James Gifford: Archie Butt

Introduction by Jonathan Ned Katz

On the 100th anniversary of Archibald Butt's death on the Titanic, OutHistory.org is grateful to historian James Gifford for allowing this site to publish his original, personal, and scholarly essay surveying the evidence about the private life of this bachelor.

Gifford concludes that the documents suggest to him that Butt did have a sexual interest in men, but that he and his friend, the painter Frank Millet, who also died on the Titanic, were not lovers.

It's striking to see this determined historian struggling to find and make sense of the evidence about Butt, and it's educational to observe how much work goes into this historical detective work. I thank Gifford for providing full citations of his sources, so that his findings can be examined and expanded by others, and this historical retrieval becomes a community enterprise.

I hope that OutHistory's publication of this essay will encourage readers and researchers to consider the evidence offered and to look for and analyze additional evidence about Butt's personal life.

Archie Butt (right) with President William Howard Taft

James Gifford: Archie Butt

Everyone called him Archie.

Whenever a photograph of President Taft appeared in the newspaper, it was almost inevitable that you could catch a glimpse of his distinguished aide-de-camp Major Archibald Butt in the background, at the President’s service.

Always impeccably (and loudly) dressed in a military uniform and sporting a clipped mustache, Major Butt in his early forties was always attentive but unobtrusive. He never drew attention to himself, unless the President needed something.

When Archie lost his life on the maiden voyage of the Titanic on April 15, 1912, Washington circles took note. President Taft was devastated. He felt as though he had lost a son.

Almost immediately fundraising began to memorialize Archie and his friend Frank D. Millet, an artist of note who had died with him in the shipwreck.

Stories sprang up to suggest that the major had died as he had lived, gallant, serving others, stepping in as a manly presence in the midst of confusion. In the end, however, very little can be verified of his activity on the stricken vessel.

The last we know of Archive for sure is a wave and a salute to the occupants of collapsible D as the lifeboat was lowered at 2:05 a.m. Indeed, it is entirely in keeping with his personality that Archie’s final minutes were lived stoically and unobtrusively.

Archie always fascinated me, and not least because most accounts always referred to him as a lifelong bachelor. A handsome man who stayed in shape, Butt’s not marrying was a sticking point for me. The Washington newspapers seemed to have enjoyed guessing what female he would settle down with, ears attentive to any possible romantic connection. A man whose occupation had brought him to the very threshold of international power found himself among the Titanic's Beautiful People, with a stomach full from a gorgeous meal, facing the ice-cold north Atlantic Ocean in the dead of night.

HIS WHITE HOUSE CAREER

Southern-born, Archie had risen early due to his competence and reliability, so that he became an aide to Teddy Roosevelt and his successor in office William Howard Taft.

There at the White House he was the perfect military man: he could be counted on to keep quiet, to get the job done, to have a world of facts at his disposal. At one point he could introduce President Taft to nearly a thousand people at a reception without looking up a name.

To the presidents he served he was regarded as a family confidant as well. Both first ladies whom he served thought the world of him, found his presence warm and comforting, and even occasionally consulted him on family matters. He thought that Edith Roosevelt was the most beautiful woman in the world, “the loveliest woman I have ever chanced to know, barring my own mother.” He would note in his letters details about her, down to the color and style of the gowns that she would wear. Edith’s biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris puts it this way:

“Archie”. . . was endowed with a combination of traits guaranteed to endear him to Edith. He was courteous without being pompous, chivalrous without being familiar, moral but not prudish, capable of intimacy without being indiscreet, and of literary talk without being pedantic.

Unmarried at forty-two, he was three years Edith’s junior, and his years of closeness to a widowed mother made him an ideal companion and confidant to the First Lady. In the ten months that remained of her White House tenure, Butt was to become an admirer of Edith Roosevelt, seeing himself “in the role of knight for a mistress so gentle, so sweet, and so altogether lovely.”

Of course the newspapers knew Archie, and on slow news days Butt occasionally found himself the focus of their columns. They loved to ask about his marital status—it seemed a game to them.

