governments to act; have waited for governments to lead Europe out
of its unspeakable agony and suffering and to prevent Europe’s
entire destruction. As European neutral governments are unable to
act without the cooperation of our government, and as our
government, for unknown reasons, has not offered this cooperation,
no further time can be wasted in waiting for governmental action.
In order that their sacrifice may not have been in vain, humanity
owes it to the millions of men led like cattle to the slaughter
house, that a supreme effort be made to stop this wicked waste of
life.
The people of the belligerent countries did not want the war. The
people did not make it. The people want peace. It is their human
right to get a chance to make it. The world looks to us, to America,
to lead in ideals. The greatest mission ever before a nation is
ours.
This is why I appealed to you, as a representative of American
democracy, in my telegram of the twenty-fourth. It is for this same
reason that I repeat my appeal to you and urge you to join a peace
pilgrimage.
Men and women of our country, representing all of its ideals and all
of its activities, will start from New York on the 4th of December
aboard the Scandinavian-American Steamship Oscar II. The peace ship
that carries the American delegation will proceed to Christiania,
where Norway’s valiant sons and daughters will join the crusade. In
Stockholm, the ship’s company will be reinforced by the choicest of
Sweden’s democracy. The crusade will then go on to Copenhagen, where
further harbingers of peace will be foregathered.
These various groups will add such momentum to the crusade that when
the pilgrims reach The Hague, with its achievements of international
justice and comity, the moral power of the peace movement will be
irresistible. In The Hague we hope to meet delegations from
Switzerland and from Spain.
From all these various delegations will be selected a small
deliberative body which shall sit in one of the neutral capitals.
Here it will be joined by a limited number of authorities of
international promise from each belligerent country. This
International Conference will frame terms of peace, based on justice
for all, regardless of the military situation.
This International Conference will be an agency for continuous
mediation. It will be dedicated to the stoppage of this hideous
international carnage and further dedicated to the prevention of
future wars through the abolition of competitive armaments.
In case of a governmental call for an official neutral conference
before the Peace Ship departs from New York, or even reaches
European shores, our party will continue on its mission, rejoicing
that the official gathering has materialized. We will then place our
united strength solidly behind those entrusted by the governments to
carry on the peace negotiations.
In The Hague the members of the Peace Pilgrimage will dissolve.
Accommodations will be provided for each one back to his home. It is
impossible to determine the exact length of time the pilgrimage will
take. Six weeks, however, should be allowed.
I respectfully beg of you to respond to the call of humanity and
join the consecrated spirits who have already signified a desire to
help make history in a new way. The people of Europe cry out to you.
Information about the meeting place in New York, the hour of
sailing, the amount of luggage, your accommodations, etc., will be
sent as soon as we have your reply. I should appreciate it if you
would telegraph your affirmative decision. Will you send it to the
Hotel Biltmore, Suite 717, New York, our temporary headquarters.
Yours for peace
HENRY FORD.
I have no copies of my replies, but I know the gist of them must have
been a heavy-hearted “I can’t do it, Mr. Ford.”
The night after my visit to the hotel Miss Addams called me up, and for
a half-hour we argued the matter on the telephone. All I could say was:
“If you see it you must go, Miss Addams. I don’t see it and I can’t. It
is possible that standing on the street corner and crying, ‘Peace,
Peace,’ may do good. I do not say that it will not, but I cannot see it
for myself.”
We were to talk it over in the morning, but that night they took her to
Chicago, hurried her into a hospital. She was very ill. Jane Addams did
not go on the Peace Ship.
Years after, I asked her, “Would you have gone if you had not been ill?”
“I certainly should,” she said. “There was a chance, and I was for
taking every chance.”
She always took every chance when it was a matter of human relief. And
if she had gone things would have been different on the Peace Ship, for
she and not Madame Schwimmer would have been in command. She saw quite
clearly the managerial tendencies of Madame Schwimmer, but she saw also
her abilities. She was not willing because of doubts to throw over a
chance to strengthen the demand for peace, and she undoubtedly trusted
to her own long experience in handling people to handle Madame
Schwimmer. But she did not go.
