As readers of this site know well, the mummified body of nava hero John Paul Jones was exhumed from a Paris grave in 1905 and shipped with great pomp to the United States. Here’s a curious footnote.
It involves former newspaperman and librarian Francis Butler Loomis of Ohio. He served briefly as U.S. Secretary of State under President Theodore Roosevelt. Loomis got himself into hot water as the ambassador to Venezuela. He was accused by a rival foreign minister of being “crooked” and “rotten.”
Loomis reportedly made improper private business deals with an asphalt company in Caracas. The scandal involved an illegal check for $10,000–worth up to $350,000 today. The secretary was cleared of any wrongdoing by a federal investigation, but the whiff of scandal persisted. Roosevelt was so annoyed by the accusation against his colleague, he decreed that no U.S. foreign minister should complain about a fellow dignitary in the media.
How does this relate to John Paul Jones? We’re getting there. When the report on the “Loomis affair” was made public, the Secretary of State was in Paris. Roosevelt had appointed Loomis as special ambassador to France to officially receive the dead body of John Paul Jones, and to escort the remains to America. Some critics, including this cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly, saw the “especially honorable” assignment as Roosevelt’s attempt to give Loomis a burst of positive publicity in the wake of the scandal.
In the cartoon, the Acting Secretary is wearing a pair of strap-on angel wings. He has been coated in white paint from a can labeled “T.R. White Wash.” Confronted by the haunting figure of Loomis, John Paul Jones drops his sword. “My nerves are not what they used to be,” Jones is saying to Loomis.
Even before his “Rough Rider” days, Teddy Roosevelt had been a master at propaganda and media manipulation. He later took great advantage of the arrival of Jones’ flag-draped coffin to stump for the expansion of the U.S Navy, his famous Great White Fleet. Secretary Loomis, coincidentally, also played a role in the Russo-Japanese War that led to the Treaty of Portsmouth later that summer in 1905. Loomis went on to work for Standard Oil.
The fact that Loommis was involved in promoting American commercial interests related to Venezuelan oil and profiting from the Panama Canal eerily portends the Trump Administration’s foreign policy in 2026. OK, it’s a pretty tiny footnote, but we love the cartoon.
Copyright J. Dennis Robinson, al rights reserved.
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