On the day in March 1912 that Butt and Millet sailed to Europe on the Berlin (and shared a stateroom, though they were separately berthed on the Titanic) Butt was asked whether the rumor that he was engaged to marry Dorothy Williams was true. “I wish it were,” he answered in kind. “This bachelorhood is a miserable existence. I have distress signals flying at the fore and will refuse no reasonable offer to enter the matrimonial field. I’ll do the best I can, and if this leap year gets away before I get a wife I shall feel very much discouraged.”

When another reporter repeated the question, he replied that he’d been a bachelor for so long that he thought he had better remain single “to the end of the chapter.”

Though Archie’s name was often attached to some eligible lady or other, now much of it sounds like bluster. When one of the presidential party was asked about Archie’s female conquests, the friend smilingly replied, “Oh, he’s the successful sailor when it comes to women… He sails right in and sails right out again.”

Perhaps this is a coy cover-up for the truth of Archie’s love life, but at the least it suggests that he never took women as romantic partners very seriously. In any reference I have found to possible female interests, I see typical Southern gallantry, full of devotion, but not romance.

Butt's reference to “the wilful Mathilde” [Townsend] in a letter to his mother, hints more of annoyance than romance with a woman with whom his name was linked. Archie was said to have despaired when Mathilde got married, but I am not sure how convincing this is. Very safe to pine over someone who is out of reach and conveniently married. Makes one's own protestations of lack of opportunity pretty facile.

A Letter to Himself

Coyly, Butt seems to have played the game of possible marriage for what it was worth, even with himself. A surviving document—a letter he wrote to himself!—found among his papers, talks about the women he claimed he was attracted to, as well as those who were attracted to him. “I think if I was suddenly face to face with poverty and obscurity I would make for either as a vessel would for a port in a storm. My life is too full now for me to feel the need of any one woman.”

In retrospect, this document sounds half-hearted, and located where it is, among his very carefully edited correspondence, it represents the word that he wanted associated with his image, namely that he appear heterosexual in spite of what seems a charade of romantic games. This letter, it seems to me, is clearly meant as a public document, not a private one. Butt was gallant toward women, but it is difficult to read romance in his actions. Flirting was part of a military man’s job, after all.

The newspapers did find Butt fodder for kidding. Among his letters is a clipping that caricatures Archie in full military dress.

By the time Butt allowed Frank Millet to persuade Taft that the President's aide needed a vacation to redeem his health, Archie was running on empty. His appearance in leaving the United States suggested that “He has lost the abounding buxomness that once characterized him, to the tune of twenty pounds or so. He has fallen away to a slender girlishness of figure,” as one reporter put it.

Such ribbing might, of course, be just that; but I wonder if this is a twist of the knife as well, suggesting a feminine side under the military glamor.

The same tone is evident when another reporter writes: “There will be a deeper note to that ‘pathos in the air which dwells with all things fair’ if the crocus must come and the pussy-willows burgeon when Archie is away.” This writer concludes, however, by claiming that Archie “will carry with him the real love and the solid esteem of all who know him.” Reporters loved him but enjoyed kidding him. Were there secrets?

One hundred years after his death, Archie still cuts a fascinating figure. On the night the Titanic hit the iceberg, in the midst of thousands of dramas being enacted, many thoughts must have gone through his head. Certainly, he could take grim satisfaction in knowing that he had left his affairs “in apple-pie order,” in case anything should happen, as he had written to his sister-in-law. And though we can only surmise, it seems reasonable that Archie must have spent his last minutes with his friend and traveling companion Frank Millet.

FRANCIS DAVIS MILLET

Frank Millet I knew quite a bit about, having researched his correspondence at Syracuse University when I was working on my dissertation. Those letters (now available in transcriptions on this site) reveal quite a bit about his sexuality. They give a firsthand account of his affair with the writer Charles Warren Stoddard. He was unashamed at expressing his feelings for Stoddard, who wound up leaving him. I knew that Millet had also died on the Titanic, but it wasn’t until further research indicated that he was traveling with Archie Butt that I started wondering about their relationship. As well as Archie's sexuality.

