Motherhood, the Media, and the Marine Corps

By Robin R. Cutler

On October 13, 1907, a 22-year-old marine from Portland, Oregon died during a fight with his fellow student officers in Annapolis, Maryland. The young men immediately claimed Lieutenant Sutton committed suicide; within 36 hours a swift and efficient naval investigation confirmed their story. But then something astonishing happened. Three thousand miles away in Portland, Oregon, the dead lieutenant's mother saw a "vision" of her son who denied the charge, and asked her to clear his name. Fueled by her Catholic faith, Rosa Brant Sutton would spend the next three years trying to redeem her son from the stigma of a mortal sin and learn the real truth about his death. Within a few months her spiritual battle became a political one — in the summer of 1909 a new naval investigation took place that was unprecedented.

The Sutton case became a national sensation as reporters, editors, members of Congress, high-ranking military officials, attorneys, doctors and ultimately the Cardinal of the Catholic Church were caught up in the question of what had really happened to Lieutenant Sutton. There was no question of friendly fire — this fratricide might have been homicide. In 1909, big-city papers in San Francisco and across the country put this case in their headlines for months as Americans from all walks of life acquired a stake in its outcome. Today, this mother's cause célèbre — a civilian seeking truth from military power — is a familiar story, a fact that is both instructive and sobering.

We might learn from the timeless language used by Major Harry Leonard, the savvy judge advocate in the Sutton court: "The hallowed grave of a dead son is no more sacred than the grave of a military reputation and there are great many military reputations at stake in this hearing." The accused marines' attorney, Arthur Birney, echoed this theme: "We know what an officer's honor is to him. It cannot be stained without the same kind of injury which is done to a woman's honor when it is stained . . ."

What really happened to "Jimmie" Sutton became less important than his mother's right to know. The case became a battle between protagonists who fought hard for their own versions of the truth. Today, America's journalists follow several families whose military sons died under questionable circumstances. Their efforts to learn the truth have been eerily similar to Rosa Sutton's both in their language and the hurdles they face. The soldiers' mothers, overwhelmed by a very private grief, have turned to the media unwillingly — and as did Rosa Sutton, Patrick Tillman's mother, Mary, has insisted on a congressional investigation of her son's mysterious death.

Misleading information — even blatant lies — may only be fully comprehensible over time. The whole truth (in so far as it can ever be known) about an alleged cover-up may come to light when the conflicting testimony surrounding cases such as these is analyzed years from now. Evidence will be weighed in the context of how military leaders function, what private battles individual officers and enlisted men faced, what allegiances they had and what personal debts witnesses owed. Only then will we understand why the exact same language used at the beginning of the twentieth century about misleading and inaccurate information from one of the armed services appears on the front pages of newspapers in 2007.

Robin R. Cutler has spent most of the past two decades as a public historian both at the National Endowment for the Humanities and as president of two nonprofit organizations. She is the author of A Soul on Trial: A Marine Corps Mystery at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Ten years ago she discovered the extraordinary primary sources that make it possible to explore the century-old case of Jimmie Sutton's death for the first time. You can visit her website at http://www.RobinRCutler.com/

 

July 19th to August 18th marks the 98th anniversary of the unprecedented naval investigation of Lieutenant James L. Sutton's death.

Comments

[fran]

The notion that Rumsfeld is somehow not responsible is abominable to me. As the head honcho at the Pentagon at the time of Tillman's death, the responsibility rests squarely with him. He and his cronies covered it up and lied to Pat's family and the rest of the country, spinning a heroic story out of a tragedy. It's an insult to Pat's memory and to the rest of America. Please make your opinion know about the Pentagon's responsibility