B2 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11 , 2021
BY MICHAEL BRICE-SADDLERLongtime D.C. lawyer Bruce V.
Spiva, who has practiced law in
the District for nearly three dec-
ades, will run for D.C. attorney
general in 2022, joining council
member Kenyan R. McDuffie (D-
Ward 5) and local attorney Ryan
Jones in a group of contenders
who hope to become the city’s next
chief legal officer.
Spiva, who announced his deci-
sion to run in an interview with
The Washington Post, said his
broad experience litigating cases
on voting rights, consumer pro-
tection and antitrust issues make
him the ideal successor to incum-
bent Attorney General Karl A. Ra-
cine (D), who will not seek a third
term.
“I view it as a large public-inter-
est law firm — the beauty of the
[D.C. attorney general’s] office is
defending the District and pro-
tecting the people of D.C.," said
Spiva, a Democrat. “I’ve been do-
ing that my whole career.”
The 55-year-old earned his law
degree from Harvard and is a man-
aging partner at the international
law firm Perkins Coie, where he
oversees the D.C. branch and leads
an office of 200 professionals. Pre-
viously, Spiva was a partner at
another law firm and headed his
own firm for nearly 11 years.He was born in Cleveland and
has lived in the District for nearly
30 years, now residing in the
Crestwood neighborhood of Ward
4 with his two children.
Spiva said he has also tried cas-
es on civil rights issues, such as
fighting for public housing resi-
dents in Columbia Heights who
were forced out of their homes
under the guise of code enforce-
ment. Between 2006 and 2013, he
represented a sexual assault survi-
vor in a case against the D.C. gov-
ernment and two local hospitals,
alleging that the response by D.C.
police retraumatized the victim.
He later testified about the case
in support of a council bill that
amended D.C. law to ensure sexual
assault survivors could have a vic-
tim advocate present with them at
medical examinations and during
hospital and police interviews,
among other measures. The legis-
lation passed unanimously.
Spiva said he would expand on
Racine’s work, with a particular
focus on consumer protection and
civil rights. He also sees the attor-
ney general’s office as a platform
to advocate for statehood and to
reduce congressional interference
in local laws and affairs; Spiva was
previously the chair of the advoca-
cy group DC Vote and now sits on
its board.
In 2007, he testified before the
House of Representatives in sup-
port of full voting representation
in Congress.
“As D.C. attorney general, the
people will have a fierce advocate
for local autonomy and statehood,
and I’ll carry that message wher-
ever I go,” Spiva said. “Congress
uses D.C. as a petri dish for their
favored right-wing policies, and
I’ll certainly be opposing that.”
Spiva said he will file paper-
work to run in the next week and
has not yet decided whether he
will use the city’s public financing
program. For now, he said, his
main priority is making himself
familiar to the city’s electorate.
“I haven’t run for office before;
I’m not a politician,” Spiva said. “I
know I’m going to have some work
to do to get my message out there
and be known by the voters.”
michael.brice-saddler@
washpost.comTHE DISTRICTLawyer
seeks to
succeed
Racine
Perkins Coie managing
partner Bruce V. Spiva to
join attorney general race“The beauty of the office
is defending the District
and protecting the
people of D.C.”
Bruce V. Spiva, a D.C. attorneyboy” — the nickname given to the
infantrymen — was carried down
the wet gangway. And Washing-
ton paused for three days of cer-
emony that would lead to the
creation of the Tomb of the Un-
knowns in Arlington National
Cemetery.
There, the soldier was laid to
rest on Nov. 11, 1921 — three years
after World War I ended in 1918.
On Thursday, 100 years to the
day, Arlington will commemorate
the event with a public procession
through the cemetery featuring
honor guards, the U.S. Army Band
and military flyovers.
President Biden will partici-
pate in a wreath-laying ceremony
at the tomb and deliver remarks
for the National Veterans Day Ob-
servance at the cemetery’s Memo-
rial Amphitheater, the White
House said last week.
The catastrophe of the Great
War, as it was then called, had
claimed 116,000 Americans,
through combat, disease and oth-
er causes, and killed millions
more people around the world.
Men were obliterated, buried
alive and gassed in the trenches.
They were drowned at sea and
burned to death in aircraft com-
bat.
It had to be “the last war,” the
British author H.G. Wells wrote in
a 1914. “The War That Will End
War.”
But over the decades the tomb
would receive three more un-
knowns from three more wars —
World War II, the Korean War,
and the Vietnam War — and be-
come a somber national land-
mark guarded 24 hours a day.
(In 1998, the Vietnam un-
known was removed and identi-
fied as Air Force 1st Lt. Michael
Joseph Blassie.)
In 1921, as the historic event
unfolded, much of it was captured
on three remarkable reels of silent
film, now held at the National
Archives. Most of it was shot or
gathered by the U.S. Army Signal
Corps, historians have said.