It was a tragedy of hasty action, of attempting a great end without
proper preparation. Mr. Ford would never have attempted to build a new
type of automobile engine as he attempted to handle the most powerful
thing in the world—the unbridled passions of men organized to come to a
conclusion by killing one another.
The Peace Ship was a failure; but so were the under-cover official
efforts the President and his sympathizers then steadily pushed. Things
grew blacker. The day when we would go in seemed always nearer to me. In
February of 1916 my depression was deepened by hearing Mr. Wilson
himself admit it. My friends Secretary and Mrs. Daniels had been so
gracious as to include me among their guests at the Cabinet dinner they
were giving in honor of the President and the new Mrs. Wilson.
We were all standing in the Daniels drawing room waiting their arrival.
I was talking so interestedly with somebody that I had forgotten what it
was all about, when I was conscious of a distinguished pair in the
doorway. It took me an instant to remember what we were there for, and
that this was the President and his lady. How they looked the part!
At the dinner table the President was gay, telling stories, quoting
limericks. Later, when it came my turn to talk to him and I told him how
charming I had found Mrs. Wilson’s animation and lively wit, he rather
eagerly fell to talking of her and, to my amazed delight, of the
difficulties of courting a lady when each time he calls the house is
surrounded by secret service men!
Dropping his gaiety, he told me a little of the situation at the moment.
“I never go to bed without realizing that I may be called up by news
that will mean that we are at war. Before tomorrow morning we may be at
war. It is harder because the reports that come to us must be kept
secret. Hasty action, indiscretion might plunge us into a dangerous
situation when a little care would entirely change the face of things.
My great duty is not to see red.”
I carried away from that dinner a feeling of the tremendous difficulty,
of the tremendous threat under which we lived, and of a man that had
steeled himself to see us through. It strengthened my confidence in him.
But of all this I could say nothing on my Chautauqua circuit, even when
I began to realize that, more than anything else, these people were
interested in the War.
One of the most convincing proofs I received of this came from things I
overheard at night. We ended our circuit with a siege of terrific
heat—the kind of heat that made sleep impossible. The best room you
could get was generally on the second-floor front. You pulled your bed
to the window, and lay with your head practically out; but if you could
not sleep you would certainly be entertained, for on the sidewalks below
there would gather, around nine-thirty or ten, a little group of
citizens who had come downtown after supper “to see a man.” Shopkeepers,
laborers, traveling men, lawyers, and occasional preachers and hotel
keepers would sit out talking war, preparedness, neutrality, Wilson,
Hughes, for half the night.
“Look at them,” said a talkative Congressional candidate. “Four years
ago I could have told how practically every one of the men in this town
would vote in November. I can’t do it today. Nobody can. They are freed
from partisanship, as I could never have believed. They are out there
now thrashing over Wilson and Hughes, and not 25 per cent of them know
which it will be when election day comes.”
More and more I came to feel that you could count on these people for
any effort or sacrifice that they believed necessary. One of the most
revealing things about a country is the way it takes the threat of war.
Just after we started, the call for troops for Mexico came. It seemed as
if war were inevitable. There was no undue excitement where we traveled,
but boys in khaki seemed to spring out of the ground.
I shall never forget one scene, which was being duplicated in many
places in that region. We were in an old mountain town in Pennsylvania.
Our hotel was on the public square, a small plot encircled by a row of
dignified, old-fashioned buildings. In the center stood a band-stand,
and beside it a foolish little stone soldier mounted on an overhigh
pedestal—a Civil War monument. We were told that on the square at
half-past nine in the evening a town meeting would be called to say
good-bye to the boys who were “off to Mexico on the ten-thirty.” “How
many of them?” I asked. “One hundred and thirty-five,” was the answer.
