With a request to remove a historical marker, how should a Bellefonte icon be remembered?
Seventy-eight years after her death, Anna Wagner Keichline’s legacy lives on through a historical marker in Bellefonte and existing structures that she designed as Pennsylvania’s first registered female architect.
An unconventional 20th-century woman, Keichline was awarded seven patents for her designs. She was never married or had children. Instead, she owned her own car, spoke German and advocated for women’s suffrage. At 28-years-old, she volunteered for military service and worked as a special agent for the Military Intelligence Division during World War I.
But for as many barriers as Keichline broke, at least one Bellefonte resident, Kathleen Wunderly, has formally requested the historical marker be removed by the state Historic Preservation Office — not because the facts are in question, but because Keichline spied on Black communities, looking for what the government believed to be German interference.
Confirmed by archived military documents and interviews, Wunderly’s discovery makes Keichline’s legacy more complicated. While Keichline’s great niece says following orders shouldn’t overshadow her life’s work, Wunderly says spying on African Americans shouldn’t be forgotten for the sake of convenience.
“We recognize our people for what they are — as humans and not mythical figures,” Wunderly told the CDT. “This is one more truth that needs to be acknowledged.”
Either way, the documents, which came to light nearly two years ago and were shared this week with Bellefonte Borough Council members, have reopened a discussion on Keichline’s legacy.
‘Flying against the patriarchal nature of the times’
After the United States entered World War I in April 1917, thousands of men were drafted into the military. For the first time, women began working outside the home in factories to help with production needs; they also served in the ambulance corps and the American Red Cross.
Keichline, boasting her language skills and ability to drive a car, volunteered for military service and was stationed in Washington, D.C. She requested a role “more difficult” and “more dangerous” than an office job, according to a 2017 Pennsylvania Heritage article that cites information provided by Nancy Perkins, Keichline’s great niece.
At the time, the FBI was in its infancy, and the United States had not determined what agency would handle domestic security. To account for limited resources, the MID — a former intelligence branch of the U.S. Army — helped with surveillance. Coordinating with each other to collect information, the agencies also recruited citizens to work as agents, Penn State associate professor of history Douglas Charles said.
“The fact that she gets involved in this isn’t terribly surprising, but it’s a little bit unusual for a woman from that period — it’s certainly flying against the patriarchal nature of the times,” Charles said.
As the war continued, German-Americans and their culture experienced a backlash in the United States, and their loyalty was questioned. In a speech, President Woodrow Wilson spoke negatively about “hyphenated Americans;” Ambassador to Germany James Watson Gerard urged every citizen to “declare himself American — or a traitor.”
In “An Encyclopedia of American Woman at War: From the Home Front to the Battlefields,” Keichline is said to have “quickly acquainted herself with German-Americans” in factories to secretly investigate their views on the war.
But reports and military correspondence found on Fold3.com — a database for military documents — and cataloged in the National Archives show that Keichline was also monitoring African Americans in Pennsylvania as part of the government’s suspicion that the Black community’s push for equality was the result of German influence.
Keichline’s time with the military has not been widely documented; Perkins, who said she is the “authority on her life and career” in a March 12 letter to Bellefonte Borough, maintains Keichline’s archives and personal papers.
An eye on ‘organized and directed’ activities
Though more than 350,000 Black soldiers served in World War I, African Americans were subject to segregation from Jim Crow laws and racism at home. But the postwar years emboldened the Black community’s push for equal rights.
However, government leaders believed pushback from African Americans was prompted by German influences, Charles said. Military and government officials, who were exclusively white, thought the Black community was incapable of coming up with original ideas and questioning inequality on its own.
“They don’t see African Americans as speaking out in terms of racial protest as having any legitimacy to it,” Charles said. “They see them as violating racial boundaries, and they perceive them as really not having any agency. So, it’s perceived as outside forces — German agents — attempting to agitate and cause disruption from within the country. They’re not willing to give credit to African Americans for this.”
In November 1918, an agent known as K. A. Wagner — who is believed to be Keichline based on a later letter from an military intelligence official who addresses Keichline by her full name — sent a report titled “Colored Minister” to Capt. Henry G. Pratt. In the document, the agent said they followed up on an article published in the “Democratic Watchman,” a former Bellefonte newspaper, which referred to a “criticism of the administration made by a colored minister.” Through an investigation, the agent learned that the preacher “in question” was in charge of Bellefonte’s AME Church and told Pratt the minister “spoiled an otherwise beautiful service by dragging in the race question and charging the administration with not having done all it could for the Negro.”
