Archibald Willingham DeGraffenreid Clarendon Butt was an American Army officer and aide to presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.
55 Facts About Archibald Butt
2.
Archibald Butt was a highly influential advisor on a wide range of topics to both men, and his writings are a major source of historical information on the presidencies.
3.
Archibald Butt died in the sinking of the British liner Titanic in 1912.
4.
Archibald Butt was born in September 1865 in Augusta, Georgia, to Joshua Willingham Butt and Pamela Robertson Butt.
5.
Archibald Butt's great-grandfather, Josiah Butt, was a lieutenant colonel in the Continental Army during the same conflict.
6.
Archibald Butt was the nephew of General William R Boggs of the Confederate States Army.
7.
Archibald Butt had two older brothers, a younger brother, and a sister, and the family was poor.
8.
Archibald Butt's father died when he was 14 years old, and Archibald Butt went to work to support his mother, sister, and younger brother.
9.
Pamela Archibald Butt wished for her son to enter the clergy.
10.
Archibald Butt's mother worked as a librarian at the university, where she lived rent-free in an apartment in the library.
11.
Archibald 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.
12.
Archibald Butt joined the Delta Tau Delta fraternity, and graduated in 1888.
13.
Watterson hired him as a reporter, and Archibald Butt remained in Louisville for three years.
14.
Archibald Butt was a popular figure in DC social circles, and made numerous important acquaintances during his time in the capital.
15.
When former Senator Matt Ransom was appointed United States Ambassador to Mexico in August 1895, he asked Archibald Butt to be the embassy's First Secretary.
16.
Archibald Butt wrote several articles for American magazines and published several novels while in Mexico.
17.
Archibald Butt returned to the United States in 1897 after Ransom's term as ambassador ended.
18.
On January 2,1900, Archibald Butt was commissioned as a captain in the United States Volunteers.
19.
Archibald Butt was ordered to take the transport ship Sumner through the Suez Canal and proceed to the Philippines.
20.
Archibald Butt remained in the Philippines until 1904, writing numerous treatises on the care of animals in the tropics and on military transportation and logistics.
21.
Archibald Butt's reports won him significant praise by military officials.
22.
On June 30,1901, Archibald Butt was discharged from the Volunteers and received a commission as a captain in the Regular Army retroactive to February 2,1901.
23.
Archibald Butt was secretary of the Army and Navy Club, and had a major role in founding the Military Order of the Carabao.
24.
In 1904, Archibald Butt was ordered to return to Washington, DC, where he was appointed depot quartermaster.
25.
Archibald Butt was the lowest-ranking officer ever to hold this important position within the Quartermaster Corps.
26.
In 1906, when a revolution against Tomas Estrada Palma broke out in Cuba, Archibald Butt was hurriedly assigned to lead US Army logistical operations there.
27.
Archibald Butt quickly organized the chaotic White House receptions, transforming them from exhausting, hours-long events fraught with social missteps into efficient, orderly events.
28.
When William Howard Taft became president in March 1909, he asked Archibald Butt to stay on as military aide.
29.
Archibald Butt continued to serve as a social functionary for Taft, but he proved to have strong negotiating skills and a good head for numbers, which enabled him to become Taft's de facto chief negotiator on federal budget issues.
30.
Archibald Butt accompanied President Taft when he threw out the first ball at the first home game of Major League Baseball's Washington Senators in 1910 and 1911.
31.
On March 3,1911, Archibald Butt was promoted to the rank of major in the Quartermaster Corps,.
32.
Close to both men and fiercely loyal, Archibald Butt began to suffer from depression and exhaustion.
33.
Archibald Butt was on no official business, but anti-Catholic newspapers and politicians accused Archibald Butt of being on a secret mission to win the support of Pope Pius X in the upcoming election.
34.
Archibald Butt did intend to meet with Pius, and he carried with him a personal letter from Taft.
35.
Archibald Butt left on a six-week vacation in Europe on March 1,1912, accompanied by Millet.
36.
Archibald Butt booked passage on the RMS Titanic to return to the United States.
37.
Archibald Butt boarded the ship at Southampton, in England on April 10,1912; Millet boarded the ship at Cherbourg, France, later that same day.
38.
The New York Times claimed that Archibald Butt herded women and children into lifeboats.
39.
Yet another version of events said Archibald Butt yanked a man out of one of the lifeboats so that a woman could board.
40.
Walter Lord's book A Night to Remember disagrees with claims that Archibald Butt acted like an officer.
41.
Dr Washington Dodge says he saw John Jacob Astor and Archibald Butt standing near the bridge as the ship went down.
42.
Several accounts had Archibald Butt returning to the smoking room, where he stood quietly or resumed his card game.
43.
Archibald Butt was loyal to my predecessor, Mr Roosevelt, who selected him to be military aide, and to me he had become as a son or a brother.
44.
The commissioned piece, which Dreyer completed on June 15,1912, was a bust of Archibald Butt situated on a base representing a ship on the ocean.
45.
Archibald Butt's letters are housed in the Georgia Department of Archives and History in Morrow, Georgia, with a microfilm set residing at Emory University in Atlanta.
46.
Archibald Butt lived in a large mansion at 2000 G Street NW with the painter Francis Davis Millet, who died in the sinking of the Titanic.
47.
Chief among these was that Archibald Butt loved his own mother so much that there was little room for anyone else.
48.
News accounts said he had a teenage mistress who either was carrying their unborn child or who had already given birth to a baby, or that Archibald Butt was engaged to a Colorado woman.
49.
Historian Carl Sferrazza Anthony has written that Taft's explanation only "vaguely addressed" the real reason Archibald Butt failed to marry.
50.
Archibald Butt was too canny an individual for that, too conscious of the risk in military and political ranks, where such an idea would have put a quick end to any hopes of advancement.
51.
In 1911 Archibald Butt became a member of the Georgia Society of the Cincinnati by right of his descent from his great-grandfather Lieutenant Robert Moseley, a veteran of the American Revolution.
52.
Archibald Butt was a member of the Army and Navy Club in Washington, DC, the District of Columbia Society of Colonial Wars, the District of Columbia Society of the Sons of the American Revolution and was a founding member of the Military Order of the Carabao.
53.
Archibald Butt appears and plays a significant role in Jack Finney's time travel novel, From Time to Time.
54.
Archibald Butt appears in the 2014 novel The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy by Jacopo della Quercia, where he is depicted as President Taft's closest friend and companion aboard a fictitious presidential dirigible "Airship One", which Archibald Butt pilots.
55.
Archibald Butt's death is depicted as a climactic showdown between the United States and King Leopold II of Belgium aboard the Titanic.