Homestead Civic, Forest Park Taxpayers Association and others, was an important political organization at a time when everything in Queens was relatively new—and largely unfinished. In some communities already populated with families in new homes, streets waited for paving or even sewer lines, and then when they got them they were accompanied by outrageous assessments to pay for them. Topics for meetings held at Whiting Memorial Hall sponsored by Union Course Civic Association are ample index of their interests. For example, the UCCA worked resolving dangerous grade crossings of the Long Island Railroad which ran at street level on Atlantic Avenue. As the Works Progress Administration appropriated 500 million dollars in 1935 for grade crossing elimination projects around the country, the Atlantic Avenue Improvement committee, led by Irving Albert, met at Whiting Hall to strategize how make a push to get the LIRR off Atlantic Avenue and underground.
The UCCA was among those that fought the encroachment of cemeteries that sought to acquire the land on which the Truant Home stood, and demanding a school in that spot, they were instrumental in the siting of Franklin K. Lane High School. The Union Course Civic Association was also a means for homeowners to collectivize their grievances, fighting back against misguided plans. One example was the notion that 88th Avenue needed to be “straightened”—an issue that originated with the way the streets were laid out over a period of decades, much as Whiting Square is “off” for the same reasons. However, such a straightening of a street that was already crowded with homes would require acquisition and demolition of properties to make it happen, something opposed by those impacted as well their neighbors. Union Course civic and others like it were essential in the development of the Woodhaven Library, and for the care, upkeep and the building of new elementary schools also. Meetings like these were held by civics across Queens.
Much like every other active chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, beginning in 1919, the Whiting Post participated in ceremonies and parades, honoring those who served overseas and to remember those who did not return. The story of what happened to Charles Whittlesey is important to consider before moving on from the Whiting Post’s efforts on behalf of their comrades in arms. Weighed down the the trauma of war and the personal postwar needs of men who served under him—and those families who had their boys stolen from them—was too much. In 1921 he jumped from a ship en route to Havana and was never found. After the creation of Whiting Hall, the men of the Whiting Post and their wives from the Whiting Post Auxiliary held events held there for at least three decades. They also advocated for veterans’ affairs, held discussions, socials and barn dances. The post and the auxiliary were very active from the 1920s through the 40s and then became less active. Whiting Memorial Hall was in use as late as May 1960, when a “rummage sale” was held, but if appearances in local newspapers are any indication, interest was waning.
By 1966, when Cornelius Smith was installed as Commander of Whiting Post at the Woodhaven Republican Association’s headquarters in the Leader-Observer Building at 80-30 Jamaica Avenue, the clubhouse building was no longer associated with its namesake V.F.W. post. It is unknown why Whiting Hall was eventually sold but presumably the VFW post saw diminished interest among newer generations of veterans as the original stakeholders moved away or passed on. After a steady decline in members and activity, the Whiting Post 59 was declared defunct by the national organization in 1985. According to Section 212 of the VFW bylaws, a post is automatically declared defunct when it has less than ten members, leaving the Woodhaven Post 118 of the American Legion as the only veterans organization in Woodhaven.
The Whiting Square memorial remains a site on the map, a place where one can stop and think about the “ultimate sacrifice” of Clinton Whiting and others who died fighting for their nation. It’s a forgotten history, but one that can be remembered if we at least try to remember.
Moving on from the “forgotten history” of Whiting Square’s location and its origins, in Part 3 we will begin to explore its “secret history,” meeting one family in particular who were at the center of the Whiting Post during the 1920s. Their story is unique to them, but in uncovering their secrets, pieces of a larger puzzle begin to come together.