“Agent expects to make a local investigation of this case in the hopes of determining in this one particular instance at least, whether this is a general feeling on the part of the Negro which craves expression on the least opportunity or whether it is in some way organized and directed,” the report concludes.
The “organized and directed” phrasing indicates that Keichline questioned whether African Americans were frustrated based on their own lived experiences or if there was actually outside influence, Charles said.
“She seems to be questioning this to some degree,” he added. “It depends how you interpret that.”
At least four additional reports detail instances of unrest and dissent from African Americans about their wages, labor and mistreatment from the government, as well as rumored “colored societies.” But a February 1919 report on “Negro Propaganda” received a reply from Military Intelligence Acting Director Col. John Dunn, who addressed Keichline by her full name.
Dunn thanked Keichline for her service on behalf of Pratt but asked her to refrain from filing additional reports with the MID.
“No doubt you will find considerable personal interest in a continued study of the Negro problem,” Dunn added. “It may seem worthwhile for you to collect material for your personal use. Some of us who have given a good deal of attention to this question feel that during the next few years it is likely to be a very live question in our national political life.”
What side was Keichline on?
Keichline only served as a special agent for a few years, but details of her work with the MID represent a contentious time in United States history.
Citing testimony from A. Bruce Bielaski — former director of the early FBI — Charles said the military investigations like the ones Keichline participated in proved nothing, but they aimed to ensure loyalty to the United States.
“During World War I, there’s an uptick in anti-Black riots, started by whites. There’s an uptick in lynchings at a time, and it’s not like the FBI and MID are intervening to stop that. They’re not doing that,” Charles said. “They’re intervening to ensure loyalty. It’s all through intimidation.”
He added: “They truly believe that there are outside forces influencing the African American community, but that’s rooted in their own racism and how they perceive this. It’s not unusual at all that they’re doing this. It fits the times.”
In a 2019 interview with the CDT, the late Donna King — a pastor at St. Paul AME, historian and Penn State African American Studies lecturer — said that it’s important to look at Keichline and military intelligence through a cultural lens before making judgments on how she should be remembered.
Though King wasn’t surprised by the nature of the investigations or race-based skepticism, she said that no one truly knows “what side Keichline was on,” and her work with the MID does not erase what she accomplished as a suffragist and architect.
Perkins — who carried on her great aunt’s legacy through industrial design and continued research into her life — believes Keichline thought she was serving her country through her service.
“Anna Keichline volunteered to ‘help in some way’ as an American who was familiar with the German language,” Perkins told the CDT in a 2019 statement. “Her offer to help in 1918 resulted in her being assigned to a branch of the Military Intelligence Division, where her orders were to investigate various groups including Bolsheviks, labor unions and the Black community. She gathered information and filed reports that commanders could use to access risk and disloyalty.”
“How many women stepped up in 1918 to ‘help in some way’ taking such a personal risk, to be assigned to what the government thought was necessary?” she added. “This was in total alignment with the other facets of her life that were outside the norm of women’s typical roles in society.”
Perkins did not respond to recent requests for comment, but sent a letter to Bellefonte Borough in response to the documents Wunderly submitted to council members.
“Occasionally, people who fancy themselves as historians and authors try to interpret miscellaneous information they find and form a construct about my great aunt’s personality and motivations,” she wrote.
She told council that she is in the process of writing a book on Keichline and plans to share it with the public “when it’s ready.”
Wunderly said she hopes the borough will review the information and issue a public statement to acknowledge that the community is proud of Keichline’s professional endeavors but denounces the undertones of her work as a special agent.
“I see finding this out as sort of an object lesson in the roots of racism in America,” Wunderly said — adding that “truth and facts are our friends, not our enemy.”
The correspondence from Wunderly and Perkins was included in Monday night’s council agenda, but Bellefonte Borough Manager Ralph Stewart said there are no immediate plans to discuss the information.
Wunderly’s 2019 request to the state Historic Preservation Office to have Keichline’s historical marker removed has not been granted. Director of External Affairs for the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission Howard Pollman said it will be considered as part of an internal review of all markers.
Last summer, PHMC staff began reviewing all plaques and historical markers for appropriate language and sensitive treatment of challenging subject matter. As for Keichline’s marker, Pollman did not specify when closure — in any form — could come.
In the meantime, Keichline’s marker will remain in downtown Bellefonte, located outside of the Plaza Theatre — a building she designed — on West High Street.
This story was originally published March 16, 2021 at 12:56 PM.
