In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Epilogue and Conclusion The Footless Ghost James Tanner haunted Washington while he lived and, according to some witnesses, after he died. One night in 1972, a security guard making his rounds in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia (then housed in the old red-brick Pension Bureau Building on F Street) encountered a mysterious “man in a light-colored suit with a peculiar walk.”The stranger opened his mouth to speak but instead emitted a “nightmarish yell.” Later, the largely incoherent guard—who, the story goes, ended up in a mental hospital—claimed “that he had looked at a man with no eyes . . . and had seen the fires of hell and smelled the stench of the dead.” An expert on ghosts in the district suggests that the specter’s “strange gait,” the location , and the legend that Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert had hidden secret evidence about his father’s assassination in the building’s faux marble columns , all point to Tanner as the ghostly presence. Whether or not he became a restless spirit in the building he occupied for only a few months, James Tanner certainly remained a presence in his beloved Washington, where he was the most famous old soldier in America, known to many as, simply, “the Corporal.” Yet when he died, a brief obituary, by turns bittersweet and dismissive, could say this about the long-lost life of this representative man of the Gilded Age: “Corporal”Tanner, who died Monday in his eighty-third year, long outlived his fame, for it is probable that our restless and rather self-satisfied younger generation never heard of this man,whose name was once a “household word.” To the minds of the oldsters he will be represented by the appellation . . . “God-help-the-surplus” Tanner. This reminds one of the names which the Puritans of the seventeenth century were wont to take to themselves, such as “Praise-God-Barebones.” . . . It was when Tanner was appointed commissioner of pensions by President Harrison that he said “God help the surplus,” and he was not long in proving that there was need of divine protection for it. 160 Epilogue and Conclusion Tanner did not last long as commissioner of pensions. For years there was no political campaign in which he was not prominent.Tanner served well in the Union army up to the second battle of Bull Run in August, 1862, in which he lost both legs. He was a lawyer by profession. When he died he was to most of his countrymen only a memory, and hardly that to many of them. At one level, Tanner was “airbrushed” out of American history as thoroughly as he was removed from scenes of Lincoln’s deathbed. By the time of his death, he had become a relic of the previous century. The pension and soldiers’ home issues with which he had been so closely associated had faded as Civil War veterans died off, and within a few years, the federal government had formed the Veterans Administration to take over the various issues associated with veterans—who were represented to most Americans by the millions of doughboys who had served during the Great War. New veterans’organizations like the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars had eclipsed the gar. Civil service reform had eliminated the centrality of political patronage in the political process, and the Democratic and Republican Parties had taken sharp turns in principles and policies. Only the infamy Tanner had gained during his few months as commissioner of pensions outlived him. Like the trains he dreaded and the automobiles he detested, the twentieth century hurtled forward, while Tanner, the man with no feet, could only hobble into irrelevance. Despite the anonymity in which he left this life, a generation earlier Tanner’s ambition, drive, and opportunism had made him nearly a household name in Gilded Age America. His experiences as a Civil War soldier and veteran, as a politician and Republican insider, and as a self-made man despite his severe disability, make Tanner an emblematic figure for the period. The ghostly presence of the Corporal can be found almost everywhere we look during this formative period in American history. At a superficial level, Tanner resembles the fictional Cyrus Trask, father of one of the main characters in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Although the novel was published in 1952, it depicts the early twentieth century, and Steinbeck, born in 1902, may have heard of...

Share