So far as I knew, Millet was the only gay man to die on the Titanic. Millet, though married, lived apart from his wife for a good deal of the time. It was largely his doing that Archie was with him on the ship at all.

After a lengthy countrywide tour with Taft, during which Archie picked up a stomach illness that would not let him go, he was in rough shape. He was also facing a rougher autumn where Taft was going to run for re-election against Archie’s former boss Teddy Roosevelt. Butt was torn between the two men, his loyalty tested in an unbearable way. Friends noticed how run down he was, his normally robust appearance showing signs of strain. It was a letter from Millet to the President that convinced him to let Archie go on a much-needed vacation to Europe. (How poor Millet must have reflected on that, on that cold April night.)

Millet was one of several men that Archie let rooms to in his Washington home, and he saw him on a daily basis. Indeed, after their deaths, their friendship was trumpeted in the news reports.

It was noted that “Major Butt thought highly of Millet, and the latter of him. On the older man Major Butt leaned for advice and took it, and the two men shared a sympathy of mind which was most unusual. None could help admiring either man.”

The memorial fountain in Washington to Butt's and Millet's friendship may or may not speak of a deeper sympathy. This may be hinted at in the following:

"’No Damon and Pythias friendship could have been closer than the friendship of Major Butt and Millet,’ said Mr. [Richard B.] Watrous [Secretary of the American Civic Association]. ‘The two kept quarters together and were inseparable when both were in Washington. They lived near the Metropolitan Club, Butt being, as is well known, a bachelor [my italics], and Mr. Millet's family being quartered at his home in England . . . . Among all of us who knew of the close friendship of Major Butt and Mr. Millet there has been the tensest of feeling since the news of disaster to the Titanic reached us.’”

Gay historians note that during this period, Damon/Pythias was often a loaded-and-encoded expression for a homosexual friendship.

Richard Davenport-Hines, in a March 2012 article for The Daily, refers to Butt and Millet (without citing sources) as lovers, but his simultaneously published book, Voyagers of the Titanic (William Morrow, 2012) makes no similar claim.

A forthcoming book by the Canadian writer Hugh Brewster also asks questions about the nature of Butt and Millet’s relationship. My research suggests to me that there was certainly an unacknowledged homosexual side to Archie, however I have yet to find any material suggesting that his relationship with Millet was anything more than friendship.

Davenport-Hines reads a great deal into Archie’s houseful of bachelor-boarders (including the married Millet, who seems to have thought of himself as a bachelor). One of their housemates was Archibald Clark Kerr, a career diplomat then in his early twenties, who Davenport-Hines suggests was gay (again without citing specific sources).

Certainly, Butt and Millet were simpatico. And Archie’s apartment, full of antiques and unmarried males in the early-20th century, deserves further study. Obviously, men do remain single for a variety of reasons, but the representation of the bachelor in literature and culture seems to fascinate a public who believe that the married state is a “natural” one. It was also natural for a single man in Washington to help make ends meet by renting rooms—but Archie’s coterie was of lengthy duration, so he must have supported himself well.

ARCHIE AND FRANK MILLET

I wanted to know more about this friendship. Were the two men lovers?

There is an amusing novel called The Titanic Murders by Max Allan Collins (1999) which centers on a fictional blackmailer onboard the ship who is finally murdered. Two of his victims are Millet and Butt, who are threatened that their relationship as lovers will be revealed unless—. Fiction of course, but at least one other person, I thought, had entertained the same idea I had.

Evidence about their friendship continues to remain elusive, however. The monument to the friendship of the two men, located across the street from the White House, remains a tantalizing image for me. But to this day, I could find nothing concrete about this relationship.

Butt is surprisingly mum in his letters about Millet, seldom naming him at all.

