Donald Macrae (1870-1932) Mayor of CB

MACRAE

Posted By: Debra Scott Hierlmeier (email)
Date: 11/15/2008 at 07:49:50

DR. DONALD MACRAE 1870-1932
Military Honors at Funeral
First Presbyterian Rites to be held Wednesday

Full military funeral honors will be paid in Council Bluffs Wednesday morning too Dr. Donald Macrae Jr., 62, who died of pneumonia early Monday.

Services will be held at 11 am at First Presbyterian church with Rev C. Carson Bransby officiating.
A regiment of the Iowa National guard will be mobilized from southwestern Iowa units to participate in the funeral rites, Major M.A. Tinley of Council Bluffs said Monday night. A gun caisson is on its way to the Bluffs from the arsenal at Rock Island, Illinois. Burial will be in Walnut Hill cemetery.

Pallbearers will be: C.O Millsap, Harry McClelland, Sumner Knox and Frank E. Merrill, chosen from the old Fifty-first Iowa Infantry, with which Dr. Macrae served in the Phillippines, and Ernest Gronewer, J.P, Orchard, Robert V. Mortenson and Harold B. Hetrick, from Moblie hospital No 1 (Unit K), which as a Colonel Dr. Macrae commanded in France
VETERAN STAND GUARD
Veterans of the hospital unit began a guard of honor at the bier Monday evening. It will be continued until 9:30 am Wednesday, when the body will be taken to the church where it will lie in state an hour.

Clothed in his colonel’s field uniform the body of Dr. Macrae lies in state in a flag draped casket in the library of the old Macrae home at 809 Fifth Avenue.

All day yesterday and late into the evening friends came and went with their messages of condolence to the family and words of tribute to Dr. Macrae as a soldier, surgeon, and citizen. Great masses of flowers and heaps of telegrams and special letters expressed their measure of the esteem in which absent friends held him.

In accordance with the wishes of the family the home will be open at all hours until the body is removed to the church Wednesday morning. Veterans of the hospital unit will meet at the Council Bluffs Clinic at 1 o’clock Wednesday morning to go to the services in a body. Spanish War veterans will gather at the Y.M.C.A at the same hour. Other patriotic organizations are expected to send delegations.

The funeral is expected to draw the greatest display of military since that of General Grenville M. Dodge. Dr. Macrae’s last illness developed from a cold which he contracted during the Christmas holidays. Loss of vitality, due to performance of night operations and consequent loss of sleep just before his condition became serious, was a contributing factor in his death.

Mrs. Macrae, a son, Donald III of Osceola, Iowa and a daughter, Mrs. Clifford Smith of Boston were at the bedside when the end came.

NATIVE OF BLUFFS

Dr. Macrae was born January 24, 1870, in Council Bluffs. He was a son of physician and the second generation of a pioneer family. In 1891, he married Mary Virginia Miller of Omaha. After matriculating in three colleges, he was graduated in 1891 from the University of Michigan. He practiced the four years following in Council Bluffs and was professor of anatomy for the next five years at Omaha Medical College, now part of the University of Nebraska.

He left at the outbreak of the Spanish-American war for the Philippines as first lieutenant and assistant surgeon of the Fifty-first Iowa volunteers. On his return he was given a gold sword by the citizens of Red Oak in appreciation of his care of soldiers of Company M of that town.

TWO TERMS AS MAYOR

He became mayor of Council Bluffs in 1904 and again in 1906. It was during this time the move was started which ended in 1911 with the acquisition of a municipally owned water plant.

Three years later he was in Arizona, suffering from tuberculosis brought on by overwork. His health was built up by “sitting on a cactus,” as he phrased it. But he was not strong enough, in the estimate of his physicians, to join the border soldiers a year later. But he disregarded the commands and after a telephone call to the Adjutant General from Kansas City, was made regimental surgeon with headquarters at Brownsville, Texas, in charge of all hospitals.

SLASHED RED TAPE

In New York, in 1917, as a delegate from Iowa at a special meeting of the National Guard, he heard of the impending declaration of war. He arrived in Washington in time to hear President Wilson read the declaration. The next day he began working for authorization for Mobile Hospital No 1.

In the army his career was marked, those who knew him best say; he had the ability to see issues clearly, and the courage to slash through red tape. AT one time in France, without proper military authority, he commandeered a fleet of trucks to move his hospital nearer the front. The ‘tin hats’ frequently refused permission to move the hospital as near the front as Dr. Macrae thought it should be. On these occasions he closeted himself with superior authorities and usually came out with the permission he wanted.

GIVEN MILITARY HONORS

In recognition of his service he was given many military decorations, including the Distinguished Service medal and the Croix de Cuerre.
A trait which endeared him to many was the fiery zeal of his attacks, often ‘illuminated with a beautiful profanity.” Over a long period, some of his choicest outbreaks were directed against what he denounced as the ‘ridiculously antiquated system of grudging charity” for persons impoverished by sickness. Before civic and medical groups he argued that the hig quality of citizenship of thousands of person could be saved….(rest of this section incomplete)
….Western Surgical Association American Railway Surgeons, Iowa State Medical association, Pottawattamie County Medical Society and the Council Bluffs Medical Society. He has been head of the staffs of both Mercy and Jennie Edmundson hospitals. He was a member of the judiciary committee of the American Medical Society.

Dr. Macrae was responsible for the movements which resulted in the formation of the Council Bluffs Clinic and the building of Hotel Chieftain. Recently he had been working for a new city hall.

Three grandchildren, Donald Macrae IV, Joyce Virginia Macrae and Clifford Smith, Jr., also survive

From the Scrapbooks of Bessie Gross Gustafsen
Source: Council Bluffs Nonpareil