David Ignatius Walsh: November 11, 1872 – June 11, 1947

Adapted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.Accessed December 11, 2011.

Introduction

David Ignatius Walsh (November 11, 1872 – June 11, 1947) was a United States politician from Massachusetts.

As a member of the Democratic Party, he served in the state legislature and then as Lieutenant Governor (1913–1914) and then as the 46th Governor (1914–1916).

His first term in the U.S. Senate (1919–1925) was followed by a brief hiatus from government, after which he was elected to the U.S. Senate four times, serving from 1926-1947.

On foreign affairs, he was a consistent isolationist, from his early opposition to U.S. domination of the Philippines to opposing Lend-Lease until the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Scandal

On May 7, 1942, the New York Post, which had long favored U.S. involvement in the European conflict, implicated the isolationist Walsh in a sensational sex and spy scandal uncovered at a Brooklyn male brothel for U.S. Navy personnel that had been infiltrated by Nazi spies.[48][49]

Over the course of several weeks The Post hinted that an important person was involved. First identified as "Senator X", the paper finally identified Walsh by name. Its sensational treatment of the story detracted from the seriousness of its charges.[56]

The charges went unreported by the rest of the press, but word of mouth made it, according to Time, "one of the worst scandals that ever affected a member of the Senate."[50]

The police operation led to the arrest and conviction of three foreign agents.[51]

The brothel's owner-operator, Gustave Beekman, though promised leniency for cooperating with the police, received the maximum sentence of 20 years for sodomy and was not released from prison until 1963.[52]

The scandal was complex in that it implicated the Senator as a homosexual, as a patron of a male bordello, and as a possible dupe of enemy agents. Homosexuality was a taboo subject for public discourse, so the Post referred to a "house of degradation."[53]

At one point a sub-headline in the New York Times called it a "Resort."[54]

In the Daily Mirror, columnist Walter Winchell mentioned "Brooklyn's spy nest, also known as the swastika swishery."[55]

The brothel's owner and several others arrested in a police raid identified Walsh to the police as "Doc," a regular client, whose visits ended just before police surveillance began. Some furnished intimate physical details.[57]

President Roosevelt believed the charge that Walsh was homosexual was true. He told Vice President Henry Wallace that "everyone knew" about Walsh's homosexuality[58], and he had a similar conversation with Alben W. Barkley, the Senate majority leader.[59]

Walsh's Response

Without discussing details, Walsh issued a brief statement calling the story "a diabolical lie" and demanding a full investigation.[48] He then conducted his usual Senate business without reference to the charges.[60]

An FBI investigation produced no evidence to support the New York Post's specific charges against the Senator, though it accumulated much "derogatory information" in its files.[61]

Barkley's Response

On May 20, 1942, with a full report from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in hand, Senator Barkley addressed the Senate at length on the irresponsibility of the New York Post, the laudable restraint of the rest of the press, the details of the FBI's report, and the Senate's affirmation of Walsh's "unsullied" reputation.[62]

Barkley declined to insert the FBI report in the Congressional Record, he said, "because it contains disgusting and unprintable things."[63]

He provided no specifics about the sexual activity at issue and said the details of the charges were "too loathsome to mention in the Senate or in any group of ladies and gentlemen."[65]

Without addressing any details about Walsh's sexuality, Barkley said the report contained no evidence that Wash ever "visited a 'house of degradation' to connive or to consort with, or to converse with, or to conspire with anyone who is the enemy of the United States."[64]

Barkley denied the charges against Walsh related to espionage and homosexual activity. But the denial conflated the charges, as did reports in the press. For example, the New York Times article about Barkley's speech said that the FBI reported that "there is not the 'slightest foundation' for charges that Senator Walsh, 69-year-old chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee, visited a 'house of degradation' in Brooklyn and was seen talking to Nazi agents there."[54]

Isolationist senators promptly denounced the charges as an attack on their political position. Senator Bennett Clark asserted that Morris Ernst, attorney for the New York Post, had contacted the White House trying to engage the administration to smear FDR's opposition to the isolationsists. Senator Gerald Nye contended the incident represented a larger effort on the part of a "secret society" that for two years had been trying to discredit him and his fellow isolationists.[54]

Press Coverage

The press used these Senate speeches to begin covering the scandal. Their treatment varied in tone, as the following headlines indicate :[55]

Boston Globe: Senator Walsh Story Denounced as Absolute Fabrication

New York Times: FBI Clears Walsh, Barkley Asserts

New York Post: Whitewash for Walsh

Time reported Barley's speech exonerating Walsh and that the Post in reply had repeated its charges. It concluded its coverage: "The known facts made only one thing indisputable: either a serious scandal was being hushed up or a really diabolical libel had been perpetrated."[50]