“I’ve watched this footage so
many times, and it never ceases to
fascinate me,” said Allison S. Fin-
kelstein, Arlington Cemetery’s
senior historian.
The massive funeral was at-
tended by tens of thousands of
mourners who filed through the
Capitol to view the casket, which
reportedly rested on the same bier
that held Abraham Lincoln’s body
in 1865
They jammed the avenues to
watch the cortege pass, and
swarmed into the cemetery to see
the burial.
The black and white film shows
President Warren G. Harding,
who led the mourners; Vice Presi-
dent, and soon-to-be president,
Calvin Coolidge; and the ailing
former president Woodrow Wil-
son, riding in a horse-drawn car-
riage driven by two African Amer-
ican men in formal wear.
Pershing, the Army chief of
staff, was there throughout.
So was Lejeune, a Marine Corps
legend who would have a famous
Marine base named for him at the
dawn of the next war.
Also present, but not recogniz-
able on camera, was then-Army
Maj. George S. Patton Jr., who
would make a name for himself in
World War II, and the gassed war
hero Samuel Woodfill, who had
been awarded the Medal of Hon-
or.
The 70-year-old French mar-
shal, Ferdinand Foch, who had led
the victorious allied armies in
Europe at war’s end, appears at
the burial ceremony in the amphi-
theater.
He wore a black frock coat with
gold buttons, a red sash, red trou-
sers and a white-plumed chapeau,
one newspaper reported.
When the controversial Treaty
of Versailles was signed after the
war, a dismayed Foch reportedly
said: “This is not peace. It is an
armistice for 20 years.”
The footage also paints a por-
trait of Washington 100 years ago.
Familiar landmarks appear as
the cortege passes on Nov. 11 — the
statue of the French general
Rochambeau in Lafayette Square;
the exterior of the Treasury Build-
ing, thronged with spectators, on
15th Street; the rectangular pil-
lars and tall light standards mark-
ing the northwest entrance to the
TOMB FROM B1
At tomb,
marking a
century of
mourning
White House grounds.
The route along Pennsylvania
Avenue is packed with bystanders
— some running to get good view-
ing spots. A man pushes a baby
carriage. Adults and children
crowd windows. People wave
handkerchiefs as Wilson passes.
Others watch from rooftops. Flags
fly from utility poles and busi-
nesses.
But Arlington Memorial Bridge
over the Potomac had yet to be
constructed. And two other cross-
ings, the old Aqueduct Bridge in
Georgetown, and the former
Highway Bridge at 14th Street,
had to be used by the cortege and
the crowds to reach the cemetery.
The cortege went over the
Aqueduct Bridge. Harding’s en-
tourage used the Highway Bridge
and got caught in a massive traffic
jam. The traffic that day was so
bad that it renewed demands for
construction of what would be-
come Memorial Bridge a decade
later.‘The soul of America’
The vast destruction of World
War I had resulted in tens of
thousands of missing or unidenti-
fied dead across the battlefields of
Europe. A British war memorial
in France bears the names of
72,000 soldiers missing from one
battle that went on for five
months.
There were more than 4,000
Americans missing in action, and
at least 1,600 unidentified dead in
cemeteries, according to the
American Battle Monuments
Commission. (The United States
did not enter the 1914-1918 war
until 1917.)
On. Nov. 11, 1920, Britain and
France each buried a single un-
known soldier to honor all their
others. Britain buried its un-
known in Westminster Abbey in
London. France buried its un-
known at the base of the Arc de
Triomphe in Paris.
In December 1920, U.S. Rep.
Hamilton Fish III, who had servedin combat with the African Ameri-
can 369th Infantry Regiment dur-
ing the war, proposed legislation
for an American Tomb of the Un-
known in Arlington Cemetery.
“The... purpose of this resolu-
tion is to bring home the body of
an unknown American warrior
who... represents no section,
creed, or race [but] who typifies... the soul of America,” Fish told
fellow members of Congress.
Finkelstein said: “The ultimate
goal is really to help the American
people mourn, to provide a single
grave that’s representative of all of
the unidentified... so that a fam-
ily... can go to the tomb and
consider that grave their own.”
“People are searching, they’re
grasping for some way to honor
these dead,” she said. “And choos-
ing one... i s both an effective way
and also a very symbolic way.”
On Oct. 22, 1921, four unidenti-
fied bodies were exhumed from
four big American cemeteries in
France and taken to the elegant
city hall of Châlons-en-Cham-
pagne, 100 miles east of Paris,
according to a history of the
American Graves Registration
Service.
The next evening embalmers
opened the four caskets and
switched the bodies around, one
of numerous efforts to prevent
identification, historian Kyle J.
Hatzinger has written.
On Oct. 24, Army Sgt. Edward F.
Younger, 23, who had twice been
wounded in battle during the war,
was shown into the room that
held the four caskets. He had been
picked to make the selection and
was handed a spray of white roses
to mark his choice.