And this was a town of not over twenty-eight hundred people.
As the hour approached, the whole town gathered. It came quietly, as if
for some natural weekly meeting; but a little before ten o’clock we
heard the drum and fife, and down the street came a procession that set
my heart thumping. Close beside the City Fathers and speakers came a
dozen old soldiers, some of them in faded blue, two or three on
crutches, and behind them the boys, one hundred and thirty-five of
them—sober, consciously erect, their eyes straight ahead, their step so
full of youth.
The procession formed before the little stone soldier, who somehow
suddenly became anything but foolish; he took on dignity and power as
had the boys in rank—boys whom, if I had seen them the day before, I
might have called unthinking, shiftless, unreliable. The mayor, the
ministers, a former Congressman, all talked. There was a prayer, the
crowd in solemn tones sang “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” There was a curt
order; the procession re-formed; the old soldiers led the way, and the
town followed the boys to the “ten-thirty.”
Nothing could have equaled the impression made by the quietness and the
naturalness of the proceedings. Beside the continuous agitations and
hysteria to which the East had treated us in the last two and a half
years, this dignity, this immediate action, this willingness to see it
through, gave one a solemn sense of the power and trustworthiness of
this people. It was a realization that I should have been willing to pay
almost any price to come to. Certainly it more than paid me for my
forty-nine nights in forty-nine different beds.
Eight months later this impression of the steadiness of the people under
the threat of war was deepened. After my Chautauqua circuit, which I had
supposed to be a temporary adventure, the lecture bureau asked to book
me for a month of lyceum work, most of it in the Middle West. Late in
January of 1917 I started out.
I was on the road when the break with Germany came. Our evening papers
of February 3rd had the digest of the President’s speech to Congress.
The next Sunday morning there was the full text. I went out to walk
early that morning, and one of the first things I saw was a lively row
in front of a barber shop. Inquiring, I found that a big Swede had
expressed sympathy with the Kaiser, and was being thrown into the
street. At the hotel, my chambermaid, the elevator boy, the table
waiter, did not wait for me to introduce the subject. Everybody was
talking about what the break meant—war of course. They were ready, they
said.
As the days went on, I found that was the opinion of everybody. One
morning I landed at a railway junction town, with no train until late
afternoon. It was a forlorn place at any time, but deadly now, with the
thermometer around twenty below. A friendly ticket agent warned me that
the only hotel was no place for ladies, and sent me off into the
territory beyond the railroad shops to a dingy-looking house which, he
said, was kept by a woman who was clean and decent. It was anything but
inviting on the outside, but travelers who are choosers are poor sports.
The woman gave me a room and, following the only wisdom for the lecturer
who would keep himself fit, I went to bed. It was four o’clock in the
afternoon when I came down. The woman of the house, whom I had found in
the morning rubbing out clothes, was in a fresh gingham dress, sitting
in the living room reading the Chicago _Tribune_. Beside her lay a copy
of the _Record Herald_. I found that this woman since the beginning of
the trouble in Europe had been reading full details in these admirably
edited newspapers. She had not been for a war, she said, until they went
back on their word.
“That settled it for everybody out here. Now,” she said, “there is
nothing else to do.”
I do not know how often I heard those words in the days that followed.
When the President said of America in closing his address to Congress on
April 2, 1917, “God helping her she can do no other,” he was only
expressing that to which the majority of the people of the West, as I
heard them, had made up their minds.
Closely watching, I personally felt utterly remote. There was nothing
for me to do. In the pandemonium of opinion nothing I could say or do
would hinder or help, and so I went on with my daily rounds.
I was speaking at a big dinner in Cleveland early in April when a
telegram was handed to me, signed by the President. It appointed me a
member of what he called the Woman’s Committee of the Council of
National Defense.
I did not know what the appointment meant, but when your Government is
trying to put through a war, whether you approve or not, I had long ago
concluded that as for me I would do whatever I was asked to do. And so I
sent at once an acceptance of what I took as an order. Two weeks later I
received my first instructions. They came from the head of the
committee, Dr. Anna H. Shaw.
