able to give to the Children’s Bureau. Julia Lathrop, its head, told us
how its work was falling behind: playgrounds in many places given up,
maternity work shut down. Could we help to stem this backward flow? We
turned our machinery at once to the support of the bureau. Women in
districts where its work had never been known were aroused to establish
nursing centers, look after maternity cases, interest themselves afresh
in what was happening to children. It was a work of education as well as
of renewal.
Julia Lathrop told me one day just before the committee went out of
existence that the work of her bureau had been extended more in the few
months that we had been promoting it than it could have been with their
machinery in as many years.
As the effectiveness of our national channel began to be understood,
naturally enough all sorts of requests came to help out in putting over
this or that scheme, to grant favors for this or that friend. While the
majority of such efforts were entirely legitimate, there were some of
dubious character.
I recall an amusing illustration of the latter. Just after war began to
take its toll the Gold Star Mothers were organized, and our committee
was asked to prepare an official arm band with a gold star or stars. The
idea had not been noised about before a gentleman high in the counsels
of the nation came to us with the request that we make the badge not of
black as decided but purple—purple velvet. His reason was that a friend
of his, a manufacturer of velvet, had on hand some thousands of yards of
purple velvet which he would like to dispose of. We did not see our way
to change our choice of color and material.
A request which led to a peck of trouble for me came from the two
persons in the country I least expected to look to us for help—Loie
Fuller and Sam Hill, friends of Queen Marie of Rumania. If I remember
correctly they wanted us to bring her over in the interest of the Allied
cause. We compromised by promising to send her a message of sympathy. I
was commissioned to see that it was properly illuminated, and through my
affiliation with the Pen and Brush Club of New York, a group of women
writers and artists, a really beautiful parchment roll was turned out.
We were so pleased with it that we had one made for Queen Elisabeth of
Belgium.
But how were we going to get them to the Queens? Mr. Gifford of the
Council was unsympathetic. No one would have dared suggest to Mr.
Lansing that the State Department interest itself. The War Department
could not be expected to carry them. Those messages lay about the
Woman’s Committee for weeks a burden and finally a joke, a burden and a
joke which was thrown on my shoulders when in January of 1919 I went to
Paris for observation for the _Red Cross Magazine_. Surely in Paris
there would be some way of delivering them. It was Robert Bliss of our
Embassy who came to my help in the case of Queen Marie, and much to my
relief passed the roll on—to a representative of the Rumanian
Government, I understood, although I never had any diplomatic assurance
that it really landed on the desk of the Queen.
As to the message to Queen Elisabeth, Mrs. Vernon Kellogg, who was
_persona grata_ with the Queen, was in Paris and, knowing that she was
going back to Brussels, I hastened to her with my roll, told her my
predicament, begged her to take it off my hands, which she kindly did.
And that was the last I heard of the messages to the Queens.
By the end of our first year I was persuaded that the making of a
permanent Federal agency lay in the Woman’s Committee. I took my notion
to the Secretary of the Interior, Franklin Lane, who had proved a
helpful friend of the committee in moments of strain.
“Why,” I asked, “could not the present Woman’s Committee be continued
after the War in the Department of the Interior? Why could it not be put
under a woman assistant secretary and used as a channel to carry to
women in the last outposts of the country knowledge of what the various
departments of the Government are doing for the improvement of the life
of the people? You know how limited is the reach of many of the findings
of the bureaus of research, of their planning for health and education
and training? Why not do for peace what we are doing for war?”
Secretary Lane was interested, but in the committee itself there was
little response. Dr. Anna pooh-poohed it. It was too limited a
recognition. What she wanted was a representative in the Cabinet, and
she was unwilling to take anything else.
It is possible that Dr. Anna did not want to encourage ideas concerning
women from a woman as lukewarm as I had always been in the matter of
suffrage. She wanted a committee as actively interested in pushing ahead
the cause of votes for women as it was in defense work, in protecting
women and children. From her point of view the cause was as vital as
protecting women in industries, indeed essential to that problem.
There was only one other woman on the committee as lukewarm as I in the
matter of suffrage, and that was one of our most valuable and
distinguished members—Mrs. Joseph Lamar of Atlanta, the widow of Justice
Lamar of the Supreme Court of the United States. Mrs. Lamar and I saw
eye to eye as a rule in the work of the committee, and we both felt it
should keep out of suffrage work. Not so easy for old-time national
leaders like Dr. Anna and Mrs. Catt, with militant suffragists picketing
the White House, begging for arrest; but they showed admirable
restraint. Indeed, I believe that restraint to have been in the long run
the soundest politics. It certainly helped in bringing both Houses of
the Congress to accept the Nineteenth Amendment in the early summer of
1919, giving nation-wide suffrage to women.