Gen. Frank Ross McCoy had this to say of that household: Archie “lived with us bachelors at 1718 H Street that spring [1908], and livened up the old house like unto a favourite son home from college for the holidays, and until he and Frank Millet and Blanton Winship took over another old house near by and made a real home and gathering place where he loved to entertain.” McCoy continues almost off-handedly, “Any one writing about Butt naturally turns to his lighter and gayer side.” (The word "gay" was not used by and about homosexuals until later in the century.)

Millet biographer Peter A. Engstrom notes in mentioning Frank’s move to Archie Butt’s house on the southwest corner of 20th Street that

“The Major had been devoted his mother before her death, two years before [November 1908], and must have welcomed Frank’s company, although the house was fully staffed with a cook and a couple of Filipino boys. The youths gave whatever service was needed and there was no consciousness of age, position or rank in the house. Millet arose each morning at six o’clock to devote ten minutes before breakfast to teaching the young men English. Frank found the housekeeping partnership harmonious because Butt talked little and lived quietly.”

It seems that every reference to the men’s friendship alludes to their compatibility, however much or little we read into it. In one of Archie’s rare references to Millet he noted that, when he learned that Taft was to be photographed for an important event, he invited Millet to the White House the night before, on a secret mission: “And so, I got hold of Frank Millet the artist and together we came to the Presidents study where the signing was to take place to choose the best grouping.”

The image of these two friends fussing over the setting for a photo of a U.S. President is striking. Worth noting, too, is Archie’s strict separation of his private and public life, even in a letter to his sister-in-law, as he refers to his housemate as “the artist,” not as the close friend that he was.

The best source for information on Archie is a three-volume biography self-published by George M. Behe, a noted Titanic scholar. It is a dogged and admirable work of research, at times a daily charting of Archie’s life.

Butt's Letters

Archie’s correspondence survives, carefully edited by Lawrence F. Abbott (1924). For most of his White House years Archie sent letters nearly every day to his mother, fastidiously recounting the life of a Washington insider (“Is that enough gossip for today?” he asks in one letter). After Archie's mother died he kept up a similar correspondence with his sister-in-law. The letters were carefully edited by Archie himself, and show that he thought of them as a testament, a public record, that he intended to publish. They survive at Emory University and show his careful handwritten annotations and many revisions. It is clear that he intended at some point to publish them as an insider’s view of national politics. I pored through the originals wondering what I would find out about Archie.

First and foremost he was a gallant, intelligent, sensitive person, and little escaped his notice. But though he often includes commentary on events and people, he very seldom reveals much about himself. The gossip—and the letters are extremely gossipy--that he includes is amusing and witty but he takes care not to turn the focus on himself. Quick to characterize others, he remains curiously anonymous.

But I discovered things about him that I found interesting. These occasional remarks form a sort of impressionistic view of the man. It is entirely logical that Archie would have been careful not to suggest anything about a sexual interest in men. His public position, his guarded references to himself, the very age, would all speak against such revelation. So I can only skirt around that subject, and show what I’ve found. As Robert Frost says, “We dance round in a ring and suppose,/ But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.”

BUTT AND HIS MOTHER

Archie was mother-fixated. Taft himself noted that he “loved her devotedly—it always seemed to me he never married because he loved her so, and the greatest sorrow of his life was when she left him.” As noted above, Butt corresponded almost daily with her.

Equally worth noting is Archie’s sister-in-law, Clara’s, deft summation of the elder Mrs. Butt: “a woman of unusual strength of character; she was deeply religious, had high ideals and lived up to them; she drew an unswerving line between right and wrong and was absolutely intolerant of the latter throughout her life; her sons seem always to have recognized her authority.”

The strength of the mother and the devotion of the son might have lifted the eyebrows of their contemporary Sigmund Freud. In a letter to his mother Archie wrote:

“At the same time I want my own home and I want you in it and at its head, of course. The next thing to having a wife and children around me is to have your own furniture and belongings and especially one’s dogs.”

