Jefferson Randolph Kean was an American military surgeon. He served as Director-General of the American Red Cross from 1916 to 1917 and as the Chief of the United States Ambulance Service from 1917 to 1919.
Background
Jefferson Randolph Kean was born on June 27, 1860 in Lynchburg, Virginia, United States, the second of four sons and third of five children of Robert Garlick Hill Kean and Jane Nicholas (Randolph) Kean. Garlick Kean, the great-grandson of a man who emigrated from northern Ireland to Virginia at the time of the American Revolution, was a Lynchburg lawyer who, during his studies at the University of Virginia, married a great-granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson. In April 1861 he was mustered in as a private in the 11th Virginia Infantry; ten months later, as a captain, he joined the staff of his wife's uncle, Brigadier general George Wythe Randolph. When Randolph became secretary of war in March 1862, he was appointed head of the Bureau of War, a post he held until the dissolution of the Confederacy. After the war, Garlick Kean resumed the practice of law in Lynchburg.
Education
Jefferson Randolph Kean attended the Episcopal High School in Alexandria and the University of Virginia. When rusticated from the university because of an excess of sociability, he taught school in a hamlet on the eastern shore of Virginia. After this exile he returned to the University of Virginia, where he received his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1883. He carried on his graduate study at New York Polyclinic Hospital and Medical College.
Career
Kean was commissioned a first lieutenant in the United States Army on December 8, 1884, with the designation of assistant surgeon. His first eight years of military service in the west, as a surgeon with the Ninth Cavalry, included the winter campaign against the Sioux in 1890-1891.
At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Captain Kean was commissioned as brigade major of volunteers, and detailed medical inspector of the 2nd Division, 7th Army Corps, in Jacksonville. There in command of the division hospital, he cared for more than 600 typhoid patients; this he regarded as "the most arduous and trying undertaking" that came to him during forty years of active service. He went to Cuba in December 1898 with the 1st Division of the 7th Army Corps, and on February 18, 1899, was promoted to lieutenant colonel (volunteers), and corps chief surgeon on the staff of Major General Fitzhugh Lee. In 1900, being ill with yellow fever, Kean's case was the first that his friend Major Walter Reed saw on arrival in Cuba. Although he was not one of the most publicized of the participants of the Yellow Fever Board, Kean, by then a major, was commended for his work with it in the secretary of war's annual report for 1902.
During the military governorship of Leonard Wood, Kean served as superintendent of the Department of Charities. In 1902 Major Kean returned to Washington as executive officer of the Surgeon General's Office, but in 1906, when the United States set up a provisional government after the Cuban insurrection, he returned to the island as advisor to the department of sanitation.
From 1909 to 1913 he was once again in the Surgeon General's Office, this time in charge of the sanitary division. During the Taft administration, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson sent Kean to the lower Mississippi valley to avert the danger of epidemic disease among flood sufferers, and to Puerto Rico to supervise measures against bubonic plague. In 1911 he was sent to Paris as a delegate to an international conference to draw a treaty for control of epidemics of plague, cholera, and yellow fever. In January 1916 Colonel Kean was assigned to the American Red Cross, where he became director general and organizer of the department of military relief.
He soon went to France as chief of the United States Ambulance Service with the French Army, with headquarters in Paris. In February 1918 he was transferred to Tours, first as chief surgeon of the line of communications and later as deputy chief surgeon of the American Expeditionary Force. While serving at Tours, he was commissioned brigadier general (National Army). On returning to the United States after the war, Kean's last tour of duty was at Boston as corps area surgeon, First Corps Area.
Kean retired on June 27, 1924 and settled in Georgetown, D. C. For the next ten years he was secretary and editor of the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States, of which he had been president in 1914-1915. Kean was the organizer of the Monticello Association which maintains the graveyard where are buried Thomas Jefferson and many of his descendants. As historian of the association (1920 - 1948), he wrote many articles for its annual reports. President Roosevelt appointed him in 1934 a member of the United States commission for the construction of the National Expansion Memorial at St. Louis and in 1938 to the commission that created the Jefferson Memorial in Washington. General Kean was particularly involved in the selection and wordings of the quotations from Jefferson in the four panels on the interior walls of the Jefferson Memorial; the dedication of this monument in 1943 gave him especial pleasure.
Achievements
Kean was notable for his service on the western frontier against the Sioux, in the Spanish-American War and World War I. He drafted laws organizing sanitary departments for Cuba and Puerto Rico, as well as extinguishing a recrudescence of yellow fever. He instigated a separate system of field medical supply depots, in which field equipment was accumulated. He was also the author of the law organizing the Medical Reserve Corps, which was the first, and for eight years the only, Army reserve. While in Red Cross he organized and equipped thirty-two base hospitals that were immediately ready for service when the United States entered the war.
He was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, the Légion d'Honneur (officer), Cuba's Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of Carlos J. Finlay, and the Gorgas Medal of the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States.
Views
Quotations:
"General Kean has done more for the advancement of the interests of the Department than any officer who ever belonged to the Corps. He had done more to establish the present satisfactory condition of the Medical Department than any other living man. The tripod on which the success of the Medical Department of the Army rested in the World War consisted of the Medical Reserve Corps, the accumulation of field supplies for an emergency, and the organization of base hospitals, and Kean was responsible for all of these activities. " - Surgeon General Ireland
Membership
Kean was the first president of the Monticello Association from 1913 to 1920.
Personality
General Kean was, unlike many able administrators, a modest, genial, and humorous man of great charm and warmth of feeling. He was a marvelous conversationalist, and his memory was so retentive and accurate that he could recall the tents and bivouacs of General P. H. Sheridan's cavalry on his grandfather Randolph's lawns and fields at Edgehill in 1865, incidents of Indian fighting on the western plains in the 1880's, or of yellow fever in Cuba, with the vividness of more recent events. For his guests he mixed an admirable whiskey toddy, served in Jeffersonian metal cups.
Connections
Kean married on October 10, 1894, Louise Hurlbut Young; they had a daughter and a son. Louise Kean died in 1915. On March 24, 1919, he married Cornelia Knox, a sister of Commodore Dudley W. Knox, historian of the United States Navy.
