THE DRAFT: Like Father …

An old familiar name cropped up last week in an old familiar situation: draft-dodging. In Manhattan, spindly, goggle-eyed Alfred Bergdoll, the eldest son of the No. 1 U.S. draft-dodger in World War I, was arrested for evading the draft just as his father was 30 years before.

Meek young Alfred, though, seemed to lack some of his father’s high talent for making trouble. The father, refusing to report for induction in 1917, successfully eluded the Army until 1920, when he was discovered crouched in a window seat at his mother’s mansion. Grover Cleveland Bergdoll (so named, his mother snappishly explained, because President “Cleveland was a draft-dodger . . . and I expect my Grover to be one of the Presidents of the United States”*) was sentenced to five years in prison. He promptly persuaded a gullible major to let him out to pick up $150,000 cached in the Maryland hills. Since Bergdoll was heir to a brewery fortune, the Army believed his story. En route, he got free of his guards, fled into a waiting limousine, led the Army a dizzy chase across the U.S. to freedom in Europe, taunting his pursuers with picture postcards along the way. An unhappy exile, the senior Bergdoll voluntarily returned home from Germany in 1939 because he wanted “to bring [my] children up in the United States,” penitently served a four-year prison term.

Son Alfred, when ordered to report for a pre-induction physical, had replied with fine family spirit: “Herewith is the order and other paraphernalia I received today. I will NOT report for physical examination on Monday, nor on any other day, either.” Then, after his outburst, he waited for the FBI in his dingy flat.

For following in his father’s muddy footsteps, 23-year-old Alfred Bergdoll faces a maximum penalty of $10,000 fine and five years in prison.

* President Cleveland, as a young man in Civil War days, paid a substitute $300 to serve in the Union Army for him, a practice which was then legal.