16
WOMEN AND WAR
What is it all about? That is what we asked ourselves when on May 2nd,
answering the call of our chairman Dr. Anna Shaw, we met in Washington.
And where were we to sit? We were but one of many anxious, confused,
scrambling committees for which a place must be found. Our predicament
was settled by finding a room somewhere on Pennsylvania Avenue—a dreary
room with a rough table and not enough chairs to go around. My first
contribution to winning the War was looting chairs from adjacent
offices. My success gave me hope that after all I might be at least an
errand boy in the war machine.
It was not long, however, before the Woman’s Committee was a beneficiary
of the civilian outbreak of patriotic generosity which had swept
Washington. “You may have our house, our apartment,” people cried. A
fine and spacious old house close to Connecticut Avenue facing the
British Embassy was offered us, a much more comfortable and dignified
headquarters than I think we expected under the conditions. We remained
there throughout the War.
But what were we there for? The Administration had called us into being.
What did it expect of us? It was quickly obvious that what it wanted at
the moment was an official group to which it could refer the zealous and
importuning women who wanted to “help,” the various organizations
already mobilizing women for action. Considerable rivalry had developed
between them, and it was certain to become more and more embarrassing.
Our committee had been cleverly organized to spike this rivalry,
including as it did the presidents of the leading national groups of
women: the National Suffrage Society, the Women’s Federation of Clubs,
the National Women’s Council, the Colonial Dames, the National League
for Women’s Service. Everybody in the list represented something except
myself. I was a lone journalist with no active connection with any
organization or publication. I was conscious that that was against me in
the committee though apparently it had not been in the minds of
President Wilson and Secretary Baker.
We were not an independent body, but one of the many subsidiaries of the
Council of National Defense, the managing head of which was the present
president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Walter
Gifford—a man of intelligence, sense, amazing self-control and patience.
This I had reason to know, as I frequently represented the committee
before him.
The fact that we had to go to men for orders irritated Dr. Shaw from the
start. She felt we ought to be able to decide for ourselves what women
should do, or at least she, the head of the committee, should sit on the
Council of National Defense. I think Dr. Anna never quite forgave the
Administration for subjecting us to the directions of man, whose
exclusive authority in world affairs she had so long disputed.
Our mandate had been to consider women’s defense work for the nation.
But what were we to do with the results of our consideration, our
recommendations? Our conclusion was that we must find a way to get them
to the women of the country. To do that, we must coordinate the various
agencies represented in our body, enlist others, create a channel for
the Government’s requests and orders. It meant organization. Here we
were strong, for Dr. Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt were the most
experienced and successful organizers of women in the country. Moreover,
they could command not only the organizations which they had created
but, through their partners on the committee, other great national
groups. To me the way that organization came into existence so quickly
and so quietly was magic, unaccustomed as I was to organization in any
form. It was not long before every state, every county, practically
every community, had a branch of the Woman’s Committee of the Council of
National Defense. Before the year was up there were states which in
twenty-four hours after receiving our requests could pass them down to
their remotest corner.
From the start the committee worked—Dr. Anna saw to that. She and Mrs.
Catt settled down in Washington. For myself I canceled two book
contracts, determined to do what I could, indefinite as the task seemed.
We met regularly; we kept office hours; we were keen to make something
of our job.
The committee took it for granted that we were to handle the food
problem already looming so large. By midsummer we had our organizations
everywhere, planting and hoeing. On top of this came dehydration, and we
had many hot discussions about the best method. I remember a morning
when the committee gave itself over to reminiscences of helping
grandmother string apples for drying, of the way mother dried corn and
berries.