Dr. Anna’s attitude towards me was quite understandable. She was
familiar with and resented, as she told me quite frankly, certain
activities of mine which had conflicted with both her convictions and
her arguments—activities which had been a surprise and a regret to many
of those whose opinions I valued highly.
I had always resented the pains that militant suffragists took to
belittle the work that woman had done in the past in the world,
picturing her as a meek and prostrate “doormat.” They refused, I felt,
to pay proper credit to the fine social and economic work that women had
done in the building of America. And in 1909, after we took over the
_American Magazine_, I burst out with a series of studies of leading
American women from the Revolution to the Civil War, including such
stalwarts as Mercy Warren, Abigail Adams, Esther Reed, Mary Lyon,
Catharine Beecher, the fighting antislavery leaders—not omitting two for
whom I had warm admiration, if I was not in entire agreement with them,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
I thought I made a pretty good showing, but I found it was not welcome.
And on top of that I settled my position in the minds of Dr. Anna and
many of her friends by a series of little essays which I finally brought
together under the title of “The Business of Being a Woman.” That title
was like a red rag to many of my militant friends. The idea that woman
had a business assigned by nature and society which was of more
importance than public life disturbed them; even if it was so, they did
not want it emphasized.
Feeling as I did, I could not fight for suffrage, although I did not
fight against it. Moreover, I believed that it would come because in the
minds of most people democracy is a piece of machinery, its motive power
the ballot. The majority of the advocates for women’s suffrage saw
regeneration, a new world through laws and systems; but I saw democracy
as a spiritual faith. I did not deny that it must be interpreted in laws
and systems, but their work deepens, broadens, only as the spirit grows.
What I feared in women was that they would substitute the letter for the
spirit, weaken the strategic place Nature and society had given them for
keeping the spirit alive in the democracy, elevating it to the head of
the procession of life, training youth for its place. But what chance
had such ideas beside the practical program of the suffragist?
My arguments again had no emotional stuff in them. They carried no
promise of speedily remaking the hard life most women were living, had
always lived. The suffragists pictured a society renewed, regenerated,
stripped of corruption and injustice, all done by a single stroke—giving
votes to women. They would never betray the trust—the old fiction to
which they held so tenaciously that women are by nature “better” than
men and need only the chance in politics to clear society of its
corruption. I could not agree.
It is not to be wondered that Dr. Anna suspected me, had a certain
resentment at my being a member of her committee. In spite of all this,
as the months went on she and I became better and better friends. She
was so able, so zealous, so utterly given to her cause that I had always
had genuine admiration for her. Now I found her a most warm-hearted and
human person, as well as delightfully salty in her bristling against men
and their ways.
An event in the history of our committee was a grand evening gathering
in one of Washington’s theaters. We all sat in state on the platform,
and in the boxes were several members of the Cabinet with President
Wilson himself, for a part of the evening at least. Dr. Anna made a
capital speech, little antimasculine chips flying off her shoulder every
now and then, to the particular delight of the President.
“Dr. Anna,” I told her the next day, “you are one of the most
provocative women I have ever known, an out-and-out flirt.” But we were
good enough friends by this time for her to laugh. I am not sure but she
was a bit flattered.
When the work of the committee was over and she was sending out her
final report, thanking each of us officially for our part in what I
always think of as her achievement, she included in mine a hand-written
personal letter which I shall always treasure as a proof of the bigness
and the beauty of the nature of this splendid woman.
Evidently she remembered how she had sputtered at me sometimes. “You
talk too much, Miss Tarbell.” True—I always do if I have a listening
audience. “I hate a lukewarm person,” she declared when I persisted in
balancing arguments. She did; she had never known for a moment in her
life the frustration, the perplexities of lukewarmness.
But now she wrote thanking me for what she called “my consideration and
kindness” toward what she called her “blunders and mistakes.” Just what
she meant, I do not know. It was enough for me that she should end with
“sincere and affectionate regard”—enough because I knew she understood
what I had never put into words, that for her I had never had anything
but a sincere regard—a regard which our associations had turned to real
affection.
The only professional work I did in this period was a few weeks of
lecturing, a contract which I had made before we went into the War.
I have spoken of the quietness and steadiness with which people through
the country seemed to me to be taking the call for troops in 1916 when I
was on the Chautauqua circuit—of the conviction I had as I saw them in
the Middle West on the declaration of war in April of 1917, that they
had already made up their minds, were ready to go.