“I entered the door... and
stood alone with the dead,” he said
in an account years later. “For a
moment I hesitated, and said a
prayer.... Each casket was
draped with a beautiful American
flag.... Three times I walked
around the caskets; then some-
thing drew me to the coffin sec-
ond to my right.... It seemed as if
God raised my hand and guided
me as I placed the roses on the
casket.”
The body was taken by train to
Paris, and then to the port of Le
Havre on the English Channel,
where the Olympia was waiting.
Huge crowds watched as the cas-
ket was conveyed through the
streets. Women and children
joined the march. School students
threw flowers.
Younger’s white roses were said
to still be in place.A crowd on the hillside
After arriving at the Navy Yard
in Washington the body was taken
to the Capitol, where it rested in
state under the dome the evening
of Nov. 9. Dim film footage shows
Harding placing a large wreath of
flowers atop the casket. (The As-
sociated Press said they were red
roses.)
Pershing then places a flower
arrangement — pink chrysanthe-
mums, said the AP — beside the
bier. He then steps back and sa-
lutes.
The body lay in the Capitol all
day Nov. 10, while almost 100,00 0
mourners filed by to pay their
respects.
The next day, the casket was
carried out of the Capitol, down
the central stairs on the east side
of the complex and strapped onto
a waiting horse-drawn caisson.
The procession to the cemetery
began.
Pershing, wearing a dark
mourning band on one sleeve,
and Harding, wearing a top hat,
walked side by side behind the
caisson. Coolidge, who would be-
come president two years later
after Harding died of a heart at-
tack, was a few paces behind.
Members of Congress and the
Cabinet, and Supreme Court jus-
tices reportedly followed.
Bands, soldiers, sailors, artil-
lery units, machine gun outfits, a
drum corps, cavalry, African
American veterans, nurses in
white uniforms with dark capes,the D.C. chapter of American War
Mothers — an organization of
mothers of service members — all
marched past the cameras.
Once across the Potomac, the
dignitaries met the casket at the
cemetery’s colonnaded brick,
granite and marble amphitheater.
The building, said to seat 5,000,
was filled. The approach to the
stage was piled with ornate me-
morial wreaths and displays. “Old
Pal,” said a display from the Amer-
ican Legion.
A loudspeaker system had been
installed, as well as a telephone
hookup to Madison Square Gar-
den in New York and the Civic
Auditorium in San Francisco,
where people had gathered to
listen, Finkelstein, the cemetery
historian, said.
Four performers from the Met-
ropolitan Opera in New York sang
the hymn “The Supreme Sacri-
fice.” One of the singers was the
Welsh tenor Morgan Kingston,
whose son, John, had reportedly
suffered a severe facial wound in
the war.
There were wounded White
soldiers and Native American
chiefs in the audience.
Dignitaries stepped forward to
place medals on the casket. Foch,
the French marshal, doffed his
feathered hat and, according to
the newspaper accounts, de-
clared: “You are forever inscribed
on the rolls of honor of the French
armies.”
There was a two-minute period
of silence. Harding gave the main
address and said the Lord’s
Prayer.
The casket was carried out of
the amphitheater and around to
the tomb, which was then a plain,
marble structure set into the
stairs of the amphitheater’s east-
ern plaza, a cemetery historical
report says. (The present white
marble sarcophagus atop the
World War I unknown was com-
pleted in 1932. The crypts for the
three others were placed between
the sarcophagus and the amphi-
theater later.)
A huge crowd, reported to be
about 100,000, waited on the hill-
side below.
In the distance across the Poto-
mac, the Lincoln Memorial, the
Washington Monument and the
Capitol could be seen.
An artillery salute was fired,
and the gun smoke drifted on the
breeze.
Military officers surrounded
the casket as it was lowered into
the tomb. Hamilton Fish, the con-
gressman who had pushed for the
tomb, had placed a wreath, then
stood in the background with his
hat off.
Earlier, Harding had told the
crowd in the amphitheater: “With
all my heart, I wish we might say
to the defenders who survive, to
mothers who sorrow, to widows
and children who mourn, that no
such sacrifice shall be asked again.. .”
“As we return this poor clay to
its mother soil... I can sense the
prayers of our people, of all peo-
ples, that this Armistice Day shall
mark the beginning of a new and
lasting era of peace on earth, good
will among men.”
[email protected]
PHOTOS COURTESY OF LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Thousands, including President Warren G. Harding, Supreme Court justices and military leaders, gathered as the unknown soldier
was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery on Nov. 11, 1921, three years after World War I ended.Chief Justice William Howard Taft, left, and President Warren G. Harding, far right, pay their
respects to the unknown soldier at the Capitol on Nov. 9, 1921.Subscriber ExclusivesDr. Wen Is In – Get Our New Health Newsletter Every Thursday
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