United States remained neutral for nearly two more years, Ogden was ready when the call came. He enlisted and was commissioned a major in August 1917, at age forty-five, began active duty in New York in September, and was shipped overseas shortly thereafter. “He arranged his business and personal affairs and packed up his effects within the brief space of 48 hours,” according to the
Boston Globe
. “His departure was very quiet, and little was said about the adventure upon which he was embarking. But he went nevertheless, to engage in an undertaking of very great importance to his country and its cause, and to fill a position of the highest dignity and service in that enterprise.”
His background and training had prepared Ogden for his current position, which was judge advocate of the celebrated 42nd Infantry “Rainbow” Division, responsible for virtually all legal issues and matters of punishment within the division. “His position demands a special endowment of the judicial temperament,” one writer noted in a profile after Ogden’s division had been shipped to the front. “Moreover, it is in practice a post of some little isolation, for the officer who is to be fair and unprejudiced cannot afford to be on intimate terms with his fellow officers or to have close friends among them—he must remain more than usually aloof, and he can have no favorites.”
The formation of the Rainbow Division had been the vision of a stern and feisty colonel named Douglas MacArthur. Amid the rush by America to mobilize, individual states had competed with each other for the honor to be the first to send their National Guard units to fight overseas. To minimize the negative implications of this competition, the Army decided to create a division composed of hand-picked National Guard units from twenty-six states and the District of Columbia. Thus, the 42nd was born, “a division that stretches like a Rainbow from one end of America to the other,” in the words of MacArthur—and the nickname had stuck. The 42nd had arrived in France in November 1917, and was scheduled to enter front-line fighting in March 1918.
Ogden’s service with the Rainbow Division would continue through the end of the war, through the division’s 175 consecutive days of virtually face-to-face combat with the enemy, through its courageous participation in the Luneville, Baccarat, Champagne-Marne, Aisne-Marne, Chateau-Thierry, Saint-Mihiel, and the Meuse-Argonne offensives. He would be promoted to lieutenant colonel in September 1918, and would be cited for “high ability and talents and valuable services” while with the division. When the war ended in November of that year, he would serve with the American Army of Occupation in Germany as a legal adviser. In 1919, he would be asked by the Army to serve on a committee investigating court martial procedures and articles of war.
After the war, Hugh W. Ogden would receive the Distinguished Service Medal of the United States, and years later, the decoration of the Officer of the Legion of Honor of the French government, honors he certainly could not have predicted in early 1918 when the outcome of the Great War was still in doubt.
Nor could he have predicted today—sitting at his desk in France and sealing the letter to his dear friend, Lippincott—that shortly after his return to Boston, he would preside over one of the country’s most celebrated civil lawsuits, stemming from one of the most unusual disasters in United States history.
Massachusetts, February 1918
As war raged in Europe’s muddy trenches, tensions smoldered at home between U.S. government authorities and anarchists. On February 22, a team of federal agents and local police again raided the office of the anarchist newspaper,
Cronaca Sovversiva
, in Lynn, Massachusetts. They seized thousands of documents, including a photograph of Bartolomeo Vanzetti with Luigi Galleani, and a mailing list of about three thousand names, including
Boston Globe
. “His departure was very quiet, and little was said about the adventure upon which he was embarking. But he went nevertheless, to engage in an undertaking of very great importance to his country and its cause, and to fill a position of the highest dignity and service in that enterprise.”
His background and training had prepared Ogden for his current position, which was judge advocate of the celebrated 42nd Infantry “Rainbow” Division, responsible for virtually all legal issues and matters of punishment within the division. “His position demands a special endowment of the judicial temperament,” one writer noted in a profile after Ogden’s division had been shipped to the front. “Moreover, it is in practice a post of some little isolation, for the officer who is to be fair and unprejudiced cannot afford to be on intimate terms with his fellow officers or to have close friends among them—he must remain more than usually aloof, and he can have no favorites.”
The formation of the Rainbow Division had been the vision of a stern and feisty colonel named Douglas MacArthur. Amid the rush by America to mobilize, individual states had competed with each other for the honor to be the first to send their National Guard units to fight overseas. To minimize the negative implications of this competition, the Army decided to create a division composed of hand-picked National Guard units from twenty-six states and the District of Columbia. Thus, the 42nd was born, “a division that stretches like a Rainbow from one end of America to the other,” in the words of MacArthur—and the nickname had stuck. The 42nd had arrived in France in November 1917, and was scheduled to enter front-line fighting in March 1918.
Ogden’s service with the Rainbow Division would continue through the end of the war, through the division’s 175 consecutive days of virtually face-to-face combat with the enemy, through its courageous participation in the Luneville, Baccarat, Champagne-Marne, Aisne-Marne, Chateau-Thierry, Saint-Mihiel, and the Meuse-Argonne offensives. He would be promoted to lieutenant colonel in September 1918, and would be cited for “high ability and talents and valuable services” while with the division. When the war ended in November of that year, he would serve with the American Army of Occupation in Germany as a legal adviser. In 1919, he would be asked by the Army to serve on a committee investigating court martial procedures and articles of war.
After the war, Hugh W. Ogden would receive the Distinguished Service Medal of the United States, and years later, the decoration of the Officer of the Legion of Honor of the French government, honors he certainly could not have predicted in early 1918 when the outcome of the Great War was still in doubt.
Nor could he have predicted today—sitting at his desk in France and sealing the letter to his dear friend, Lippincott—that shortly after his return to Boston, he would preside over one of the country’s most celebrated civil lawsuits, stemming from one of the most unusual disasters in United States history.
Massachusetts, February 1918
As war raged in Europe’s muddy trenches, tensions smoldered at home between U.S. government authorities and anarchists. On February 22, a team of federal agents and local police again raided the office of the anarchist newspaper,
Cronaca Sovversiva
, in Lynn, Massachusetts. They seized thousands of documents, including a photograph of Bartolomeo Vanzetti with Luigi Galleani, and a mailing list of about three thousand names, including
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