But I confess I was unprepared for what I everywhere met early in 1918,
traveling chiefly in the South, the Middle West, and the Southwest. The
country was no longer quiet, no longer reflective. On every street
corner, around every table, it was fighting the War, watchfully,
suspiciously, determinedly. All the paraphernalia of life had taken on
war coloring; the platforms from which I spoke were so swathed in flags
that I often had to watch my step entering and leaving. I found I was
expected to wear a flag—not a corsage. At every lunch or dinner where I
was a guest all declarations were red, white, and blue.
When you are on a lecture trip one of your few resources is the
newsstand. I had the habit of searching the postal-card racks for local
points of interest—local celebrations. But now all these had
disappeared. The racks were filled with pictures of soldiers in all of
their scores of operations, humble and otherwise—not only on parade, but
on “spud duty.” There were thrilling pictures of cavalry charges, of
marches across country, of aeroplanes directing field maneuvers,
touching scenes in hospitals, cheering ones of games, endless
sentimental ones to be sent to the boys.
A change had come over the literature of the newsstands. Serious
magazines I had never before seen in certain southwestern towns were
there now. “Anything that pertains to patriotism is a good seller,” a
railroad station news agent told me. “Why, look at the books we carry!”
And there they were, Hankey, Empey, Boyd Cable, disputing attention with
“Slashaway, the Fearless,” “Gunpowder Jim,” “The Mystery of Demon
Hollow.”
The libraries of scores of towns made a specialty of war books. At
Council Bluffs—an old, large, rich, and cultivated town of course—I
found on an open shelf beside the librarian’s desk Hazen’s “Modern
European History,” John Masefield’s “Gallipoli,” “The Old Front Line,”
André Chéradame’s essays, Hueffer’s “Between St. Denis and St. George,”
and a score of others. They all showed signs of much reading.
As for the newspapers, they were given over to the war. It was my duty
to make sure that they were giving the releases of our committee fair
attention. They were—the local women were attending to that. Editors
might and did grumble because Washington was swamping them with
information and suggestions which often they felt were “old stuff,”
repetition; but they sweated to do their part.
The editorial attitude was not characterized by excessive respect for
great names, particularly if the great name was that of an enemy. I was
in Texas when the Zimmermann note was given out by the President.
Nothing could have been more amusing than the contemptuous attitude of
the average Texan citizen whom I met. Some of the country newspapers did
not even take the trouble to print the gentleman’s name, but called him
“Zim.” You received the impression that a German-Japanese attack on our
Southwest border would be a very simple matter for Texans to clean up.
All they asked, I was told, was for Uncle Sam to keep his hands off.
They would take care of it. There was little anger but much contempt.
Everywhere the boys were the absorbing interest. In the Southwest and
along the Atlantic coast I practically lived with them. They crowded
every railroad station, hustled into every train. There was rarely a
night that I was not wakened by their demanding beds in already
overflowing sleepers. Troop trains passed you en route, all sorts of
slogans scribbled in chalk on the cars. From wherever they came they
were sure to announce that they were bound for Berlin.
It is of course beside the truth to say that all young soldiers were big
and cheerful and spirited and brave; but the total impression was
certainly one of bigness, of freedom, and of exultation in the
enterprise. One came to have a fierce pride in them, an impatience of
any criticism of what they did, a longing to fight for them, since one
could not fight beside them.
Crossing the Apache Trail in March of 1918, we picked up three silent,
rough youths who had come from somewhere out of the desert, and were
making for camp to enlist. They were fascinating traveling companions,
shy, watchful, suspicious, discovering for the first time the ordinary
arrangements of railroad life. I remember a wonderful young savage with
whom I traveled for a day. We were depending on eating houses for food
and woke up to find our train six hours late. This meant no breakfast
until possibly eleven o’clock. Of course the boy was famished. He ate
ravenously and then bought right and left sandwiches, pie, hard-boiled
eggs, an armful of packages. You could almost hear him saying to
himself, “They are not going to catch me again.” They had put one over
on him, but next time he would be ready for them.
The interest of the boys in what was before them was unflagging. They
were not afraid to talk about the worst. When the _Tuscania_ went down,
those bound for sailing points were not fazed in the least by the danger
of the passage; but more than once I felt that the tragedy had whetted
their desire to get at the enemy.
The interest of older men in the young soldier was inexhaustible. They
were like the little boys in that. Little boys could not resist a
soldier. It was startling to see a baby of three years slip away from
his mother, walk down the aisle to where a soldier boy was sitting,
watch him silently with wide-open eyes, get a little bolder, stretch out
his hand and stroke his clothes, get a little bolder still and ask him
if he might put on his cap.