Personal life and death

Walsh was raised a Roman Catholic and throughout his life identified himself as a Catholic and practiced his religion both in public and in private. An altar boy as a youth, in his adult years he regularly attended retreats and participated in meetings of Catholic laymen. Senate colleagues recognized his Catholic faith and occasionally baited him by challenging him to defend himself as a partisan of Catholic interests, which Walsh did not hesitate to answer.[71]

Walsh never married. He and his brother Thomas, who died in 1931, supported their four unmarried sisters, two of whom outlived the Senator.[73]

Walsh's homosexuality has been accepted by historians.[74]

Writing in the 1960s, former Attorney General Francis Biddle hinted at the subject when he described Walsh in the mid-1930s as "an elderly politician with a soft tread and low, colorless voice...whose concealed and controlled anxieties not altogether centered on retaining his job."[75]

According to Gore Vidal, interviewed in 1974, "There wasn't anybody in Massachusetts...who didn't know what David Walsh was up to."[76]

Walsh's biographer writes that "The campaign to destroy David I. Walsh worked because he could not defend himself.... David I. Walsh was gay."[77]

Notes

48 Wayman, 312

49 The brothel was located within walking distance of the Brooklyn Navy Yard at 329 Pacific Street and attracted young military men, not all sailors. Clients included a range of New York professional men. The scandal also touched composer and music journalist Virgil Thomson, who was arrested in a raid there on March 14, 1942. Tommasini, 355-6

50 TIME: The Press: The Case of Senator X, June 1, 1942, accessed Dec. 1, 2009

51 Tripp, 224n

52 Tommasini, 360; New York Times: "Pleads Guilty in Morals Case," May 12, 1942, accessed November 4, 2010; New York Times: "Gets 5 to 20 Years in Spy-Tinged Case," October 6, 2010, accessed November 4, 2010

53 Tommasini, 358

54 New York Times: "FBI Clears Walsh, Barkley Asserts," May 21, 1942, accessed November 4, 2010

55 Tommasini, 360

56 Tommasini, 358-9

57 Tommasini, 358-9; Tripp, 225

58 Fleming, 298

59 Gentry, 287. See also Charles, 87ff; Fleming, 298; Lewis L. Gould, The Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern United States Senate (Basic Books, 2005), 164

60 Tripp, 226

61 Gentry, 287

62 Wayman, 351-8, presents Barkley's speech in its entirety.

63 Wayman, 354

64 Tommasini, 359-60

65 Tommasini, 361; Tripp, 226

71 Wayman, 10-1, 16, 21, 49, 66-7, 92-3, 127, 142, 145, 160-1, 174-5, 194-5, 257, 316, 345

72 Wayman, 163-4

73 Wayman, 36, 123-4, 193, 322, 344-6

74 Steinberg, 138, calls Walsh "a notorious homosexual who sought companions in the lower ranks of the Naval Academy staff." Randall E. Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Authority (NY: Free Press, 2006), 138, attributes this characterization to Congressman Carl Vinson, a key opponent of Walsh on naval policy issues.

75 Biddle, 202

76 Vidal also said that "The senator from Massachusetts, David Ignatius Walsh, tried to make my father when my father was a West Point cadet." Peabody and Ebersole, 16

77 O'Toole, 8

Bibliography

Biddle, Francis, In Brief Authority, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1962)

Charles, Douglas M., J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-interventionists: FBI Political Surveillance and the Rise of the Domestic Security State, (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2007)

City of Boston: "Charles River Esplanade Study Report as amended June 23, 2009"

Fleming, Thomas, The New Dealers' War: F.D.R, and the War within World War II (Basic Books, 2001), ISBN 0465024653

Gentry, Curt, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, (NY: W.W. Norton, 1991)

Hanify, Edward B., Memories of a Senator: The Honorable David I. Walsh (Boston, MA?, 1994?)

Improper Bostonians: Lesbian and Gay History from the Puritans to Playland (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998)

Irish Heritage Trail: Irish Heritage Trail, Boston

O'Toole, David Outing the Senator: Sex, Spies, and Videotape (privately published, 2005), ISBN 097719700X

Peabody, Richard and Ebersole, Lucinda, Conversations with Gore Vidal (University Press of Mississippi, 2005)

Rosenkrantz, Barbara Gutmann, Public Health and the State: Changing Views in Massachusetts, 1842-1936 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972)

Tommasini, Anthony, Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle (NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999)

Tripp, C.A., The Homosexual Matrix (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1975)

Trout, Charles H., Boston, the Great Depression, and the New Deal (NY: Oxford University Press, 1977)

Wayman, Dorothy G. David I. Walsh: Citizen-Patriot (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Company, 1952)