
Archibald Willingham DeGraffenreid Clarendon Butt (September 26, 1865 – April 15, 1912) was an American journalist and United States Army officer. After a short career as a newspaper reporter, he served two years as the First Secretary of the American embassy in Mexico. He was commissioned in the United States Volunteers in 1900 and served in the Quartermaster Corps during the Philippine Insurrection. He gained notice for his work in logistics and animal husbandry, and received a commission in the regular United States Army in 1901. After brief postings in Washington, D.C., and Cuba, he was appointed military aide to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. He died in the sinking of the RMS Titanic.
(P: Lieutenant Archibald Butt in 1909)Archibald Butt was born in September 1865 in Augusta, Georgia, to Joshua Willingham and Pamela Robertson (née Boggs) Butt. His grandfather, Archibald Butt, served in the American Revolutionary War. His great-grandfather, Josiah Butt, was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Continental Army during the same conflict. He was the nephew of General William R. Boggs of the Confederate States Army (CSA). He had two older brothers (Edward and Lewis), a younger brother (John), and a sister (Clara), and the family was poor. Butt attended various local schools while growing up, including Summerville Academy. Butt's father died when Butt was 14 years old, and Butt went to work to support his mother, sister, and younger brother. Pamela Butt wished for her son to enter the clergy.
With the financial help of the Reverend Edwin G. Weed (who later became the Episcopal Bishop of Florida), Butt attended the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. His mother worked as a librarian at the university, where she lived rent-free in an apartment in the library. While in college, he became interested in journalism and eventually was named editor of the college newspaper. Butt became acquainted with John Breckinridge Castleman, a former CSA major and guerrilla fighter during the American Civil War and who was, by 1883, Adjutant General of the Kentucky Militia. He joined the Delta Tau Delta fraternity, and graduated in 1888.
Looking northeast at the Butt-Millet Memorial Fountain near The Ellipse (the southern portion of the President's Park) in Washington, D.C., in the United States. This memorial fountain was erected in October 1912 in memory of Major Archibald Butt (military aide to President William Howard Taft) and Francis Davis Millet (painter). Both men died during the sinking of the RMS Titanic in April 1912.
Archibald Butt lived in a large mansion at 2000 G Street NW with the painter Francis Davis Millet. "Millet, my artist friend who lives with me" was Butt's designation for his companion. They were known for throwing spartan but large parties that were attended by members of Congress, justices of the Supreme Court, and President Taft himself. Some speculation exists that Butt was a homosexual. Davenport-Hines believes Butt and Millet were gay lovers. "They were together in death as in life."
( Read more... )Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Butt
Charles Warren Stoddard (August 7, 1843, – April 23, 1909) was an American author and editor.
Charles Warren Stoddard was born in Rochester, New York on August 7, 1843. He was descended in a direct line from Anthony Stoddard of England, who settled at Boston, Massachusetts, in 1639. While he was still a child his parents moved to New York City, where they lived until 1855, when they migrated to San Francisco, California. In 1857 he returned alone to New York, lived with his grandparents for two years, and then rejoined his family in San Francisco. In a short time he began writing verses, which he sent anonymously to a local newspaper. They met with great success and were later published with the modest title Poems by Charles Warren Stoddard. Poor health compelled him to give up his plans for a college education. He tried the stage, but soon realized that such a life was not his calling.
In 1864 he visited the South Sea Islands and from there wrote his Idyls — letters which he sent to a friend who had them published in book form. "They are," as William Dean Howells said, "the lightest, sweetest, wildest, freshest things that were ever written about the life of that summer ocean." He made four other trips to the South Sea Islands, and gave his impressions in Lazy Letters from Low Latitudes and The Island of Tranquil Delights. Several times he visited Molokai, and became well acquainted with Father Damien, the Apostle to the Lepers, and a Catholic saint as of 2009, and wrote his interesting little book, The Lepers of Molokai, which, with Stevenson's famous letter, did much to establish Father Damien's true position in public esteem. In 1867, soon after his first visit to the South Sea Islands, he was received into the Catholic Church, for which he had a most tender devotion. The story of his conversion he has told in a small book interestingly written: A Troubled Heart and How it was Comforted. Of this book he has said: "Here you have my inner life all laid bare."
( Read more... )Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Warren_StoddardStoddard's work is laced with overtly erotic in tone and description scene. Here the narrator first meets Kana-ana:So Kana-ana brought up his horse, got me on to it in some way or other, and mounted behind me to pilot the animal and sustain me in my first bare-back act. Over the sand we went, and through the river to his hut, where I was taken in, fed, and petted in every possible way, and finally put to bed, where Kana-ana monopolized me, growling in true savage fashion if any one came near me. I didn't sleep much, after all. I think I must have been excited.
After the narrator returns to the United States, he misses his chum and muses on what it would mean to bring him to "civilization":I could teach him to dress, you know; to say a very good thing to your face, and a very bad one at your back; to sleep well in church, and rejoice duly when the preacher got at last to the "Amen."
Stoddard presents a complicated relationship between the sexual freedom that Kana-ana represents and the narrator's desire to bring his friend to "civilization," even as he admits the civilization is riddled with repression and hypocrisies. Stoddard is concerned with finding a way to merge what he idealizes as sexual freedom and lack of social constraint with the conventions of the U.S. life. His attempts remains all the more powerful as a radical ideal, not a reality. --A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski

Francis Davis Millet (November 3, 1848 – April 15, 1912) was an American painter, sculptor, and writer who died in the sinking of the RMS Titanic on April 15, 1912.(P: Francis Davis Millet shortly before his death in 1912)
Francis Davis Millet was born in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. Most sources state that his date of birth was November 3, 1846, but a diary which he kept during his military service stated that November 3, 1864 was his 16th birthday, thus indicating birth in 1848. At age fifteen, Millet entered the Massachusetts regiment, first as a drummer boy and then a surgical assistant (helping his father, a surgeon) in the American Civil War.
He repeatedly pointed to his experience working for his father as giving him an appreciation for the vivid blood red that he repeatedly used in his early paintings. He graduated from Harvard with a Master of Arts degree. He worked as a reporter and editor for the Boston Courier and then as a correspondent for the Advertiser at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.
In 1876, Millet returned to Boston to paint murals at Trinity Church in Boston with John LaFarge. He entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at Antwerp, Belgium, and won a silver medal in his first year (never before done), followed by a gold medal in his second. In the Russo‐Turkish war of 1877–78, he was engaged as a war correspondent by the New York Herald, the London Daily News, and the London Graphic. He was decorated by Russia and Romania due to his bravery under fire and services to the wounded.
An Autumn Idyll (painting), The Brooklyn Museum, 1892
( Read more... )Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Davis_Millet( Further Readings )