“I hesitate to say anything which would seem to dignify the activities and statements of Mrs. Humiston,” declared Secretary of War Baker. “What she has so far done seems to have begun in irresponsible slander upon the army and ended in a futile and disgusting trick.”
Soldiers are not saints.… Reformers, too, are only human, and frequently a misguided zeal o’ertops judgment. Mrs. Humiston’s motivations may have been admirable. Her performance has been deplorable, and its effects vicious beyond description. A scandalous accusation has been lodged, not against individual soldiers or cantonments, but against soldiers in general, facts to sustain which have not yet been produced by this woman. The charge has been spread far and wide, and wearers of the uniform have been discredited, regardless of their personal character. Yet the most discreditable thing in the whole affair has been done and admitted by Mrs. Humiston itself. Any servant of this country should be free from the attack of sensation mongers.
Government officials and reporters were calling her claim of six hundred girls “the greatest exaggeration” and added that she was simply “seeing things that ain’t.”
Grace had apologized for her methods but was sticking to her story that she had evidence of vice at Camp Upton. She told the papers that she had three cases with facts that were “absolutely straight” and would vindicate her. She said that she had evidence of two infantry soldiers who had attacked two fourteen-year-old girls and held them in a Bronx rooming house for ten days. Grace kept repeating that the army had actually instructed her to investigate Upton in the first place as part of a secret operation. Fosdick disagreed: “The army has not been directed to cooperate with her in her investigation.” He was quoted in the Upton newsletter, the Trench and Camp, that she had not “one scintilla of evidence.”
Grace finally had a meeting with Major Gardner of the inspector general’s office on Governor’s Island, which lasted three hours. According to Grace, she furnished him with full affidavits and witness reports about the three cases, including the Bronx kidnapping. But the commander of the regiment refused to place the men Grace named under arrest. Grace’s response was biting: “If more of our Generals were like General Pershing and would order men shot who attack women, we would have fewer problems on our hands.”
As December approached, the shining reputation of Grace Humiston as a peerless detective was no more. The criticism against her seemed never-ending: “Her vague and preposterously incredible charges of immorality at Camp Upton,” wrote Brooklyn Life, “show to what depths of depravity and mendacity a morbid imagination coupled with an inflated ego induced by a little notoriety can cause a woman to descend. Her achievement in the Cruger case has evidently turned Mrs. Humiston’s head completely, but imagine a woman posing as a public informer of morals inducing a young girl to ruin her own reputation in order to supply some shadow of evidence to sustain the would-be reformer’s extravagant charges. It would be well for this lady barrister to change her mind or have it thoroughly fumigated.”
More ridicule came from “The Rookie’s Diary” in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a column allegedly written by an Upton army private. “The men in my squad were discussing her refuted charges and her nasty attempt to manufacture evidence after mess this evening,” he wrote. “I have been reading the papers and I never did take the woman or her charges seriously.”
“Corporal” was another soldier who was quoted, further down the column. “If I had my way I would see that the proper punishment was imposed upon that woman. The Major General disposed of her in short order and to make the job more complete Washington disowned her. But being discredited does not have any effect upon her. The men I know personally in the National Army do not feel that justice will be done them until the woman who threw the mud is forced to remove the smirch.”
On December 19, the Cosmopolitan Club on East Fortieth Street held an event to honor Sara C. Douglass, one of the first women police officers in New York City. The event also featured Miss Miner, who was head of the Committee on Protective Work for Girls at Camp Upton. There were smiling, flowered ladies everywhere. Miss Miner delivered a patriotic speech, and as she was stepping down from the dais, she was asked about Mrs. Humiston and the Upton disaster. Miss Miner said she was glad to be reminded, since she had meant to bring it up.
“Absolutely false her stories are,” Miss Miner said, with emphasis. “The conditions about the camps are wonderful. We know, because we have had expert investigators there. Here is one of them.” She drew Marian Goldmark up to the stage, who spent October investigating conditions at Camp Upton.
“Of course, we don’t mean that nothing unfortunate ever happens there,” said Goldmark. “There are silly girls and bad women attracted by uniforms, and there are bad soldiers of course. But the conditions are wonderfully clean, as clean as they could possibly be, and there is no truth in Mrs. Humiston’s stories.”
As Goldmark spoke, a man stepped in through the back door of the room, framed in its shadow. When Goldmark saw him, she stopped speaking. After a moment, she smiled and said that police commissioners were busy persons and must not be kept waiting. She gestured to the back door and introduced Commissioner Woods.
Woods took the stage with a smile. In truth, he was on his political last legs. “I am on the eve of a period of my life when I will not be so busy,” he told the crowd with a smile. They all knew that the next mayor would want his own police commissioner. But instead of being nostalgic, Woods plunged into his subject, which was about the necessary human touch of police work.
“Poverty,” Woods said, “is one great cause of girls leaving home, ignorance of parents is another, and drunkenness on the part of the father.” He told of one girl who ran away because “she was so large for her age that she was ashamed to go to school, and her father beat her to make her go.
“That is the kind of work I like the police to do,” said Woods, his grave face lighting up. “I admit I disagree with my friends who want to spend their efforts teaching Sing Sing men to knit, and so on.” He paused for effect. “I’d rather prevent boys from landing in Sing Sing!” The crowd laughed and cheered.
When Woods was done, Captain Williams spoke next. He told stories of missing girls found by the police.