Then came canning—the larder was to be full. We were pretty well under
way and rather proud of ourselves, thinking this was a special job, when
Herbert Hoover came back from feeding Europe and was put at the head of
the American Food Administration in a building of his own, practically a
dictator of the food of America. Obviously Mr. Hoover was the one man in
the world who could properly manage the huge and many-sided job; but it
caused considerable heartburning in the Woman’s Committee that gardening
and canning and drying should not be left entirely to us. Were we not
already in the field? Had we not an organization which was rapidly
extending to the last woman in the country? Were they not digging and
planting and canning and saving? But in spite of Dr. Anna’s bristling
opposition we were soon put in our place, made an auxiliary. It fell to
me to act as liaison officer, which amounted to nothing more than
finding out at food headquarters what they wanted from women and passing
it on.
What we soon had contrived to become, thanks largely to Dr. Anna and
Mrs. Catt, was a free channel through which we could pour speedily and
uninterruptedly any request which came to us from any department of the
war machine. We developed a disciplined army with other things to do
than knitting and bandage making, gardening and canning, essential and
important as these were.
Our most useful service, as I see it, was a growing activity in
preventing the machinery of daily life from rusting in the storm of war.
Take the women going in droves into industry. For the most part they
were as untrained as the boys drafted into the Army, as willing as these
to take it, throw themselves away.
Jane Addams had said to me at the beginning of the War: “Everything that
we have gained in the way of social legislation will be destroyed. It
will throw us back where we were twenty-five years ago.”
That did not seem to me to be necessary nor indeed to be the way things
were already going. Take this woman in industry for whom Miss Addams was
especially alarmed. Recruiting for munition factories had been pushed
before we went into the War by the National League for Woman’s Service,
of which Maude Wetmore, a member of the Woman’s Committee, was chairman.
As early as March, 1917, the league was at work in the Department of
Labor. Soon after war was declared the President and the Secretaries of
War and Labor called for general support of labor laws for women as well
as for men. Mrs. J. Borden Harriman was soon made chairman of a
committee on women in industry of the Council of National Defense. About
the same time our committee created a department to handle the problem
and was given a tenth member from the ranks of organized women—Miss
Agnes Nestor of Chicago, a leader in the glove workers’ union. We were a
little concerned about the new appointee, but Miss Nestor from the start
was one of the most useful members of the committee—wise and patient in
understanding all problems though naturally concentrated chiefly on her
own, which were grave enough, because of the rapid multiplication of
agencies with their unavoidable rivalries and jealousies.
The determination not only to protect woman in her new capacity but
educate her, thrust her ahead, was strong. Representatives of organized
women met in Kansas City in June demanding new standards for war
contracts. The upshot was that Florence Kelley was made a member of the
Board of Control of Labor standards for Army Clothing. Things went
rapidly after that. A woman’s division was created in January in the
United States Employment Service with Mrs. H. M. Richard at its head.
About the same time Mary Van Kleeck was made head of a woman’s branch in
the Ordnance Service and our Agnes Nestor, who had by this time become
generally recognized for her intelligence and steadiness, was appointed
on the newly formed advisory council to the Secretary of Labor in war
labor legislation.
Agnes Nestor and Mary Anderson, the present head of the Women’s Bureau
of the Department of Labor, demonstrated as I had never seen it the
education to be had in a labor organization which seeks by arbitration
and more arbitration and still more arbitration to improve its situation
without weakening the industry by which it lives, one that appeals to
force only as a last resort, never as a mere threat.
What all this amounts to is that through the activities of women in and
out of industry there was a steady clarification and strengthening of
our position.
The chief service of the Woman’s Committee in the matter was seeing that
full information of what was going on was sent broadcast. Miss Nestor’s
reports reached women in quarters where labor standards had probably
never been heard of. In our bulletins we kept up a constant stream of
news items of what women were doing in industry not only in this country
but in others. To make our vast horde conscious of the needs of sisters
at the machine, eager to support what the Government had decided was
right and just for her protection, was our aim. We did our part in
proving that even in war determined women can not only prevent backward
movements but even move forward.