Soldier or not soldier, however, the men talked war, talked it all the
time when they were not reading their newspapers. How the news filtered
to them in certain remote spots, it was hard to understand. In crossing
the Apache Trail I was startled to see a man rise from the desert, as it
seemed, and ask if we had any more news about “them big guns,” if
anybody had found out “how they do it.” We gave him all the papers we
had, and the passengers freely aired their theories of the mystery.
With the inexhaustible interest went a fierce determination to see that
every suggestion of the Government was carried out. When the Third
Liberty Loan opened I was traveling in a section where there were many
German settlers.
“What is their attitude?” I asked a woman active in the work of our
committee.
“We have but one family in this town,” she said. “After being waited on
by five of our leading citizens they took $10,000 of Liberty Bonds.”
I do not know whether these citizens carried ropes in their hands when
they made the call, but I did see in one town a detachment of citizens
parading with ropes on the pummels of their saddles and banners marked
“Beware.”
It had been agreed by all concerned that I talk on what was doing in
Washington as I had been seeing it. Now and then I was “lent” by my
sponsor to aid in a drive of one kind or another. Once I spoke from the
platform of “Oklahoma Billy Sunday,” a picturesque and highly successful
revivalist who patterned his campaigns after those of his great
namesake. A liberty loan drive was on, and no gathering, not even a
revival, certainly not a lecture, was allowed in the town which did not
share its time with the grim banker heading the local committee. He
opened the meeting and left me shivering with what might happen to those
who differed with him about the size of their purchase. Then came
boisterous singing and praying, broken to let me tell my story. How dull
and uninspired it sounded, sandwiched between this goading and
inflaming!
I realized more and more as I went on that I did not really know much
more of my subject than they did in Bisbee, Arizona, or Little Rock,
Arkansas, so persistently did they tap every source of information; but
I certainly knew fewer things that were not so. It was inevitable that,
stirred to their depths by the continuous flow of all this young life
towards the battle fields of Europe, they should “see red,” hate,
suspect. I could neither give them the inside information they craved
nor stir them to the hate of which they had absolute need, I sometimes
felt, to keep up their courage.
“Are you a pacifist?” a stern citizen on a Missouri railway platform
asked me one morning as I was leaving a town where I had spoken the
night before, and where I had deplored the will to hate I was sensing.
“Well,” I parried, “I am for winning this war.”
“Did you sign this?” He pulled out a prewar list of names, a peace
society list where my name appeared. It was headed by Jane Addams—“that
woman,” he called her.
“I am proud to be classed with ‘that woman,’” I said indignantly. “She
is one of the world’s greatest, and if the world could or would have
heeded her counsels you boys would not be dying in France.”
There was no time for argument or arrest, for my train came. I took it,
followed by the black looks of more than one listener.
But it was the boys that were doing this. They had given of their blood,
and their hearts went with the gift. They were all like an old fellow
that I heard cry out one day, “I can’t bear to think of one of Ours
gettin’ hurt.”
It would be idle of course to pretend that in the territory over which I
traveled between the break with Germany and the Armistice—in twenty-five
different states, something like twenty-five thousand miles—there were
no indications of revolt; but, as I saw them, they were infrequent and
never in public. Now and then I came upon a man or woman who dared to
say to me when he had me in a corner: “I am a pacifist. We must find
another way.” With which I so heartily agreed. But that man or woman
would not have said that on the street corner without danger to his
life.
People generally did not have much interest in what was to happen after
the War was ended. They took it for granted that Germany would be driven
back. That was what they were working for. But how the adjustments were
to be made—that did not deeply concern them. What they wanted was to
have it over and get the boys back. That done, they were willing to
forget, pay the bill—but there must be no more of this senseless
business in the world. Even the most violent occasionally confided that
to you.
All these observations—of which I talked, I am afraid too much, to the
members of the committee when I came back—strengthened my conviction
that, whatever it cost, there was no doubt that the country would insist
on seeing it through. That conviction was never stronger than when the
Armistice was suddenly signed.
17
AFTER THE ARMISTICE
The War was over and the United States was setting the brakes on its war
machinery, setting them so hurriedly in some cases that they created
situations almost as destructive as war. There was nothing left now for
the Woman’s Committee of the Council of National Defense but to clean up
and move out. Dr. Anna stayed by while an admirable executive secretary
and a small clerical force put things into order, reported what had been
done, thanked everybody for his or her cooperation.
By the end of the year my desk had been cleared and I was preparing for
a new job, to go to France for the _Red Cross Magazine_. My old editor,
John S. Phillips, had been in charge there for some months, making a
really significant and stimulating journal. He wanted a fresh eye on the
rehabilitation work the organization was carrying on in France. He
thought I might furnish it. I agreed to try.