In a letter to his sister-in-law, Clara, he tells of his mother’s portrait which he always takes around with him. After Butt’s death, the Washington Times noted:

"Many pictures of Major Butt's mother are to be found in his last home, and the same pictures were on the walls of the house in which we lived together," said Lieutenant Commander Palmer this morning. "Major Butt was devoted to his mother, whom he brought here to live with him. When she died, he and Frank Millet, and myself lived together for two years. His devotion to his mother while she lived and his affectionate memory of her after her death were always touching. He used to keep referring to the time when she was with him, and it was evident that she was often in his thoughts."

PRESIDENT TAFT AND ARCHIE

President Taft’s attachment to Archie was especially strong and almost speaks of what we might now call “bromance.” Certainly Archie was a devoted worker, but it appears that his position in the White House went beyond that. Taft relied on his aide to a personal as well as professional degree. He pointedly remarked:

“I very much doubt whether I have ever known a man—I have known women—but very much doubt if I have ever known a man who had as much self-abnegation, as much self-sacrifice, as much ability to put himself in the place of another, and suffer and enjoy with that other, as Archie Butt.”

Certainly, in 1912, the qualities Taft describes were most often seen as feminine characteristics.

In a letter of Butt to his mother he mentioned that Taft had bought him sets of books for Christmas in 1911, including the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, and signed on the flyleaf, “For Archie with love Wm H Taft.” Butt also noted that the President had said that it was a constant surprise to him that Archie loved books, as he didn’t “look like a book-worm or even the student yet I have noticed that your eyes sparkle when you get among books as some mens’ do when they enter a bar room.”

It was said that the idea for the Butt-Millet memorial originated with Taft, who may have known a thing or two about their intimacy.

Taft’s attachment to his aide was well-known. A general at a party early in 1912 remarked that Archie was due back at regular army duty since his four years with Taft were nearly up. Archie replied that it was up to the president, whereupon the general replied, “He will never let you go and that we all know!”

One of the last letters Butt wrote to President Taft, in his own hand, not the usual typewriting, speaks strongly of his feelings for his boss. “If you will only glance down to see my name and to know that I want to do what is right and catch this last line which contains my love for Mrs. Taft and my sincerest regards for Miss Helen, I shall be content for the rest of it to go into the waste basket. With a great deal of love and respect for yourself, Sir, I remain, as ever, most sincerely and truly, your aide, Archie W. Butt.” He was unafraid to express his feelings in an age where men often found it difficult to do so.

A FASHION PLATE

Archie was a dandy. The seven(!) trunks he took with him on the Titanic supplied him with outfits for his six weeks in Europe. He loved his uniforms, kept them impeccable, and was fond of parading himself in them whenever possible.

A portrait of Butt painted by Millet was the occasion for a dinner party at home, where Taft was invited, as well as his aide's bachelor friends. They could not help ribbing Archie on the elaborate uniform he chose to be painted in. McCoy recalled that “since we allowed it was a good picture of his uniform, his countenance brightened. For he did love his uniform and had frank and unabashed pleasure in it—the gaudier the uniform the better, the broader and yellower the stripes the better—quite in contrast to the self-consciousness of the average regular officer of the days before the war, when the uniform was seldom worn away from army posts and made the wearer somewhat conspicuous.”

Photographs of Taft’s days in office invariably feature Archie, very easy to pick out in his dashing outfits. On one occasion during the Roosevelt years, Archie volunteered to accompany the President to a dinner for labor leaders, only to be told by his Rough-Riding boss that, “As much as I would like your company, I fear that all your gold braid would jar upon the liberty-loving labour leaders.”

Is suspicion justified here that Archie’s Beau Brummel look would have been viewed as a trifle effeminate to mix with blue-collar leaders? If so, such an accusation seems to fly over Archie’s head, since he is the one to report the incident!

Edith Roosevelt told Archie that “her husband’s weak spot was not liking the family to laugh at him [Theodore Roosevelt]. ‘I will not have him [Roosevelt] wear a uniform in Europe,’ she went on, for they [the public] would ridicule him in this country.’” Again, this indirect barb at Butt’s own love of conspicuous military dress seems to have escaped Archie completely.

