It was one of the first 20th-century anti-gay witch-hunts, a panic that gripped the American Navy between 1919 and 1921.
The Newport Sex Scandal, taking its name from the Rhode Island town it unfolded in, thrust the issue of same-sex friendship, same-sex desire and same-sex sexual intimacy into a national debate about homosexuality.
If you thought the armed services’ vexed history trying to control homosexuality in its ranks began with the now dried-out husk of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” then you’ll be surprised to learn that the Newport Sex Scandal offers an instructive corrective to the ongoing controversy of homosexuals in the U.S. military.
The United States Navy sought, almost 100 years ago, to seek, to find and to remove gay seamen (sailors) from active duty. The Newport Sex Scandal remains America’s forgotten gay sex scandal.
In those early days of the 20th century, there was no accepted definition of men who loved men; the term “homosexuality” had not yet come into general use.
The word “gay” would not come into common usage until the 1960s (the descriptive “queer” was commonly used in English-speaking countries).
Sigmund Freud, the then-expert on all things sexual, had in 1905 published Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory, in which he proclaimed heterosexuality as perfection and homosexuality as unnatural.
Such thinking even influenced our dictionary definition of homosexuality: the 1909 Merriam-Webster New International Dictionary defined homosexuality as “a medical term meaning morbid sexual passion for one of the same sex.”
Such definitions of homosexuality caused people to be afraid, especially in regard to their children; fearing such morbid men, they would do all they could to keep young males, especially boys, safe from supposed moral infection; they also feared that homosexuality threatened masculinity, especially the masculinity of the “impressionable” and “naïve” young men (many in their teens) entering the military.
Such was the subject of my thesis at Hofstra University titled, America's First Anti-Gay Crusade: The Newport Sex Scandal, 1919-1921.
So great was the fear of homosexual influence on American young men that Franklin D. Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, wrote an article in the June 1917 Ladies’ Home Journal entitled “What the Navy Can Do for Your Boy.”
Primarily, the navy would protect all enlisted boys from any kind of moral depravity, the latter a code for protection from homosexuals.
By 1917 Newport, and other naval stations like New Orleans and Portsmouth, had reported the presence of immorality, perversion (homosexuality), gender impersonation (drag queens or “Ladies”), bribery, drug use, vice, and licentious behavior between Navy personnel and townspeople.
By 1921, 15,000 to 20,000 “boys and young men” called Newport’s “cheap lodging houses” home.
As accounts of sexual perversion and gender impersonation increased, the Navy was forced to translate and interpret the private actions of its men for a public adamantly opposed to accepting same-sex desire and same-sex sexual intimacy.
In Newport, sailors who engaged in “immoral” acts were tried for vagrancy and lewd acts; if actually caught performing oral coitus and anal intercourse, such sailors were tried for sodomy and imprisoned. The 1919 revisions of the Articles of War made sodomy a felony.
Some gay sailors were labeled as inverts, the period’s more specific medical term for homosexuals. As accounts of homosexual activity increased, the Navy reached out to any group who’d support them, especially Christian churches.
Naval reports targeting the Newport Naval Base and Training Station, where several ships from the Atlantic fleet operated, detailed the existence of drag shows, where men would dress as women to perform before an audience of mostly men.
Other naval reports included the presence of perverts (homosexuals) working on Ward B of the Naval Training Station Hospital. Reports also targeted Newport social clubs, like the YMCA and the Newport Art Association, where homosexuals gathered for recreation and dinner.
Truth be told, drag shows were quite commonplace in the Navy (as they were at Harvard, like the latter’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals).
The historian Blanche Wiesen Cook notes that even President Woodrow Wilson reluctantly took in a drag show aboard a ship.
Who better to annotate the scene than his travel companion, the proto-feminist Eleanor Roosevelt.
She wrote, “At the end of one of the popular songs, the “ladies” of the chorus attired in pink tulle and pin socks in spite of hairy legs, arms and chests, still most coy, ran down into the audience. One boy, carried away by the spirit of the play apparently, as he passed the President chucked him genially under the chin.”
Back in Newport, after a performance of Jack and the Beanstalk in June 1919, Navy Admiral William S. Sims wrote, “I have never in my life seen a prettier girl than Princess Mary. She is the daintiest little thing I ever laid eyes on.” Princess Mary was a naval cadet!
While Rhode Islanders may have tolerated this behavior, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, did not. He wrote to Rhode Island’s governor, R. Livingston Beeckman, pleading that he clean up Newport.
When Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer refused Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt’s request to have the Justice Department begin a searching and rigorous investigation of Newport’s Naval Base and Training Station, the YMCA and its vicinity, Roosevelt was incensed and took matters into his own hands because he already had designs on the office of Vice President.
He also fully understood that a campaign against “immorality” in America was political dynamite, one that could eventually blast him into the White House.
Thus, politically motivated, Roosevelt had no compunctions about ordering a hidden and undercover investigation to uproot the conditions of vice (homosexuality) and depravity (homosexual acts) that existed in Newport.
These secret investigations, its funds and personnel were hidden in a clandestine Navy Department document, “Section A, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy.”
Men attached to and serving on the staff had to perform the following: keep their eyes wide open, “observing all and ears open for all conversation and make himself free with this class of men [homosexuals], being jolly and good natured, being careful to pump these men for information, making them believe that he is what is termed in the Navy as a ‘boy humper,’ making dates with them and so forth.”
It was, in short, entrapment.
These men were encouraged to have sex with their peers, other Navy men in order to identify the “cocksuckers and rectum receivers and the ring leaders of this gang, arranging from time to time meetings so as to catch them in the act.”
The duties of each man involved in the operation to uncover vice in Newport also included gathering evidence about drug and alcohol abuse, and obtaining information pertaining to and searching for women (prostitutes) who were pursuing the same risky business.
