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FeedTiptoe Around the Powerful
Sentences for WWI draft dodging were less than a year—but not for Grover Bergdoll.
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Never make politicians look stupid. Vote against them if you want. But expose them as incompetent, and they’ll come after you.
As an example, consider all those who, between 1917 and 1939, made it a top priority to capture and punish a German brewer’s son who refused to go to war. Grover Cleveland Bergdoll successfully dodged the draft for all those years while federal officials held hearings, postured and fumed—and mostly ignored thousands of other draft dodgers.
Bergdoll was 24 when the ordeal began. By the time the public servants were finished with him, he was 51. “Bergdoll had insulted America!” said Corliss Hooven Griffis, who unsuccessfully tried to kidnap Bergdoll from his refuge in Germany in 1923. “It was every American’s duty to punish him. German soldiers who fought against us may now be my friends. Cowards and traitors may never be.”
Born in Philadelphia, Bergdoll was the grandson of a German immigrant who’d founded a brewery here in 1846. At its height, the Louis Bergdoll Brewery at 29th Street and Girard Avenue supplied more than 1,400 saloons and taverns. All that beer supported a lavish lifestyle, which included sending Louis Jr. back to the Fatherland for a German bride: Emma Barth of Bavaria. Louis Sr. died in 1894 and Louis Jr. only two years later, leaving Emma with five kids and the business.
Grover was Emma’s third child, named for then-sitting President Cleveland. Emma admired the 24th president for avoiding military service during the Civil War by paying a substitute.
None of the Bergdoll children got much supervision. Emma was busy managing the brewery and other business holdings. Grover, meanwhile, had a blast. In 1912, at age 18, he bought a Wright biplane and terrorized the community—panicking horses, dive-bombing rooftops, racing trains and chasing bathers at the Jersey Shore. (The plane is now at the Franklin Institute.)
Grover and his brother, Erwin, spent thousands on racing cars. “Speeding tickets, arrests, accidents and complaints soon became synonymous with the name Bergdoll,” wrote historian Roberta E. Dell.
In 1915, Grover turned 21 and came into a million-dollar inheritance. He also moved into a stone house in Wynnefield purchased for him by his mother. Later, Erwin received a stone mansion in Broomall, located where the southbound Blue Route exits to West Chester Pike.
In June 1917, Grover registered for the draft, which he likely gave little thought. (He was busy building a balloon at home.) The United States had declared war against Germany in April, and a mass mobilization was underway. Emma, however, was offended by the shrill anti-German propaganda.
With little initial support for war, Woodrow Wilson’s administration offered overheated rhetoric about German barbarism. Amid the hysteria, schools canceled German classes, Beethoven was excised from concerts, and sauerkraut was renamed Liberty Cabbage.