Once when Butt was suddenly summoned to attend a cabinet meeting, all that Archie would report of such an appearance was his own--that he “was still wearing my riding boots and a rather snappy riding suit.”

In a letter a few days later, he told his sister-in-law: “And, by the way, did you know that the kilt is worn without any drawers? I never knew it before until Archie Kerr came to live with me.”

MEN’S APPEARANCES

If Butt was obsessed by his own self-image, it is not surprising that he would note the appearance of other men.

When he met Willie K. Vanderbilt, he “found him so charming that we became rather close luncheon friends at once. . . . He is the first good-looking Vanderbilt I have ever seen. . . . He would be strikingly handsome if he were a little larger. George [probably George Washington Vanderbilt II (November 14, 1862 – March 6, 1914] is rather a nice looking person, nicer in one respect to Willie K: But on the whole lacks that quickness & keenness which characterizes the face of this one.”

In December 1911, Butt held a dinner at his house and found “Mr. Leslie … very interesting. He was interested in every thing in my house & when I apologized for talking so much about myself & showing him so many things personal to myself he said ‘It is a great mistake to think people are not interesting when they talk about themselves. To me that is when they are most interesting. It is when they get to talking about other people. . . . .” (Would that we could have overheard the rest of that conversation.)

Of Governor John Tener of Pennsylvania Archie noted that he was “a big, stalwart man, handsome as a Greek athlete.”

Right to the end of his life Archie paid attention to men’s looks. His final trip took him to the Vatican on behalf of Taft, where he met with the most august prelate of his day, Cardinal Merry del Val. “As I entered and got a glimpse of the Cardinal,” wrote Archie, “I felt that I was looking upon one of the handsomest men I had ever seen. . . . The more I saw of him the more convinced I was that this was true. I have often heard some faces compared to cameos, but I never saw one before that looked as if it might have been cut out of Diamond…all I seemed to remember was his face and particularly his eyes, which gave me the impression of roaming until his mind became concentrated, and then they became fixed and looked like agate.”

CONCLUSION

Of course there is no conclusive evidence that Archibald Butt was gay, and I find it highly unlikely, given Archie’s careful self-image control, that he ever committed to paper any overt thoughts of such a nature. He was too canny an individual for that, too conscious of the risk in military and political ranks, where such an idea would have put a quick end to any hopes of advancement.

So I can only suggest that my research results in an “impression” that he was homosexual. What struck me when I presented this idea to members of the Titanic Historical Society was that they all seemed to feel that the very idea of his possible homosexuality cast aspersion on Archie, that it dishonored him. Of course men can like antiques, be mother-obsessed, remain an inveterate bachelor, notice the colors of ladies' dresses, live constantly in a home full of men, without being gay. We all know that, yes. But my gaydar was telling me something else. We Titanic Society members were looking at the same known facts about Butt and coming to opposite conclusions. It wasn't homophobia here, just that I lacked definite proof.

Yes, Archie liked to accompany Edith Roosevelt to track down antique bargains in junk shops, for example, and I well know that a love of antiques is not a sexual marker—except when it is.

I feel I grew to know Archie a little, and I confess that I felt horrible as the trove of his correspondence drew to an inevitable close by the spring of 1912. He was a kind and competent soul whose demise brought universal sadness to those who knew him, including me, one hundred years later. Archie was a remarkable man.

And after all, does his sexuality matter? For me it does, yes. My lifelong love of all things Titanic led me to Archie, and out of all the lives of passengers on that wonderful ship that I have examined, his comes closest to offering a shock of recognition and empathy, my personal entrée into the magnitude of that disaster.

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See also:

Archibald Butt: September 26, 1865 – April 15, 1912

Jonathan Ned Katz: Francis Davis Millet and Charles Warren Stoddard, 1874-1912

Letters of Frank Millet to Charles Warren Stoddard: May 10, 1875 - January 3, 1900

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