Homosexuals and effeminate men found throughout Newport were dated, seduced, fondled, and toyed with by team of sailors-turned-investigators.
To protect the government’s secret agents, Attorney General Palmer differentiated between the criminal acts of those accused of homosexuality and those who were considered feigned accomplices (government agents).
Palmer distinguished between a feigned accomplice and a real accomplice by writing: “The feigned accomplice lacks criminal intent, an absolute necessary element in every crime, except where the legislature provides otherwise.
“His intent is not evil but meritorious, since it is in aid, not in obstruction, of justice. This principle, being general and all embracing, applies to unnatural sexual crimes as well as to others.
“The abhorrent disgust which such crimes excite may make the burden heavier upon the apparent accomplice to show that his true intent was not criminal, but it does not deprive him of the right to justify himself by showing he acted as an agent of the Government, under the orders of his superior officers, in order to detect and punish crimes against the Government.”
Even though some government agents had had sexual intercourse with gay men in Newport, they were legally protected by Palmer’s principle of a “feigned accomplice.”
Following the recommendations of the Nay’s Bureau of Investigation and the Foster Court of Inquiry, courts-martial were ordered for gay sailors stationed in Newport.
Some 15 men were tried and convicted of various crimes. Frank Dye was found guilty of three acts of “oral coition” constituting “scandalous conduct tending to the destruction of good morals.”
Dye received a 20-year imprisonment, but presidential clemency reduced his time to five years, three months.
The same happened for David Goldstein.
When Albert Viehl, a defendant, changed his testimony, the sailor Fred Hoage received a lesser penalty, for drug possession.
Some of the men were dishonorably discharged from the Navy; others, like Thomas R. Bruenelle and Jeremiah Fowler, deserted.
No charges were brought against them, or Harrison Rideout, but their lives, like the others, were ruined.
Such brief, minuscule snapshots into the lives of these men are contained in Lawrence R. Murphy’s history, Perverts by Official Order: The Campaign Against Homosexuals by the United States Navy.
Soon the complex relationship between homosexuality and Christian brotherhood was brought to the forefront of a national dialogue about sexuality and gender, especially once Newport’s Episcopalian Navy Chaplain, the Reverend Samuel N. Kent, was accused and tried for perversion.
Charles Zipf, a Naval investigator, included this interaction with Reverend Kent in his report: “Kent threw his arms around me, and kissed me about the face. Repeatedly tried to put his tongue in my mouth. His hand strayed and he felt my penis…Kent made me promise not to say anything to the gang down at the YMCA.”
Newspapers like The Boston Herald, The Providence Journal and The New York Times did their best to cover the news. The Times ran this headline: “Lay Navy Scandal to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Details are Unprintable.”
The most telling example of the outrage caused by the Naval squad's methods is contained in a letter from the Episcopal Bishop, and later Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in America, James de Wolf Perry.
Bishop Perry wrote to Roosevelt on January 30, 1920 that he did not want to believe nor “could he believe” that Roosevelt was personally involved with the chief designers of the program to find and arrest homosexual sailors from the very beginning of the Newport investigation.
In the letter, Bishop Perry details a conversation with chief investigators and Navy personnel Dr. Erastus M. Hudson and Ervin Arnold, a conversation that revealed that their “work” personally represented the Secretary of the Navy.
Knowing the character of the “Section A” agents and the nature of their work, the Bishop declared that “it was not my habit to make serious charges such as I have had to make, on impulse or by prejudice. I have refrained from any course other than the clear statement of incontestable facts.”
Bishop Perry condemned the investigators tactics as vile and immoral. The U.S. Senate’s Committee on Naval Affairs called Roosevelt’s behavior “reprehensible.”
Josephus Daniels wrote to the Chief of the Bureau of Investigation that “[Chief investigators] Hudson and Arnold [were] honest and sincere in their efforts and acted solely for the best interests of the service.
“In view of the nature of the offenses under investigation, the assurances given them by the Office of the Attorney General of the United States that the methods authorized were legal, it is not believed that their bona fide mistake in judgment was such as to warrant a letter of censure.”
While the Newport Sex Scandal, of course, has conditions unique to its time and place, one must point out that the whole history of the Navy’s efforts to wipe out the “immoral” conditions at the Newport Naval Base and Training Station and its vicinity illustrates the difficulty of moral reform by government agencies and affiliations.
The Newport Sex Scandal witnesses the first exploration into the treatment of homosexuals and homosexuality by the United States government and quite possibly the first instance where homosexuals were treated directly as mere second-class citizens.
As the Navy and American government felt that it was their duty to protect enlisted servicemen from the “contamination of their bodies,” they ignored the consideration of homosexuals as persons, as citizens.
There are few details about the lives of the gay men who were targeted by the Navy’s vice investigators. For those who were imprisoned questions remain: What kind of lives did they have after prison? What kind of love life? Were their lives totally ruined?
Roosevelt was quick to pass judgment on the lasting effects of the Newport scandal. He wrote Josephus Daniels, “In the long run neither you nor I have been hurt by this mud-slinging… what is the use of fooling any longer with a bunch who have made up their minds that they do not care for the truth and are willing to say anything which they think will help them politically.”
Given the campaign of anti-gay harassment he had overseen, how ironic that Roosevelt was happy to play the misunderstood victim. Perhaps it was how he rationalized his actions to himself.
Whatever, Newport would come to be the worst kind of template.
The entrenched bias and intolerance of the Navy’s actions there, the arbitrary, if not cruel, way in which people were singled out, and the sleazy injustice with which these efforts were executed through secrecy, entrapment, and coerced confessions prefigured the vast anti-gay crusade that the United States military would later launch, more forcefully, against its lesbian and gay servicepeople.
